What’s The Meaning of Life? Why Are We Here Now?

Corruption and Lies Health and Wholeness Liberty/Politics Neo-Marxism Personal Development Relationships Spirituality The Lie What Your Father Should Have Taught You

What’s the meaning of life? Why are we here now? Today…in this place…you were born for such a time as this. Some faiths believe we choose the life we are born into and the challenges that we face. They also say some of us are too optimistic about what we think we can face before we incarnate. But, we are here…now.

When I was 21 I was near death, I viewed my body on the gurney in the emergency room where my young wife cried next to me. I felt something was odd. A beautiful person with the most beautiful voice I ever heard spoke to me. I believe we are born with an identity of male or female, but I could not tell which this was – its voice had qualities that I would assign to both genders. It said to me, “This is not your appointed time, you have not accomplished what God sent you to do, however, he said that if you want to you can come home now.” I am still here. I’m not easy to kill. People have tried. I believe we all have a purpose that only we can do. Even if it is just to communicate an important message to one person, at the right time, one pebble that starts an avalanche.

Today’s Society and Life is built on lies. You can tell the and that now nearly everything is in service to The Lie because it makes you feel empty or anxious inside. It doesn’t call to you. It doesn’t make you feel alive. But that isn’t how it’s supposed to be.

Welcome to What Your Father Should Have Taught You; the Sunday installment of SabersEdge.Online.

When I was working on my master’s degree, I was assigned a book that I thought was going to be the most boring and depressing book I was ever to read. It was by Cornelius Plantinga and the book was entitled: Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be; A Breviary of Sin. I don’t know about you but for me it was not a title that, had I seen it in the store, and it had not been assigned I would have not been excited to buy it. You probably know the story. The mythic tale actually has deep meaning for us even today if we pay attention. I remember Professor Carter talking about facts and truth. He said, when you read a story, it may or may not be true. You can’t be sure. But when you read a myth its always true. That’s because myth (like the modern myth of Star Wars in the original 6 movies,) speaks of an epic truth that resonates deep in the human soul.

Still, A Breviary of Sin? Not an enticing title. However, as I started reading the book I was drawn into it. Far from doom and gloom it looked at the world and all that was wrong in it and made a point of saying that it was not the way the Divine Intelligence had intended the world to be. Humanity had and was continuing to not only mess it up but to do horrible things to each other. Providence had created the world and declared it good. Then Adam and Eve messed with their program and went their own way. Even then I think God would have forgiven them if they had taken responsibility for what they had done. But they didn’t. That’s the lesson. Not that we are hopelessly trapped in sin, but that forgiveness comes when we take action and assume responsibility.

There is a Hebrew word that is translated into English as “peace.” That word is SHALOM. Shalom can mean peace but “peace” is a pitiful translation. Shalom means that everything in the world is not only at peace but that everything interacts in a way that is mutually uplifting and creates not only inner but outer harmony. It is a universal flourishing of all life.

Does that sound like your life? This book described what we call sin NOT as some breaking of a cosmic collection of rules, Righteousness is not found by keeping all the rules meticulously. That is not what righteousness is. Righteousness is more like doing the right thing at the right time according to the situation you are in and your understanding or your own obligations to the people or creatures you are interacting with. Sin, is (as Cornelius Plantinga says,) a culpable disturbance of Shalom. Doing something that disturbs the universal flourishing or failing to act justly to bring things back into harmony.

I was reminded of the First Peoples of America, when they killed an animal for food (disturbing its own shalom definitely,) they always thanked the animal for giving its life to feed them, their family, and tribe. Thus, restoring the harmony.

Saint Paul described sin as “He who knows what is right to do and does not do it, for him it is sin.”

Religion, as Jesus says, makes a bunch of rules for us and tries to make us feel guilty for not following them. When religious leaders tried to make Jesus stop his disciples from gathering food on the Sabbath – in violation of the “law.” Jesus said, “The Law was made for man, man was not made for the law.” They were hungry and they needed to eat. The religious leaders could just see the rules and not the need of the people Jesus pointed out that the people were more important. Hunger is a disturbance of our shalom. God’s rules were intended to help us figure out how to get along with one another not to entrap us in breaking them.

