Why did God put the Infinity Stones in the universe?   I don’t mean the Marvel universe but our own.  As the Marvel world winds down, Stan is dead, many loose ends are wrapped up and the last movies is called ‘Endgame’, it won’t be the same going forward, the magic is gone.  But some of the magic that made this world work were the  Infinity Stones.  Gems which contained complete power over certain aspects of the world; space, mind, reality, power, time, soul.  In Infinity War the bad guy gets them all and is basically all powerful, in a Malthusian move he wipes out half of the life in the universe, in a failed attempt to solve the economic problem of scarcity.  Now this sub-created world isn’t as morally accurate or as good, in the real sense of the word, as say Tolkien’s world.  But in order to hold sway with so many it must contain certain connections to the truth.  So why these ridiculously powerful objects?  Obviously it makes these stories better, which is not unlike our world.

In our world, also known as reality, the Infinity Stones are more like ideas, really bad ideas.  From the start they were questions no one had asked before with devastating consequences.  “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?”.  Then we are off to the races, the bad idea creeps in and is embodied in the fruit, the apple, or pandora’s box, various forms in various literatures. But wouldn’t the world have been better if no one had asked the question?  Apparently not.  Why do bad things happen?  We often wonder while they happen to us.  Yet we all flock to the theater to watch them happen.  How many people went to see Titanic?  One of the worse sea disasters of all time.  Asking bad questions makes good stories.  When everyone does what they are supposed to and there is no possibility of failure, there is no story.  Which is why Captain Marvel is so lame.  After the garden God placed angels with fiery swords to keep humans from solidifying their sin by making it eternal, by partaking in another object, the tree of life.  Bad questions are generally just testing the opposite of what God said.  And they piled up into a huge flood of sin that wiped out most of the world, save Noah.  Then they piled up again in the great tower of Babel, as men tried congregating instead of spreading and filling the earth. God resets the world again.  It continues generating bad ideas; “maybe we should sacrifice our children?” “virgins?”.  But from now on God only pulls out a small remnant.  And there seems to be cycles.  Why does God allow these ideas of such immense destruction?

Each bad idea, each Infinity Stone asks a bad question and posits a fake Messiah as the solution.  In 1798 Thomas Malthus, wrote an essay laying out the philosophy of Thanos.  War and famine were necessary to balance out the people vs. resources equation.  Since these were going away in the modern world other steps would be necessary to balance the equation.  This thinking lead to modern catastrophes such as eugenics, championed by Hitler and the lesser known founder of Planned Parenthood Margaret Sanger.  They were trying to balance the equation.

In 1848 Karl Marx ask his stupid question.  Was the problem with the world really all about economic disparity?  If only we could crash capitalism, Christianity and the Family we would reset the system and all live happily ever after.  The dark red armies marching the earth in pursuit of this insane question, have killed hundreds of millions of people.   Communist famines, wars and death camps made the 20th century the bloodies in human history.

In 1852 while the Communist Manifesto was still hot off the presses, Harriet Beecher Stowe asked a similar questions.  Maybe the problems of the world were due to slavery?  Her misrepresentations and overstatements of southern slavery in a work of complete fiction, kicked off much of the strife we now see to this day in the US.  The radical abolitionists went on to undermine the Biblical and legal foundations of our nation, and the reverberations spread around the world.  The resulting war killed close to a million men and actually made race relations worse.  Rather than patiently working out the issue with talking in government, we took to arms.  North vs. South, the Klan, Black Panthers, marches, demonstrations.  Shows of force instead of political discussions. And now we have all the piggy back movements, everyone wants to be repressed minorities, LGBTQWERTY.

Shortly after Darwin asked his question.  Did God really say he created each according to his kind?  Perhaps kinds just turned into other kinds.  Perhaps their was no God, just metamorphosis.  His question led to the further devaluing of life.  Humans were not special, we just happened.  Forces and Nature had conspired randomly to drive this extreme pragmatism.  Our task was really to further this happening, this survival of the fittest.  Hitler took up this mantle too and millions more died.

Well that didn’t work out so well.  Maybe the problem was really your parents and repressed sexual desire.  Sigmund Freud asked all sorts of insane questions placing blame everywhere but upon you.  There was no original sin, the heart was not desperately wicked.  Men are good made bad by their parents.  So don’t repent, blame someone else.  He may not be responsible for millions dying, but he is responsible for enslaving the modern world in bitterness, anger, envy, jealousy, and a myriad of sexual perversions.  He undermined truth as it applies to self discipline, all the virtues and criminal law.  He kicked off all sorts of destructive projects from asylums to drugs to electroshock techniques.  Science had given us machines.  So let’s apply that science to men and fix everything.

