Atta boy, Newt (or “If I had a hammer …”)

Some of them, of course, are consistent in arguing for a blunt instrument approach for everything. These types have always been readily available to us. We give them the hammers and everything looks like nails. So, they smash their world up in the name of their ideologies, personal slights, and hatreds. I especially enjoy it when they work to demonize those with whom they disagree.

These have always been our useful tools, and they are dependable because we can count on them to never, ever deviate from their hidebound ways. They howl for action and force. “Something must be done!” they scream. One of the reasons this is so helpful to us is that in their blundering stupidity, they forget that it is usually the case that they caused the situation in hand.

How many times have we watched them engage in some action with the purpose of “promoting liberty” or “protecting freedom” or even “serving God” when they had not even thought to question whether their much-loved freedom, liberty, and obedience had died at their hands?….

If they realized that evil met head-on is one of our greatest goals, they would change their tune. Meeting evil head-on puts them on our ground and, once there, we will always win. This is how we want them to think. We don’t want them to consider how resistance to evil early on would snuff out the flame we seek to fan. What would Germany (or the rest of Europe for that matter) have looked like if its citizens had refused to hate the Jews? True resistance to evil never comes from weapons; it comes from a heart that refuses evil’s call to hate, or fear. By the time they get to the guns and knives it is too late for them. They are already in our hands.

The ones that really bother me are the ones that don’t become obsessed with eradicating evil. They don’t become fixated on the evil of those they oppose to the point that we can use them so broadly. There are those who recognize the evil in a particular situation, take it seriously even, but they don’t allow it to absorb them. They move by other means to blunt our impact and keep us from the space that is rightfully ours.

When the BODY showed up, well, that scared the hell out of me, I must say. He understood that the real world is, in fact, an illusion that they grasp like dying persons holding on to life. I am not surprised they wanted to kill him. They realized what a threat he was to true evil. If they lived like the BODY desired, we could not exist. I could not exist.

Jeffrey C. Pugh, Devil’s Ink: Blog from the Basement Office (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011), pp. 45-48.