Shackles of Paper

The fact of death, and one's own eventual demise is the fundamental fact of our lives. I've had a couple of brushes with death--a car accident and a severe bicycle accident. In both cases, I ended up going to the hospital in a helicopter, then recovering from skeletal and soft tissue injuries for weeks (and months in the case of the car accident).

In our world, decay and death are necessary for life to exist and adapt to a changing world. If there's any permanence at all, it's in the natural order. For religious people, the natural order is the Kingdom of God, which adds a supernatural element to the understanding of the whole.

Most people in the western world at this time are in the Beast System and aren't religious at all. I was in the Beast, and the congregation of Satan for my whole life, and didn't really even know it. I didn't know, or really even imagine that there was any different way to live. The consumer/corporate lifestyle of the Beast has all but destroyed the previous culture and replaced it with superficial garbage. The "culture" is really a bunch of noise that's mostly a distraction from anything serious, that is, the fact of death.

The 'serious" part of the culture is about cheating the natural order and escaping natural necessity and death itself. Science and engineering is really all about that. They're like the chains on the doors of the Synagogue/Temple/Mosque/Church of Satan. The chains on men are all paper in this modern world. The covenant with the Beast is a paper covenant.