THE BALLAD OF JOHN BOOKMAN

John Bookman has come to a point in his life where he's tried everything, but senses a spiritual vacuum that nothing and no one has been able to fill. Mr. Bookman has begun his spiritual quest that he hopes will bring his restless to an end. John figures the best way to do this is to start digging into books about Christianity and to learn what his wife has been nagging him about: "How to be saved," as she calls it.

John wants to be thorough and study all he can to answer that question. He goes to a Christian bookstore and buys three books, "The Gospel According to Jesus," "Hard to Believe," and "Faith Works," all by the same author. Every evening, he seals himself off from the distractions of family, computers, and television and, with pen and paper he begins to read, carefully recording the requirements to be saved that he finds as he reads word by word, line by line, paragraph by paragraph, and page by page. Here's what he recorded:

 Follow Christ
Surrender to Christ
Be Willing to Obey
Commit yourself
Turn From Sin
Be Willing to Sacrifice Everything
Give Up All For the Kingdom
Deny Self
Love Christ supremely
Give Up All Your Earthly Possessions if the Lord Should Ask This
Give Yourself Totally to Him
Fulfill the Demands of Discipleship

Have “a transforming commitment to the living Christ” 

Follow Him in submissive obedience
Deny self, take up a cross, forsake all and follow Christ
Repent, surrender and have an eagerness to obey
Obey Christ
Yield one’s life to the Lordship of Christ
Be willing to forsake everything
Commit yourself to obedience
Make Christ the highest authority in your life
Be willing to obey
Repent and follow Jesus
Turn from sin
Forsake oneself for Christ’s sake
Be willing to sacrifice everything to acquire the kingdom
Give up all for the kingdom

Totally abandon self-will 
Exchange all that you are for all that Christ is
Make a full exchange of self for the Savior (“absolute surrender”)
Turn from sin, abandon self and intend to obey God
Repudiate the old life
Turn from evil and intend to serve God
Surrender to Christ and choose to obey Him
Deny self and follow Christ
Love Christ more than your own family members, be unquestionably loyal to Him even above your families
Obey Christ’s divine authority
Submit yourself to God
Resist the devil.
Draw nigh to God.
Cleanse your hands.
Purify your hearts.
Be afflicted and mourn.
Humble yourselves.
Turn to Christ in full self-surrender
Turn from your sins
Surrender heart, mind and will to Christ 
Deny self
Take up your cross daily
Follow Christ
Refuse to associate any longer with the person you are
Be willing to give up all your earthly possessions if the Lord should ask this Be willing to give up as much as it takes
Slay yourself! Refuse to associate any longer with yourself, reject all the things your self longs and wants and hopes for. Be willing to die for the sake of Christ.”
Totally and absolutely deny self
Be willing to hate your father and mother
Be willing to dump all your earthly goods (possessions).
“The complete surrender of all possessions is the essence of salvation”
Give yourself totally to Him which involves self-denial, cross bearing and following Him in obedience  

 Deny yourself and give Him your life
Die to yourself 

 Obey the Sermon on the Mount
Leave all your possessions behind  

Live in obedience and service to Christ as revealed in the Scriptures

These commands were disconcerting to John, and one which stood out was the one that said, "Be willing to give up all your possessions if Christ should ask." 

"Wait a minute," John thought to himself. "What's going on? To be saved Christ asks some to give up all their possessions, but He doesn't ask others? That sounds like two ways of salvation."

Then John thought about his children. How could he tell them all this stuff that they need to do to be saved? How could they do all this, much less even understand all these complex commands, one even involving obeying the entire Sermon on the Mount? 

The author of the books had an answer to that question regarding John's children--he told Mr. Bookman that they couldn't be saved because there's no way they could do or even understand all those commands. But this didn't make any sense to John because he remembered hearing that somewhere Jesus said to "permit the little children to come to Me" and that Jesus said that except you become like little children you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. 

From all those weeks of reading, John was at his wit's end. The book's requirements were impossible to keep and even if he tried, he knew he'd be constantly haunted by the questions, "Have I done enough, all of them? Have done them long enough? What if I stop doing one, two, or three of them? Was I saved in the first place?"

It was then that Bookman asked God to show him how to be saved. He threw the books away and picked up The Book and turned to the Gospel of John where he learned that John wrote the book for people just like he was, confused and lost. 

As he read what John wrote, he noted over and over and over, actually 99 times, John says that gaining eternal life and the forgiveness of sin comes from faith alone that Jesus is God, that Jesus died for John's sins, that Jesus rose from the dead and that if John will trust Him and Him alone, there it is, salvation. 