Thousands of years ago Herodotus wrote: “All of life is action and passion, and not to be involved in the actions and passions of your time is to risk having not really lived at all.” He, like The Teacher, Ecclesiasticus in the Bible, basically is telling us that life has no deep, hidden meaning. Life is meant for living and the process of facing and overcoming challenges, living, falling in love, mating and raising a family, continues the line stretching from the very beginning on into a future where no one has gone before. But whatever that future brings there will be people, life, our world, and our families.

In a sense, whether you look at things spiritually or biologically we have been entrusted by the past with the future. Within your own body you carry the genetic code of all the winners who ever lived, mated, and raised a family in your family’s line. There are no losers in your history. Everyone succeeded enough in life to pass on their genes. Abraham didn’t manage it until he was an old man, when he finally had two sons. They became the Jewish and Arab peoples, as the story of both the Bible and the Koran tell us.

If we don’t continue this line and eventually have a family and kids of our own, then our entire line is silenced and the genetic coding of thousands of generations is lost forever. I think that is part of the answer to what is life for? It’s to keep the code alive. Everything yearns for life. Even people who tried to commit suicide often say, when they fail, that right at the moment they tried to end it they realized it was a mistake. Our own bodies imperatives and striving to stay alive gives us the information we need. If we fail in that regard all that is left to speak for us is our deeds. The Viking sagas had a truth that I have carried with me since I was a lad, “Men die, kinsmen die, we ourselves must also die. But one thing, never dies, the deeds of life lived well.” Leonidas, Alexander, Caesar and Octavian, Jefferson and Washington, Lee, Teddy Roosevelt, Pershing, Eisenhower, Rommel, and Reagan, their names and many others continue on with their story. Life is for living and as Herodotus says, you don’t want to miss it. Its the only one you’ve got! Ecclesiastes says the same, if you get a good translation.

You see the Truth of deep meaning behind myth does not change while the lies society tries to feed you change constantly. The Truth is embedded in the Creation and science was originally envisioned as a way of learning about the Creator by studying the Creation. Now Science has finally delved deep enough that it is leading us back to God as more and more scientists at the forefront of their fields find the intricacy of patterns and design defy random chance. The Creation itself repeatedly points to Intelligent Design and the God Hypothesis (As Stephen Meyer describes in his book The Return of the God Hypothesis so clearly illustrates). The God Hypothesis is the most logical answer to the questions the cutting-edge scientists are now asking about the designs imbedded in the Universe. The idea that Science has all the answers is a non-theist religion called Scientism and it is as empty as the materialistic society that it has coopted and poisoned.

Herodotus said: “All of life is action and passion, and not to be involved in the actions and passions of your time is to risk having not really lived at all.” ~ Herodotus

Do you feel passion in your life? For your life? Do you wake up with a joy to face the sunrise of another day with your children, your dog, and your cats (both of whom are already waiting at the food dish for you!)

Herodotus said all life is action and passion, Jesus said, I come that you might have life and have it abundantly. He wasn’t talking about things that leave you empty inside. He was talking about being filled with the experience of Living! Do you feel it? Interestingly enough Hebrew mystics taught that the orgasm was the moment when we most closely felt the joy that God felt in the moment of Creation. Our moment of Creation is a sign that points to the Creation and the reason for living which is life itself.

Jesus called us to abundant living. Living each moment to the full! And that is so different from the empty existence the Radical Materialism of the Capitalist Robber Barons who see us only as consumers or the Godless Neo-Marxists who see us only as a member of a class and as tools to bring about the Revolution.

In Ecclesiastes 9:7-10a we find one of my favorite passages to preach on and which I have never heard anyone else preach on (the lectionary misses it by one verse) – probably because they have a translation the views Ecclesiastes and totally cynical instead of reading it with acceptance for the world God has made.

