Predestination might not be what you think it is. I thought it was “an unavoidable outcome known in advance”. That was a mistake.
Scripture is a fan of such outcomes. They’re the prophecies! It’s interesting to explore how God tells us what’s going to happen, in such a way that we know He’s right, yet are unable to change the outcome despite knowing it. The classic time travel paradox, a.k.a. as Greek tragedy.
It’s reasonable that different theologians will put different emphases on different parts of Scripture. For example, Romans 8:28-30. “[We] know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.”
Well, which is it? Do you have a choice whether to follow Christ, or not? Are you as prone to evil as anybody else, or is evil something only other people do?
I once thought that that was the essence of the Arminian-Calvinist schism. The former says it’s your choice, the latter says it’s inevitable, with the truth being both at once, yet obscured in a metaphysical contest of causality that defies easy mapping. Comparable to how engineering is a collection of basic, easy principles that becomes very complicated in their application. Thus, that schism is really just a choice of perspectives.
Oh hell, no.
The reason Calvinist churches has fallen to Freemasonry more quickly than the Arminians, is that it has the same theology of predestined Chosen People specialness that the Puritans of the Mainlines had, and the Vatican before them, and Islam, and the Talmud, and every Kabbalah-based secret society there ever was.
It’s a different mindset.
A Christian learns about the world, then creates something of it. “This is what is real. How do I make what I want from it?” For example, “triangles are very sturdy. If I make a bridge out of triangles then it should also be very sturdy,” or in a theological context, “I see that I am evil. I don’t want to be evil anymore. How do I proceed from Evil to Good? …Jesus might not be the way I want, but He’s the only way being offered.”
The diabolist thinks backwards. “This is what I want. How do I make it happen?” To use the engineering example, “my bridge will be sturdy because… uh… it’s made of rectangles, and rectangles consist of two triangles.” The nerd might believe that justification because he imagines a rectangle with a cross-brace, thus making two triangles of a rectangle, but no, the diabolist’s bridge doesn’t have any cross-braces. It’s made of RECTANGLES, which are cheaper and prettier! He only said the bit about triangles in order to get it approved.
That poor bridge is doomed to be built wrong, because otherwise, its failure would be the designer’s fault. And it’s not, now isn’t it?
Now theology. “I am Good, while the entire rest of humanity is Evil. How can I convince myself this is true? By imputing a special status to myself! God, or maybe Genetics, decided that I would be a special case of human being!”
Put that way, the vulnerability of religions/factions offering predestination theologies are easy pickings for a diabolist. The people are pre-convinced that they have a Specialness that sets them apart from the unwashed masses.
Pastor: “Predestination!”
Me: “God already knows which of us will be loyal at the end, so He gives us selected trials to help us reach our full potential.”
Them: ”I always knew there was something special about me, that made me better than my neighbor. This why I deserve to be in charge until God returns!”
I know that ‘Them’ sounds paste-eatingly stupid, but for serious, it’s impossible to overestimate the extent to which the diabolist will lie to himself. Here’s a relevant example:
‘Old-time religion’: Netanyahu invokes scripture as Hamas fight becomes Israel’s ‘holy war’
Sourced from news.com.au
By Frank Chung, 1 November 2023
Benjamin Netanyahu has been accused of declaring a “holy war” against Gaza by supporters of Palestine, with the right-wing leader continuing to invoke religious themes in the escalating battle against Hamas.
Critics say the tactic shows the leader is intentionally appealing to the Orthodox faction of his cabinet and drawing on “old time” ideas of religious battles to rally support.
In a televised address on Saturday night announcing the ground invasion of Gaza, the Israeli Prime Minister likened Hamas to the nation of Amalek — the biblical arch-enemy of the Israelites.
“You must remember what Amalek has done to you,’ says our Holy Bible — and we do remember, and we are fighting,” he said.
Mr Netanyahu was quoting from [Deuteronomy], the fifth book of the Torah — which is made up of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible.
The Palestinians are not the Amalekites.