The last of the six stones was The Feminine Mystique.  This bad question asked by Betty Friedan was “Is sex just a social construct?”  The problem with the world doesn’t have anything to do with sin, it’s all about women being forced into subservient positions.  The problem was Paul telling women to love their wives and their husbands.  And the solution was walking out on your kids and your husband and the white picket fence and having free sex in the mud at Woodstock.  And if sex is a social construct so is marriage, so I can marry whomever I want.  I can even choose my own sex, or invent new genders.  And the disease and social chaos continue to this moment.  Many of us are so wrapped up in it we don’t even notice.  Because this evil is now the enslaving social construct Friedan purported to shatter.

But why does God allow all this to happen. Why not keep the lid on pandora’s box?  It’s almost like that isn’t good enough.  It’s like that conversation with Peter by the lake.  Do you love me?  Do you love me in a world where you have to love me?  Will you choose to do what I say in a world where there are only two options?  How about 5 options?  How about 50 options?  Will you repent despite all the excuses given by the above people?  It’s easy to follow Biblical tradition when everyone is doing it.  But will you marry and treat your marriage roles as I have created them, male and female, in a world where everyone is making up new rebellions to my order?  Will you keep your long hair and submit to your husband when no one else is?  Will you work hard and lay down your life to protect your wife from all the snakes in the garden offering lies?  Will you raise your kids to walk in my way?  It’s easy when the free public schools are doing most of it for you.  But will you choose it when it’s not popular?  When it’s expensive?  The Church of late has almost obsessed with the notion of chosen good.  We over emphasize our choice so much because, deep down we “hate the idea that we are not in control of our lives”.  And so we have stopped coming alongside our brother, we have stopped correcting those in error.  We have stopped holding the world to account for it’s evil.  We don’t rule the fool with the rod.  We think the presence of the rod is an indicator of a problem not a form of the solution.  Yet we do the same thing in many areas, we forbid alcohol, we make arbitrary limits on all sorts of areas of life where God does not.  And in addition we succumb to the power of these bad questions, these Infinity Stones.  Part of this is correct.  God made a world with the potential for incredible destructions, from small ideas, mind objects, idols.  He gave us enough rope to hang ourselves, and everyone else.  The world is dangerous and risky.  In some ways pressing on despite the tide of growing evil is a greater love.  It requires much wisdom, which is sorely lacking.  Often we enable sin, cause these little ones to stumble unnecessarily.  We don’t train them to fight, to obey in the face of these new growing forces.  We need to ease children into these risks not protect them in a bubble.  Yet often when they are older and they do stray we need to pull out the rod and correct, bring back that lost sheep.  Narrow the field of options a little.  If not, woe to us for causing the sin.

So I wonder about all these things, as I think about how our universe winds down. What is God’s endgame?  It seems very clear that the Gospel has been remaking the world for the past 2000 years. No more remnant, every knee shall bow.  Much has changed, paganism with its cannibalism and child sacrifice are gone, but in a sense they are not.  The gospel has divided men of every tongue tribe and nation.  The truth has been put to them in the sea of lies and they have made their commitment by the Spirit.  The false world marches down the road to inevitability, getting ever more ticked off that it lost at the cross.  All it can do is ask more dumb questions.  Use the Stones for evil because it must.  Their raging will grow louder but they won’t win.  American Christians have fallen into the inevitable pit themselves, by saying “in the end times things will get worse”.  But that was meant for 1st century Jews trying to decide whether to rebel against Rome or follow Jesus.  Those who followed Jesus lived.  And today following Jesus to life is similar, do what he says, remake the world.  They may have the infinity stones. But we have a leader who came back from the dead.  He his now seated and ruling in heaven.  People who ignore that are inevitable, but they are also a joke.  We are laughing at them.  We have the ultimate weapon, we can lay down our lives.

Further Reading: Pereladra, C. S. Lewis

God created the female body to illicit a response in men that would lead to fruitfulness.  Apparently it’s the most fun activity in the world often turning into worship or addiction, yet God had to command his people to be fruitful.  No doubt because our tendency is to want all the enjoyable aspects without the responsibility.  And so the morning after or however many mornings after we murder the fruit before the harvest in various ways.  And this has been the norm throughout human history.

Today our culture seems to think that eliciting that response anywhere on the street is no big deal, as long as you are ‘comfortable’ in your attire.  In addition we take the most ideal female bodies, those most likely to illicit the response to which we all owe our existence, and plaster them everywhere.  We take the fruit and the mechanism for granted, as if it is only about our choice and our will.  Not even considering the child, much less the transcendent God and his rules of created order.

Pilgrims Going to Church. George Henry Boughton. c. 1867

And then when we do finally chose to have that one designer child, as an accessory to improve our FB posts.  We seem to have a lot of trouble doing so.  And so there is a huge industry of medication to illicit the response in the male that used to be the role of the female.  We are desensitized to what the average wife has to offer.  I once heard a pastor ask “Which culture is more sensual the one where husbands get aroused by their wife’s calf or the one which requires silicone enhanced actors and medication to become aroused?

