Returning to the 501(c)3 status I laid out last post, we come face to face with some shocking revelations. First, the 501(c)3 status requires the church leaders, when speaking as a formal representative of the church, to be apolitical. Second, why do churches opt to be 501(c)3s in the first place? Other non-profit designations would fit a church without being politically handcuffed. The 501(c)4 designation allows for political stances as does a 501(c)7, just to provide two examples. It isn’t insane either to suggest a church run as a standard for-profit business since its expenses will likely outweigh its income and therefore will be net negative on the net profit line. Those establishing churches will need to rethink business structure, but this is no hard task and we should continue to innovate in the church as well. I intend to show that the Church committing to being apolitical undermines its God-given directive to make disciples of all humankind.

Firstly, is it possible to be apolitical? Asking this is likewise to ask if humans can be utterly devoid of any beliefs, which is impossible. Political beliefs or policies are inextricably tied to morality, values, and vices. Humans cannot divest themselves of these things; even in the case of the raw darwinian acolyte, survival instinct as the only guiding behavior is a vice without the influence of other virtues to re-situate and control that survival instinct. Someone might object here that I am question begging a worldview of good vs. evil, which is partly true. The darwinian approach to ethical (or non-ethical) behavior already raises the meta-ethical question about whether or not humans should act like beasts. In other words, the darwinian approach already implies an answer on the good vs. evil framework. Simply, the darwinian acolyte presumes that it is better to assume the world is not a good vs. evil framework, which is why they promote the animalistic darwinian behavior pattern.

This approach, however, is not socially acceptable even if we allowed that the “good-vs-evil-framework” did not exist. Many animals mate based on a “show of strength,” which often is a violent battle among males. The outcome of this is the animal kingdom’s version of “the right” to copulate with the females because this victorious male showed himself to be the most fit to pass on his seed. If we put this into human terms, we end up with women being effectively sex-slaves for the most violent male, with the male having claim on the woman’s body to carry his seed to full term without her compliance–what we would call “rape.” The darwinian idea that “good-vs-evil” does not exist gets checked hard by trying to put animal rules into a human society.

At this point, we could go much deeper into the ideas of socially constructed morality and how that might affirm or deny objective morality, but that takes us far afield of our present task. I will merely state that God being Trinity already lays out an intrasubjective framework for morality that society mimics, but let’s move on. Politics, then, implies society because there are no politics without human society. Society then implies morality, however we want to understand the existence or construction of good-vs-evil. There are political rules–our laws that come from legislative political action–that legislate certain behaviors to be worthy of protection or punishment. Murder is immoral; a just society punishes this behavior. What our society morally allows or disallows will be expressed legislatively through the political process.

To summarize, society has moral norms that demarcate what is good from what is evil. These moral norms–through the American government system–are advocated for by electing representatives who commit to legislatively advancing those moral norms. When legislation is successful, society’s moral norms are fortified into society as laws. If this is accurate, why would the church voluntarily opt for a non-profit designation that requires them to be apolitical?

Reading from the IRS’ website, a 501(c)3  “may not be an action organization, i.e., it may not attempt to influence legislation as a substantial part of its activities and it may not participate in any campaign activity for or against political candidates.”

What good reason could a conscientious church leader commit to this? At first, I thought this was nothing more than church leaders wanting to get paid or make more money, but, sadly, this isn’t entirely the case. Monetarily, a church leader could make the same money under a different non-profit designation and not be committed to being apolitical. Furthermore, if a for-profit business’ expenses outpace its income, taxes are nullified as there is no profit to tax. Whether a 501(c)3 or different entity type, employee payroll taxes apply and are to be paid, so this provides no impetus for a church to be a 501(c)3. Ministers get a few fiscal perks from the 501(c)3 status in terms of their personal taxes. I hesitate to ask, but could it be that in exchange for a few bucks off a minister’s taxes, they would commit to being apolitical?

We should out the psyop at this point. Somehow society by-in-large and the church in particular has come to believe that being unbiased and being apolitical is more morally excellent than being biased or politically-leaning. I’ve written a lot on this: humans cannot be unbiased because they are limited, and no human will ever become unlimited–whatever that would mean? By extension, being apolitical is equally impossible, but concealing or self-censoring one’s bias or political-leaning is possible, and it is precisely what the 501(c)3 status demands.

Therefore, two psyops have claimed victory over the mind of the masses: (1) that non-bias is achievable and good and (2) censoring yourself and political views is desirable and morally better than making them known. Think of the colloquial adage that many take as a kind of common good law: “around the dinner table with general friends and family, you don’t talk about religion or politics.” You’re telling me that the two things that will frame our moral world in the form of America’s laws, we should make sure we don’t talk about? That is insane. Being biased is more morally excellent than trying-to-be-unbiased so long as your biases are known-to-yourself and so long as these biases are tempered with testing, knowing that they may need to be revised or discarded altogether. As moral agents, it is more morally excellent to be politically-leaning than not since morality is entailed in political platforms and policies. Church members, as self-attesting agents of the moral-living-God, should advance His character and morality in every way feasible, should they not? Someone might object that church members do influence people towards God but only through their private life, not through political action. In response to this, I would merely point out the bifurcating private life from public life (political life) is impossible: the two are interpenetrating and cannot be ultimately untangled. Secondly, why would we think that the church’s influence campaign to advance a God-centric-moral-worldview should be limited to only a private affair? The better if more frightening question here is, whose morality is fueling the “should be limited” in the last question? Jesus said to go out into the world and make disciples of all humankind, which is quite the opposite of “should be limited.”

We should not forget that the political parties are extremely divergent on the moral norms they value, and it has been that way for a long time. The Democrat party was the party of the slave-owners back in the 1850s. Slavery is no small moral issue! One party, Republicans, deemed slavery as evil and immoral, and they were willing to die in hordes to put an end to it. Another party, Democrats, deemed slavery as acceptable and moral, and they were willing to die in hordes to maintain it as a societal way of life. We must highlight the fundamental moral quality of politics and its legislative actions. The church is the so-called manifestation of the Judea0-Christian God in this present world, and this God is inherently moral and likely–according to many theologians–His character both defines morality and constitutes the standards against which all moral actions are judged. In America, the most direct way to enact God’s will on earth writ large–His moral character–is through the political process. 501(c)3 status is an infection and terminal disease to the church’s mission, and it should be cast overboard.

Prime Theologian

There are certain things I have been taught over the course of my life to just assume. These are frameworks that are so assumed we never think to question them. In this category goes things like “food processing, taxes, inflation-as-a-feature-of-a-good-economy, car-mobility-and-freedom, that-news-reports-news, that-being-unbiased-is-best, and death. There are many of these structures that effectively frame every piece of our lives. If and when we question them, we sometimes discover them to be cons or psyops, which are information programs designed to frame you in, to control you.

