Christians are supposed to practice Self Government.
And this is why it must be stamped out and replaced with watered down Buddhism. Just go with the flow of the universe, man. Everything happens for a reason. Om!
"How to undo the damage done by Fabian socialists, Gramsci communists, and 60s radicals. Restore the Constitution and make America sane again."
I support your goals, but wonder if they may be impossible. What if the USA and the West are in terminal decline from which they may not recover? Not that I claim to know the answer to that.
There are some good insights in your article - as Christ said, "He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much." We need to demonstrate reliability in small things and serve until God calls us to a higher place, as you said.
Also, Christ did not seek a large number of lukewarm followers, but a smaller number of truly dedicated ones. He demanded sacrifice and self denial (as you pointed out), and did not just say "Believe in me and you can go to heaven." Lenin demanded real commitment.
It is worth nothing that the early Christians did not have the conscious goal of trying to save or to reform the Roman Empire. They accepted that biblically the world is a dark and sinful place ("And we know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in wickedness"). Their goal was individual salvation, and declaring and living the truth and love of Christ - and in the end, their impact was much greater than it would have been if they had set their sights on political goals.
What if things are going to go from bad to worse? What if God's judgments are being stored up and our society will not be changed until God jerks the rug out from under our feet and the whole globalist technological contraption comes down like a house of cards, amid great destruction and unheard of suffering?
Forgive me for stating the obvious, but it should be said - the Communists were able to use many strategies and tactics that are not available to the Christian, including lying, murder, theft, false witness, brutality and cruelty. And, they failed in the end, all of their efforts were for nothing.
If this is the ordained time for the AntiChrist to rise, then indeed, defeat is inevitable.
I intend to go down fighting.
There is an alternative hypothesis which has significant Biblical backing: the AntiChrist will rise when Christians stop doing their jobs. Take note of the stories of Sodom and Gomorrah and Jonah. Also note how Moses laid out choices in the last chapters of Deuteronomy. Moses both said that doom was inevitable AND he called for his audience to choose life.
It is a choice for each generation.
Today's persecution of Christians in the US has been cranked up into the gurly-man range. Do you really want to preemptively give up? Or do you want to put your hands on the plough?
The bad guys have been winning many a battle by default.
It does not necessarily have to be the antichrist. Many Christians have lived through historical upheavals and it was not the end times.
If you want to go down fighting, that is well, as long as it is a spiritual warfare as described in Ephesians 6. Pat Robertson with his presidential campaign and Jerry Falwell with his Moral Majority were confident in the political clout of the Christians and they failed completely. And people had such hope for Reagan and Trump and conservative Supreme Court nominations and things are now worse than they were before.
About Sodom and Gomorrah, that is an example of a doomed society with wrath hanging over it, and God did not send them a prophet to call them to repentance. Jonah, however was effective, and his calls for repentance fell on receptive ears. But I do not see anyone in America today that seems authentically sent by God to call America to repentance, especially as the nominally Bible-believing churches are themselves so weak, conformed to the world and full of sin.
About Moses giving the people a choice between obedience and disobedience, blessing and wrath, at times the Israelites chose one, at times the other. In the end their rejection of God was so great he raised up the Babylonians and Assyrians as instruments of his wrath. Americans to day have that same choice - and what do the majority of them choose? And what if God himself is behind so many of America's troubles? The same God who blessed us with peace, freedom and prosperity in the past can and I believe is now taking them away. As Job said in the midst of disaster, "The Lord has given, and the Lord has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord."
I do not want to preemptively give up, and I want to put my hand to the plough - but I do not want to plow the sand ofthe seashore or engage in a worldly struggle by worldly means.
True, the bad guys have been winning by default for many years - but what are the causes of that default? Until those are recognized and set right it will be the same old same old. And how can the church be any sort of a light when it is full of sin, conformity to the world, and false doctrines? Where have the Christians been for the past 100 years while the forces of secularism slowly but effortlessly took over the government and the courts and the educational system and the corporate boardrooms and the public schools?
