Long ago there lived by the banks of the Great River on the edge of Wilderland a clever-handed and quiet-footed little people, said Gandalf to Frodo,

"I guess they were of hobbit-kind (and) the most inquisitous and curious-minded (of them all) was... Sméagol." (The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien, p.65)

Sméagol was intensely interested in power, so in his quest for the knowledge of how things work here below he burrowed under trees, tunneled into green mounds, examined roots and dove into deep pools. During his quest he fell further and further away from Iluvatar (the personal God of life and creation) and as his soul turned ever inward away from the personal, life-sustaining Light above and down into darkness, hardness, and spiritual impoverishment, his soul materialized and withered and he ceased to look up at all. For Gollum, Iluvatar ceased to exist.

Just as Gollum's fall into darkness was preceded by pride, ingratitude, and haughtiness, so was pre-flood man's fall. In "Against the Heathen," early Church Father Athanasius reveals that a proud spirit led antediluvians to make light of the higher things of the Lord, and in their wickedness they deliberately disregarded what they knew to be true (Romans 1:18). Like Gollum, they began to seek in preference power and knowledge in the lower or natural dimension (the cosmos). Thus they fell into worship of self, sorcery, change and energy (evolution), sexual pleasures and acquisition of status and things to the living God and His Truth. In those days as in our own, barbarism reigned:

"Barbarism is that which prevailed from the days of Adam down through ten generations to the time of Noah. It is called barbarism because of the fact that in those times men had no ruling authority or mutual accord, but every man was independent and a law unto himself after the dictates of his own will." (John of Damascus, "The Fount of Knowledge," cited in Political Apocalypse, Ellis Sandoz, p. 131)

The truth as to this evil said Athanasius,

"...is that it originates, and resides, in the perverted choice of the darkened soul" that, “materialized by forgetting God" and engrossed in lower things, "makes them into gods," and thereby "descends into a hopeless depth of delusion and superstition," whereby "they ceased to think that anything existed beyond what is seen, or that anything was good save things temporal and bodily; so turning away and forgetting that she was in the image of the good God, she no longer... sees God the Word after whose likeness she is made; but having departed from herself, imagines and feigns what is not (and then) advancing further in evil, they came to celebrate as gods the elements and the principles of which bodies are composed...." (Against the Heathen, New Advent)

Saurons' Ring of Power symbolizes the power of sin and the Evil One here below, thus after Gollum's bulging, covetous eyes fell upon the ring he obsessively pursued this earthly object even unto the murder of his friend Deagol. Then armed with his "precious" he used its' power (Saurons' power) to spy, to find out incriminating secrets, to blackmail, slander, dominate, terrorize, and much like Americas’ godless and morally and intellectually bankrupt ruling class, to put his ill-gotten knowledge to crooked and malicious uses.

In these brief passages Tolkien masterfully paints a bleak and terrible picture of the spiritual destruction of Gollum's soul – the deadening of conscience; the hardening and turning of the will to wickedness resulting in disordered, imbecilic upside-down reasoning resulting in pathological lying, unhealthy obsessions, paranoia, psychosis and thoughts of vengeance and murder. Gollum is a sociopath, his darkened embittered soul devoid of hope, peace, love, truth and light.

Just as the spiritual source and taproot of Americas' fall into apostasy and search for power here below is Satan and the Powers and Principalities, Gollum's fall is also a movement of spirit whose source and taproot is Sauron. Sauron is the first lieutenant of Melkor (Lucifer) and he led Gollum away from Iluvatar, the supernatural, living, personal Holy God above who is the origin and only source of life and spirit. Iluvatar is the Author and Designer of everything good, beautiful, natural, true. He is the Revitalizer of the spiritually dead souls of men:

"So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day." (2 Corinthians 4:16, ESV)

Rather than spiritual regeneration, by his own free choice Gollum, like his modern counterparts, chose spiritual desolation, thus became a walking dead body energized by Sauron that sustained itself in the manner of a parasite or vampire.