Now I am not Catholic, but the New Catholic Bible gets it right:

 Go forth, then. Eat your bread with joy and drink your wine with a cheerful heart, for God long ago approved what you do. At all times dress in white garments and always anoint your head with oil.

Enjoy life with the wife whom you love throughout all the days of your allotted span of life that have been given to you under the sun, because that is your lot while you live and labor here under the sun. 10 Whatever task your hand finds to do, expend all your efforts on it, for you will find no work or planning or knowledge or wisdom in the netherworld to which you are going.

Too many people just lumber on like mindless zombies in a Romero Movie blindly shuffling back and forth to work or to the mall but understanding no more of what we do in the heartless and mindless shuffle that we never realize that whether we are a zombie or “living” we are existing in an evil construction of the Enemy. An Anti-Life Parody of the true Life that God calls us too.

“I come that you might have life and have it abundantly.”

Are you living abundantly? Is your life full? Are you living with the wife that you love and among the children of your youth, or old and among your children’s children? Does your job leave you fulfilled and full of life? Do your thoughts? Are your musings something God would welcome? All of these are described in the Bible as things God has declared as good.

It is said that the Jews consider the first Commandment God gave to humanity was to “be fruitful and multiply, while the text itself calls us to live life abundantly, to live our lives with joy and enjoy our family and put our whole might into the life that we have while we have it.

Life is not meaningless, or hopeless. You are a child of the Living God. You are the product of thousands of years of evolution and a genetic line passed down through thousands of generations. Life is not meaningless, but our society would tell us so because only then can they trap us in their lies as cogs of either a consumer materialistic capitalist wheel or the soul-crushing, life-destroying cog of a lifeless Communist radical materialistic wheel that destroys everything, criticizes everything because nothing matters to a true Marxist except the Revolution.

Feminism is not the issue it is toppling the society to make way for the Revolution, Prayer in schools is not the issue it is toppling the society to make way for Revolution, Transgenderism is not the issue it is toppling the society to make way for Revolution. Trump is not the issue it is the revolution. Justice and bail reform is not the issue it is toppling society to make way for the revolution, queer theory is not the issue it is the revolution, Ukraine is not the issue it is revolution, inflation is not the issue it is revolution, corruption is not the issue it is destroying faith in our institutions to make way for the revolution. A member of the SDS once said, “The thing is never the thing, it is always the revolution.”

So Neo-Marxists are busy destroying our society as well-meaning people try to take the issues brought up seriously not realizing that none of these issues matter to the Neo-Marxists are simply using honest and caring people to help tear apart our society of the LIE to replace it with the NEW LIE. They have been twisting and warping American society for almost 80 years if not more (Remember Marx was writing before and during the American War Between the States)…of course everything we see feels like a lie. The Lie has corrupted it all. But then Jefferson and our founders foresaw that:

The Constitution is not unable to deal with modern society, that is just another lie. The over-riding and watering down of the safeguards of the constitution and Bill of Rights that we have done over the last 200 years is what has brought us to this point.

Then they raise the LIE again. “You who want to return to the Constitution want to put blacks back in chains.” The Constitution didn’t make anyone a slave, it just acknowledged the aberration of slavery as a fact marring the free society envisioned. That is why Jefferson originally wrote in his draft of the Constitution:

But they didn’t tell you that, did they? That is because, like everything else they don’t tell you it doesn’t serve the lie.

We live in a hard time. But those who say we shouldn’t bring kids into this world have swallowed the LIE and are living according to it. God proclaimed the World to Be good and it is only where we have deviated from the Divine Path that we have sullied it and made it empty.

This is the time that tries men’s souls. It is a time where history will someday look back on and say there were those who battled for the light and freedom and there were those who battled for The Lie and helped plunge the world into a new Dark Age while most people, as always, did nothing.

Is this time harder than World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, or when the Mongols swept out of Mongolia to cover a third of the globe, hurling thousands of heads of their slain over the walls of cities to get them to surrender? Is today really harder than that?

Every generation has faced their own Lie and the Enemy of their time and proceeded with God’s commands to “Be fruitful and multiply” and Jesus call that: “I came that you might have life and have it abundantly.”