Not that I advocate theocracy or a Christian struggle for political dominance, I do not. Our policy vis a vis the government should be that of the Christians in the book of Acts.
Government-wise, we should aspire to Christian compatible government, not Christian government. Democracy is government by the median. If legal = good in your view, then you are not fitting through the Narrow Gate by definition.
Christians are supposed to practice self-government AND influence through example those who lack faith. "Let your light so shine before men that they see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven."
I leave it to Jesus to judge the homos, drug abusers, swingers, etc. I've been naughty too.
But I will redirect the might of the state when public school teachers teach kindergarteners that they can be any gender they want to be. And when druggies poop on the sidewalk, I'll invoke the might of the state to sober them up.
There should be a very large gap between the threshold by which naughtiness is frowned upon and naughtiness which triggers police action.
I'm not sure what the punishment for Drag Queen Story Hour should be, but it should be at least an order of magnitude more than Joe Camel Story Time.
If you do not advocate theocracy, that is good. I don't either - yet some people do AND many people think that your "Christian compatible" government would be a theocracy, if it forbade certain un-Christian activities and protected Christian rights.
True, we have the right to seek Christian compatible laws and candidates, but that is not what we have been getting for a long time, is it? The possibility of Christian compatible government (whatever that might be) is getting more and more remote every day - and meanwhile the churches are becoming increasingly like the world. "The walls are broken down, and the gates are burned with fire" and "the foundations are undermined, what can the righteous do?" We can't even maintain our own churches and lives in godliness, let alone change the world.
As to the Christians in the book of Acts, they did not say "Legal = good" and neither do I, but neither did they have the goal of reforming the Roman system. True, we live in a government that allows us some participation, so we have some opportunity to make our voices heard, but the downhill trend continues and with increasing rapidity.
I agree, "Christians are supposed to practice self-government AND influence through example those who lack faith. 'Let your light so shine before men that they see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven.' "
As to naughtiness which triggers police action - now the courts are refusing to enforce duly enacted laws. There is no law in our meaningless cosmos, now there is less and less law in society as a result.
We read that Lot in Sodom "vexed his righteous soul from day to day with their unlawful deeds." But what could he do about it? Exactly nothing. His own sons-in-law mocked his warnings.
One thing we should do is warn people of the resurrection from the dead and the coming day of judgment. We are not merely chemical-biological machines that disintegrate at death but have immortal souls that will live forever and we will be held accountable for every every act and every word and even for the thoughts of our hearts, and our destiny is heaven or hell.
Our legal system is like a Vogon spaceship: not so much created as congealed.
A single act can trigger dozens of offenses. Lots of opportunity for double and triple jeopardy.
Part of the path out is to encourage more economic independence. We used to have farm programs which attempted to preserve the small family farm. We had antitrust law to keep corporations from achieving government like power. We had limitations on the number of television and radio stations a single entity could own.
With corporations achieving government like power, it kind of makes sense to extend the Bill of Rights onto corporate governance. But this leads to mass government meddling in private associations. And mass social engineering. And separation of Church from everything.
I'll be writing on antitrust alternatives when I get to Rule 13.
Our legal system has become fantastically complex. And as you say “A single act can trigger dozens of offenses. Lots of opportunity for double and triple jeopardy.”
Not only that, they do not need a real offense, they can just make up something, as they are doing with Trump in this alleged fraud case in which there was no loss and the supposed victim is willing to do more business with him.
You mention encouraging economic independence. That sounds like a good idea, and there are many things that could be done – but more likely than not they will not be done. Possibly if Trump gets elected he can reduce some of the government overreach as he did in his first term, but the government is so huge now and the bureaucracy has so much power, that I am skeptical of any solution.
Separation of the church from everything? The American churches have historically been fragmented. Protestants, Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, liberal, conservatives, etc. etc. At no time in America has any one church ever had any significant religious influence over government policies.