One of the largest grand cons on the church is its conditioning to be apolitical, which is largely accomplished through 501(c)3 status but also its confused approach to violence. The Church is a gathering-ground for saints to organize around biblical values and then see their implementation in whatever government circumstance they might be in. Although America is tipping on a knife’s edge towards becoming a autocratic monstrosity, it looks now that its original Republic form may be restored–how long this will take, who knows. Christians, then, in America are the government–“We the People . . .”–even though the administrative state (or deep state) of unelected bureaucrats have frustrated this for all of my life. Christians can enact whatever values they hold through America’s representative republic approach to public policy. Again, I don’t want to be accused of far-fetched idealism, so I recognize that the administrative state and our bought-and-paid-for-politicians have sizably interfered with The People enacting their values through their representatives. If Christians can effect their values through political representation, why would Christian leaders agree to being apolitical? Let’s turn to the topic of violence, and then we will return to answering this question.

Theology is by far the most dangerous and destabilizing subject to the political centralization of power. Those governments which have been most tyrannical disallow or disavow God. Theology–humankind’s thoughts and reflections on God–is a transcendent and unmovable threat to governments. The best the governments can do is to limit access; enter censorship, enter infiltration of church leadership, and enter political persecution. The ship has largely sailed to prevent the distribution of the Bible itself although continued vigilance is warranted as digital forms of the Bible become dominant while leaving behind physical forms. Governments main task should be to do away with the source of any threat to their power; namely, do away with the Bible. Since this isn’t possible, what is the next best step to render the Bible moot? Upon deeper inspection, we should realize that it is the confluence of the Bible and humanity’s thoughts about the Bible that is really the danger. Imagine a world with no humans, only animals. In that world, even if there were Bibles everywhere, the Bible would not matter. It is the conjunction of humanity feeding on God’s word (the Bible) that is the danger to governments: this is why I said that theology is “by far the most dangerous . . . subject . . .” to governments.

In a world that has both good and evil, violence will inexorably happen. Before violence takes kinetic or physical form, it is long preceded by two other types of violence: the violence of speech and the violence of manipulated speech, or, put differently, the ability to form and frame human’s epistemology. In the old world, humans’ perception of the world was mostly framed up by their limited experience of the ground, food, water, family, and local politics around a church or town center. From this, the many cultures, differences of ideas, and a certain tribalism was the raw experience of humans. What is plainly absent is the intrusive messaging of a few in the homes of all; the old world was much free of this invasion. Someone might object that the messaging of the few did go into homes in the form of books in the old world, but I would argue that these books were chosen to be in the home rather than being forced or secreted into the home.

The violence of speech is as old as evil in this world. This is nothing new. Cruelty issues from our lips before we physically destroy the person we target. Violence of speech can happen without physical violence happening, which is a basis for why protecting freedom of speech is more important than ensuring no speech is violent. It is the difficulty of parsing out when speech becomes too violent that it should be censored that humanity now faces in 2024. Who is deciding what is considered violent is the issue: this is called the subjective aspect of this issue. What is considered violent speech to one may be humorous to another. All this is complicated by big tech, big media, and by government collusion with such entities. Said differently, all this is complicated by a special few who are trying to centralize their definitions of what speech is violence. To put the matter plainly, an elite few want their subjective views on violent speech to be the norm for the whole population of the planet. Because of big tech and big media, such daily and intrusive messaging is possible while in the old world such was impossible.

Take the so-called “hate speech” issue developing in the UK and across Europe right now. They are imprisoning people for hate speech, but the really obvious question is who is deciding what constitutes “hate speech?” The anti-Bible transgender movement’s views on what is hateful speech has been adopted by the elite few, who pump that message out to frame the masses’ epistemology; it is the elite few’s desire that we all–the masses–take up their view on what is hateful speech as centered around protecting and advancing the anti-Bible, anti-human transgender ideology. To make matters worse, they want us to sanction the imprisonment of these people by approving of such incarcerations. This effects the dual objectives to centralizing power by governments: there is violence for wrong speech–“the authorities will rough you up and put you in prison”–while the big-tech, big-media, and government collusion vector manipulates speech into their definitions (the violence of manipulated speech). This violence of manipulated speech is what fortifies mass-population-obeisance to the governments’ threats and violence and devolves resistance into tiresome debates about the definition of words. These battles over definitions are needed and inescapable, and it is the grandest success of centralized power (big-tech, big media, government collusion).

In the ability to control or formulate how the populace writ large understands the definition of words is the power to form the world. The world of humanity is words; consider this, the East Coast of the United States is only this because of humanity’s words and their maps. Imagine a world without humans, the East Coast is nothing more than a combination of rocks, sea, and vegetation. To animals and lower life-forms, this geographic area is nothing more than a present place to live. The rest of the animals on the planet that do not live there do not even know of its existence and they have no names or words to describe it. Indeed, the power to define words is the power over how humanity will develop and progress, or should I say, regress?

Coming back to the church now, the church must un-confuse its stance on violence. The first issue to tackle is the church accepting that violence is inevitable, unavoidable, and is good as a feature of justice. I do not think any of this is particularly controversial. To put context to this, let me give an example from when I was a Professor at Liberty University. The s0-called mastermind behind the 9/11 attack, Osama bin Laden, was executed by seal team six while hiding in a compound in Pakistan. The student body was all over the board on this use of violence. Some students became fixated on how other students reacted: those students who celebrated his death were condemned by these so-called “righteous-minded” students, as they thought themselves. Do not the Psalms often celebrate the death of the wicked? To cite one example: “The enemy came to an end in everlasting ruins; their cities you rooted out; the very memory of them has perished (Ps. 9:6).” We could cite many more biblical passages where saints praise God for the death of “enemies” or evil people. Under the throne of God in Revelation 4, the saints that were killed in this world wrongly cry out for God to take vengeance on those like them. We could then jump immediately to the all-too-prioritized “turn the other cheek” text where we are commanded to “love our enemies.” I will not try to reconcile these issues here, but you can read some attempt in another article: https://againstallodds.site/2024/02/18/avenger-of-blood-vis-a-vis-turn-the-other-cheek/. What is the central piece of much of modern Christendom’s view on violence? Aversion to violence is likely the main feature; nevertheless the church simultaneously outsources it in what would appear to approve of it (to the police, military), but when faced with it as a topic of discussion often condemn nearly all violence. Is avoiding violence achievable? No, it is not. So long as good and evil co-exist, violence is the only remedy at the end of the day. If the Bible closes with the good-vs-evil final conflagration as a final solution, why would we be any better?

