Separating the Wheat from the Chaff

God is not passive with His windowing fork

Whose fanne is in his hand, and he will throughly purge his floore, and gather his wheat into the garner: but will burne vp the chaffe with vnquenchable fire.

- King James Version (1611)
 

Ever since being cast out of Eden, we have been burdened with choice. Whatever circumstances occur in our lives, whatever world events unfold around us and whatever desires we may have, we are forced to choose between right or wrong, true or false, good or evil. How we choose defines our character and becomes the essence of who we are. When we embark upon new relationships, such as interviewing for a job or going on a first date, the inquiries we make are asked as part of assessing the character of the individual we are intending to spend time with. In a sense, we are trying to assess how the prospective candidate makes decisions.

The "how" we decide has been in dispute ever since that fateful day Adam chose to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge. The study of philosophy essentially is the study of how we choose. Stoicism versus Epicureanism is one such Western philosophical debate on how we choose. In simple terms, the Stoics care about virtuous behavior and living according to nature, while the Epicureans are all about avoiding pain and seeking nurturing pleasure.

Lao-Tzu's Tao Te Ching is essentially 81 versus instructing people on "the way" to choose. This valuable fourth century BC work out of China has been translated into English more times than any other Chinese work. Verse 44 has become my Eastern philosophy basis for choosing:

44.

Fame or integrity: which is more important?

Wealth or happiness: which is more valuable?

Success or failure: which is more destructive?

If you look to others for fulfilment,

you will never truly be fulfilled.

If your happiness depends on accumulating wealth,

you will never truly be happy.

What you gain is more trouble

than what you lose.

Be content with what you have;

rejoice in the way things are.

If you know when to stop

and realize there is nothing lacking,

the whole world belongs to you.

The great ongoing debate regarding how we choose is one of nature versus nurture. Do we observe nature and attempt to act in accordance with its way? That is the essence behind the Stoics and Lao-Tzu. Or, do we choose nurture because we were conditioned to do so by our experiences. That would be the Epicureans' point of view. In the movie, Trading Places, Randolph and Mortimer Duke place a one-dollar wager on this ever disputed nature versus nurture debate.

Nowhere is the battleground more heated for determining how people choose than in our education systems. Here, the nurturists are winning the day. But it isn't really a fair fight as the academic administrators, being so insecure in their dogmatic nurture argument, simply keep any reference to natural law out of the curriculum and thus, out of the debate. At least that is how it has played out in the United States. For the last 100 years that the Deweyists commanded our education system, they operated with the undying belief that education can condition young souls to "correct think" their way into making the “right” choices. So intimidated are educators by the notion that nature and nature's God have an impact on our consciences and thus our choices, that they have shut the door on any such teachers that hold that sordid philosophical view. At the university level, especially in the religion and philosophy departments, those naturalists have all but been replaced by nurturalists. And not even the fun-loving types either. In our modern universities, classical professors have been replaced by troubled educators who cherish the nihilism of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Camus over the optimistic thinkers such as Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas. Unless a philosophy professor is trying to make the case that ancient Greeks were into homosexuality too, Plato is nary discussed at all.

But for all our debates on how we choose on this earthly plane, there is One who is constantly and actively weighing our decisions. When those decisions lead society to choose building giant towers towards the heavens, God sends us mighty tests of choosing. When at first, we fail to choose the right path, subsequent tests become more intense. Biblically speaking, if we continue to ignore the right choices, God floods the world by pressing “Control-Alt-Delete” on our modus operandi choosing systems, thus rebooting society and bringing it back to His way of thinking.

Up to the point where a wretched humanity can no longer be saved and the purging floodwaters once again are released, God is ever present with winnowing fork in hand ever separating the wheat from the chaff. And this is done by weighing how we react to the circumstances surrounding us. A great winnowing of society seems to come around about every four generations. The last such event was World War II, where my nation had to choose whether we were on the side of the Allies or the Axis powers. Four generations before that, my nation had to decide if they were on the side of abolition or of slavery. And four score and seven years before that we had to decide if we were on the side of Nature and Nature's God or to remain faithful subjects of a foreign and oppressive monarchy.