1 Samuel 15:7-8. “Then Saul attacked the Amalekites all the way from Havilah to Shur, near the eastern border of Egypt. He took Agag king of the Amalekites alive, and all his people he totally destroyed with the sword.”
Agag was soon executed, so 1. there are no Amalekites alive today, and 2. if there were then Bibi would have mercy on them.
Alas, impossibly stupid word games like that are how these people think. They don’t want truth. They want results. And they crave external validation for their internal beliefs.
Professor Joe Siracusa, Dean of Global Futures at Curtin University, said Mr Netanyahu’s Biblical references were likely an appeal to the right-wing Orthodox arm of his cabinet, and a reflection of the influence of his father, Benzion Netanyahu, a renowned biblical scholar.
“I think he’s going back to his taproots — he’s drawing up this aura of battle,” he said.
“Words mean a lot to him, so he’s going back to that old-time religion.”
The “big problem” facing the PM, Prof Siracusa argued, was selling the war to the public. “Even Jesus and Moses had to sell the program, right? We’ve got TV screens, we can see what’s happening,” he said.
“His 300,000 reservists, they’re professional soldiers. They haven’t been trained to kill children. They’re way outside their comfort zone.”
They’re calling innocence “the comfort zone” now, are they?
As the Noahide Heresy gathers steam… note that Netanyahu’s faction is one of its authors… I predict it’ll offer specialness before God to the people who sign up. An easy prediction, since that’s already the belief of self-righteous fools from Rome to Mecca to Tel Aviv to New Delhi to...
Meanwhile, God sends rain even on the wicked man’s crops.
The real Christian teaching, of course, is that everybody is evil and in need of a Savior… not “everybody is evil until they become a dues-paying member”.
It’s hard to believe the churches ever stopped teaching about evil, but they did and in living memory. “Jesus is the answer!” says the bumper sticker, which famously raised the mystery of the missing question. Which is, “everybody is a rebel against God, and God cannot be bribed or threatened into forgiving that rebellion.” Only when the reality of evil is accepted, does “Jesus’ answer” make any sense at all. You would not give a parachute to a man standing on the ground.
Evil got memory-holed because it hurt woman’s feelings. Today, after many iterations of Original Sin, Jesus is now the answer to why ZOG should enslave the planet. Oh yes, I bet reintroducing the concept of universal evil would crimp that agenda… reintroducing the fact that “I once did evil but not anymore” would not convince even a traffic-court judge to forgive.
Meanwhile…
I have read more about Freemasonry and its occult predecessors than is probably healthy. I’ve traced their history, the secrets to their philosophy’s longevity, their origins and accomplishments, as well as any outsider with a day job can be expected to. And I discovered a secret, Cosmic truth:
They’re all full of bullshit.
I mean that technically, as in “they’re making up nonsense and feeding it to us”. The secret to Freemasonry’s history is that there is no history*. There is no multigenerational organization reaching from ancient Babylon to the modern District of Columbia. The Cabal would be suppressed in one place in Europe, and a decade later, reappear on the other side of Europe. The new Cabal might claim to be the successor/survivor of the old Cabal, but it almost never tried to prove it, and the new dogma was never quite the same. I had an epiphany when one author that really did his homework on the origins of secret societies, I was very impressed, at one point he complained that most Masons do not even care what their organization’s history is. Or its leaders, goals, etc.
Epiphany: most Masons join up for the benefits of membership, not the history or symbology or secret teachings. Freemasonry is just a tool to them.
I had been thinking that the Cabal was a single organization like a hydra, that held some supernatural promise that no matter how many of its heads were cut off, two more would take its place. That whenever they were uprooted, governors and magistrates would have their thoughts & actions forcibly clouded by spirits enough that the devil’s agents could escape to reprise the villain in the next chapter of human history. No. Those governors and magistrates all thought they were special little shits, too, so they didn’t hurry to find any special little shits who were on the run. Preexisting conspiracy not needed.
