“The Judges keep informing me that the situation down there is in complete chaos, and they are losing control of what’s going on”, Lord Azrael informed the war council. “And I completely agree with them. There are so many things going on either simultaneously or in quick succession, that I can’t figure the heads and tails of it”.

“The stability of the feudal system and the spiritual guidance of the Church in Europe are gone forever. There’s no getting them back, I’m afraid. Everybody is about being liberated from something, and this would not be a bad idea if they meant the world itself and the grip of Satan. Unfortunately, they think the other humans are their problem, and if only they got rid of them and got more freedoms and emancipation in the world, everything would be great. They shifted focus from God as the goal to the world itself, and as this progresses, they will be completely lost”, he concluded.

“It’s not all bad”, his wife continued. “When we say that they moved away from God, in a very large percentage of cases this is not a bad thing, as ‘God’ seems to be a word they use when they don’t want to use their brains for their intended purpose. Ascribe something to God, and you solved the problem – you made social signals of your pious virtue, and you didn’t have to think about how something actually works. They use the same words as we do – God’s will, God’s providence, fate and so on, but they mean completely different things by them, which makes things complicated to explain even when they arrive here, because we tell them one thing, and they understand something completely different. They think the Will of God has to do with reasons why lightning hit some place and not another, or why hail destroyed the crops. The concept of God micro-managing every aspect of that world is a pervasive misapprehension, and it’s actually Christ’s fault, because he explicitly stated that God has every sparrow’s feathers accounted for, let alone their lives, and on the other hand he explicitly stated that the world is a principality of Satan. They are trying to make sense of those contradictory statements, and they either err on the side of giving God what they think is greater glory, saying that he controls absolutely everything, or on the side of removing God altogether from their lives, giving all the power to the material forces. The truth, of course, is in between, but both theology and science seem to be completely unable to figure out a model of reality where this would be conceivable. I don’t blame them. Will of God, providence, the concept of God working both through us and involving us in a larger plan that is conceived beyond us, is hard for even us to understand. Blaming humans for being confused and lost, and often angry at God for understanding something in a sense that they were betrayed or abandoned, or that God is evil or indifferent, would be completely unfair, considering how broken we all were just recently, when Grace died and most of us almost followed her. If even we can be ignorant of some wider aspect of God’s plan, and we are his own persons, we should be very understanding of the human situation, but on the other hand, their understanding of God’s hand is often mere superstition and ignorance. Yes, God obviously has every sparrow’s feathers accounted for, and also every atom of Hydrogen, because the Jewel that renders that world merely borrows the power of God, and if something renders out that entire world dynamically in every detail, everything is known, somewhere, on some level. However, that world is also a principality of Satan, and as such excepted from the Throne of God – God has little to no power there, save for some special circumstances that are so exceptional, that they are rightly called miracles. This understanding, unfortunately, is completely absent down there, and they keep bouncing between unbalanced extremes of vulgar materialism and superstitious faith. The age of the Church is gone, and it will never return, but that, I’m afraid, was always a necessity, because the Church, good and useful as it was, always carried within itself just enough ignorance to never move to the higher level of understanding, which continued to be a problem even here, because the Christians tended to get stuck at a certain level of understanding, and were extremely unwilling to move forward. Our Christian brothers sometimes achieved apotheosis with thousands of years of delay, only because they held on to limiting concepts long after they outlived their usefulness. But regardless, it is hard for me to criticise the Church, as it produced more holy and enlightened people than almost anything else, with the possible exception of some schools of Buddhism and Hinduism. At this point, unfortunately, the Church is defined more by its superstitions and limitations than its transcendental impulses, and as material sciences develop, this becomes increasingly obvious. Rather than lament the loss of the golden era of European spirituality and transcendence, we should think of ways to turn this into something good, because we obviously aren’t getting the Church back”, she concluded.

“So basically, they have too much faith in God, and of the wrong kind?”, Lady Lakshmi asked.

