Does God use PGP?
06/05/2024
there's a Jehova's Witness in my house. she tells me a lot about god and the coming end of the world. it's fairly stressful to have to sit down and occasionally let her blast me with 15 min promotional videos made by presumably The Watch Tower Bible? with a narrator whose intonation makes me want to tear out his vocal cords.
she tells me a lot about the devil. how God (Jehova) lets him roam and do his evil deeds to tempt us away from Him, as a test. when Jehova does come, however, all will know Him. no false idol may deny Him, nor usurp Him.
this notion of the devil concentrates on how he tempts us away from the One Truth. he wants you to forget Jehova, to reject Jehova, to knowingly discard the principles and duties of a Witness. what's interesting about this is how much it relies on Jehova being completely and immediately identifiable as God. the devil knows Jehova, and does not in fact deny him, even in his work to tempt you away from Him. the devil names Jehova to diminish him, but remembers His name always, and the sinner is constantly reminded of what he walks away from
this feels like too basic an idea as to how the devil would thwart true believers? he is a mindless antagonist in this telling, he acknowledges the entities at play, he respects the fabric of the narrative and certain facts about it
but what if it was not so easy to come back to Jehova? the devil need not tempt you away from Jehova. it need only seed doubt about who He is, how He is. the devil does not run from Jehova and His image, he distorts it
and so when the day of judgement does come, it shall not be a choice between salvation and destruction, between Jehova and perdition. it shall be a choice between a hundred Jehovas. a great row of gods stretching into the horizon. you shall not know your father nor his true name. is Jehova as the burr of the sword he holds in his hand? is He kind and gentle and dressed in white? is Jehova a man in tatters or wreathed in glowing gold thread? is He disembodied light? the procession of Gods marches on, miracle-work is the sign of their power and their claim to authenticity. their voices thunder over that dark valley, a cacophony that retains a sickly divinity. a choir of angels still.
you have spent so much time away. the path you took is a patchy memory. you cannot distinguish truth from imitation.
your salvation is not a choice. it's a gamble.
the devil has sown discord, and comes to reap the fruit of his labor.
statistically speaking, he wins.
"So he was cursing them, he said in a voice trembling with emotion, cursing the mean and degenerate; let the dry flesh fall from their bones and turn to dust; he cursed them once, he cursed them a thousand times; that they should prepare themselves for ruin, for the time their children, their orphans, their widows roamed the world unconsoled, as he has roamed it, starving and fearful in the impenetrable darkness, abandoned for ever. He cursed them, he said, cursed those on whom curses had never nor ever would take effect; he cursed those who worked evil and destroyed trust; he cursed the cold-hearted slick ones, cursed them in victory and in defeat; he cursed the very idea of victory and defeat. And he cursed the ruthless, the envious, the aggressive, those who were so in their thoughts; he cursed the treacherous, and the way the treacherous always triumphed; he cursed the cheapskate, the confidence trickster, the unprincipled. Let the world be cursed, he declared, choking, a world in which there is neither Omnipotence nor Last Judgment, where curses, and any who pronounced them, were held up to ridicule, where glory could only be bought with trash. And above all, he said, curse the infernal mechanism of chance that upholds and maintains all this, and reveals it; curse even the light that by illuminating it exposes the fact that there are no worlds but this, that nothing else exists. But above even that, he said, curse humanity, curse mankind that enjoys control of the mechanism whereby it may reduce and falsify the essence of things and make that reduced and false essence the cornerstone of the deepest laws of our existence. All is false by now, he shook his head, it is all one lie after another, and these lies so permeate the most obscure recesses of our souls that they leave no room for expectations or for hope, and so, should that which will never happen actually come to pass after all and present itself anew then he Korin had a message for this breed of humanity: that no, there would be no point in expecting mercy, that they should scurry away, for they should not trust to forgiving and forgetting, for in their case there would be no forgetting; nor should they try to mend their ways or to reform, for reform and salvation are most certainly not for them, for under no circumstances will they be forgiven, nothing awaits them but memory and punishment; for in their hands even the good has become bad; for his message to them was: perish, rot and perish, for it is enough that the mark they have left, that indelible mark, had its place in eternity."