Does theology imply violence? What is entailed in this question? Let’s rephrase it to expose the answer: does doing theology presume objective morality in a world with evil beings? It might sound strange to speak of theology as “being done,” but all disciplines rightly pursued are likewise performed. The point of theological reflection is to enact it so that you become more like that to which your mind attends. The quick and simple of it is that Christians must make room for violence as a proactive and proper response to evil. The founding fathers of America were concerned about establishing a nation state as a way to sanction the violence they deployed in rebellion to the British crown. This is not to say that such an organization was “Christian” at its core, but the concern to respect Romans 13 is implied. As with St. Augustine’s work on just war theory, violence as part of a war against evil is good and protects the public order. Romans 13 notes that it is the government agent who is the “avenger of blood” and will execute God’s wrath on the evil-doer:

“Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God. Therefore, whoever resists authority has opposed the ordinance of God; and they who have opposed will receive condemnation upon themselves. For rulers are not a cause of fear for those doing good, but for those doing evil. Do you want to have no fear of authority? Do what is good and you will have praise from the same for it is a minister of God to you for good. But if you do evil, be afraid; for it does not bear the sword in vain; for it is a minister of God, an avenger who brings wrath on the one who practices evil (Romans 13:1-4).”

The American revolutionaries were making themselves into “avenger[s] who bring wrath” by establishing “these United State of America.” What is really remarkable is the union of the idea of “self-determination” in terms of establishing the United States together with believing that the newly formed United States “exist [and] are established by God (Rom. 13:1).” To form a government for the purpose of revolting against the British was forming a government to commit violence against British persons. In light of Romans 13, this violence would then be sanctioned by God because it follows the order God lays out in this text.

If objective morality is in a world of evil person actors, then violence must be. Potentially more cynical is the Nietzsche view of humanity’s relation to violence: humans all “will to power” and as such we make war the normal state of things, not peace. The will to dominant other humans is obvious, but we can reconcile Nietzsche view with the biblical view of the world presently having good and evil in it. War, the will to power, and the desire to dominant are all features of evil existing and therefore objective morality is implied. I can’t digress far here, but all moral systems that don’t rise to the stance of being objective are therefore subject to change as trends change among peoples; this makes justifying violence in the name of the good very difficult since what is good today might be evil a few years from now. Society quickly destabilizes when the once-believed evil that was punished is understood to be unjust, and the violence done was little more than a fashionable trend.

Theology implies violence and peace. In a world with evil, theology to remain constituted as a good must resist evil through violence. A just society must utilize violence or the criminal “law of the streets” takes hold, which attributes authority to whatever gang can strike the most fear into the people. Theology likewise implies order, but order, when faced with disorder, must finally converge into a incident of violence: i.e., Revelation, Egypt and Pharaoh, etc. Theology implies peace when evil is not. The original symphony of the Trinity entails a personal interrelationship among the Father, Son, and Spirit that has peace as its only mode of expression since endless riches of good already implies endless riches of order. The Christian Church must unconfuse its stance on violence. The Bible is filled with many ways to either use or reject the use of violence, but what is certain is that human civilization must use violence for the public good. Hence, this is why most Christians agree to violence implicitly by outsourcing it to cops, federal agents, and the military.

Violence of speech and kinetic violence are both demonstrated in the Bible by God Himself and through the people of God with God’s approval. The violence of manipulated speech is the war to frame the world itself. It is the war to determine who will frame the masses’ epistemology. To resist evil always requires one of these violences. Theology, therefore, in a world of evil is a weapon of violence to deter unchecked violations of morality–or the law of God, what many Enlightenment writers called natural law. Jesus Himself deploys all three of these violences Himself, the violence of speech and the violence of manipulated speech in the Gospels, and kinetic violence in Revelation. Good will not be overcome by evil, and it uses violence to achieve its ultimate victory since the Sacrifice on the Cross is an example of using violence to claim victory over humanity’s epistemology (violence of manipulated speech). The Cross claimed victory to win humankind’s mind, and violence was part of that equation.

Dr. Scalise

There is very little literature reconciling heaven and this-worldly sports. My intuition tells me this is a problem because of the centrality and importance sports competition have played in every culture in history. The unstated Christian accusation is that sports are inherently evil to one degree of another. This accusation focuses on the dominance a winner has over the loser, along with the other potential vices like pride, arrogance, boasting, envy, jealously, and disdain. Thinking about certain verses in Scripture makes me hesitate that this accusation is accurate. In Proverbs, we learn that iron sharpens iron and so one friend sharpens another. What is implied in this Proverb is that one friend is indeed better than another in terms of his sharpness. Being better leads to pushing or challenging the other friend to improve. This friend that needs to improve recognizes that the other friend is better, and so sets out to learn from and reach a higher standard of sharpness. There is a lot here: humility, self-awareness, objective realization of being deficient, being challenged, and growing. The question we should ask is if the lower performer must entertain envy to see his friend as better than him and seek to achieve a similar standard of excellence.

Is all competition evil? This is the root question, but from this question we can expand into other questions. Is hope implied in competition? Is challenge different than competition, and, if so, how so? Can competition serve celebration or does competition only serve and feed envy? Let’s go deeper. Do different levels of excellence always invite sin and evil? Must that someone is better than me always lead to envy, jealousy, and the will to dominant that person? We can preempt these questions with Paul’s vision of heavenly future, where he discusses each saint shining like a star, but some will glow more brightly than others (1 Cor. 15). He goes own to note that those shining less bright will rejoice in the brightness of those more luminous. We should ask, what does “rejoice in” invoice? Is it merely spectatorial or is it participatory? It is one thing to enjoy a song and sit in a recliner and listen to it; it is quite another to dance to that music as it plays. The former is spectatorial; the latter participatory. Can someone being sharper than me in soccer lead me to wanting to be sharper in a rejoicing way? Can “iron sharpening iron” be a matter of celebration and rejoicing? A better question still, is there a way to avoid difference among humans’ degrees of excellence given we are limited? There seems to be two issues here.

Firstly, can heaven be a place where we have a cap to our growth and abilities and still be heavenly? Second, let’s say God made heaven’s residents perfect in a way that is identical to His perfection; what would distinguish God from us? Would this be idolatry since heaven’s residents would have all of God’s perfections to the degree that each one could be god? Let’s analyze the second issue and then move back to the first issue. That Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 lays out that fact that there are differences in luminosity among heaven’s residents tells us that God does not make heaven’s residents equally perfect. That some of heaven’s residents have diminished brightness compared to other residents indicates that heaven’s residents are not made complete in the sense that they have arrived. Difference and limitations remain; this also means hope remains forever as 1 Cor. 13 claims. God’s great making property of Aseity is not shared with saints right now or in the heavenly future. Aseity simply means sufficient in oneself, which also implies that God is philosophically necessary. God and God alone has the property of Aseity since He “has life in Himself” and as such is not dependent on anyone or anything outside of Himself for sustenance. No heavenly residents share this property since none of them are necessary in themselves or self-sufficient. Another property heavenly residents will never share is Eternality. Humans are eternal only in the sense that they are endless; God has Eternality because He is both beginning-less and endless. A final verse to remember in all this is 1 Tim. 6:16 which outlines that God “possesses immorality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen nor can see.” When we pair this with 1 Cor. 13:12’s famous “now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known,” we should slowly consider how we understand it. I’ve argued in other posts that 1 Cor. 13:12 is about access not about having whole or perfect knowledge. When we look at these verses side by side, we have good reason to lean towards 1 Cor. 13:12 being about access since we do not want to interpret it to make it contradict another equally famous verse, 1 Tim. 6:16. Although we could try to push 1 Tim. 6:16 to being only applicable to the fallen and sinful world, the formality of the verse and that it is discussing “immorality” suggests that it is speaking about the state of God perpetually. Whether in heaven or now, humankind cannot see God the Father nor are we capable. This of course proposes powerfully the importance of Trinitarian theology and just how critical the incarnation of Christ was. We can see God in Jesus because God took on or assumed humanity, as The Theologian, Gregory Nazianzen puts it, “For that which He has not assumed He has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved (Epistle 101 to Cledonius).”

