Every few months I very round up and loosely link together various bits and snippets which I am not inclined to expand into full length posts, either because I like them better short, or because they condense ruminations which I’ve developed at greater length somewhere else.  Here we go.

Hope, which is grounded on faith, is the sorrow of unfulfillment, mingled with participation in anticipated joy.  It bears only the most superficial resemblance to optimism, which is the unjustified assumption that everything will turn out well on its own.

It is hard to see how any sane person can live without hope.  Frankly, I don’t see how any sane person can read the rest of this post without it!  But that is another way to say that no sane person can live without God.

Those who try to live without God inevitably make some worldly power, agency, or treasure their god.  As one of the humanist society’s mottoes has it, “No one else will save man; man must save himself!”  The organization of this mentality is not well understood even by most of those consumed by it.  For example, the iron law of oligarchy tends to operate most strongly in organizations and movements which think of themselves as anti-oligarchical, just because the rank and file are under the illusion of grass roots control.  Man-made gods always disappoint, sometimes catastrophically.

Activists often find themselves compromising or destroying the very things for which they contended in the first place.  What began as their means have become their ends; vast instrumentalities which were supposed to accomplish certain purposes now accomplish little but their own preservation.  Consider how much harm has been done to the poor, their marriages, and their families, by the bureaucracies which were supposed to “help” them.

Speaking of depending on belief in God:  Conscience does and doesn't depend on it.  The atheist surely has a conscience; he can’t help it, because it comes with being human.  However, if he denies a Creator, then his conscience seems arbitrary to him, and so his denial drives him to a further denial:  He must now deny that conscience is what it seems to be.  Let it be anything – mere socialization, mere instinct, mere illusion, mere ideology, mere mix of such things – anything but the inbuilt voice of God in the wellsprings of our minds.

If I don’t give up my delusions. or repent of my known wrongdoing, then in order to quiet my conscience, I have to dig in – I have to try to justify what I have done and believed.  In order to justify it, I have to adopt premises which, if taken as principles, inevitably lead me into still further delusions and wrongdoing.  This vicious circle is the most important reason why the actions and rhetoric of so-called Progressives (as well as other kinds of ideologues) become more and more extreme over time.  Having said crazy things, they must now try to believe them in order to keep their consciences quiet.  But having told themselves they are true, they must now do and say even crazier things, carried along willy-nilly on the avalanche of unexpected implications.

Vicious circles in politics are often entangled with vicious circles in disordered private lives.  If sexual intercourse has nothing to do with fruitfulness, you will eventually conclude that it need not be faithful, need not require a spouse, need not require stable family life, need not require a difference of sex, and need not require any meaning at all beyond the felt impulse of the moment.  If you want sex but you don’t want a wife, then you will be a user of women.  If you want sex but you don’t want a husband, then you will probably expect the State to be your husband, or else your stock dividends.  If bumping off your babies is permissible, then so is bumping off your grandparents.  If their lives have so little value, then neither does your own life.  If you go even a short way along this path, then less and less will go right.  And then you will find yourself demanding “Let us fix things by making them still worse.”

The revenge of conscience takes other forms too, such as self-punishment.  I and some other writers have suggested that self-punishment is the most plausible explanation of the common form of self-mutiliation called “delicate cutting,” which is especially common today among adolescent girls.  The self-cutter is burdened by unacknowledged guilt, doesn’t know how to repent and be forgiven, and so hurts herself instead in a futile effort to atone.  But there is another plausible explanation too, and they could both be true.  For suppression of guilt tends to numb not only guilty feelings, but all feelings.  The self-cutter may be trying to make herself feel something, even if pain is the only thing she can still make herself feel.

I was brought up to believe in a population explosion.  Actually, population growth is now below replacement rates throughout the first world (except Israel), and even in large parts of the third world.  The natural consequence of declining fertility is declining population.  If you haven’t heard much about womb tanks, be patient; you will.  Some activists and researchers hope to develop and use them to outwit the law of natural consequences.  Since we can’t be bothered to conceive children themselves, let’s just use machinery!  And since we can’t be bothered to raise the children who came out of the machines, well, we can pay people to do that!  Shades of Brave New World.

But attempts to outwit the law of natural consequences never work.  If love becomes sterile, eventually people will lose interest even in love.  Sex will become exactly as interesting as scratching an itch.  In some quarters, this is already happening.

But many young people are rediscovering marriage too.  And that takes us back to hope, where this post began.