Tolkien creatively depicts the inner desolation and decay of the souls of Gollum, Grima Wormtongue, and the Orcs (apostate elves) outwardly, with blackened eyes and fingernails, rotting gums, decaying teeth, fetid breath; stringy, greasy wisps of hair, and oily, blackened bodies that obviously reek with the putrid stench of decay and death.

The sign of Golloms’ modern counterpart is the wildly popular soulless Walking Dead, epitomized by John Dewey:

"There is no God and no soul. We, of course, say that we do not believe in God (and) eternal morality. That is moral that serves the destruction of the old society. Everything is moral which is necessary for the annihilation of the old exploiting social order and for uniting the proletariat." (John Dewey, The Unseen Hand, A. Ralph Epperson, p. 298, 378-379)

Americas’ parasitic Walking Dead are the soulless ‘elite' ruling class. Like Gollom, they are sociopaths who freely chose spiritual desolation. They exist at every level of society from the lowest to the highest corridors of power: presidential, congressional, military, financial, and judicial power in unison with Hollywood, big media, academia, library association, the porn and abortion industries, and certain seminaries, pulpits and congregations.

Like Gollum, Americas’ Walking Dead are nihilists with a cause – the cause of obtaining power to do and have whatever they want. They have their own highly exalted imperial opinions and ever-unfolding menu of self-granted privileges empowering them to deny life to the inconvenient, to terrorize citizens, burn down cities, practice their own pansexual 'love' and force it onto our children, and live parasitic lives at the expense of the productive. As they are sovereign, morally pure hypocrites they travel their own sovereign roads and expect the God of Revelation and everyone else to accept and tolerate them – to put up and shut up. This being the case, they resent the Holy Trinity, faithful orthodox Christians and morally ordered people in general and blame them for not accepting them just as they are, for not jumping through hoops for them, for not celebrating them and seeing things their way. This is why our parasitic elites,

“...govern societies that systematically deny the rights of the unborn and the elderly, that aggressively violate their citizens’ rights of free speech and free exercise of religion. They seek to create a world where parents have almost no rights over the education and rearing of their children, where toxic ideologies about race and transgenderism are forced on young and old alike, and parents are afraid to oppose these ideologies for fear of the state.’ They "don’t actually care about violence or even incitement to violence, any more than they care all that much about the rights, dignity, or safety of women. In the face of real evil, real violence, they are reduced to inane platitudes.” (The Afghanistan Debacle Exposed the Moral Bankruptcy of the West, John Daniel Davidson, The Federalist, Aug. 19, 2021)

Spiritual Desolation

According to Scripture, spiritual desolation is a judgment rendered by the Holy Trinity against a proud, rebellious, godless people whose inward turned souls have fallen into contemplation of 'self' rather than of the Lord. The book of Ezekiel for example, is a history of the apostasy of God's people and resulting spiritual desolation while Jeremiah speaks of desolation as the cup of God's fury:

"For thus saith the Lord of hosts the God of Israel: Take the cup of wine of this fury at my hand: and thou shalt make all nations to drink thereof, unto which I shall send thee." Jeremiah 25:15

Nihilism: Spiritual Desolation

In "Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age," Eugene Rose analyzes the causes and terrible effects of Americas' abandonment of the God of Revelation. At the deepest level of meaning, spiritual desolation is the nihilism that Rose summarizes with the words, "God is dead in the hearts of modern Westerners:”

“...and it is as true of the atheists and Satanists who rejoice in the fact, as it is of the unsophisticated multitudes....Man has lost faith in God and in the Divine Truth that once sustained him... apostasy to worldliness... has characterized the modern age since its beginning..." (p. 60)

When for millions of nihilists the God of Revelation does not exist and life has no higher, fixed meaning or purpose with neither hope of an afterlife nor any accountability to their Maker for their actions here in this world, then men no longer have reason and purpose for being good, thus are free to be evil. They are at liberty to invoke meaningless law and perverted justice to destroy freedom, dismember babies, imprison political opponents, and force disordered appetites upon men, women, and children. They are free to accuse the good man of evil, to enslave other people and deprive them of all that sustains life. With this freedom they vandalize and plunder the property and wealth of others and throw our borders open to floods of disease bearing illegals, rapists, drug-lords, terrorists, pedophiles, murderers and other sinister individuals.