1 Cor. 13:13 notes that “faith, hope, and love remain forever. . .” and so we must ask what is proper to “hope.” Since hope endures forever, how does hope function for heavenly residents who dwells with God? We spent lots of time on this in the last post. For now, however, I want to close this by detailing the questions we have asked along with short answers mined from the earlier discussion.

Does hope imply something to be reached that is not yet attained? Yes, it does.

Life in heaven therefore will mean ever new attainments.

Does competition imply hope. Yes, it does.

Does competition have to have inherent evil in it? No, it does not. Competition can be reformed as celebration as 1 Cor. 15 intimates.

Hope in heaven solves the problem of evil. If ongoing growth in heaven is not possible–if God is infinite, does this not imply that humans must always be arriving at new knowledge of Him–then boredom is inevitable. If boredom sets in, then heaven becomes hell. The problem of boredom in heaven is a problem of evil, and hope remaining forever dispels the problem.

Dr. Scalise

II have written about how heaven likely still includes challenge in an earlier post. I want to build on that, utilizing the rightly famous verse, “faith, hope, and love, these three endure forever.” We will focus down on “hope” and what this word implies. These three are central to what makes heaven heavenly. It is one thing to think about hope in this world; it is quite another to think what “hope” means in a world without sin. Before we discuss this further, however, we must ask if these three—faith, hope, love—endure forever only in humans or if these three endure forever into the eternal past. Does the immanent Trinity—which is to say, God in the eternal past—provide the basis for these three? Do the Members of the Trinity experience these three? We may say preliminarily that the way “faith, hope, and love” is experienced by God need not be identical (univocal) to how humans experience it. To start this investigation, we will briefly look at the Greek of this verse, but first let’s address the elephant in the room, which is the weakness of humans in the face of eternity.

When I stated, “. . . or if these three endure forever into the eternal past,” I am applying a temporal word—’past’—into an atemporal situation. Grammatically in Greek, the word for “forever” or “eternal” is aiōnîon, or for my Greek nerds, since it is an adjective, it could be aiōnîos, aiōnîa, aiōnîon depending on the word it is modifying. This is sometimes strengthened in the biblical texts to this phrase using the nominal (or noun) form of aiōn: eis aiōnas tōn aiōnōn. This is often translated as “forever and ever”; this is not literal though, and the translation is more literally “unto the ages of the ages.” The early Church’s Origen, regarded as the ultimate scholar who even the great Athanasius revered, long outlined that the Son of God being “begotten” was a timeless occurrence. Origen understood the weakness of human language. Dietriech Bonhoeffer would later articulate this as humanity’s frustration with the impenetrable beginning, that no creature can access. It is not only that we cannot access it in thought, we have no words that can univocally describe such a situation. Our imagination allows us to attend and modestly approach, but with every revealing we are met with a concealing, to quote Karl Barth. Origen’s phrase that the Son was “eternally begotten” only gets us so far since all occasions of a child being begotten in the world of humans denotes that child’s beginning in time. This is why Origen goes to great lengths to articulate that the Son being begotten is a timeless generation.

There were some in the early Church and today that look at the phrase, “unto the ages of the ages,” and conclude that hell is not eternal or endless. Appending an alpha, α, to an adjective in Greek makes it a negative adjective, a negation. Thus, the adjective aiōnîon (αιωνιον) has often been argued to connote the negation of time not its endless extension. This is complicated by the underlying noun, aiōn (αιων), whose referent is seemingly straightforward: i.e., age, which is not a timeless period but firmly a time-frame. We are oversimplifying this, however, since aiōn in the more ancient Greek philosophical tradition could even have the meaning of “life” or “enlivening principle.” The span of these meanings—i.e., life, age, timeless, endless time, perpetuity—are drawn together by the realization that the entire human-program is situated and defined by “time-orientedness,” which only matters to sentient-sapient life-forms (humans). To speak of “an age” only matters whatsoever if there are sentient and sapient (humans) life-forms. The point is that “life” requires “an age” or a “time” in which to express and observe itself. In this world, time is a critical piece of life. Hence, it is not strange that aiōn (age) once had the meaning of “life.”

In the face of eternity, humans are helpless. Because we have no experience of eternality, we can have no language that univocally articulates it. This does not mean that we cannot piecemeal our way towards understanding eternality. We understand things beyond our minds partially, and we ever stride towards greater understanding. To those who want to avoid the idea that hell is eternal because the word aiōn sometimes means “age” fail to understand that no word univocally conveys eternality. It is only through our imagination that we stride towards understanding eternality: we take our experience of time, make it abstract, then imagine that such experience would go on and on. To prevent confusion, we should point out that “eternal” as applied to God has a different meaning than when applied to creatures. What we can imagine is endless time into the future; this is “eternal” as applied to creatures. The idea of no beginning and no end is the “eternal” applied to God, which idea dwells in unapproachable light, and no one can grasp it. To wit, we have no option but to use words that are built from time-situated humans, but the limitations of creaturely words does not mean that these words don’t set the groundwork for what comes next. This highlights the importance of analogical interpretation, which is to say that analogies are important to know and love God. We understand in part and it takes eternity to grow ever towards knowing God.

Now we are ready to discuss hope with this understanding of eternal in the backdrop. Here is the Greek of 1 Cor. 13:13.

Νυνὶ δὲ μένει ⸉πίστις,* ἐλπίς, ἀγάπη, τὰ τρία ταῦτα⸊· μείζων δὲ τούτων ἡ ἀγάπη.

And now these three remain, faith, hope, love: but the greatest of these is love (trans. mine).

