Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Spiritual Freedom, Part IV


America claims in its Constitution that God gives us certain inalienable rights, that among them is liberty of religion. We have cast God as the Great Capitalist in the sky looking down with approval that His eternal truth is just one in a cafeteria line of things claiming to be truth and that somehow His Truths will eventually work their way out in the marketplace of ideas. 

This Free Market god is proud when we become rich suing a soup company that mislabels its food products but he is even prouder when we fight to the death to protect a crazed prophet whose visions tell us that God wants us to paint ourselves purple, eat only raw radishes and marry our first cousin.

Maybe that's America's Enlightenment god, but it doesn't seem to be the God who tells us that the truth will make us free. Seems we have it turned around to say that freedom will make truth

Whatever the good intensions of America's Founding Fathers, what we have today is a miserable chaos of religious equality where sheep pretend they're shepherds, black pretends it is grey, grape juice pretends it's wine and a soft drink pretends that it brings happiness.

All that claims to be true is not. And humans were never supposed to try on each lie to see if it fits. 

Only when there is a clear Truth can we be free to choose or reject truth. And that was God's plan. The Devil salivates when he sees truth blurred and watered down. Mormons are tasty. (Not to say Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck are going to hell, but that if they do, they'd taste a lot better to the Devil than a John Boehner or Harry Reid type.)

The Devil has so stirred the pot of truth and lies that America is unable to even admit there is an Absolute Truth and that we can know it. I hear those who are paying attention wistfully hope that "one day, in heaven, we will know truth" and those who aren't paying attention say that Christians actually agree on essential Bible truths.

In America, we have the right to disagree, indeed it is a noble thing, as if the disagreement about truth is more noble than the truth itself. So we all go around assuming we have freedom and we don't for the Devil has made a garbage dump of lies appear glorious. 

And all the time, sitting among the rubbish of lies is a truth sparkling. The diamond is almost unseen among all the shards of glinting glass because everyone is heroically dying for the glass to claim it is diamonds. And people are spending their lives and their fortunes maniacally clinging to their "precious" glass shard thinking it is the pearl of great price.

Is that why Christ died? 



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