Thy Kingdom Come

[Hereford Eye]

The price of fallibility is knowing you’ve been wrong. You know that you have been, expect that you will be again, are not surprised that you have been wrong, may be wrong even at this moment. The side of the angels isn’t the side of the always right; it’s the side of those who trip but carry on. It’s the side of those who make a cause of something, stick to it in the face of opposition, and carry on.
The demons want a sliding scale and delight in pointing out the items you’ve placed at their end of the continuum never looking at what you withheld. What is your greatest idea of good? How close do you come to attaining the ideal? That’s the side of the angels.
It isn’t all that difficult. You have some of it hardwired into you regardless of how the philosophers split the hairs. Philanthropic urges, instant acting to save a child’s life, reacting to dangerous situations to save strangers, helping the old person to cross a busy street.
Building on the basics you form a code of behavior that work’s for you, makes sense to you. You look around for others of like thought and band together. Enough of you make a movement, a movement starts a change, and a change turns the world to your way of thinking, not with guns and bombs but ideas.
Ideas threaten other belief systems; threatened enough the other belief systems retaliate, quite often with physical force; that is always easier than dealing with rationale argument. That’s why it’s so often put that the side of the angels is the more difficult side; it’s easier to be self-centered. It’s easier not to deal with new ideas to see if they change your ideas. It’s easier to say my ideas, right or wrong.
Then, when you determine your ideas are right and six billion demons want you to change, standing against six billion takes courage. Far easier to run away.
What it requires is that you believe in yourself, believe in your ideas, and believe in your fellow believers. In the face of six billion demons, that is no easy road. In the big or the little things, it is no easy road.
Look how it works: suppose that your belief system says that it is wrong to kill another human being. What if they are trying to kill you? The old self-defense plea! Can it truly be that killing is a bipolar problem, that is wrong to kill or it is not wrong to kill? Do you find yourself hedging your bets? Is there a time when it is okay to kill? Then, spit it out. Lay it out there for all to see. When is it okay to kill another human being?
You see? In the harshest terms of reality it takes courage to even spit it out, to say that yes, by god, there is a time. Inside you believe it. You believe it but you are very concerned those six billion demons will use that as the final straw to savage your house.
On the side of the angels, we deal with the question and we deal with whatever the answer that comes. Angels can kill demons; remember? That’s the final apocalypse you folk continually fear, the side of the angels vanquishing forever the side of the demons. That must mean on the side of the angels, killing has its moments.
It comes back to you, though. What can you die with? Or live with? Defending your faith against the other guy’s? Fighting on the side of right? They say that history determines who was right and who was wrong and the winners are always right. You are not history; you are one human being. You determine what is right and what is wrong. Always. Every time. Win or lose. You determine. You go to your grave knowing whether you were right or wrong. You believe in yourself or you don’t.
The side of the angels is the hard road, the road that requires thought. Blind obedience doesn’t cut the mustard that is allowing someone else to determine what is right or wrong. You must do that for yourself. No abdicating to some higher authority. No saying I did it because they told me to do it. You live according to what you decide is right or wrong. You may die living according to what you decide is right or wrong. You will find, though, on the side of the angels, you cannot live with what you decide is wrong. You must try to change it.
You are all alone even though billions may agree with you. It doesn’t matter what the billions think; it only matters what you believe.
Outside your door are six billion demons or three billion demons and three billion angels or five point nine nine billion angels. It doesn’t matter. When you go out the door, it is you going out the door, not the numbers that are on either side. Just you.
The final apocalypse is you facing yourself. Can you live with that?

[kater]

The arguments were persuasive as you knew they would be, they have, after all, been preparing for this for no small amount of time. Time, it is the one thing the world needs but doesn’t have, the world of course being defined as ‘the world of man’ not the Earth herself, she would see it end with all three strains of the virus wiped from existence. Knowing you know this she has placed you in a position of judgement, for though you have been told you are not the judge by choosing to listen you have been given such a position by default. Right now default aptly sums it up.
Beginnings and ends, everything has them, from the twelve minute life of some insects to the nine digit lives of stars, each entity is faced at its conclusion with what exactly does its existence entail and where does it go now. Judgement, we humans love it, we have Gods to judge us, religions, societies and none of them hold any value at the end. At the end it’s a guy sitting in his room staring deep in thought at a demon and an angel and being told, despite what circumstances brought him to this role, to judge. To judge a whole species, a whole planet on the basis of twenty-something years of life. And that’s your first mistake, experience has no value here, it is pure morality but only if you have morals otherwise heads or tails works just aswell. It would work but belief holds you back, holds you back because a coin has only two heads, more of the Demon’s polarities, simple black and white but he forgot to account for grey. Grey is a combination of combinations of the two and thus creates an exponential curve of variety. Choices. You see though two people, groups or even nations can hold differing opinions it does not necessitate that either is right or wrong but could in fact be both and neither. Just as the Angels can trip and carry on doesn’t mean that what they struggle in the name of is right, we are at the nexus of judgement. It is a conclusion when the pyramidal hierarchy of mankind asks a question at the base that only the point can answer. But the point is merely an inflated representation of the base, the base in microcosm without the ability to shed responsibility. Can you conquer yourself and live, deciding the fate of billions based solely on whether the face looking back at you from the mirror makes and holds eye contact. It’d have been nice to avoid this and be normal but there is no such thing and ultimately we are here because there is no such thing but there should be. Normality is a myth conceived to bring order to chaos - our lives, to structure and compartmentalise the very nature of existence so we can display it like a trophy and be proud to hold it. Proud to show the universe, and everything else we know nothing of, our weaknesses, our blind stumbling path into forever-no-more. Normality bolted back when non-existence was our de facto state, when somewhere out on the plane of multi-verses a star was born and died, we watched that star and wondered in awe at its magnificence, how could it be so powerful yet die? It is the immortal question which has chased us into solid bodies so we may experience it and in doing so we have forgotten the star. We have come to hide in the tangible and dream of a house, a car and 2.4 children – for what else is there, what is there for this body to do? To see? To believe? At the very core of the creature who saw that star die is a question and that question is the single truth which this existence knows, what is the unknown and where do we go when we face it. So what is the answer, the simple defining point on which this knife-edge lies?
Death, we are afraid of our own judgement and thus of making judgements, it is the elementary lesson brought forth by the idea of angels and demons, these are the judgements that supposedly await us yet are created paradoxically by us for that role. They put a friendly facade on the unknown truth, a facade which we hide behind because not knowing is worse, not knowing is the answer.
Neither of them sees the line of reasoning I have followed to this point, but she does, she knew all along. What a truely terrible web we spin when we seek to deceive.
Outside the first earthquake of many rocks the San Andreas fault, a tsunami over 200 feet high is spotted racing to engulf the coast of Japan and this is only the beginning. I choose a quicker method much to the amazement of both sides and join the line of humanity awaiting their one truth. In the end living with it was never a choice.