Fatalism

Truly, for some men nothing is written, unless they write it.

You may have wondered before, why a sanction can be both a licence and a ban, e.g. why you may sanction a war, but also enact war sanctions - or, likewise, why pigs are haram, when so are mosques, and while cows are holy in India, but pigs not in Arabia.

Well, as it turns out sanction comes from the same root as Latin sancio, which means I ordain, and hence a sanction is simply something that has been ordained, something that we can do nothing about, and something sacred is likewise, i.e. pigs and mosques are both haram, because our treatment of each has been ordained for both of them.

Likewise, when a war is sanctioned, it is ordained, and when war sanctions are enacted, they have been ordained. But where is all this coming from? Is there a natural link between what is holy and what is ordained? Or were the Romans, just like the Arabs would be, fatalists, who figured that, just like you can do nothing about the demands of the powerful, nobody can do anything about God's, respectively those of the gods?

The truth is, the Romans may have been, while the Arabs should not be, considering that God is called a helper in the Quran and hence He has ordained nothing for people's earthly lives, but simply makes demands for His help.

The latter is true, God doesn't hear the sinners, we owe Him, when we depend on Him, we owe Him our servitude, which means to make us dependent on the spiritual source of life, which expresses itself in our preference, what we feel connected to, our (subjective) belief, what we know in our heart to be true, and our conscience, what we know is incumbent upon us, more on this in the previous post, by vowing to heed its direction even if that means hardship or danger.

And so it is actually always: things are ordained only as a consequence of dependence, of which there are three classes,

1. in case of disbelief in God: dependence on the powerful,
2. in case of disbelief in God: dependence on a strategy to fight power, or
3. in case of belief in God: dependence on the spiritual source of life.
   

Now, when it is said that it is written that either means that always there is something that is ordained, or it means as much as you could see that coming, and in the latter meaning the introductory quote from Lawrence of Arabia refers to disbelievers in both cases: the fate of the disbeliever who relies on the powerful is written by the powerful and the disbelievers fate who relies on a strategy to fight power is written by himself, whereas the fate of the believer remains unknown.

An important area for our reliance on the spiritual source of life is warfare. It is true that man never grasps God's purpose and hence never wages war in its name. The Old Testament expresses the idea that God may decide to do away with things and employ believers to this end, but that is contingent on those things being worthless in comparison to other things that God demands to protect, and that is not His actual purpose, but only a means to an end.

More generally speaking, that is one of two cases, in which our conscience demands of us to fight (including by retreating), namely

1. in order to protect a social order and
2. in order to prove to an enemy who fights in the name of order that one has discipline enough to establish order oneself not regarding the chances of military success in the fight, as the Christians did in early Rome against the Roman authorities and again at the Battle of Wahlstatt against the Mongols and Mahatma Gandhi did in the struggle for Indian Independence against the British.
   

As I said, believers fight in order to remain in God's good graces, but the more they understand God's purpose, the rarer they feel obliged to, because God protects His purpose and one's conscience becomes less focussed on smaller achievements, the more one understands the greater challenges, or, if you think that sounds a little cowardly: It is for the establishing of order that we fight, but it is more of a debt for him to fight for it, who hopes to inherit it, than for him, who strives to bestow it, because

1. mere potential for order means physical existence, which is ruled by force,
2. the concept of an order is more dependent on communication than on force and
3. God's purpose will not be defeated and neither any concept sufficiently aligned with it.
   

Not that the Friends and Mennonites who refuse to serve don't fight in the above sense, since they fled to America, but they do fight less often and they also have a clearer understanding of what it means to be Christian than most. By the way, the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode The Survivors is right on target: Stay in God's good graces and pray for what should be, according to your understanding of God's purpose, and you'll see it emerging with far greater force than your fight could commandeer.

One way in which a believer is tricked into becoming a disbeliever is by the idea that it would be fatalistic to accept hardship and danger and that one can always rely on God's blessings to escape them, because it makes it impossible to understand when it is in alignment with depending on God to fight as opposed to relying on a particular strategy to fight power and once you've bought the idea that you fight in order to advance His purpose, as opposed to allowing it to proceed, you'll actually rely on someone's strategy to use concepts as a means to mobilise people to fight power.

There are other ways in which the reliance on the spiritual source of life is targeted: denial of God's existence, exaggerating the role of the material, in particular in health, promoting human substitutes for God, who have the power to ordain life or death, e.c. doctors, priests - yes, Christ said that his disciples would have the power to forgive sins, he also said that you shouldn't cause his little ones, those who believe in him, to stumble, it's not mutually exclusive, just requires a little thought concerning the conditions under which it is not, - and many more like buying people off with money and fame for sharing in one's success. Since that comes to its logical end as I speak with the swing from Biden's extreme scare to Kamala's extreme bribery, we're left with the last chapter of the belief in America's historical mission.