Article 10: In Absence of Adolescence

Rule Three of the Firmament:

All intelligent races in existence likely stand within one or more of these states

*Primordial
–Made New and Blameless
-Corrupted and Afflicted:
- Recipients of Passive Wrath
- Promised and Waiting
- Justified or Judged
- Made Blameless Anew
-Maturing and Blameless
-Authoritative and Blameless
-Mutually Interactive

At long last, we will transition together into the next conceivable racial stage of development. Whereas before we focused predominantly on things with firm examples, namely our history, we will now turn our attention to the more theoretical. As a result, I will rely on natural development, logic, and a few fictional examples to demonstrate such a stage.

Maturing and Blameless

If, we must ask ourselves, there can be a blameless creation that is new, then there must logically be, at some point, a blameless creation that is mature or maturing. As I’ve postulated previously, much of the purpose of being created is to grow, learn, and experience both heavenly relationship and creation. If so, then that directive must point somewhere. There must be a time when a developing people grow into something more than their default instincts. Yet how do we measure when a race is maturing? When can it no longer be considered “New” while remaining blameless?

My thinking harkens back to the ancient world. Then, there was a firm line between childhood and adulthood. (The idea of “adolescence” is a more modern social construct, and I will set that aside for the moment). All manner of ancient civilizations had their ways of determining such things. For girls, this was far and away determined mainly by menstruation, whereas for boys a test of courage needed completion, or perhaps merely an age of responsibility was reached. Regardless of the ceremony, once achieved the child was now considered an adult in some very real, very important respects. The adults that were young had more to learn and be guided through. They were of course often rasher than an adult who was old. Yet adults they were, with honors, responsibilities, and expectations related to a certain amount of autonomy.

My concept of the stages for a race are not unlike this. We began as children in Made New and Blameless. Uninterrupted, we would have naturally transitioned into Maturing and Blameless, or to put it in the analogy, the beginning of our adulthood. All with again, new honors, responsibilities, and expectations. For the purposes of the Firmament, I have drawn the line at the fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. As I have previously covered, it is highly likely that the forbidding of this fruit was temporary. Temporary in the same way one might teach a child to ride a bike, and yet forbid them from attempting mountain trails with training wheels still attached. It is not that they never intend to teach the child to ride them, only that they are too dangerous at the moment to attempt. There is a stage of teaching where too much knowledge given without a proper foundation is only and always harmful. There is some information that requires a certain amount of maturity to process and use correctly. A race in the Maturing and Blameless category has reached adulthood, so to speak, and has had things explained to them now that they can begin to understand them. In this way of thinking, Adam and Eve had a list of chores (name the animals, populate the earth), but duties such as creating culture, fiction, or even science would have been conceivably harmful without the maturity to understand the ramifications of such creations.

So let me rewind a moment and address adolescence. As I said, it is a more modern societal construct in its implication, wedged right in the middle of childhood and adulthood. Anyone who has been paying attention to the last few generations will doubtless recognize that the age range of this category of development has grown increasingly, and to great societal harm. After all, the longer someone remains in adolescence, the greater the damage they can do before accepting full responsibility for their life choices. It used to be merely the “teens”, then expanded into the experimental years of college. Further, I have even seen countless people push it into the mid-twenties using the excuse that, until then, the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain that aids in decision-making) isn’t fully developed. This is a commonly held assessment, yet statistically speaking by the age of 25 the average American is $78,396 in debt and had between 4-14 different sexual partners (depending on the study) beginning at the age of 17. My point is merely this, Adolescence in our modern day is seen broadly as an excuse for all manner of “acceptable” poor decisions, rather than the much more important period of instruction to ready young adults during the most key time of formation. The time that will most greatly affect the trajectory of their entire life.

Yet what does this have to do with the Maturing and Blameless category? Simply put, to contrast as a representative of the stage of Corrupted and Afflicted. While I won’t re-hash the entire category, I invite you to see the similarities. Firstly, we begin as children (made new). This period ends in an increasingly stark loss of innocence with the increasing exposure of children to identity politics, sexual preference, pornography, and even the social autonomy of an anonymous online persona. This is all brought to bear in an age where many parents assume and even encourage rebellion. This is typified by the stance of “I don’t care if you get wasted at a party, just call me afterward to come to pick you up instead of driving home” or “I accept my 17-year-old is going to be having sex, I just want to make sure they wear protection”. In essence the attitude of “I don’t care what your sin is, I accept them as inevitable (and even natural), and as such I will capitulate to all of it in an effort to stop you from breaking our now tenuous connection”.

Conversely, a race entering into Maturing and Blameless has taken the alternative route. Or to be more specific, the route a race ought to have taken all along. The parent (God) has determined that they are now in a place where the child is a young adult, and can begin to learn of the dangers of reality, of having a choice. Rather than leave it to simply “make its own mistakes” the parent begins to introduce responsibilities that the young adult is ready for. The more the young adult relies on its trust for the parent, the more the parent can rely on the trust in the young adult. Having a trusting relationship is the key to good guidance. Not in order to force or control, but to help teach and grow at a rate natural to the young adult, or in this case race. A relationship wherein one who is young is taught the nature of responsibility and can lean on the wisdom of their parent until they can lean on their own.

Now, I promised some fictional examples. the most obvious (given my dear affection for C.S. Lewis’s “Space Trilogy”) would be the races of Malacandra. The three races of the planet Mars never broke their relationship with their creator Maleldil. They had grown and matured in an open relationship, and while I would say they did not have a firm grasp of what “Evil” was, they were clearly mature enough to understand its foolishness when bought to the point. Similarly, Tor and Tinadril of Perelandra have entered into Maturing and Blameless by the end of their book, yet it was clearly only their beginning development of culture, fiction, and science. Perhaps a more well-known example would be the Elves of Tolkien’s universe. The Elves we get to know in the books, the Elves that lived in Middle earth, were much like humanity might be when we complete the stage of Maturing and Blameless. For they too were deceived into rebellion and were not allowed to return to the Undying lands of Valinor until the final servant of their deceiver had been vanquished. While I can claim no serious scholarship in Tolkien lore, we absolutely get to see the final stages of Maturing and Blameless here. For, as I will be showing in my next article, the Elves will be entering into a Mutually Interactive relationship with the Vala, the God-created and ordained deities of Tolkien’s fictional pantheon.

It is admittedly difficult to find good fictional examples outside of these scholars, for much of the modern world would confuse Maturing and Blameless with stories of societies that had merely evolved beyond doing evil to one another. Science fiction is rife with examples of these sorts of benevolent races, from Star Trek’s “Federation” to StarGate’s “Asgaurd”. Of course, these would fall outside of the purview of The Firmament, as they do not acknowledge or function within a relationship to an overarching creator God. In a number of practical ways however they are similar in effect, if not in origin. The major conceptual difference lies in the means by which they result in maturity, self-directed social evolution in one, and a lovingly guided relationship in the other.