The Wonder Springs Chronicle

Too bad you can’t survive.

5 August 2009

Volume 11, Issue 31

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Too bad you can’t survive.

So we now have the close, so what is the opening?

Could it be, to paraphrase an old song, “Your so vain, you probably think this article is about you?”

Or perhaps, using a little community spirit, “We’re so vain, we might realize that this article is about us.”

Or as they teach in business school, “MBA means, Mediocre But Arrogant.”

Then we imply that everyone else has an SBA, which means Stupid But Arrogant.”

However, I realize I must be in error, for as we learned last week many Christians are so humble that they know they are without sin.

In that “but arrogant” motif, it is nice to know that the government’s plan for “Cash for Clunkers” was such a hit that they ran out of money almost immediately. After all what better way to reward bad decisions made in the past, while still allowing the recipients to continue down essentially that same highway. That sure makes you feel real secure that the government can successfully operate a really big budget program like healthcare.

Of course this continues the late twentieth century program to live beyond your means with cheap credit and no thought for tomorrow, for tomorrow didn’t come until late 2007.

Thankfully we are now told that a return to those happy days are just a few months away. And hey, this time not only are we told that the consumerism will soon be back, but this time we will do it along with cap and trade, healthcare reform for everyone, and still unregulated market makers, again pushing the price of oil well over a hundred bucks a barrel. Isn’t heaven on earth just grand?

If the rosy predictions don’t come true we can always hope for change we can believe in. For through that type of hope, the human species has learned to create reality through the unity of the massive collective thought process. As they said in ancient Babylon, “If we all hope together there is nothing we can’t achieve.”

The problem is that the massive collective suppresses individual expression, especially the vain narcissistic type of self-expression. That collective process will surely cure your vanity in short order, but it will also prove the reality that this type of life is hard work and really isn’t ever present fun. Furthermore the controlling persons in the bureaucracy really don’t understand just how special you are.

Now some might debate whether this current spin of the concept that we create our own reality began and grew rapidly in the twentieth century church or whether the church picked it up from the world and adapted it to become the church growth movement where self-esteem played a major role in securing your best life now.

The fact is however, that self-esteem for material prosperity is really the broad and easy highway into the future, provided that government provides easy money to fund the whole program. The problem is that true prosperity and wealth are created by hard work and a certain amount of sacrificing the present for the future. In contrast in the last half of the twentieth century we believed the hopeful assumption that tomorrow will even be better than today, and much better than yesterday.

What is missing in all the noisy chatter coming from the media is any sort of cosmic reality. The founders of America called this natural law. Theologians called it Godly Absolutes. Old-fashioned pagans called it moral law and morality. The Bible describes it as the reality that humanity is created in the image of God and we therefore have an eternal personality and the ability to think and to understand right from wrong.

This brings us to survival.

When people are rescued from virtually all types of real survival situations, there is one major factor that dominates all others. That factor is universally the survivors prayed. We really don’t know if the non-survivors refused to pray, but true survivors prayed.

In our context this week, prayers, regardless of the underlying religion, are attempts of the individual to touch their inherit belief in some sort of cosmic reality. Now the naturalistic educational paradigm long favored in this country is that this cosmic reality does not exist outside of the natural laws of science.

Carrying that philosophic worldview only a short distance and you are confronted with the causal effects of the reality of reality and it then follows that we should explore to determine the true origin of that reality, beyond the paradigms by which we limit scientific investigations to only confirm our sheltered and simplistic worldview. Naturalistic and theistic evolution, as well as blindly using Bishop Ussher’s chronology, are such attempts to make time an idol to confirm our vain bias.

Survival is by definition an attempt to overcome obstacles that poise a reality beyond one or more of our presently developed coping mechanisms. Those mechanisms may be, knowledge, wisdom, physical strength, moral strength, self-determination, faith, and many more. From the dictionary we find: survival - the state or fact of continuing to live or exist, typically in spite of an accident, ordeal, or difficult circumstances.

Therefore it logically follows the more you really know about yourself (not your perception of yourself) but rather your cosmic self, the better off you will be when trying to survive. If you do not believe in the cosmic self then your survival skills are limited to direct learned behaviors.

It is well known that if you take adolescent thru adult ages of urban raised and trained individuals and drop them off totally alone in the wilderness for 24 hours, those without understanding beyond their own created world, may not be alive when you return, and those still alive will have had a severe mind and life altering experience. There are just too many demons in the deep dark forest to handle alone in total isolation. Those may be actual demons, or demons of your own imagination, but they probably have nothing at all to do with real forest creatures.