We are now nearly 80 years past our last great choosing as the seeds for Nazism and fascism were sowed in the 1930's. Back then, we had to choose between Neville Chamberlain's “peace in our modern times” appeasement strategy or peace through dominating strength of the Allies' military. In each of these last three generational choosing, God rewarded nations that chose right. Those of us who understand God's methods and study history's results of his winnowing fork know the times we are in right now. Perhaps those stuck in self-fulfilling moments of nurture have missed the classical signs of choice confronting nations over these past 20 years. These were the geo-political and social-economical situations that require leaders to choose a path. To be sure, Western nations have been led by “the science,” the nurturing inspired graduates, bred from our finest universities. The academic nurturers have been in the positions of power, and it is their world view that is currently being tested.

Since the dawn of the 21st century, Western societies have been given the choice to unite by Natural principles of equality yet nurture-guided leaders choose divisive equity and continue divide citizens by what distinguishes their differences. Another point of choosing is in economics. Our leaders have been given the choice to follow natural economic laws of supply and demand, but instead, followed the nurturing principles of Keynesian economics, and merely succeeded in tripling our national debt from $10 to $33 trillion in less than 20 years.

The great test of choosing occurred in 2020 with the onset of COVID. Our leaders, faced with allowing natural immunity to take its course, chose the "following the science" option proffered by nurturing academics. Untested and ineffective vaccines were forced upon the people of the world through outright mandates from power-hungry government officials or by job retaining decrees by little fiefdom controlling company CEOs. If one did not think that COVID was a great separating force, look at what I did to families. Not only within society, or within companies and churches did COVID separate individuals into these two distinct camps, it did so within our families as well. And the fact that we are going through yet another national election four years post COVID and these perpetrators of nurture are asking voters to ignore the failure of their COVID decisions and return them to power, is proof the division is still within our troubled houses.

World leaders have been given the natural choice to allow a border dispute between the thugocrasy of Russia and the kleptocracy of Ukraine to play out uninhibited by external forces. Yet our Western leaders cannot don enough Ukraine lapel pins or add enough Ukraine flag emojis to their social media handles to show blind solidarity with that corrupt country. The significate outcome that the unsavory Russian Ukrainian war will have on the world truly comes down to a mere set of degrees. It is akin to stepping outside at subzero temperatures with a 20 mile an hour wind versus a 5 mile an hour wind. Either way it's f***ing cold. One outcome is just slightly less intolerable than the other. And for that minor distinction of degree, we are choosing to further indebt our children and grandchildren's future and possibly put them on the frozen front lines in a region that historically been the graveyard of all prior acts of imperialism.

Having continued to make the wrong choice on every major decision of the last 20 years, God, as biblically proclaimed, continues to up the ante in his eternal quest to separate the wheat from the chaff. We are now faced with an Israeli Arab conflict in the Middle East. This, more than any other natural versus nurtural law has placed so many individuals on the threshing floor. The "blame United States and Israel first" crowd is now forced to choose between supporting these two countries in vanquishing the berserker-inspired terrorists that inflicted horrendous and unspeakable acts of violence against innocent Israeli citizens or to choose to support Hamas and its Iranian allies. At no time has the "self-contortion" of media journalists been more pronounced as their nurturer over nature education conditioned them, not to respond with compassion for the innocent victims but to reflexively react against Israel by supporting a faction that whole-heartedly disagrees with their intersectional ideals.

If leaders do not get the philosophy right, if they do not get the nature versus nurture argument right, all their decisions flow from an incorrect premise. That could not be more apparent in my observance of the current trajectory most Western countries are traveling. And it is the only benign explanation for why our leaders constantly and consistently choose wrong at every major intersection. Of course, there is the possibility that our leaders simply understand the choices they are making and are willfully choosing nefarious intent. But I have no ability to discern malevolence in someone else's heart. But there is One who does, and He stands on the threshing floor with a winnowing fork in hand. For our nurture choosing leaders, the heat they are feeling is not from global warming, it is from their proximity to unquenchable fire.