Recall the preceding context (v. 12) here is Paul detailing how we currently see in part—through a glass dimly lit—but in the heavenly future we will have direct and full access so that we “know [God] as we are known.” I’ve explained in other posts that verse 12 is about access not perfect knowledge of God as though limited creatures like humans could divest God of His infinite mysterium. How then does hope remain in the heavenly future? To hope implies something to look forward to. Hebrews 11:1 gives us this intel: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” This verse reinforces the fact that hope involves conviction of things not currently seen. What are we looking forward to in heaven? If hope remains in our perfect future, what is the object of our hope since we are already dwelling in the presence of God, the Satisfier of all living things, as the Psalmist puts it (Ps. 145:16). The answer is obvious presuming that God really is an infinite Well that has no bottom. Jesus gives us this imagery: “Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again; but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life (Jn 4:13 – 14).” No matter how deep you swim, we never come to the end. No matter how long we live in heavenly future with God, there is water anew to satiate each new day in eternal life. To avoid the big issue of the problem of evil in heaven, we must remove the possibility of boredom. Jesus’ “well of water springing up” somehow “in us” provides an image of ever new water in eternal life, and what does water from a well do? It provides new life and energy, and do not miss the implication that water is a symbol for the Spirit of God. Water is critical for life and endless welling up water provides a basis for hope. Hope implies new accomplishment, new mountain tops to climb. As I’ve said elsewhere, hope lays out the possibility of challenge being part of the culture of heaven—without obviously the envy that corrupts challenge into something evil. The simple observation is that if God is infinite, then discovery is endless; and this is Gospel good-news because it eradicates the problem of evil in the form of heavenly boredom.

Dr. Scalise

Last post, we left off with the existential crisis that AI poses as it removes the need for human labor. This issue centers largely on the ancient philosophical question of “what the good life is.” I argue that three major factors make up “the good life.”

(1) Effective Productivity

(2) Limit-Breaking

(3) Gratuitous Activity

Before we move through explaining these, what precisely is an “existential crisis?” It is a threat to the reason or reasons for a person’s existence. We want to find what contributes to fulfillment but also to find what factors into meaningless. The rather cliché Christian answer to what the good life is goes something like this: “you were made for relationships and relationship with God.” Unfortunately, this answer is terribly amorphous and does not center our attention on how that relationship works.

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly deployable, the fulfillment persons get from their jobs will evaporate. I would dare say many find their identity mainly from their jobs. What happens when being part of a necessary, productive work force is torn away? What happens when “the job” that acts as a main identity-builder is just over? In the West, at least in America, most adults are so consumed with their job much of their happiness/success/accomplishment is tied to it. It is certainly plausible that the masses will undergo an existential crisis: “The job that defined me for so long is now gone, I am unnecessary; who am I?”

Biblically, we know Adam was made to “work the garden.” It is the curse that made labor difficult and painful, so work is a part of the original world before sin and death. God created and worked, then rested. Jesus tells us that the Father (God) has been working ever since. Labor, therefore, is a critical piece of how we express our inherent “God-likeness” and it is part of how we are to relate to God. He creates, we create–albeit not in the same way as Him. To remove jobs from humans is to remove a feature of what fulfills and what represents God. We can of course imagine working without having to do so as part of a job. In part 1, I noted that this is the best outcome we could desire as AI takes away jobs. We must consciously choose community living and work where we produce and barter among trusted and like-minded individuals. I am asking myself as I write this, “why does there have to be produce and bartering?” Work must solve the problem of scarcity and be tied to provision. The way creatures like humans work is different than God since His work involves provision and is not born from necessity. For humans, however, work needs to be effective and provision oriented or else it is simply a hobby. Right now, I work a job to provide food for my family, but I also grow food at my home as a hobby. Both are fulfilling, working my job and doing my hobby. My life would be diminished if I had only one and not the other. We were created to work the ground to produce its goods; this is part of the image-bearing behavior we have as being made in God’s image.

To name number (1) above, effective productivity is part of the good life and helps fulfill us. I say “effective” and not just productivity because we must “enjoy the work of our hands” or “enjoy the fruit of our labor.” It is conceivable that certain productivity is wasteful or unsuccessful. The productivity humans are designed to perform that satisfies us is the effective kind because it most resembles God’s work. Satisfying productivity is inextricably connected to the results of such production–the fruit or work of our hands. The good life takes as a major feature, therefore, effective productivity. We could go into much more detail and discuss how finding the right type of work for your personality can enhance the fulfillment you receive from it, but that only extends and deepens the point. Fine-tuning the right work for increasing your fulfillment underscores the point that effective productivity is part of the good life. I am seeing this post is already getting long, so I will extend this series to write up points (2) and (3) later.

Prime Theologian

Artificial Intelligence should make us wax and wane on how it will impact humanity as a whole. Elon Musk has called for a halt to AI advancement while more recently rolling out his new AI robots, Optimus. This captures well the uncertainty implied in its development. The promise is huge, but I wonder what happens to humans whose jobs evaporate. In this sense, education comes powerfully to the forefront. What jobs require human talent if AI advances in mass? Data analysts’ jobs will erode quickly. More generally, all jobs that deal with comparative data will likely disappear. There are many white collar jobs: lawyers, research scientists, computer coders, scholars, etc. Why bother with scholars at all? Scholars synthesize data to provide new insights, but this goes at a human rate. Coders write and check code, but an AI will do this way more rapidly. How many coders will it take to keep an eye on AI if corporations utilize AI instead of humans to write code?  Humans take years to read and digest the literature to make them a scholar on a subject. An AI can read, digest, and produce new material, in an instant. If an AI lawyer could cover every piece of case-law, why would I want a human lawyer? If Musk’s Optimus can work in a labor position, why do I need laborers? What do humans do if all these jobs no longer require humans to fill them?

The answers to these questions will be born from our take on human nature generally. More specifically, what happens when humans have an abundance of time on their hands? To quote the Puritans, “idle hands are the devil’s playground.” We need not agree with this sentiment completely, but it focuses rightly on a coming crisis. To cite another cynic of our time, Yuval Harari, humans will become “useless eaters.” While my view of human dignity precludes thinking of humans in these terms, we can’t miss Harari’s point. What do humans do when they are no longer needed to work? The theological insight from the book of Genesis—that God created humankind to work—also brings forward the question about human happiness. If humans are inherently designed to find satisfaction in the work of their hands, what happens when humans no longer need to work?

Two crises look to be on the horizon: a crime crisis and an existential crisis. As we know from historical demographic data, as unemployment goes up so does crime. While the research on the connection between job-loss and crime is varied, there is sizable volume demonstrating the connection. Intuitively, it is obvious that crime should go up as job-losses happen. If income is lost and resources are sparse but needs remain, what is the solution? Either we produce what we need, or we plunder what we need. Without a job, we cannot produce so that leaves plunder. There is another answer that Marxists would offer: i.e., UBI, or universal basic income. UBI destroys social mobility, and it puts a feature into society that enables idleness to endure. Is it an instinct to improve our own lives and the lives of our children? UBI cannot provide a path to improve anyone lives except for those administering UBI, which is typically government and the elites at the top of the financial social strata. In short, universal basic income codifies a caste system where mechanics for social mobility are eroded. An idle society with no opportunity to “change their stars” commends “plundering” as a way out. The father or mother, telling themselves that their kids and their kids are worth it, will view UBI as a systemic evil to be overcome so that no matter how heinous the plundering might be, it will be justifiable, and they will sleep well at night.