A society of nihilists is a welcome mat to human predators of every stripe from drug lords, ISIS, and the Muslim Brotherhood to sex-slavers and the world's criminal elite: the occult Luciferian New World Order super-wealthy criminal consortium of psychopaths.

The Void: Absolute Nothing

For those of the global and Western ruling class who are mystical Eastern pantheists or of New Age spirituality, god is an impersonal force or energy from the void or abyss that is part of everyone and everything. But for global and ruling class evolutionary materialists there is no god, only the void, chaos, nothingness, energy field, waters, or abyss (Genesis 1:2; Revelation 9:1-12; 17:8; 20:1,3) as first cause of all things. It is the Void of absolute nothingness from which emanate evolutionary energies that work upon matter to produce life. But like the first view, nothingness produces nothing since it has no living, personal Ultimate Source for life, conscious life, inner being, and truth.

Thus the cohort of sinister nihilists believe in nothing, know only hate, contempt, violence, greed and egotism and share a foundational hatred of the Tri-Personal God of Revelation, faithful Christians and Jews and traditional Christian grounded Western and American civilization.

Idolatry

In rejecting the Holy Creator God of heaven and earth and two thousand years of Christian witness, Global and American elite nihilists and their parasitic followers have systematically replaced the living Holy God with senseless "idolatrous self," His Word with addlepated opinions, Darwinism as origin account, and scientism as the only legitimate form of knowledge. Whatever a stupefied idolater places at the top of his pyramid of self-gratifying, self-glorifying values is ultimately what he serves.

When the greater part of society has turned away from the Holy Triune God to deified 'self,' it is an idolatrous society heading for destruction. This is because at the root of the rejection of the living God is the stupid, rebellious assertion that man was not created by God, thus is not created in His spiritual image but is soulless. Soulless man is not dependent upon Him for his own life; he is not dependent upon the living God but is rather a man-god, the creator of god, and the master of time, being, and the world who through his own powers will save himself.

Since idolatry leads to the conceptual murder of the Holy Trinity and the rejection of His work on the cross, this means that like Gollum the Walking Dead judge themselves unfit for Paradise:

"Celebration, holy days (holidays) of fellowshipping and feasting together is a vibrant part of heaven. It is very much associated with joy and rejoicing in the Bible. Food, conversation, singing, shouting, praise, nature, music, thankfulness, rewards, prayer and people, are all associated with rejoicing in heaven. This is how we will celebrate together. The feasts of the Old Testament went on for days. Imagine how long the parties in heaven will last!" Larry Dick, A Taste of Heaven

"Heaven, as the eternal home of the divine Man and of all the redeemed members of the human race, must necessarily be thoroughly human in its structure, conditions, and activities. Its joys and activities must all be rational, moral, emotional, voluntary, and active. There must be the exercise of all the faculties, the gratification of all tastes, the development of all talent capacities, the realization of all ideals. The reason, the intellectual curiosity, the imagination, the aesthetic instincts, the holy affections, the social affinities, the inexhaustible resources of strength and power native to the human soul must all find in heaven exercise and satisfaction....Heaven will prove the consummate flower and fruit of the whole creation and of all the history of the universe." A.A. Hodge, Evangelical Theology

In the end, it is parasitic, nihilist idolaters who willfully shut themselves out of paradise and condemn themselves to Hell. They came from nothing and to nothing (the abyss) they return. They are non-self nihilists from the Void and/or Abyss, the nothingness that is the abode of their father Satan and his host of fallen angels, powers, principalities and demons.

In affirmation, C.S. Lewis says that Hell is of the choosing of the walking dead:

"There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done.' All that are in Hell chose it."

Linda writes on worldview and related subjects