Belinda wrote: ↑Sun Jul 20, 2025 10:57 am
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Jul 19, 2025 11:53 pm
How interesting: I couln’t have put it better myself.
The only way to get rid of the knowledge of God is to make a foe of Him. And people wonder how anybody ends up in an eternity without God….
They choose it. C.S. Lewis was right. Everybody who is lost has
chosen to be lost.
No, everyone who is lost is a victim of circumstances.
When a man or woman chooses something, he or she is no victim. He or she is the cause.
If a man does not know that danger then good people should tell him of it, for his own safety and the safety of others.
I could not agree more. It is precisely why there is a sacred duty on all Christians to share their faith…that if the hearer is willing, the choice will be clear. This is why Jesus repeated, many times, the phrase,
“He who has ears, let him hear.” He provided that message of the danger and of the deliverance with absolute clarity: but it was the disposition of the hearer that was going to determine the outcome.
For instance, think of the millions of Germans who were exploited by Hitler and his Nazis. The German people who said after 1945 ,that they did not know what was going on chose not to know because at the time they were deliberately misled.
And yet, so many of them saw the trains of helpless victims being shipped to their deaths, or lived in the precincts of the 44,000 prison, forced labour and concentration camps that Germany established and ran. How plausible, then, is it to think that the Germans were all mere victims of a very clever campaign of misinformation?
There is always cause for men to choose what they choose.
But that cause is often found in their volition, their nature, their wills. As John wrote,
“The Light has come into the world, but men preferred darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.” So the message, the warning was there: but men looked at their evil options, and preferred those. And that speaks to the dark character of human nature.
Incidentally, you’ll find that this is the greatest failure of Socialism: that it is founded on a belief that if we only engineer the right social situations, men will be instinctively good. This belief has never been justified anytime in history, nor by any social rearrangement. In fact, the opposite has proved true, and true in 100% of the cases. What happens when men try to engineer the right social situations is that not only are the people found to be too corrupt to make the idealistic system work, but even the aspiring engineers themselves are so corrupt (for there are no specially naturally-righteous and trustworthy people who cannot be corrupted) that Socialism dissolves into totalitarianism every time.
That’s about the most confirmable fact in all of human history: that human beings fail to live up to their aspirations, because they cannot resist the opportunity to seize some advantage, or because they’re driven by spite and envy, or because they’re simply being too lazy to make the effort to sustain a good project for long. Meanwhile, our various democracies have turned out to be just as flawed, but blessed with a better sense of what to expect from human nature — to anticipate the failure, and so to distribute power in such a way that though it remains accessible to the people in some measure, it cannot be so tightly concentrated in the hands of the corrupt. Term limits, distribution of responsibilities, constitutions, votes and such distribute power in such a way that it is difficult — perhaps not impossible, but certainly much more problematic — for an autocratic group to seize all the reins of power and brutalize the people for their own gain.
Not so when Big Government becomes the practice, of course. For Big Government always demands more and more power, and the dropping of every limitation, so it can force its self-serving projects forward without the inconvenience of consulting the public or caring for their protestations.
And this explains the old aphorism about democracy: that it’s the worst form of government
except for every other form. It’s not perfect, but it’s always better than the alternatives because of its more realistic view of human nature.