The truth is this. All the diabolists who think of themselves as special, as “set apart from humanity to rule”, they need a reason to believe it. The Talmud and related occult texts provide an attractive, premade reason. They have always been obtainable by Elites. Sometimes merchants and normals, too, but literacy and travel were typical prerequisites until modern times.
All those secret rites and famous ancestors, are nothing but the softest ego-fluffing on the market.
An example.
One theory about the Templars is that they learned Freemasonry from the infamous Turkish Assassins, whom they warred against during the Crusades. On the one hand, there is a thread of Babylonianism passing from Egypt through the Muslims & Turks independent of Judaism, and a case can be made that the Assassins were structured similar to Masonry.
(A disturbing revelation during that study was that both Catholics and Muslims have sects worshiping prophetesses named Fatima. Hmm.)
We coming from a Christian cause-to-effect mindset, quickly see several objections. First off, the Assassins were murderers, not soldiers. The Templars would not have been quick to adopt the beliefs of their enemies, not when the Templars would have gained access to those beliefs by defeating them. Winners do not imitate losers. Also, the Templar Order existed before any possible cultural exchange. Of all the claims made against them, “going native in Arabia” was never one.
Lastly, the wickedness of the Templars was them acting as the first Central Bank of Europe, not them offering services of murder and mayhem. Their behavior was much different from the Assassins before & after.
But consider the diabolist mindset. If the Templars were already arrogant, seeing themselves as better than the peasants and priests that they constantly fought & died to protect… Christianity would offer nothing to justify that arrogance. Quite the opposite, any priest worth his ordination would call them to repentance and remembrance that they are equally flawed... just not in military arts.
The Templars could have encountered a Muslim version of Babylonianism, found it useful for justifying and feeding their arrogant sense of specialness, for rearranging their brotherhood to best “get away with it”, and claimed the useful parts while disposing of the rest.
I don’t know whether that tale is true… nobody alive does… but it demonstrates the pattern of Cabalism which is repeated everywhere. Newcomers always find in Cabalism a justification and blueprint for their worldly ambitions, one that dates back to “King Solomon”, “Pythagoras” and “the Pharaohs”, and claims membership by many of history’s most notable figures… rather a self-fulfilling prophecy, that.
The Cabal doesn’t need to be continuous, to be useful.
Maybe the new Cabal come from nowhere. Maybe they’re the personal guard of a famous general unfairly accused. My conclusion is that whatever origin they claim, would only be the truth by coincidence.
Thus is explained the difficulty in tracing the Cabal’s history. One would expect that survivors of a purge would be careful to document their survival… rebels, by definition, need something to rebel against, and what better way to demonstrate the worth of your teachings than beating the odds… but if the teachings were always adopted by the locals for their utility of the moment, then of course the handoff would always be hinted at but never proven.
Freemasonry is not kept alive by supernatural intervention. It’s kept alive by being the four-thousand-years distilled fantasy of that fatal, shortcut-to-Godhood flaw in every human heart. If it did not exist, then the wicked would simply find other explanations for why they’re Special People…
…such as belief in predestination.
*”The secret to Freemasonry’s history is that there is no history.” Rumor has it that Benjamin Franklin was only accepted into the Lodges when he said exactly that with his printing press, as the price of his silence. He still misbehaved, however, so he got shipped to Paris in order to burden the rival French Lodge. Either that, or Franklin was a great & noble ambassador despite all his coincidental drunkenness and womanizing, as official history claims.
Here’s a thought, the church has a continuous history (the gates of hell not prevailing), so the anti church has a non continuous history, different cults getting crushed or fading away and some unrelated men picking up the idea; and since it’s not actually being handed over it’s a funhouse mirror transmission.
By contrast to that last part one of the fascinating parts of Christian history is how sturdy the transmission of scripture was and is; there are always heresies, doctrinal issues, etc., but the Bible itself has been remarkably preserved. It doesn’t matter in the anti church if anything is preserved if the whole idea means trying to get the power of God, speaking things into existence.
Official History for Franklin is that he didn't do shit in France. The historians paint his practice of not doing shit as Ambassadorial Genius. I prefer your explanation.