Through the Gates of Hell

Let me be the first to admit my soul is already numbed to all this. As another blogger put it,

We are a nation of nonpareil separators, those who play the degrees of Kevin Bacon game with the comforting, obscene litany of morning cup of coffee, underpaid Wal-Mart bagger, local Republican fundraiser, idiot savant warmongering crony politician, multinational weapons manufacturer, theocratic aggressor state, shrapnel torn infant. I separate myself from that child now, as I write these words and plays these clever, charming games of intellect and wit. How can a word like sin be so tiny, so terrible, so true?


To the left, a decapitated toddler from Lebanon. What would an Amos or a Hosea say to us, as our munitions are so used from our aircraft?

On the lower left, a child murdered in Baqaba, Iraq (circa 7/21) by an airstrike; to the lower right, an infant in Lebanon was murdered by shrapnel penetrating into the womb, tearing through its flesh.

I have nothing to say--words fail me. So I turn to the same blogger who speaks

Only this simple truth: we are responsible. For each dead child, for the living hell in which billions suffer, for the maiming and the bombing and the endless horror. We must take up the ownership of the authors of terror, cast our gaze upon the literature that justifies them, accept the tender for the mechanisms that power them. “We are the world,” and indeed so we have made it. The world is ours, to rape, to pillage, to destroy, to consume. And so we do, from the cloying comfort of our spacious shelters, with the practiced ease of the most rapacious carnivore, in the complacent tones of the righteous, buoyed up by the knowledge that our God of victimhood protects us with his loving hands.
The time has come for we on the left to accept that we have long since past the Gates of Hell, and forgo our urge to cling to the comfort of lost hope.

"Lost hope" brings to mind the words of Jesus:
I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot. 16So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth. 17For you say, “I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing.” You do not realize that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. 18Therefore I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire so that you may be rich; and white robes to clothe you and to keep the shame of your nakedness from being seen; and salve to anoint your eyes so that you may see. 19I reprove and discipline those whom I love. Be earnest, therefore, and repent. 20Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me. 21To the one who conquers I will give a place with me on my throne, just as I myself conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne.

He is knocking; he is pounding on the door.

His use of "conquer" is especially bitter for us mindlessly savage Laodiceans--it has nothing to do with using munitions and warfare.