“God has arranged matters so that we won’t die by seeing all the evil in their innermost selves. He wants us, rather, to see it through the eyes of faith.” (His Eyes)
Watched another Holocaust (for which Luther was partially responsible) film and was again reminded of Hannah Arendt’s term of the “banality of evil.” Meaning that anyone anytime anywhere can be induced to become a “good Nazi,”usually under some other name.
Long before I became aware of this designation, I was aware that any man could be a Hitler, if all that were within the individual was suddenly unleashed upon the world. And that’s only in regards to the surface matters that we think we know, not in regards to the deeper realms. Who, after all, wants their thoughts and visions put up on a screen for even one other person to view, much less a larger audience?
I once thought dreams were a good indication of the state of the depth of evil in our hearts; but I now realize that these dream states are themselves heavily censored—for the same reason Luther mentions—so we can “sleep in!”
And of course “A” Huxley made good sense about “The Doors” (of Perception); that even sensory input has to be mostly filtered out—even if he was a nut about LSD.
(We can all contribute a bit of a partial insight—but the whole always escapes us—but good!!!)
As to more and more proof that we are simply larger children with more elaborate and destructive tools in our hands, and power gone to our heads, I need not adduce any further evidence. “Folly is bound up in the heart of the child (read “adultery”) but the rod of discipline will drive it far from him.” But if said discipline is not made a part of oneself, we are perpetual slaves to the smallest nut or kernel of one’s self.
The sins of Solomon’s sons and of Solomon himself are adequate proof that Sol was only dealing with the surface of reality, not about internalizing God; it took Christ himself to demonstrate the possibility of more Light from within, which nonetheless is still borrowed, at best, by the rest of us. “Aye there’s the rub…perchance to dream…(all “nobility” aside!!)
Reality is largely defined by loss—and love much more so. They are, shall we say, “loss leaders”?
Most of us would have the capability to do evil as shown by Stanley Milgram.
ReplyDeleteThe Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of notable social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience.