The Veil Of Ignorance

 So I’m gonna lift the veil here on how things work at Adventus. It should be obvious typos are seldom cleared, and edits and additions go on until I lose interest or start again with a new post. But this post was  especially weird. 

I do 99.9% of this on my phone (the real cause of the typos). Like all computers nowadays, it updates a post I’m writing automatically. (Who else remembers your computer crashing before you had a chance to “back up” what you were writing?). Sometimes I get a notice that “Update failed,” and I wait patiently and the phone recovers, or I save it myself.

I worked on that post yesterday three different times. But as it grew longer, I found it harder to save. I lost half the post, rewrote it in a different direction (we never step twice into the same draft), and lost it again. Each time (of 2? 3?) I got the spinning wheel of death which wouldn’t resolve (usually it does), and I arbitrarily lost much of what I’d written. 

Now I wasn’t that happy with what I’d written. I wasn’t getting where I’d mean to go, it was incomplete, it was fragmentary, but hey! I’m not writing for the ages, here. I’m not Kierkegaard handing the print 100 handwritten pages covered with deletions and additions. It’s pretty much one and done here (obviously, amirite?). So I wasn’t thrilled with what I was doing (mostly I couldn’t decide where I was going), but I wanted the choice to keep it it scrap it. And that choice was being taken away from me, in a way I haven’t experienced since I had to “boot up” a computer and “log on” to DOS.

Last night I just said “screw it,” got tired of starting over mid post again and again, and decided to scrap it.

This morning I had a clearer idea what to say, and had no trouble writing it and keeping it. I thought maybe the post had gone on too long, or the app had a bug, or something just didn’t like what I was doing. Getting the direction right was a normal result of “sleeping on it.” Getting the cooperation of the computer was something else entirely. 

Am I even implying divine intervention? Nah. It’s something to do with how this phone works (and doesn’t), and how my writing brain works (and doesn’t). Still, curious it would be on that post, and not some post endlessly piling up tweets. 🤷🏻‍♂️ 

Why am I telling you this? Because a point I wanted to make after the original post was an examination of why Thiel cares about dispensationalism nonsense, and why we should, if at all. I can answer the first part now by incorporating herein by reference (legal boilerplate) the entirety of this post, which is not mine. 

TC draws out a point I couldn’t (not without a new post): Thiel doesn’t think this eschaton he’s discerning is inevitable. He thinks it’s avoidable, if we all just stop doing what he doesn’t like.

In other words, the words of the prophets (and Daniel, and Paul, and John of Patmos), all foretold the future that is our present; but it’s all up to us. Somehow everything inevitably led to now, in America (but not in Brazil or China, or anywhere in Africa), and we can still make it all go away. The AntiChrist is inevitable; the AntiChrist can be stopped before it happens.

It’s like a bad science fiction movie. And a weird thing for a “devout Christian” to profess. (Although, honestly, I’ve seen weirder. But “devout Christian” is a label that covers a multitude of sins. Including claiming to be a “Christian.”)

Which I still can’t understand that Thiel is. Clearly Thiel is playing in this sandbox because he thinks it gives him some power of some sort. My point here is: who cares? Dispensationalism is superstitious hooey that puts its adherents in history’s drivers seat, thinking they are immune from what happens because, hey, that’s the way God meant it to be! From the Garden! Thiel’s using it to swat at “woke” and anything else he doesn’t like (Greta Thunberg?). It’s a weird cudgel to pick up. He’d be as well off turning to the rhyme about the 20 rings. Oddly, there are no similar “prophecies” in LOTR. The poem about the Rings was Sauron bragging about his new One Ring. The other poem in the trilogy refers to the “sword that was broken” when it cut that ring from Sauron’s hand. It’s a paen to hope, though; not a parting of the veil of years to see what hasn’t happened.*

Like I say, a weird bat to wield. Thiel clearly doesn’t believe as most dispensationalists do. He seems to think he’s found a useful framework for discussing his brand of politics. The people backing him think they’ve found a friend, or maybe a Cyrus who is on their side because he’s not on the side of the enemy. He’s being used by God, in other words, to do God’s work without meaning to. Or they just like his politics.

Takes all kinds.

Honestly, all this talk of helping God or hindering God just makes my head hurt.  Do justice, love mercy; walk humbly with your God. Don’t complicate it beyond that. God doesn’t need your help, and if there’s a plan God is determined to execute, you won’t hinder it. Even the Greeks understood that (read the tragedies). Honestly, I don’t think there is a plan. God just keeps telling us how best to live with each other, and in the creation, and we keep ignoring that and asking for some plan that takes all responsibility off of us, or better, puts some of us in charge.  In charge, but not responsible; because it’s all God’s plan, donchaknow?

Such, as Lewis Carroll observed, is human perversity.

*When the prophets weren’t explaining why the Exile had happened, they were offering hope for the future. But they weren’t offering a timeline, or anything like it.

I’ll complete that thought by pointing out the Ring acts like a horcrux, keeping the villain alive until it is finally destroyed (or Harry dies). I won’t promote Rowling’s Xianity, since she’s so virulently anti- people she thinks are icky, but Harry Potter and LOTR are both, like “Beowulf,” distinctly Xian works. Just not evangelical Xian. And none of them rely on prophecy of the kind we associate with Nostradamus. Or Matthew’s predictions of the Messiah. Which, it is fair to say, is where all our troubles began. But that’s because we misunderstood Matthew, all those millennia ago. As always, the problems are ours, not anyone else’s.