However if you take someone much younger, and as long as there are not totally adverse weather or similar conditions, when found they might not seem to understand why the adults were so worried. That is because “children” while not born innocent, are born with a basic cosmic trust, that life is a wonder. It takes our educational system to brainwash them to understand our adult phobic worldview.

Now most of you will never experience that wilderness trauma, but the application is still the same in the current recession. You hear all the spin that instead of at W shaped recession; this is going to be a V shaped recession. We are now through the valley and it will be onward and upward from here on out. This of course comes from the same persons who told you not all that long ago that there was nothing to worry about; the wise people knew what they were doing.

We should have learned, or are still learning in this recession, the economic models do not control the economy any more than the weather forecast controls the weather. What we have really done is bailed-out the highly leveraged, and unless they have learned their individual and corporate lessons, we are destined to repeat the recent past sooner than later.

But the wilderness survival lesson should still apply. The recent expansion of highly leverage market making profits are outside the scope of natural law, or theology, or moral behavior, hence they are bound for eventual failure, not just because they are reprehensible morally, but they cannot support themselves energetically. They will eventually run out of gas because they really bring nothing to the enterprise other than leveraged money, not real wealth.

It is too bad you can’t survive believing in what you hear on television or read in the media, but they are simply part of the vain unable to survive population also. I’ve always found it amazing that when people see something on TV or read it somewhere they take it as truth. So when the media portrays Christians like they are still doing to Sarah Palin, all Christians are thought to be stupid, gullible, and inarticulate, because that is what they hear about Sarah Palin. That was also a great deal of the moronic jokes leveled at George W. Bush. In all cases it really is not about substance, it is about the Christianity. In continuation, that seems to fit the views of the world towards the Wonder Springs Chronicle worldview.

The thing about a real Christian however, that the world chooses to ignore, is the fact that along with Jesus the Christ comes free of charge the understanding of a cosmos that is indeed ordered and designed and that eventually all the naysayers will not be survivors. Too bad, not really, that was the choice they made many times, and for some reason decided that their present narcissistic satisfaction was more important than present peace and future justification.

So far we have been dealing only with individuals, but real survivors must be part of a larger community, which has the milling effect to temper our vain selfishness. Today that is attempted almost exclusively by peer groups. The problem with this community, if a group of fifteen peers agree on something, as far as the world is concerned fourteen are unnecessary.

Part of the cosmic common grace of human communities is the fact that they function best with a broad spectrum of about twenty-five members across the age spectrum. It takes a group that large to possess the diversity of skills necessary to become reproducible and successful in the real world. Empirical evidence to support this is found in virtually all team sports, which are broken down into various sub-groupings and crossovers of five individuals contributing to the whole and team success.

This same numerology is found in indigenous people groups around the world and throughout history as well as all successful militaries. Moses, Samuel, and Jesus managed groups by tens, fifties, and hundreds. To be managed successfully these groups are allowed to grow until they reach thirty to thirty five members when they are split in half and the growth allowed to continue. Within that context, those we call primitive humans learned to survive in the wilderness. With that same group structure we can survive urban caused economic recessions and depressions as well.

Over the years I have questioned why these community groupings do not exist in modern society outside sports teams. The only workable solution I have come up with is ineffective leadership. On the one side you have leaders, who never have been trained to be leaders other than through promotion. “Shuckie darn, they jist don’t know no bettir.” In contrast we have leaders who think leadership is about control, they just don’t care about group survival, they believe that they alone have the right to all the vainglory. As a result real leadership, if you can really call it that, is virtually nonexistent everywhere, outside the military.

So we have briefly outlined a few steps necessary to be or become a survivor in almost any situation. It would be too bad if you don’t survive, because you were determined to use your vanity or advanced degrees mentioned at the beginning, to miss out on the real reason why you are taking up space on this big blue globe orbiting in space.

Most who have bothered to read this far have made the choice to be a survivor. For by design there are a number of spots herein where your vanity is explained in its old fashioned term as “sin.” Today instead we have made narcissism a new virtue, a new goal. The problem is that there is nothing new under the sun; it is all vanity, vanity, vanity.

Narcissus was a beautiful youth of Greek Mythology, who rejected the nymph Echo and fell in love with his own reflection in a water pool far distant from Wonder Springs. He moped away his time until he was changed into a flower that bears his name.

It is not too bad Narcissus survived as a flower. For if it were not for good old Narcissus we really would have to find another moral for this vain story. Too bad you can’t survive essentially means that prematurely someone may place or see flowers on your grave. You made the change just like Narcissus.