Our culture now embraces the notion that speech is violence because it causes stress in people who are not equipped to hear dissenting opinions.  Which is really nonsense.  But we care nothing for willy nilly actually, casually causing arousal in men, in any and all contexts.  And any results from this are of course more blamed on males as a repressive group.  God made the world in a certain way despite our choice.  We can’t choose our own sex but we can choose what we do with it, and we will be held to account.  We can’t pretend that modesty is not an issue, but we can choose to dress in a way that encourages all of the good things in the world, such as strong marriages, and a full quiver of children that result.  As in all things do you dress for yourself, or do you lay down your preferences, your life for the good of others?  Laying down your life is the Gospel.

This whole Report on Russians is a lot like a later Space Shuttle launch.  After many successful launches and two unsuccessful launches, NASA put a bunch of video cameras on the outside of the Shuttle to watch what happened during launch.  And they saw all sorts of wild things, they didn’t expect like tiles falling off.  But they didn’t know what to make of it.  Were these tiles necessary?  Does this always happen?  They had no context for the video they were watching.  They just didn’t know.

And that’s a lot like this report.  We don’t have reports like this on Obama or Bush or anyone really.  So what do we compare it to?  We don’t know how the White House does, has or should run.  We don’t know which tiles falling off will actually be a problem, which don’t matter and which are actually necessary.  Who is to say this is unbecoming a President?  Who is to say this will result in disaster?  Most of us don’t know from personal experience and we can’t even read about it because we don’t have a picture at this level of any other President.  It does seem pretty obvious that any President being dragged through this process for two years with a media hoping for the worst the whole time, is hindered.  If you look at the results of his actions, any bad results might just as easily be attributed to the insanely negative press, as to strange methods employed by Trump.

Also, no one seems to know how Trump, works.  Though in some ways he is the most transparent President we have ever had.  He he seems to be the same character in private as on his reality shows and in his books.  How many Americans do what he did?  We know no politicians have done anything comparable.  They have been spending their lives developing the perfect answers to the right candidate questions and crafting fake personas to get elected.  What we do know is that this Trump, whom we all know, was fairly elected.  We do know that politicians and media have no idea what Trump is saying, or how he communicates.  As evidenced by them seriously entertaining a joke about Hillary’s emails, as an invitation to the Russians.  They didn’t get the joke, and seem to think Trump chose to conspire with Russia while in front of thousands of people live, with the whole world watching at home.  So why should we think they understand anything he says?

It’s like watching a master chef at work.  If you don’t know anything about cooking, how can you criticize his methods as he cooks?  The real test is in the tasting.  If you understood the correlation between cooking and the meal, you could do it too.  But how many  of all these critics can do what Trump does?  And concerning those commentators who have worked in previous administrations:  Who is to say that their experience was the ideal?  Who is to say that things couldn’t be better or just different?  The American people sent a clear message by electing Trump.  They were tired of all these political professionals and their stuffy official speak and all the resulting nonsense.  They wanted something different.  They wanted a working man who wasn’t part of this Washington gang.  So assuming that his unorthodox methods are proof of evil is just begging the question. He’s not a politician, he doesn’t claim to be.

The truth is, there should not be political orthodoxy, there should not be professional politicians.  The whole point of our system was that normal people who have proven their worth in the real world, may serve for short periods of time in public office representing their fellow man.  Now this ship of state is covered in so many barnacles that all these foolish DC wonks think it is some grand crafted marble edifice.  I was even marveling at David French’s fawning love for this encrusted mass we call our justice system.  But many Americans are sick of all of it.  We want the barnacles scraped off and our USS Constitution and returned to we the people.  So give him a chance.  Maybe his methods actually work better.  It’s like when your boss asks you to do something you don’t want to do.  So you sabotage the task, or do it poorly, and then think you proved how wrong he was to even want it done.  Trump has had no support including from his own party, yet he has gotten things done.  In one sense this stale mate is good.  But if it only happens to Republican Presidents, then we keep moving in one direction.  That’s not trusting or even respecting the system, or the Constitution all feign to care about.  This isn’t the peaceful exchange of power.  You don’t withhold some of the power because you don’t like how someone tweets.  And any criticism of this hindered leader is really nonsense.  You cut the mans breaks and then mock him for crashing his car.

So the proof is in the pudding, as they say.  And we are all out there criticizing the rancher and his cows before they even thought about making gelatin.  People who are in the White House five minutes are trying to write tell-all books evaluating Trumps Presidency before it even started to happen.  We really need some perspective and context.  And I need some pistachio pudding.