If AI takes over jobs, and there is no UBI, what do humans do? Will corporations pay lots of humans with benefits and the whole nine yards when they can simply have AI and robots do the same job with potentially better results, and way cheaper? There is one situation that sound favorable; if property ownership is vast and property-owners can go back to farming and bartering, there is a path forward for society. As an aside, I do not believe UBI to be a solution, just to make it clear—as I hope I did in the former paragraph. Without property ownership and the will to return to an earlier way of life, however, what will humans do without jobs?

This is not a small problem, and it is a new problem. There has never been a time in human history when humans were not needed for the productivity of society. To be fair, AI is nothing more than human intelligence magnified with massive processing power—I’ve written on this extensively in early posts. Because it is new, how it will play out is unknown and solutions are not available. We might cite Star Trek, the Next Generation, where the technological advancements allowed humanity’s basic needs for food, water, and shelter to be eliminated, and with this, the old-economic currencies were unneeded. While such utopianism is conceivable, it doesn’t deal with the problem of limited resources. Scarcity is the center of all human envy. Population growth mixed with limited energy mixed with scarcity leads to the conclusion that there will be those who have and those who have not. If resources are extractable from other planets, we might resolve the problem of scarcity; it still seems doubtful. We don’t know, at this point, the impact of introducing new mass or new elements into Earth to even know if such is viable. Plundering, then, is a reasonable expectation for those who are under the full weight of scarcity.

The existential crisis deserves more space, but let me qualify the nature of the crisis here. A long-standing philosophical question is “what is the good life?” What brings human happiness? The American project has been outed as a failure with its adage, “pursuing what you want is the attainment of happiness.” What we should desire is central to the quest for happiness. If doing as one wants led to happiness, Americans should be joyful to astronomical levels, but what we find is a populace with greater stress than other countries and a culture fixed around grievance and envy. We suggest that the belief that the pursuit of money leads to happiness is a toxic feature too of the American myth. Satisfying work, a work/life balance, the centrality of a cause or causes bigger than ourselves, and the ongoing moral improvement of our souls, seems like a start to finding happiness, at least as this theologian sees it.

Dr. Scalise

The relationship between the original Great Awakening (17 – 18 century in America) and the American revolution is well understood. This original Great Awakening was marked by a dedication to the reading and study of Scripture, communal revivalism–which is a community devotion to forming society in light of biblical directives and guidance–and codification of biblical values into the then colonies’ moral structures. A misnomer which can be dismissed by reviewing the pre-1776 government literature is that many of of the Founding Fathers of America were bent towards Deism. Deism is the idea that God exists, that God set the world into motion, but that God is absent in the world on the day to day and instead the world is governed by so-called “natural laws.” A true Deist would not have a place for God entering into the world in the form of a man, which means a true Deist has no place for the truth or possibility of Jesus Christ. There is robust literature leading up to 1776 and after that directly and indirectly refers to the Biblical texts or to being a protestant Christian, which is a referendum against the idea that the general tenor of the Founding Fathers was deistic. Instead, the original Great Awakening with its emphasis on the actual words of Scripture was the ideological quarry from which the American revolution gathered a great deal of resources. The famous adage on many of our coins, e pluribus unum, “out of many, one,” may need to be inverted to help us understand how 1776 happened and was sustainable: ex uno plures, “out of one, many.”

Why does all this matter at this precise moment in 2024? The present cultural milieu of the conservative Right in America is expanding its influence to welcome those who are not historically conservatives through something popularly referred to as “the great awakening.” The great awakening of today should be starkly differentiated from the original Great Awakening. The latter was centered on the Christian God and the Bible while the former, today’s great awakening, is centered on seeing through the lies that have brainwashed, deceived, and captured many Americans for decades if not longer. The original Great Awakening was built ex uno plures, out of one protestant ideology, many colonies united to form the United States. I am not saying that Protestantism is a uniform set of beliefs; however, even today, there are foundational cornerstone beliefs that all conservative Protestant groups agree-upon. We can disregard the captured elements within Protestantism, often referred to as “liberal” or “progressive” protestantism, which really are an extension of American leftism or “wokeism.” Today’s great awakening is more the inverse of the original Great Awakening: e pluribus unum, out of many religious positions and worldviews, one people is coming together against the elites. My question for our moment in 2024 regards today’s great awakening’s sustainability. Can a group of non-ideologically aligned persons sustain the unity required to sustain the changes that come after the elites are defeated? The question is relevant because we want to know if our present struggle against globalism/elitism will provide my kids and their kids a brighter future. If the current struggle against globalism/elitism results in 4 years of conservative-MAGA rule but then retraces to the typical RINO and Democrat binary rulership, then little will be made of the current great awakening. It will not be seen as something that improved the lives of our kids or their kids; it will be little more than a populist trend tied to a strong personality–Donald Trump–that did not have the unifying ideological foundation to give it lasting effect.

In view of such a danger, I appeal to the original Great Awakening. The hopes of staying unified and not becoming immediately divided will reside in our ability to agree upon a formal set of documents as characterizing our identity and ethos. The way that the internet works with social media has made the idea of an immovable document that sets the identity and ethos all the more important. Social media makes things change fast; social movements change fast. An immovable document called the Bible has the battle-tested history behind it. First, the Bible upended Rome and ancient Greco-Roman values: much to the disapproval of Nietzsche. Then it spread to the Nordic tribes. It battled a sister religion Islam to a stalemate, and finally the Bible undergirded the American revolution. What has made America great are the ideals that came from and were sustained by Protestant Christianity and the Bible that identified it. My plea is that the current great awakening turn towards what we believe and move beyond focusing on what and who we dislike. We defeat the elites, and then what? Yes, the current great awakening is united by the belief in personal liberty and its protection from government. However, once the elites who use government to violate that freedom are defeated, whose definition of freedom will keep the unity of the people together? Christian freedom is about learning the good and doing it so that one’s ability to use their freedom expands and deepens, but it is not about just doing whatever someone wants. American freedom is often defined as “do as one pleases.” Islamic Americans must face the difficulty that the final goal of Islam is to establish theocracy wherever it gains standing and within that Sharia Law that comes out of it will prohibit the proselytizing by other religions: i.e., Islam does not protect the right to “freedom of religion.” Thus, Islam’s freedom of religion prohibits others’ religious freedom. My point is that today’s great awakening cannot stop with the negative: “we are joined as one people to stop the elites from violating our freedom.” It must go on to affirm the nature of that freedom at a level and depth that only a religion can provide.

