The Blogging of the President: 2004
The Mark of Hell
by Stirling Newberry
I am amused by the recent boom in the phrase “the culture of life” – with its combination of meanings of kulturekampf and catholicism mixed together. It will, indeed, be the rallying cry for invasions, the death penalty and crack heads ranting along with Rush Limbaugh. Given their choice of martyr’s – a brain dead woman who the courts had ruled wanted to have her suffering endeded, they should really call it the horticulture of vegetable life.
But more seriously, if you know your theology you know that God is not where they are coming from, instead, as the writings of CS Lewis make clear: the unswerving devotion to a mechanistic sense of life is a mark of hell, not heaven. The spiritually prepared do not fear death, nor do they regard death as the prime evil. As Lewis has one of his devils say: “They believe that death is the prime evil, and life the prime good, because we have taught them so.”
On a moral level, the ghastly stew of Spencerian dog eat dogism that lives under the phrase should be enough to cause any individual of faith to reject it. It also tells me why they can’t stand Darwinian theory – dogs eating dogs don’t like even the appearance of competition.
In Lewis’ series of novels — Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hiddeous Strength — Lewis attacks the mechanistic view of life as being the source of great evil. At first it shows up in the desire to propagate ones seed, and in the second in the desire to achieve personal immortality. The demon inhabiting the body of the villian makes it plain that the dead hate the living, because once through the order of life, there is nothing but a dry chaos. In Lewis’ world, the afterlife of the damned is very much like ancient Sumerian mythology – to descend into a realm of permanent shadow and eat mud.
This mechanistic worship of the life force, as Lewis is also at pains to explain, often masquerades as spirituality and religion itself: the devil teaches others to worship the self and the ego as he does. The worship of the mere continuation of life is a theme in other Christian stories. It is, specifically, at the root of stories about the undead.
The undead are those who have not only sacrificed their immortal soul, but their connection with the divine, in order to subsist in this world for longer. They do not merely trade life and salvation for unlife and damnation, but also recruit others into their ranks. They spread horror, disease and terror – and swell the ranks of the damned.
It should not escape notice that the first battle of this new cult which is to be America’s new state religion, was not over a living person, but over a person trapped as a technological undead. Alive in body, but not in spirit or personality, and subsisting, continuing. Gaining not more life, but merely the continued association of mere molecules.
This cult of the life force is, then, a cult of undeath, and, as with its previous incarnations, one which is profoundly both sadistic and masochistic. This can be seen not only in their demand to keep alive someone who is dead, but also in their cultural artifacts: The Passion of the Christ is an erotic celebration of self-flagellation. The revival of this worship of suffering comes with two parts: one of course is guilt at material prosperity, the same people who protested outside of Schiavo’s hospice would not send money to prevent famines in Africa – and fear. The cult of death and the cult of the life force live hand in hand, the desire to be consumed is next to the desire to consume.
That this form of pharisee-ism is renewed in a time where the United States is, vampire like, sucking the prosperity from the other developed nations of the world – nations which stood by us duiring that long twilight struggle that was the cold war – is not an accident.
This new cult then, is opposed, not to the culture of death, but to the society of spirit and the life of the mind. By placing something other than grace as the prime good, it is, consequently, a rejection of God, and his message of love and salvation.
Because those who know they are saved do not fear death, nor cling to life beyond that hour which has been appointed for them.
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