Nuking Omelas
Jesus already died for this, but Omelas won't go away.
I wasn’t an Ursula LeGuin fan in my youth, though my sister was. I was reading C.S. Lewis and Tolkien in those days. But recently I came across a mention of how LeGuin allegedly chose the name Omelas for her imaginary country in this short tale (it’s the reverse spelling of Salem, O[regon], as seen in a rearview mirror), and that took me to the Wikipedia page to learn more about her story of the ultimate sin-bearing sacrificial victim.
Spoiler alert: the story is based on the premise that everyone else in this society can be happy as long as one child is suffering. The catch is that people are informed of the child’s suffering existence, and then they have to choose to either accept the happiness and knowingly and selfishly allow that child’s suffering to continue, or walk away from Omelas and deal with their own happiness and/or suffering without benefit of a scapegoat.
I still haven’t read the story, but the thesis is compelling. It demonstrates the human need for a redeemer, for one thing. It wouldn’t be so compelling if the people of Omelas were perfect and happy and no one was suffering. Though it will be wonderful when it does happen (and it will, for those of us who accept Jesus’ free gift of salvation), it’s not the story we want to read right now. It’s the suffering that draws our attention, because we have all been someone’s scapegoat at one time or another. We know that sin causes suffering, and we live in a broken world, not a perfect one. Our spirits cry out for justice as well as mercy.
The only problem with the premise of LeGuin’s story is that the innocent, sinless Lamb of God has already died and risen from the grave to redeem any of us who believes in Him and His willing self-sacrifice in our place. So her story is actually pagan, where one human being is willing to sacrifice another in order to obtain “happiness,” or at least relief from guilt and shame.
No matter how often a pagan dispatches a victim to take away the pagan’s sin, of course, the sin never goes permanently away; like a yoyo, it always returns. You know how it goes: a narcissist will bond with an “inner circle,” and project those “bad feelings” of shame and inadequacy and fear of condemnation onto another person, and then “split” that person off, and keep him or her outside that circle; it is an act of psychological murder by an infantile adult who is frantically trying to get rid of her or his sense of shame. And very smart narcissists don’t even do their own splitting; they triangulate it onto other people to do the splitting for them. And those people may not even be aware that they are being used that way.
Even if their mom has warned them for years about it. Ahem.
Only those people who have been the victim of such “splitting” events will get this. Most Christians get it, I would guess, 1) because the enemy is always looking for ways to attack us, and 2) because we serve a perfect God, and non-Christians assume that we think of ourselves as also perfect because we know we are redeemed.
Actually, we know we are very broken sinners who NEED a Savior, the Son of God who became a perfect man and chose to die in our place, on our behalf, wiping out our sins forever. If only the pagans could come to the knowledge of this amazing truth! We won’t be perfect until we receive our new imperishable and sinless bodies, but we can keep on keeping on until that glorious Day, knowing that we WILL be victors over original sin (i.e. our corruptible hormone system that Adam bequeathed to us) through the combination of faith in Jesus’ payment of our debt in our place, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit who seals our betrothal to Jesus, and our continuing repentance for any new wrongs against God and each other.
So I suggest we nuke Omelas. No one should be standing in Jesus’ place, suffering for the sins of another person in order to make the guilty feel more comfortable. THAT IS JESUS’ JOB, to take away sin FOREVER. Wherever the “circle of exclusion” exists, we should ignore those boundaries and show love and do good to everyone inside that circle, to wake them up and reveal to their sight the body of the suffering child on which their happy little circle is built. Once they see it, they will walk away from Omelas.
If that exposes the guilty triangulator, the one who panics at having her sin revealed, her abortion known, her many adulteries exposed, the exploitation of her children uncovered—then she is blessed indeed to be brought into the light where she can learn about the free gift of salvation that will take all her sin away—FOREVER!!
P.S. In this substack post I was also going to postulate about the airborne hormone experiments of the 60s-70s (remember the “summer of love”?) that were inflicted on an unconsenting and unaware population in order to test various contraceptive methods, before they evidently settled on abortion as the best solution to control population growth…and how the recent LGBT cultural psyops were cover operations for more airborne hormone applications that are causing gender confusion as well as limiting fertility, results that have evidently proved successful enough that the unseen martial law government that is actually in charge was willing to let Roe v. Wade come to an end. And also how cruel and evil this unseen government is, to consider the souls of the gender-confused people they afflicted as disposable, “acceptable losses” in their godless goal to save humanity from the oncoming space rocks and solar micronova (that’s Jesus’ job, too). But I couldn’t possibly do the topic justice, and only wanted to say that anyone who is or has committed sexual sins or sins of rage, etc. because this unseen authority is treating us all like lab rats—perhaps it would help you understand your choices and behaviors if you know that someone else has been messing with your hormones…and perhaps it would help my fellow Christians to understand that and be gentle and compassionate with these victims instead of judgmental…because the techlords running the world and inflicting these evils on us would like to lay all the blame on Christians in order to cover their own behinds.
And to the techlords who don’t repent of participating in this evil…Jesus was on to you. Your eternal suffering in the Lake of Fire will be your own doing—no Omelas about it.
[Matt 18:6 NKJV] 6 "But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to sin, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were drowned in the depth of the sea.
[Mark 9:42 NKJV] 42 "But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were thrown into the sea.
[Luke 17:2 NKJV] 2 "It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were thrown into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.
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