Monday, October 27, 2008

The Golden Fiddle

(this has nothing to do with the website of the same name)

Welcome to the readers of goldenfiddle.tumblr.com! Please allow me to explain that this posting is somewhat snarky and tongue-in-cheek.

"The Devil Went Down to Georgia" originally by Charlie Daniels Band:



Of course, Johnny earned his golden fiddle by accepting the Devil's challenge and out-fiddling the Devil, but what the story doesn't say is that anything you get from the Devil, whether you've earned it or not, isn't really free and isn't really yours to keep forever. You can't take it with you when you die.

A lot of people in the last couple of decades have "earned" their golden fiddles, too. But now that they are trying to cash them in they are learning that they are truly worthless. They built entire empires upon the wealth (and talent, or luck, or whatever) they thought their golden fiddles represented. However, not even modern high-tech people can really outwit or win any bet with the Devil, despite all of their humanistic, postmodern, intellectual, and other philosophical hubris. Mankind has not really evolved so much in the last few thousands of years.

2 Timothy 3

Godlessness in the Last Days

1 Remember that there will be difficult times in the last days. 2 People will be selfish, greedy, boastful, and conceited; they will be insulting, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, and irreligious; 3 they will be unkind, merciless, slanderers, violent, and fierce; they will hate the good; 4 they will be treacherous, reckless, and swollen with pride; they will love pleasure rather than God; 5 they will hold to the outward form of our religion, but reject its real power. Keep away from such people. 6 Some of them go into people's houses and gain control over weak women who are burdened by the guilt of their sins and driven by all kinds of desires, 7 women who are always trying to learn but who can never come to know the truth. 8 As Jannes and Jambres were opposed to Moses, so also these people are opposed to the truth—people whose minds do not function and who are failures in the faith. 9 But they will not get very far, because everyone will see how stupid they are. That is just what happened to Jannes and Jambres.


Sounds pretty familiar, doesn't it? Well, we can't really expect those who reject religion and faith and proclaim that it is evil and irrational to actually read the scriptures and learn that it is full of such sociological and historical wisdom. That particular passage from the Bible pretty accurately describes all the behaviors that have caused the fall of every great empire. It's kind of funny that so many so-called intellectuals have ignored such a valuable resource and have remained ignorant of these causes-and-effects that recur every so often. They are not so smart, and their minds don't function all that great after all. In their delusions of grandeur they have fallen into the exact same traps as so many before them.

And the Devil always gets the last laugh. And he always gets his golden fiddles back somehow. But this time the Devil is coming to all of America to reclaim all those golden fiddles so he can redistribute them. Unfortunately, he is also taking much more than some ill-gotten golden fiddles. He wants to take all the other fiddles too, including those humble homemade heirlooms that were never touched by the Devil at all.

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