He also read Acts 16: 31: "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved, you and your household." He liked those words, "and your household." The gospel was so simple, his children could understand it. All those commands piled up in those three books, John now saw them for what they were, works that can never save anyone. 

John Bookman, like the ancient jailer, had asked, "What must I do to be saved?" God had answered.

  

STEPS TO TYRANNY II

 BRAVE NEW WORLD is a book that gives the details concerning how such a tyrannical brave new world of rulers controlled the population. It reads like a playbook to follow if one wants such a world. It's science fiction, a book that Aldous Huxley penned in 1932, but should librarians today classify it as fiction? 

The story of the brave new world begins after the revolution has already occurred. The elite are firmly in control The author informs the reader how it came to be by looking back at each of its increments as the characters of the story remember, relate, and happily live under them them. In the brave new world, there is no such thing as a family, a father and a mother are gone. The divine institutions of marriage and family  don't exist. The oft-repeated motto is, "Everyone belongs to everyone else." 

The powerful ruling elite show pictures to young children, pictures of families and then comes a sudden electric shock so as to condition children to believe that families produce pain. In that world there are no readers of books; from their earliest years, the powerful elites have instilled a fear in childrem of the written word via those electric shocks. 

Among the things that brought about the tyranny to which the people willingly submitted was a war. No, not a conflict of cannon and campaigns, but the War on the Past. To the citizens of the brave new world, history began with Henry Ford as evidenced when the elite changed the dating system of the brave new world from BC/AD to BF/AF with the "Fs" referring to Henry Ford to whom they render all reverence, even in the vocabulary of the brave new world. When exasperated, shocked, or frustrated, the citizens exclaim, "Oh, my Ford!" Then there was the expression: "Cleanliness is next to Fordliness."

The War on the Past involved the removal of statues; those were gone from the brave new world. Since Christianity heavily influenced the past, the elites removed two things especially abhorrent to the control of a population. The first was the symbol of the Cross--they cut off all crosses at the top so that they looked like a "T." Then, as we would expect, in the brave new world, the Bible had to go and when there was only one left, the highest official there was locked it in his safe. Along with the Bible, Shakespeare was o-u-t, out.

The education of the brave new world wasn't an education; it was an indoctrination by sentences, phrases, and mottoes repeated thousands and thousands of times and by that means they educated the masses. The powerful indoctrinated the citizens to behave in one way only according to their caste. They learned what the government wanted them to learn over and over and over again in the hundreds of thousands of times of various repetitions while they slept. 

This constant repetition would be similar to those who were alive in 2020-2021 who could not keep from hearing and reading the term "systemic racism" so many times that when they heard the word, "systemic," they automatically coupled it  with "racism." Those alive in November 1963 through 1964 were conditioned to the term "Dallas the city of hate." They could fill in the blank of any sentence that said, "Dallas, the city of __________." That's because they heard it over and over again by the ruling class. 

The brave new world is also a world of drugged comfort because of soma." Soma is a government-provided drug distributed to the people. It's a way to escape pain, discomfort, embarrassment, sadness or anger and to enhance joy, and an overall sense of well being. It's non-addictive (physically or mentally) and has no negative side effects on the mind or body whatsoever." The government has conditioned the people to repeat a phrase about soma: ''A gramme in time saves nine." (English spelling) Whenever a person in the book feels the slightest mental or physical pain, mild or serious, he takes soma.

What the government doesn't want anyone to do is to think. To prevent the people from  thinking, the government creates a multiplicity of distractions which are tools to control the people. Huxley explains the role of these distractions: “They [the people] did not foresee what in fact has happened ... the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant." Irrelevant is the epitome of distraction.

“In Brave New World non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation.”

One author wrote, "That sounds like our entertainment-saturated realities today. A quick scroll through most social media feeds will reveal just how much of the online experience is built around these jolts of pleasure, from people “liking” our posts to food and travel experiences that give us vicarious enjoyment to feel-good videos that generate positive feelings. . .  one is able to consume only the things that give one pleasure or fit in with one’s world view, while avoiding anything that doesn’t."

The brave new world focused people's attention on the banal, the irrelevant, and the trivial. These distractions created a passive people who willingly became that way.  In Brave New World, one of the regime’s biggest achievements is creating the illusion of “doing” when all they're doing is observing.(Sharmilla Ganesan) 

 Brave New World is often compared with Orwell's 1984 but it would be better to contrast them. In 1984, there's Big Brother with his massive surveillance and swift punishment which he used to produce a citizenry like Winston Smith who fears opposing the regime. In the Brave New World there is no need for surveillance or punishment because the citizens have been thoroughly conditioned to be happy with their lives. That's the most scary part.

So, do you think Brave New World is science fiction?