It is to be remembered that every question about how to go about life is a religious question. Let’s take progressive wokeism as a religion for a moment. What makes a religion or cult? There are either founding documents or a measure of “divine right” which is the unilateral issuance of one’s word as law. Furthermore, there is either a fideism to the beliefs or a rational participation in those beliefs. Fideism, by the way, is the unmoving faithfulness to one’s religion or worldview despite evidence that contradicts it, and it is usually identified by a staunch close-mindedness to even hearing the counter-evidence. Western, progressive wokeism has the same belief-structure of all cults and religions although it leans to the side of the more irrational religions/cults. There is divine right, which are the talking points of the current media apparatus as it represents and reaffirms the “top liberal candidate or leader.” Wokeism expects fideism to its word and its beliefs. The implied beliefs within the “divine right” of wokeism may change but the fideism to those words are expected to be believed, upheld, and to be punished if any deviance happens. Wokeism’s position on abortion, which really is one of the only well-known policies of Kamala Harris’ 2024 democrat platform, codifies profiteering on a mother’s preference to kill her unborn baby as a defining feature. This affirms that “freedom to personally prefer” is more valuable than human life. It is a dark belief, but it can be wondered how many democrats think of it this way. More likely, the good democrat is merely staying within the cult’s requirement to be faithful to wokeism’s divine right.

Dr. Scalise

Sharing of power is a shocking thing, and apparently the more evil someone is, the more shocking it would be that such an evil would share power. J.R.R. Tolkien captured this well when he penned, speaking of the main villain: “. . . and he does not share power.” When God created, He shared power. God’s act to make creation is the supreme act of decentralization. God Himself as based on Christian Trinitarianism is not a centralized Entity. The unity of God owes to His one nature, but the differentiation and decentralization of God owes to the Persons of the Trinity. In this sense, the immanent Trinity is a model that intimates that the highest form of existence is one of decentralized harmony. We can further postulate that true Personhood and community exists only in the context of perfect peace. This is the Christian myth–which I am not implying by my use of the word “myth” as meaning untrue–that undermines the idea that humankind should always be at war.

I’ve talked to quite a few friends who believe that humankind is largely a horrible species, destined to be cruel, exploitative, and killers. While I think there is credulity to this view as represented on the governmental and media world-stages, I remain skeptical that we don’t have great hope in humanity elsewhere. Forget the non-profit groups and forget the churches and forget the rest of the contenders for whom is the model or exemplary of how humankind should be. You need look no further than your kids. Kids model the highest form of humanity. Even when we admit that their cognitive abilities are far less than adults, we find that those features kids have in bounds are far more desirable for harmony than big cognitive skill. Kids care. Kids focus on a sense of fairness to wild extents. Kids love intimacy. Kids want to just have fun–pleasure in the good is arguably the highest form of human existing. Kids are not driven by necessities but have far greater cares to attend to like love, friendships, hugs, and spending time together. Notice that these are all things that take a back seat or disappear as we become adults and the necessities of life predominate.

God’s act to create was the supreme act of decentralization and if we take kids as how humanity could be, that act of decentralization was for harmony to exist. Enacting intent and influence is central to personal power. The Trinity is always already a decentralized harmony of personal power. Nevertheless, the Trinity created persons with wills that can enact intent and influence, and therefore the Trinity shared power in what is a jaw-dropping feature of the Christian myth. When I use “myth” in this way, I do so just to put the Christian myth up against the other contending myths including putative scientific explanations of the universe’s purpose, existence, and explanation. That the universe should be at all is the stuff of legends and miracles. It used to be the case that scientists thought the universe to be eternal, which would somehow make organized energy eternal at least until observable history, which goes against the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which states that energy moves from organized to unorganized until max entropy is reached. My point is that even this so-called scientific explanation of the universe is mythical. Similarly, proponents of the Big Bang theory of the universe recognized that the moment of the beginning of the bang was a moment “where all scientific laws break down.” Hence, such a view is likewise miraculous or mythical, depending on which terms you are more comfortable with using. Thus, when I speak of the Christian myth, it does not imply “untrue” just as I suspect when a scientist states “where all scientific laws break down” he or she does not mean to imply “untrue.” My larger point is that all explanations of the universe–whether scientific or faith-based–are equally mythical or miraculous. Even the famed Nobel-prize winning physicist, Penrose, with his theory of existence being a series of expanding and collapsing universes, faces the ongoing trouble of current scientific laws being upended, replaced, or otherwise only relative to this present universe. Of course, we could simply rewind all this discussion and note that the attribute “eternal” as soon as it enters the conversation, we are readily moving into divine talk whether we apply that attribute to God, karma, the universe, or otherwise.

Therefore, central to the Christian myth is the origin of decentralization, its explanation in the Trinity, and decentralization inherent good. In Christian patristics (study of church fathers), there is a known differentiation between different and division. Division is bad, evil. Differentiation is good, beautiful. Division leads to dissolution, destruction. Differentiation constitutes harmony, balance, and symmetry. In the famous words of lord Acton, “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Absolute power is a singly power that has no check or balance to it. That Acton’s truism is cited as an obvious explanation of reality is supported by the Christian idea of Trinity: that decentralization is the model of the divine, the departure from that decentralized harmony in favor of a unitary power, with no other persons checking, balancing, or contributing, makes perfect sense. Humans were designed to mimic God the Trinity so leaving behind decentralization in whatever domain of life leads inexorably to corruption, denigration, at least on the Christian view.

Dr. Scalise

A developing subtext to planetary politics is the impact of population growth. With this development has come more explicit keywords: sustainability, reproductive-health, abortion. These keywords are repeated time and time again in the United Nations’ Agenda 2030 (https://sdgs.un.org/2030agenda). The threat to the planet, according to the UN, isn’t really climate change but humanity itself: https://press.un.org/en/2021/sc14445.doc.htm. This press release identifies humanity as the victim but also the cause of its own mass-extinction. It is interesting that in this article it is explicitly noted that it is not the lack of money that is the issue but humans themselves. I find this hard to believe since half of the world’s population lives on less than $5.50 a day income (https://www.usnews.com/news/economy/articles/2018-10-17/world-bank-half-the-world-lives-on-less-than-550-a-day). If I were to throw my hat in the ring to determine what is really the threat to the planet and humanity, I would name two: (1) usury, and (2) centralization of power. What do I mean by this? For those of us indoctrinated happily with Scripture, it is a bit shocking that the Old Testament Law repeatedly prohibits usury, which is the charging of interest on loaned money. Modern dictionaries define usury as “charging exorbitant interest on loaned money,” but this is a major change from the Old Testament definition, which is charging any interest at all on loaned money (cf., Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, Deut. 23:19).