To quote a line from G. Michael Hopf’s post-apocalypic novel “Those Who Remain”: “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” But this is not our destiny, it is our choice. Some hard men and women will fight through to the light.

“And what does the Lord require?…” the Bible tells us in Micah 6:8:

He has shown you, O man, what is good;
And what does the Lord require of you
But to do justly,
To love [a]mercy,
And to walk humbly with your God?

To have an abundant life you need to live the life that you have been given and live it to the max wherever you are. I have been in the cavalry, counterintelligence, worked with AFOSI, NIS, and a variety of other alphabet agencies. But those were things I chose to do. Whatever life you have, if you embrace it, it can be more real than any video game. We are living in a historic time and the decisions we make today and every day are final for that time. We don’t get them back and we dare not waste them.

In 1776, Washington’s army was evaporating. It was a dark time for the rebellion. The reason the Spirit of 1776 is so important is because it was a time when most people had already given up. But a chosen few…hungry, starving, and freezing to death marched through the snow in ragged shoes and clothes, with freezing fingers they clutched their rifles as they moved across a frozen river and attacked an elite unit of the enemy. Some of them died. They froze along the way or just lay down in the snow and went to sleep, never to wake up. But those who went on. That band of brothers. When they were done they had a story for the ages. That was the spirit of 1776 that kept a faltering rebellion against the greatest Empire, military , and navy that the world had ever seen, going. And it turned the tide. Those who wouldn’t give up, or escape into the oblivion of sleep in the snow. They made it possible to create the first free country in the world where the people ruled and governed themselves, with a government of, by, and for the people. Like the elite of today, the elite of the 1700s didn’t trust the people to do so. In America, starting in the 1860s decided that it was too difficult to reign over a people who actually believed in what our founders taught so they stripped the states and the people of a lot of power. Then, in the 1920s this accelerated and we began being told we need to listen to “experts.” It really began to amplify and by the end of World War II and in the Cold War. Today the elite want to use tech to minimize what we do and to manipulate who we can vote for. Somewhere along the line it was decided that it was too hard to control a people who actually believed the revolutionary philosophy of the idealists who carried us through 1776. So they stopped teaching it.

It is now so lost to common knowledge that when PBS tried to tweet out the Declaration of Independence one sentence at a time, two years ago, people began posting that their twitter account had been “taken over by terrorists.” So, that is what the average educated American thinks of the revolutionary values that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all are created equal and they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights…that to ensure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it NOW, deserves the love and thanks of man woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap we esteem to lightly: ‘Tis dearness alone that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed, if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. [The elite who define themselves as the real ruler of the Western Republics]…with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but to BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER,” and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then there is not such a thing upon earth. Even the expression is impious, for so unlimited a power can belong only to GOD.” – Thomas Paine, December 23rd, 1776.

Government, led by the corrupt elite, believe they have the power to manipulate you and feed you what they want through media, entertainment, and drugs and that by so using their 21st Century “Panem et Circensus” Bread and Circuses can keep you entertained with virtual gladitorial games while they wage war against the God given freedoms that our forefathers fought and died for. You can lose yourself in them. Or you can choose to live. Freedom is not the only thing of esteemed value. Your life is a one shot. You don’t get to respawn. You need to fight and claw through and overcome the obstacles placed before you and if you decide its too hard for you you don’t get another go. With only one life, each day, each hour, each minute is precious. You won’t get them back so don’t waste them.

We are living in a historic time. And you must grasp it and fully engage in the task of our time. That task is to fight, claw, and stubbornly hang on to our freedoms, or watch the world, our families, our children, and our neighbors children lapse into hundreds of years of darkness before they get another chance to claim them. This is what our time brings to us for as Herodotus said, “All life is action and passion, and not to be involved in the actions and passions of your time is to risk having not really lived at all.”

We are all victims of the ancient Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times.

When Theoden died he said to Merry and Eowyn, “My body is broken. I go to my fathers. And even in their mighty company I shall not now be ashamed.” He lived and seized the passion and action of his time.

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