Dave Sim's blogandmail #61 (November 11th, 2006)

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.


We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow

Loved and were loved and now we lie

In Flanders Fields.


Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you, from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high

If ye break faith with us who die,

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flander's Fields.

Major John McCrae


This Remembrance Day Edition of the Blog & Mail is dedicated with the greatest respect to the enduring memories of all those have given their lives in the cause of keeping faith with the war dead of World Wars I and II, Korea, Viet Nam and the War on Terror. Thank you for taking up the torch from failing hands on behalf of all who love freedom and democracy and who are unceasing champions of both in prosecuting the on-going war against the ever-mutating foe.


A very interesting question from Jason Pilley which, I think I'm safe in saying, would require genuine omniscience to answer accurately. My best speculation is that the Overall Largest Construct is that the Big Bang and ensuing "hurling forth" of everything that makes up the physical universe was specifically decided upon—either jointly by God and the seminal YHWH or by the seminal YHWH unilaterally—so as to separate he/she/it from God and that God is doing His best to respect that choice even though, in his omniscience He knows that all of the myriad he/she/its will not/would not/have not unanimously or eternally adhered to that choice and consequently wants to be universally available for any he/she/it that expresses any level of repentance and seeks to return to God. It seems to me that the way that He has chosen to fulfill those two contrary absolutes is by taking component parts of the YHWH (in Genesis the dust of the ground, in the Koran "Clots of Blood") and making self-replicating beings out of he/she/it incarnating them physically and causing them to be inhabited by little bits of whatever spirit is available (bits of God, if you will, since my own assumption is that all spirit originated from God). To visualize YHWH's relationship with us, picture Gulliver among the Lilliputians but with a Gulliver exponentially larger and the Lilliputians (us) exponentially smaller. It's our appointed task from God to "subdue the earth" (that is, YHWH) and each of us who takes up the task takes it up in a different way. Or, in the case of our own society, we take the side of YHWH (the "Friends of Yoowhoo" from Latter Days) and do everything we can to express hatred and animosity towards God and to make a Pariah of anyone (like myself) who takes God's side in the debate. Repenting of your sins and turning towards God is the best thing you can do for yourself, in my view. That holds true whether you are the overall national spirit of Great Britain, Iraq, you, me, YHWH his/her/itself, or whatever the YHWH inside Jupiter or Uranus or the sun or Alpha Centauri calls his/her/itself. The earth and all of his/her/its spirits so far as I can see have until the sun goes nova and incinerates us or until the sun collapses into a white dwarf or a black hole into which all unrepentant spirits will be drawn to make up our minds—hopefully to choose God in our own cases and to persuade YHWH to choose God and acknowledge God's sovereignty in YHWH's case. Each individual soul makes its own choice and, cumulatively, the earth makes his/her/its own choice. Based on how we are doing so far, as I speculated in The Last Day, we are, as modern beings, almost entirely unrepentant. Only 2% of us, two out of every hundred, is going to repent and return to God. I would suspect it was probably 20 or 30 in every hundred back in the 1700s and 1800s when faith in God dominated our thinking. Maybe someday we'll get back up to 20 to 30% or maybe the twentieth century was the last one when we would even register on the radar screen of repentance and from now on we just sink miserably into the black miasma of aimless atheism and agnosticism. It's all free will choices. If we chose to we could hit 90 to 95%. We choose not to, so, as far as I can see, we're stuck at 2% and fading fast.

But anyway, my best answer to your question specifically (sorry about the necessary preamble) is that I assume that God strictly limits himself to indirect participation through proxies, relying on us as His creations to do the right thing and therefore persuade the earth to follow our lead so as to maintain the promised complete remove that the Big Bang put into effect. God has promised to make no effort to contact YHWH and to establish YHWH in an environment where God cannot go but God has also created us and we all strut and fret all of our hours on the stage of life wandering around on YHWH and likewise presented with the same choices YHWH has. We can—and most of us have—decided that God doesn't exist, so we get what we get and then we die and ultimately get incinerated within the sun or disappear into a black hole or get crushed together into a dwarf star. If we, collectively, let Him and ourselves and YHWH down by just endlessly postponing the decision of repentance until it's too late, well, if you check the night sky, it's not as if there aren't others who will make up for our failings. As far as I can see (literally) the universe is (literally) made up of a (literally) uncountable number of chunks of rock and chemicals that are convinced they are God and whose self-replicating proxies are either assisting their he/she/it back to some semblance of reality and repentance or who are, like us, frittering away their opportunity out of exactly the same wilful, brainless and malicious intransigence that got all the unrepentant spirits into grief prior to the Big Bang. I'm sure it will be a wonderful moment when all of the repentant spirits return to God at the site of the Big Bang even if only 2% of them actually stick with it and make the trip. I hope to be one of them. All of the unrepentant spirits trapped in black holes and crushed against dwarf stars for all eternity well, hey, don't say you weren't warned. You had your whole life—whether that life was twenty years or eighty years or eight billion years—to repent and change your mind and return to God. I mean, seriously, how much time do you—DUH!—need for a no-brainer like that? If you can't recognize a no-brainer of a sweet deal that's completely for free I hardly think a spanking is going to help you wake up and open your eyes. And I would guess that that's God's assumption with YHWH and God-fearing men's assumptions with the feminists. If you really prefer ending your life crushed inside of a black hole or a white dwarf star to returning to God and, in our present world, you really prefer post-1970 reality to pre-1970 reality I think I'm safe in saying that your fundamental problems are way beyond anything that a spanking is going to fix. It would seem to me needlessly cruel to spank someone who is choosing to be pitiful. I think that the only thing you can appropriately do with the pitiful is to pity them.

See Monday's Blog & Mail as we finally move our way back to Jason's lead paragraph.


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