The Wonder Springs Chronicle

Catalyst for cognitive dissonance

19 January 2011

Volume 13, Issue 3

Access now the fresh insights of The Wonder Springs Chronicle - Front Page. Be sure to check out the grizzly times wisdom and fresh insights of Brute’ Griz every Friday. This column also now appears each Wednesday on Deep Woods Moola, Redux Rendezvous and The Creation Leadership Center.

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In last week’s “The evolution of childishness!” I made the point that most of the rhetoric concerning the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords on Saturday January 8, spewed forth for childish reasons. On Friday our cartoon Et Tu Brute’ provided the grizzly wisdom that this continuing childish-juvenile political bantering was perhaps a catalyst for the surfacing of much deeper societal issues.

It seems that these problems continue with no apparent end in sight. We no longer have here “a failure to communicate,” but what seems more a desire, not to communicate at all and to distance one’s remarks from those of differing political views. Childish? Juvenile? Infantile? Take your pick!

“I’m taking my word toys and going home to play by myself!”

You can almost understand this coming from the more liberal-progressive side of the political spectrum. Not because they are more childish than their more conservative brothers and sisters, but they have had their wishes so suppressed for so long, and with the election of Barak Obama, they had the feeling their freedom was finally achieved. With the conservative swing now more pronounced than possibly any time in American history since the Revolution, they really can’t believe what is happening. Was it not just two short years ago, when the vision of progressive victory seemed within reach?

Conservatives however do not have such a luxury. They seem to be intent on revenge; it is just their civic duty, to make two years of Barack Obama a political anomaly. Sadly, politicians have ignored the problems facing the United States today, and the world for that matter, for at least a generation. We could go back further, but that would just continue the cognitive dissonance.

This week Congress goes back to work, if that hasn’t become an oxymoron. Top on the agenda is a bill “Repealing The Job Killing Health Care Law.” Then come the serious issues related to federal debt and deficit spending that have now become critical (because for a generation we have believed a lie that debt financed economic growth could continue upward and onward forever).

“If we all just work together there is no twenty-first century problem we cannot fix with twentieth century failed verbosity and some Band-Aids.”

The catalyst for this cognitive dissonance has set in motion events that require solutions well beyond the hopeful return to decades of living in an economic debt fantasyland. Maybe we need to get some information from the “Prophets of Doom.”

Actually the Prophets was a show that aired on the History Channel a couple of weeks ago. As far as I can tell it only aired once, but will be available in February on DVD.

There are a couple of blogs about the show available, but for our purposes, we will deal with just the conclusions. In the show six experts discussed their expertise and together they came up with what they thought were the most likely Dooms to occur and in what order. Those six, were interrelated but were: population, financial collapse, water, peak oil, artificial intelligence, and nuclear terrorism.

Deciding that a nuclear terrorism threat was something they could do little about, but would have drastic unforeseeable consequences, the wise experts ranked the others in order of probability and proposed some solutions. It might be noted that you can find very similar results here at Wonder Springs. Notice that climate change was not on the list, probably because the consequences are too far in the future to be a significant present danger.

Number one on their list was the total collapse of the world’s financial Ponzi scheme. Number two was the availability of good water, both potable and irrigation, in the United States and around the world. Three was peak oil. Fourth was overpopulation (which may beginning to be controlled and an updated article abstract). The final topic was the threat from artificial intelligence; if you have to turn off the switch to survive, there really is no threat.

Specific solutions provided by the experts were among others: a rule of law that really was; rebuilding of local infrastructure; nationally the rebirth of railroads; in sourcing of manufacturing; local currencies; and local food supplies.

None of these items are being seriously discussed in the context of any type of threat to the United States or the world — in any political, common or normal context. In other words our political discussions are controlled either by childishness or cognitive dissonance, but could this tragedy in Arizona become the catalyst to bring a certain level of reality to a real world in which we are all forced to live.

I found it sadly amusing that the solutions proposed by these experts, while focusing on local independence, were governed by the premise that, “If we all come together we can solve these problems!”

For what remains of human intellect, we still seem to think that the Babylonian solution, is our only option, because the option of relying upon the grace of God is totally repugnant to our culture. What we really need is a catalyst to overcome our self imposed cognitive dissonance. Real doom and survival has a tendency to remove those barriers.

This is what makes the codification of the United States of America, through our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution such a unique happening in human history.

Let’s see if we can bring a little maturity to what is happening in the United States and around the world.

Conservatives have received from Glenn Beck and others that the collective elitism of progressivism began about a century ago with Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, but that is grossly simplistic.

If you look at the most collective elitist personalities in today’s culture many of them are religious in their message. Sadly in the country with a very strong Christian heritage, many are leaders of megachurches and megachurch movements. If you put this leadership in historical context, the same can be said for at least the last 1700 years and encompasses all of the world’s religions, both major and minor. “Follow me (us) and we will make your life better, save you for eternity, et al.”

The major exceptions to this rule occurred during the Reformation in Europe during the sixteenth century and the First Great Awakening and the foundation of the American Republic in the eighteenth.