“I would definitely say so”, Bernard nodded. “It is as if we, and I say ‘we’ because I was definitely a part of this, competed on giving God more glory and power, until we all but turned into Muslims”, he smiled. “But crediting God with everything and assuming he can do anything, in a world that is almost completely governed by Satan, always ends up in blending God and Satan into the same object of worship. It is spiritually incredibly unhealthy, and is no better than atheism, eventually”, he shrugged. “It’s better to say that God decides almost nothing, than to say he decides absolutely everything, thus crediting him with all the terrible evils that are going on there”.

“The concept that God can do anything isn’t a sign of great faith, it’s a sign of philosophical naivety”, Lord Augustine frowned. “It should be long established that God has all sorts of limitations. Consistency, for one – if he gave his word, that limits his future options, and usually causes all kinds of paradoxes and problems. He is also limited by his nature – he refuses to do evil, for instance. There’s a whole complex topology of limitations placed upon God by all sorts of things and reasons, and the belief in God’s omnipotence persists merely because theological idiots think it gives God greater glory, and not because anyone serious believes it is a reality”.

“Those newborn souls in the astral nursery can do more than God. They can be anything and do anything. They can become Satan, or demons, or angels, or Gods. The more advanced and closer to God we are, the less we can do. Our choices place limitations upon us. I am extremely powerful in a sense that I could do all sorts of things, so it’s not the lack of ability that restricts me, but my own nature. I love my wife and I need to love my wife, so I will protect her always, and care for her in every way. This makes me literally unable to do anything that would hurt her, or threaten our love. She needs to obey me and to love me. That restricts her ability to do anything that would threaten this. We are not free, and we don’t want to be free. We are bound by our nature, and by our love. When I wasn’t married, I was more free, but I was less as a person. Now that I am less free, I am more as a person. I have many people whom I love and care for. This further limits me – I don’t want to do anything that would harm those relationships, and I want to do everything to promote them and to be of help and service. As we can do more, we desire to do less, in a sense of our actions being constrained to a narrower field. The Judges, for instance, are free to do anything, and yet, they constantly do hard work of service for others, not because they have to, but because they want to. Their spouses could stay at home and be idle, and instead they join them in their work and the couples often overwork themselves to the point of complete mental exhaustion, where they hold on to each other lest they fall to the ground. They do so because they are not free, and they don’t want to be free. The fact that we can technically do something doesn’t mean that we can actually do it. Every God could technically hurt his wife, and every Goddess could technically disobey her husband. But in reality, all of us would rather die than do it, because we are bound by our love which is our deepest nature. And the Absolute obviously can’t do everything, either. The impersonal God can’t break the fundamental laws of its nature and remain God. It couldn’t kill Grace and stay God, as we saw recently. Her death harmed the Relative to the point of almost ending it all. Her resurrection brought everything to life again. One single good person dying unjustly could end the world. The idea that God is omnipotent in a sense that he can go around and do whatever is a sign of spiritual idiocy”, he finished, as all the Gods and Goddesses nodded and clapped in support.

“Hear, hear”, Vishnu clapped. “But this brings us to the next point. What are humans even talking about, with all their liberation and emancipation nonsense? I see them emancipating the serfs from serfdom, after which they come to the towns and have nothing to do. They find jobs, but since there are few jobs and many workers, they are underpaid and overworked, and their lives are miserable. What are they going to do next, emancipate wives from having to serve their husbands?”

“You think you’re joking”, his wife smiled, “But unfortunately I see that exact thing taking place. They are going to point to every single part of someone’s nature and present it as something that limits them and needs to be discarded on the path of emancipation. As Lord Augustine rightly pointed out, the more we are as persons, the more limited we become. And they, removing their limitations, are going to become increasingly less”.

“So, now they are between broken faith, and knowledge that is still so much in its infancy that it is barely deserving of the name”, Paul noted. “They are going to discover more about their world and forget more about the real one. They are going to reject superstitious ideas about God, but they sort of go in package with the correct ones. Is this going to just end badly as they are completely lost in that world, having renounced every transcendental thread that could have led them to salvation, or is there some light at the end of that terrible tunnel? Are we even going to see new holy people from there, or are they just going to all die worshipping Satan and his creation?”

“I’m afraid they are going to work hard on rejecting all bonds and limitations placed upon them for the foreseeable future”, his wife responded. “Whether that ends as you suggested, or they discover that limitations are what emancipates you, remains to be seen”.