I have found that the further men move in a vector away from the Living God, the more they eschew life and the institutions rooted in biological necessity and divine revelation. Hence, the malignant symptoms of this divorce from reason are inexorably expressed as deviations in: man-woman coupling, marriage, family -- those fixed hierarchical identities and institutions of order we find articulated throughout the panorama of Creation.

But as the darkened human imagination, unencumbered from its foundation in God, cannot conjure new values but can only distort and defile existing ones, we nevertheless find that there are limits to the self's depraved autonomy -- that men in moral and ontological rebellion must still pay begrudging homage to classical virtues and masculine and feminine archetypes which are embedded deeper than any artificial convention, and indeed, deeper than the tendrils of nature itself.

How fitting that the Brave New Humanity of Nietzsche's Zarathustra -- the Transvaluation of Value and Identity trailing after the eclipse of the Christian horizon like an earthquake, simply cannot be. How enlightening that within the Great-hearted worldview of the Cross, the Adversary, in contradistinction to the omnipotence of the Triune God, cannot himself create ex nihilo, but can only act as corruptor par excellence of existing essence and matter. Therein Evil, as opposed to the Good, is strictly an inferior and derivative mockery of God's primordial formulation.

It is instructive that the Unholy Sacraments of the anti-theistic worldview are as follows:

в—Џ Licentiousness: a Hyper-emancipation of the passions (in truth, a democracy ruling the soul): the unraveling of mind and desire divorced from the Summa of Ordered Being;

в—Џ Homosexuality and its abrogation of nature: the rebellion from designed form and essence;

в—Џ Human Abortion and its nihilistic Will to Death as a consequence of the deification of Absorbed Self. The activity of murder as convenience: the mortification of innocence birthed of moral abandon grown devoid of consequence.

в—Џ and ultimately--Suicide: the final act of desperate nihilism grown mature in its cavernous and morbid despair.

Glenn Fairman writes from Highland, Ca. He can be reached at arete5000@dslextreme.com.