To give us the proper perspective from here, we need to go back to the foundation of Christianity and the arrival and teaching of Jesus himself, and his announcement of the present Kingdom of God as described in the New Testament.

This Kingdom that Jesus announces is really his fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant of grace, and hence is not geopolitical, even though that reality is the vision to which humanity always looks. We are temporal fallen human beings, and hence we need to learn to look by faith beyond the geopolitical and visible religious trappings.

When Jesus announces in Matthew 28:18: “All authority in heaven and on earth is given unto me.” that is an absolute statement outside our conventions of time. That authority includes what we consider invisible natural laws that govern the universe as well as specific revelations relating to what we would call common goodness and morality, as well as the ramifications of sin, death and this present evil age.

Through his life, death and resurrection, that kingdom takes on the reality of legal adoption and justifying grace. Just because we wish to remain totally bound by a reality that we can only perceive through our childish desires of temporal bliss without effort, Jesus doesn’t call us to recreate his finished work but rather become his disciples of grace. In essence in the name of the Great Commission the church has commonly substituted the Messianic Indicative with all sorts of human centered substitutionary imperatives.

Now coming back to the American progressive experiment in religious terms. We see true good news in the foundation of the Republic and the First Great Awakening. However over time we see natural entropy begin to push these substitutionary imperatives into a secondary role in the natural order of things and human piety and religion become the focus of the churches. As appalling as it may seem, God uses the Second Great Awakening to focus Americans upon the things of God, even though in context, we should consider pretty much all of the visible manifestations as sects, cults, or transcendental deism.

What came with this awakening however was and is a missionary zeal that has lasted until this current time and has changed the whole world in a way that Constantine’s and following formal religious elitism never could. In other words even though the church seemed to turn its back on formal religious theology, a gospel message of Christianity became known in the whole world.

Along with the Second Great Awakening came a religious revival tension we shall call atheistic materialism, wherein the concept of human evolution from lower animals, specifically monkeys became accepted “science.” Along that evolutionary progression it naturally follows that the smarter humans should rule over the dumb monkeys. This gives the geopolitical missionary zeal to collective elitist progressive governance.

Contrary to the human cognitive dissonance desire to just get along, God and the Bible contrasted with Babylonian evolving elitism are mutual incompatible worldviews. This brings us to the Prophets of Doom and today.

The evangelical religious response today is to say that Christianity is not about religion, but a relationship. That however by its very context is really a statement of human based law rather that an Absolute Indicative, because it supposes the ability to bring the finished work of Christ down to the level of human understanding as pointed out in Roman 10:6. This is a perquisite precursor to the oft-used verses of Romans 10:9,10, where it states that if you confess with your mouth that God raised Jesus from the dead you will be saved. Simply and logically understood the first statement negates the second confession.

However if we stay entirely within the context of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called Religionless Christianity we find that God’s costly grace, through the gospel of Jesus Christ is the entry into the Kingdom of God. Once there you can begin to understand individual worth in a way that our human based collective understanding becomes a cognitive dissonance.

Put another way, only God Almighty can understand individual diversity in such a way as to make you truly an unique human personality, not only in this small part of space and time, but also in an eternal context.

However we presently live in a world of limits including a limited understanding of eternal absolutes. But within that world we can see a forced similarity of a will that seeks egalitarian results greatly simplified into machine-like harmony. This is contrasted with an open universe of opportunity limited only by your willingness to accept God’s grace rather than your personal empowerment.

Now there are strong voices for change in today’s church that says we must return to basically the New Testament church before Christianity was corrupted by Constantine. That is a noble vision, but from what I have read about the subject, what is really desired is not small church bodies based upon the Kingdom of God through grace, but more so a kingdom based upon social relationships, sort of like a Facebook or other social networking church.

Christian community is a result of communion, not about us reaching up to God, but God condescending to human limitations through what is called in Reformation Church circles, Word and Sacrament. However Reformation churches, just like all other churches are based upon a congregational model, which really is a means of church leadership that came into being after Constantine and the church moved into the mainstream of western culture, where this model remains today.

Some churches have instituted small groups that meet to bring about some social interaction and also some level of discipleship training, or what was once called catechesis. Having studied these groups over the years, these groups are sort of an addition to the work of the congregation, for it is the congregation that pays for the church building and the salaries of the staff, or that is what we would like to believe from our collective (church-business) management models.

In the exodus Moses led approximately two million people out of Egypt to the Promised Land. Out of that group, all those under forty and born during the journey made the destination. Those over that age with the exception of Joshua and Caleb did not, because the old duffers lacked faith in God’s faithfulness.

There is however what is called a Moses model of leadership that is often corrupted for congregational ends, however properly applied does give insights into all successful management structures not just within the church. These abilities are part of the Kingdom of God’s natural laws for successful human relations.

These are considered primitive by collective standards, because they provide for individual empowerment and success. If we are going to overcome the Prophets of Doom scenarios, we are going to have to understand and adopt these methods because our current world order is doomed because of its reliance of only the limited wisdom of only contemporary childish human ideals.

Anything beyond this understanding is treated with cognitive dissonance and will remain that way without some catalyst for change.