114 What About Yin and Yang?

One philosophy that certainly seems to become more popular than the "We make ya dead" type of Christianity that has given the Cause of Christ a bitter by-taste ever since the crusades, and turned out specially bad latest since the Bush administration, is the Zen-Buddhist philosophy of Yin and Yang.

The symbol of Yin and Yang is rapidly becoming more popular than the cross, especially among young people.

After all, Buddhists aren't known for having caused a fraction of the damage "Christians" are still perpetrating worldwide every day.

So, who can blame them? Who can blame them for believing that good and evil must be equally strong, and that evil must necessarily stick around forever in order to keep the "proper balance" in nature and all things?

After all, it's plainly evident by looking all around us that there are 2 sides to nearly everything.

There is a good and a bad side to even all apparently bad things, as well as to seemingly purely good things.

Everything seems to have a shadow side to it, a dark side. Even sunshine: you get too much of it, and it can ruin crops, or your health, and cause whole lakes to evaporate...

Even water, as necessary as it is to make all life possible, can also drown you and bring death.

Too much air can pop the balloon or - in the form of a storm - tear down your house.

Even trees can fall over and kill you...

So, what's up with all that Yin and Yang, good and evil stuff, Jesus? Looks like You're pretty speechless now, huh? Could it be that we just ruined Your show and exposed Your dark little secret that evil is just as strong as You are, and that it's going to hang around forever?

Well, it may seem that way, because we've never seen anything else and never experienced anything different.

But according to the Bible, there was a couple of folks who did. And coincidentally, they introduced this whole good and evil stuff.

When God created Adam and Eve (a fairy tale, you say? Well, we'll see, won't we?), and the whole caboodle of creation was done, He saw that it was good! In fact, very good. Nothing evil or bad about it. Yet.

But wouldn't you know it? As much as we're always craving for something new to consume and try out, even the two happiest and most perfect folks who ever lived turned out not to be perfectly happy with what they had, even though it was perfectly good.

That's what advertisement will do to you. Some legged serpent came strutting along, obviously possessed by the greatest advertiser of all times, and broke the news to Eve that there was a product around that she hadn't consumed yet: the notorious fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil! The price: one tiny little disobedience, since God had made one single little rule in order to keep happiness in Eden afloat: No munching off that one tree!

The reason - retrospectively - becomes obvious: If you already know good, and it's perfectly perfect and good, who the heck would want to know evil?

Well, Eve did. And so we all probably would have. After all, who's ever been able to resist advertisement?

It had a fairly attractive slogan, too: Promises of godhood ("Ye shall be as gods,") and - cunningly effective - the spicy ingredient of suspicion by making God sound like a liar: "Hath God said...? Not really so! Ye shall not surely die!"

Well, they probably wished they had, after they ate that darn piece of forbidden fruit (which by the way was NOT an apple)! But that wasn't God plan. Adam and Eve were still supposed to become Mama and Papa and Grandma and Gramps of us all.

But life wasn't half the fun it used to be before the knowledge of good and evil had entered the land! The knowledge of good had perfectly sufficed, as far as happiness goes, but then, God had a little lesson to teach the universe, and it wouldn't last billions of years, either. Just - roughly - 7,000.

And thus were born - roughly around the same time as Cain and Abel, coincidentally - the twin bros Yin and Yang, who have been wreaking havoc around this place ever since. But - and that's where some folks are mistaken - not forever!

Just as life was perfectly possible and enjoyable without evil, so it will be again, and next time without any interruptions (except for a minor hiccup a little further on in history, but that's another story)!

While the current laws of nature and the dog eat dog scenario of the "survival of the fittest" may seem to tell a different story, and even lead us to believe that man isn't much more than a slightly overly mutated animal himself, it takes a little bit of faith in a shred of information from outside the Yin and Yang matrix (namely the Word of God), to reveal to us that circumstances haven't been and won't be always the same.

There have been "changes in the Matrix" before, introducing the Yin and Yang program (aka Good and Evil), after the first human couple rejected the original "All Is Good" System, bringing into our reality all the deficiencies riding along on evil's coattail, such as death, suffering, wars, etc.

But God (- the Architect with better intentions than the one we know from the "Matrix" trilogy -) has promised to push the "reset" button in the near future, which will restore the original operating system, which will make evil - once again -obsolete.

Because mankind will have (believe it or not!) learned its lesson from evil, which is, life's much more fun without it, and thus we will also be able to wave a cheerful farewell to the Yang Bros., and add, only faintly audible, (the same way most of us would to the former US president:) "Please don't come 'round again!"