The Motive Behind the Assassination of Charlie Kirk

I had been puzzled over the motive behind Charlie Kirk’s assassination. There was no sign of mental illness. There was no prior criminal record. The assassin was not some desperate loser like Lee Harvey Oswald or Sirhan Sirhan whose only hope of fame was to kill someone famous. This guy had been an A student. Why did he kill Charlie Kirk?

Now it makes sense.

It turns out he had been living with a trans lover. Now it makes sense. He was necessarily part of the “LGBTQ community; although he was probably not sure himself which letter properly referred to himself. His “trans” “partner” initiated him into the trans ideology, and he had to embrace it to be in that relationship. And the trans ideology is in effect extreme narcissism: the idea that one’s personal will must override biology, mut override physical reality itself. This is in effect an assumption of godlike powers, the right to control reality. 

God naturally also has the right to kill; God kills all of us, after all, sooner or later. As God, the assassin could kill or destroy anyone who stood in his way.

Charlie Kirk denied he had the right or ability to control the world. So Charlie Kirk had to die.

Transgenderism is endemic in the culture now because he conviction that you are God is endemic in the culture now. A recent Facebook post--from a close acquaintance and in a sense a friend!-- expressed the common New Age sentiment. I encounter it at least monthly, it not daily, in Canada. I quote:

“We are divinity itself…we are here to take FULL responsibility for Ourselves, we are the ones we've been waiting for, we are here to save Ourselves…We are the manifestations of Source expressing and experiencing itself in the form of Infinite Many-ness. We are already ‘That.’ … There is no God outside of you. It is nonsense to worship that with you are a literal living, breathing expression of... It's a mind control program propagated to keep the masses feeling less then, keeping them disempowered and continuously beLIEving that ‘God’ or ‘the power’ is ‘out there’ - It's all nonsense, tools of control.”

Here is a whiff here of Advaita Vedanta Hinduism: “tat tvam asi,” “Brahman-atman.” But Vedantic Hinduism has been mostly superseded in India itself by devotional Hinduism: it has over the centuries lost the competition of ideas even there. It is of course incompatible with Christianity, Judaism, or Islam; and with Buddhism. 

And with Western paganism.

This is the sin the ancient Greeks called “hubris”: thinking you are a god. Bad news: it leads inevitably to madness and disaster on a social scale. It was also a crime in Athenian law; it was understood to lead automatically to the abuse of others. 

It is moreover the original sin with which Satan tempts Eve: “when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” And it is Lucifer’s own original sin. From this sin all other sin emerges.

It is also an untenable claim. As Descartes pointed out in his Meditations, it is immediately obvious to us that it is false.

“If I were independent of every other existence, and were myself the author of my being, I should doubt of nothing, I should desire nothing, and, in fine, no perfection would be wanting to me; for I should have bestowed upon myself every perfection of which I possess the idea, and I should thus be God.”

And this, however much the narcissist might wish it, is transparently not so. We know we do not know everything; we know we make mistakes. We know we cannot fly. We know things happen to us that are unexpected, even against our will. 

Hence the inevitable retreat into bitterness, anger, depression, and hostility towards the universe. And to violence towards others.

There is another emotional issue with the belief that we are God: it leaves us alone in the universe. I recall Ramakrishna’s emotional objection to monism: “I want to taste sugar. I don’t want to BE sugar.” There is no possibility of Martin Buber’s “I-Thou” relationship, which is the entire point of existence. God is love, and now there is no one to love, and so no love, and no God.

We must pull out of this tailspin. 

God in Everything

 

Ouroboros, the cosmic world-serpent 

Friend Xerxes seeks to embrace all the joys of life. He sees God in everything. Even he says, the rattlesnake coiled to strike. 

It sounds like a good, cheerful and magnanimous philosophy.

It is, however, not possible for a Christian to see God in everything. That is pantheism, or perhaps panentheism, not monotheism.

To worship everything would be a violation of the First (or Second, but who’s counting?)  Commandment: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.” That is, you must not worship nature. God stands apart from anything in the physical universe, on land, or sea, or sky. “God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”

One thinks also of this passage from 1Kings: 

“Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.  When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.” 

There are evidently many things in nature God is not in. He is in the whispers, the inconspicuous or invisible, the mustard seed, the leaven. He is more present where the physical is more absent.

All of this is based on the Bible. Authoritative for Christians, but does pantheism perhaps make sense on its own merits? 

It does not. As the later philosophers of India have pointed out, if you assert “God is in all things,” the concept God simply loses all meaning; as there is nothing other than God against which to define it. You have said nothing but “the universe is the universe.” “Things are things.”

Moreover, Xerxes choice of the rattlesnake image is telling, in a Freudian sense. The serpent is the standard Christian image of evil. If you hold that God is in all things, he must also be in evil: not just in natural evil, like rattlesnakes, cancer viruses, aging, death, and pain in childbirth, but also in moral evil, in murder and rape and incest. And he is in the ugly and defective, in offal and pollution and decay. This cannot be, for God is by definition perfect: perfect good, perfect truth, and perfect beauty.

You have simply turned away from God.

Nature has fallen. The prince of "this world" is, after all, the Devil.

On the other hand, one’s daily life can and should be understood as a conversation with God. If one is alert, and prayerful, little miracles are happening all the time, as well as little corrective messages.

It's All about Me, Right?

 

were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

Elizabeth Gilbert wrote a travel memoir titled Eat, Pray, Love, in which, following a divorce she initiated at 34, she travels to Italy for the food, then to India for the spiritual insight, then meets and marries a man in Bali. (They have since divorced.) It has been made into a movie, starring Julia Roberts.

It sounds to me like a parody of the rootlessness and frivolousness of modern life in the developed world, existential angst among the Karens. But Oprah Winfrey loved it. Friend Xerxes also takes it seriously, and cites as revelatory the author’s key insight: “God lives in me, AS me.”

One understands how this is something she might have picked up in India. “Tat tvam asi,” “That art thou”: “that” being Brahman, the undifferentiated Godhead. Brahman-Atman, a common formulation of Advaita Vedanta Hinduism; monism. “All is one.”

It is not clear to me, however, that it means what she thinks it means. It is dangerous to parachute into a foreign religious tradition with your own prior assumptions. You can get thing backwards.

It means that the individual self is insignificant and transitory, like a raindrop falling into the ocean of Brahman. Or like a momentary hand gesture of the dancing Siva, the glitter of a sequin on his thigh. I suspect Gilbert, her acolytes, and Xerxes are reading this instead in the Satanic way: “I am God, and there is no other God before me.” Fatally wrong.

Monism, Advaita Vedanta, is more popular with foreign spiritual tourists than with Indians. Buddhism objects to the “Brahman-Atman” formulation with its counter-doctrine of “anatman”: “there is no self.” Precisely because of the danger of misinterpretation. It is self that must die, not God. Others object that “All is one” is a meaningless statement: one compared to what? And then there is Ramakrishna’s succinct practical observation: “I want to taste sugar; I don’t want to BE sugar.”

Among actual Indians, Advaita Vedanta has been mostly supplanted for centuries by devotional Vaishnavism.

The issue is that one must “die to self.” “He must become greater; I must become less.” C.S. Lewis writes: “The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real, new self will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him.”

In the Gospel of John, Jesus says we must be born again. That is one way to put it. But in order to be born again, we must first die in some sense. It is the death of the will.