The Neotenic Era

This blog post and the one which will come after it are a bit of a diversion from my usual content, though I think a necessary one.

The target audience of this two-part series is Christians. If you're not a follower of Christ, you're welcome to read and comment as long as you do so respectfully, but I will be gate-keeping the conversation quite strictly for these posts.

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The world we wake up to every day seems to be creative only in its creation of new forms of darkness. It is a world of weak men creating hard times, of moral decay and of the play-pretend fancies of childish adults who were never permitted to be children and never encouraged to grow up. 

Let us not however be so foolish as to think these neotenic humans are entirely wrong in their errant obsessions. Those weaving the Hell-bound horrors of our time sometimes draw closer to the truth than many faithful Christians prefer to recognize. They assert that how we identify ourselves has power, and followers of Christ, seeing the poisonous fruit of neoteny often reject this assertion, even though it is fundamentally true. 

Self-identification is a powerful tool, and our enemies know it. True, it mainly has power over our own fate and not the actions of others, but this is not a small thing. Do not mistake the power – for good or evil - of choosing your identity. A chosen identity can bolster your virtues, or it can empower your demons. It can point to Heaven’s throne, or to Hell’s gates. 

The neotenics know this in their own way. Their error is to believe that the demons of their corrupted identities will become guardian angels which protect them from judgement, if only those horrors are given sufficient power. The Enemy’s lies seem true to them mainly because they have been tricked into using their own not inconsiderable powers of self-identification to prop those lies up. 

There is another lie, used by the same Enemy to weaken those of us who stand on the other side of the battle-line rather than to win over converts to its own side. Since one can clearly see how self-identification props up the damnation of the neotenics, this lie goes, clearly a follower of Christ must avoid using this power themselves, to avoid their fate. 

Like most dichotomies, this one is false. Self-identification, like all powers of mankind, is not in itself good or evil. It is something that can be bent toward good or evil according to the will of the individual. It is a tool, no different morally from a wrench, a sword, or a rifle. The Enemy, however, wishes to persuade those not under his power to put down any tool that might be used for good. If Christians were as comfortable with this innate capacity as their foes, those foes would be swept aside quite easily. On any other field of battle than self-identification, the neotenics are the weakest force ever assembled in opposition to Christ, but they choose to go on the offensive only on fields of battle where their opposition has laid down its arms. 

What then should a proper, goodly, Christian self-identification look like? That isn’t necessarily a question one person can answer for all. We should look to find a self-identification which fits the role we are called to fill in Christ's Kingdom. This won’t necessarily be the same process from one individual to the next – all are called, but not to the same service, nor do those called to the same service arrive at it from the same preparation. All, however, are united by the cross, and the self-identities of all who follow Christ will point to the cross. 

Though I can’t claim to describe the global set of all Christian self-identifications, I can speak for the one I have arrived at for myself in the blog post to follow, though you’ll forgive my use of a fitting metaphor to do so. 

(Continued in "A Prince of Narnia.")