Normality/Abnormality

There are varied ways to interpret and manage our lives.  The main ones are what we term in generality as natural and supernatural in some combination of concepts.  Some persons accept one and not the other, to the denial or disparagement of the other.  Even some religions do not include God, but advance high ethical context for life, even using substitutes for parallels with those persons holding faith in the divine – such as advocating meditation that incorporates amended characteristics of prayer and worship.  Some simple faiths are built on a reverse philosophy so to attract worship of spirits that may be identified as evil.  The logic for these persons hold that God is good so will not hurt us – so appease the evil spirits sufficiently well they will not.  That logic is not remote to our experience.  We often mollify those we feel are on a wave length different than our own, especially with those we feel will impact our life context.  Perhaps business persons feel they must do this or that to meet the situations they would handle differently than the company or customer is asking.  That normal for one may be abnormal for another.  On occasion the differences must be managed by a court of law.  The matter becomes so intense, perhaps judged on the opinions of the majority which can, and sometimes does, make the abnormal into the normal.  We must comply because we want to follow the laws of the land.  For Christians the norm is found in Scripture so is perceived to be both the preference of God for normal to both natural and spiritual life.  One of the norms is to be faithful to one’s nation.  If that faithfulness is violated by human laws, and the rights of emerging laws prevent the individual from maintaining the righteousness of people and nations, the Christian submits to the penalty of the court as witness to God’s holy preference.  Accepting penalty is part of the meaning of respecting the laws of the land.  It is in this context that peaceful demonstrators for improved rights, ethics and conditions are to be honored or resisted.  Peaceful persuasion is God’s way with us.

Non-violent persons may be wrong, perhaps demonstrating peacefully against righteous contexts.  They have the right in the concepts of love and peace, and the right to express the personal self in witness to the world that personal values are of importance, and need to be considered.  Christians have no doubt that the grace of God in love, objectivity, practicality, communication and application, are values and ethics of God at the top of life choices, spiritual and natural.  In this the natural life is soaked through with the spiritual context for understanding faith.  From God’s holiness flows a practical righteousness for persons and nations.  Scripture offers abundant evidence from history for what happens when the values of God are violated, perhaps rejected.  There is an ongoing conflict of normality and abnormality.  Preferences of human beings may or may not accept the values of God for mankind.  In any event, we can be sure that some things will be interpreted as normal (righteous) and some as abnormal (sin) – by whatever names.

All this is simplified for our understanding in the history of nations.  The radical, the liberal idea, of America following the American Revolution was that the people were to be self-governed.  Had George Washington requested the status of a king after the war, his popularity would likely have gained it, and the conservative government focused in the authority of the government with royalty would have continued in America.  The United States was seen as a new and radical experiment – liberal in the extreme that the electorate had control of themselves at the polls.  At this writing the two major parties are perceived as one liberal and the other conservative.  So the complexities and contradictions of two large concepts continue, furthering the competition in that the former conservative (government centered) is now liberal, and the former liberal (limited government) is now conservative.  Both parties include some features of each other. The confusion of normality with abnormality has become the norm, and that is difficult to manage. It is likely that the speeding up of life and circumstances; the growth of populations; the disappearance of frontiers; the uncertainties of economies; the increasing terrorism and secularism; and, the loss of the meaning of God’s normality have all impacted the society, a society that seems unsure of itself.  The public feels threatened.  In all, Christians are to live rightly and support legal free society.