The early church through most of the medieval ages prohibited all usury, and it did not distinguish between Jew and Gentile in this prohibition. In the OT law, Deuteronomy 23:20 allowed only for the charging of interest on the foreigner. Those belonging to the community of Israel were never to be charged interest on loaned money. That the church would see this prohibition as effectively universal, with major condemnation towards it, is not strange based on its self-understanding as a new Israel or now “grafted in” part of Israel. Muether cites Ambrose, stating: “Ambrose agreed when he wrote: ‘If anyone commits usury, he commits robbery and no longer has life (John R. Muether, “Money and the Bible,” Christian History Magazine-Issue 14: Money in Christian History: Part I (Worcester, PA: Christian History Institute, 1987)).'” This early church teaching that charging interest was tantamount to or resulted in the loss of one’s salvation is shocking because of how wide spread the practice is in the modern world. We have now come full circle back to why it is the case that half the world makes $5.50 or less a day. In a word, usury. Jesus’ favorite teaching topic was the danger of money; perhaps the early church and the OT before it rightly understood the damning effect interest has on one’s soul.

Before we go on about usury destroying the livelihoods of half the planet, let’s consider the relationship between usury and centralization. Usury is a wildly successful tool to centralize power. To loan money and receive back more than loaned accrues power over the long term, there is little doubt. In the current era of modern monetary policy–which I cannot get into now with going on a huge digression, you can read about it here, https://againstallodds.site/2022/06/12/monetary-fascism/–the ability to loan governments money, after first creating those fiat, unbacked dollars, is demoralizing and insane, and it is even more monstrous by its enforcement through taxation. This present situation where banks loan governments fiat currency–instead of governments creating their own currency–is really the capstone of a long centralization of power over the control of money, or monetary policy. There is a reason Andrew Jackson destroyed and got rid of the 2nd central bank in the United States, the precursor to the current central bank, the so-called Federal Reserve. One question easily demonstrates how inane it is to think the Federal Reserve is fiscally part of the US government: why does the Federal Reserve charge the US government interest (usury) on the fiat dollars it prints? Whoever enjoys the benefit of this interest has potent centralized power.

How much money has been collected through usury over the past 124 years? How would the world be different if that currency remained with the families who produced it? Of course, we could investigate and see how those interest-payments flow from certain parts of the world to other parts of the world, effectively removing wealth from local economies. Since trees process and remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the further developed local economies are, the better the chance that energy sources other than trees are used. This isn’t terribly insightful; local wealth results in improved infrastructure which results in better energy options. There are only two options for handling the increase in carbon dioxide into the atmosphere: either (1) we plant more trees or (2) we reduce carbon emissions. Water produced energy is utterly efficient, clean, and sizable. The countries of northern Africa could have arguably built infrastructures to improve the habitats of deserts to be able to plant trees if local wealth remained local.

Before someone avers that we need to redistribute wealth from rich countries to poor countries, we must recognize the specter of centralized power hiding behind that suggestion. Who would decide what countries should receive it? What persons in that country get it? Who is the wealth taken from in rich countries? Why should someone have the power to decide who has to give up wealth and where it should go? No, centralized power of this sort over money and how it flows on the planet is precisely what led to this situation. How could it not? If tomorrow, you could be in a position to determine how money flows, who it flows to, who it is taken from, and the steps involved in its transfer, wouldn’t it seem reasonable to get the smallest of a fraction of that money for the kids? Taking the smallest of amounts from such large amounts of money won’t really hurt anyone, but it will change my kids’ futures. Fast forward a few generations, however, and that same family is likely in the same business but with far more resources and with far less inhibitions about what they are doing.

To try to summarize and bring this together, the danger of carbon dioxide to humanity is a symptom of the practice of usury in the service of centralized power. The root threat to humanity is usury, which today is the forcible removal of wealth from local economies to private interests. To repair the world to make it feasible for population growth, we must (1) build renewable energy infrastructure, (2) make habitats hostile to trees favorable to trees through investments in environmental projects, and (3) decentralize monetary policy and give it back to the local families. That a very few people on the planet determine how everyone else’s wealth will behave–i.e., monetary policy–will always lead to impoverishment, lack of modern infrastructure, and those who have always having more. It may be a dream, but the banishment of all usury would create the greatest financial revolution on this planet perhaps ever.

Dr. Scalise

I’ll grant the title is bombastic, but humans’ disconnection with humanities must be of some seismic consequence. An infamous quote from those at Google developing AI brings the consequence to bear: “why the worry over AI (artificial intelligence) and the loss of human connection, we spend much more time looking down at our phone screens than we do looking deeply into one another’s eyes?” This is an excellent microcosm of what the whole of Western culture faces. Do we want being human to be defined primarily by STEM (science, technology, engineering, math)? What type of humans will this produce? Should we embrace the androidification of the human race? Are humans really just complex science equations, routed through technology, social media, and phone screens? Does engineering and math produce better people? What do we even mean by “better?” STEM has a glaring missing piece: morality. Morality, by the way, is not the concern of those who embrace a faith. There are those who embrace the importance of morality while still being methodological naturalists. There are others who likewise find morality to be very important who have tried to ground morals as objective by appeal to a kind of neo-platonism rather than appealing to a transcendent Lawgiver (God). No, indeed, morality is important to many more people than only those inside a faith.

Humanities, it seems, is the contrast to STEM. Within humanities are history, rhetoric, argumentation, cinematography, speech, writing, singing, dancing, music, theology, administration, morality, ethics, law, politics, and social science. I am sure we could add more, but this list is warming. The amount of joy and satisfaction that comes just from music is a case in point. What would life be like without music? What warms the soul like a rousing speech? Why write if not to connect? Story-telling in terms of movies brings in outrageous revenue every year, testifying to the centrality and importance of this part of humanities. Why do we love a good story? Is it more human to spend time on humanities? If so, why the emphasis on STEM? Would less technology but more ethics improve the world? Would less science but more music make the world better or worse? These are difficult questions.

I would advocate for a return to the Renaissance ethos where all these subjects should be jointly pursued. Unfortunately, the Western countries are in a arms race over AI and space weapons. The only things that matter with those concerns are STEM topics, the rest just slow down the arms race. The genie is out of the bottle, so to speak, and there is no reset button. In this sense, the demise of the West as a civilized world seems all but certain. How can we expect kids who have stared at screens most of their lives and concerned themselves mainly with computer programing–as an example–to act in accord with values, virtues, and civil behaviors, all of which come from the humanities? Its obtuse to suppose the type of dignified behavior that the Great Generation and Baby-Boomers (those born from roughly 1900s – 1960s) exhibited could be replicated in humans fixated on screens and STEM. The West has to decide if STEM is more important than, say, freedom. Likewise, is STEM more important than privacy? Is the 4th amendment, which affirms we can keep our finances hidden, more important than digital, online banking? Yes, the rubber meets the road with this question. Would we Westerns inconvenience ourselves by reorganizing our lives to protect our fiscal privacy since we cannot trust the government not to violate our rights? Is online banking really an affirmation that we don’t care about our privacy (humanities) and that STEM is worth giving up our rights? I presume that the present god of the West is convenience, and I think there are very few who have the discipline to resist worshiping that god.

Dr. Scalise