The general influence of the Christian religion however, has been significant – but that is the result of many individuals from many different churches sharing some common beliefs. It is not the result of a church interfering with the state – and people with religious views have just as much right to make their voices heard and to try and influence legislation as anyone else.
If many Christians support a specific candidate or work to get some law passed or correct some abuse, that is not the “the Church” influencing the government, as if the Catholics or the Lutherans or the Methodists were undermining democracy.
Gramsci may not be known to the public at large but I think anyone interested in modern Marxist mutations knows something about him. Andrei Znamenski's book SOCIALISM AS A SECULAR CREED says this about him: "Gramsci pointed out that a class that controlled media, culture and education exercised hegemony over society. Therefore, the chief task of radical intellectuals was to gradually take over the 'superstructure' from the bourgeoisie and exercise 'cultural hegemony' of socialism on behalf of the proletarian masses."
That really describes so much of what has happening in our society. The basic Marxist hatred of normality and real life has been retained but the method of revolution and destruction has been modified as Marx's stupid fantasy of a worker's revolution proved to be totally false.
I read some Gramsci a long time ago, it doesn't require deep study. Just let the leftist intellectuals take over. They will show us what life is all about.
I saw the link at the Tree of Woe and thought at first you meant the original Joseph, not Joseph Stalin, lol. *But* the same principles are evident in the original Joseph as well: he was willing to serve and do lowly jobs. He almost lost it all because he got himself distracted and played along with Potiphar's wife. In the end he made it to the top and revolutionized Egypt - e.g. all the common people became Pharaoh's slaves (now, whether it was a good thing is open to interpretation...)
I find myself more aligned to this approach recently.
The dissident right is ineffective for many reasons, but the crux of it is that they are still working within the left’s paradigm. There is a confusion over principles, and over what the general mission should be.
If I may be so bold as to suggest the true mission of the Right: a Divine mission, which is to establish/re-establish the divine order. As it always has been. Contrast this with the Left’s mission: which is to tear down and ultimately destroy said Order for the purpose of evil.
How many on the Right today are actually aware of this?
As C.S. Lewis wrote, the most dangerous evil is Bent good. That is, the perversion of Good is more dangerous than pure wickedness. But Left and Right have been guilty if evil acts for good causes. The Left tends to be worse, because the Left takes on more causes, and the Left obsessively pursues and impossible cause: complete equality.
The Right has its impossible causes as well: trying to eliminate recreational drugs, for example.
This observation does not mean good causes should be abandoned. Inequality is currently excessive. Hard drugs are doing serious harm. But mindless ramping up the Might of the State to fix these problems can cause more evil than good at some threshold.
Jesus did not do away with the Law. He demanded that his followers go beyond the Law and rely more on setting a good example vs. meting out punishments.
-----
Doing more good without resort to force is a means to reduce force.
Charities fueled by ongoing volunteer effort and donations are harder to corrupt than charities funded by either government or endowment funds.
The conspiracy power structure in the intro pic was made using cards from the game classic Illuminati by Steve Jackson Games.
Good practice for building your own conspiracy...
Christians are supposed to practice Self Government.
And this is why it must be stamped out and replaced with watered down Buddhism. Just go with the flow of the universe, man. Everything happens for a reason. Om!
"How to undo the damage done by Fabian socialists, Gramsci communists, and 60s radicals. Restore the Constitution and make America sane again."
I support your goals, but wonder if they may be impossible. What if the USA and the West are in terminal decline from which they may not recover? Not that I claim to know the answer to that.
There are some good insights in your article - as Christ said, "He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much." We need to demonstrate reliability in small things and serve until God calls us to a higher place, as you said.
Also, Christ did not seek a large number of lukewarm followers, but a smaller number of truly dedicated ones. He demanded sacrifice and self denial (as you pointed out), and did not just say "Believe in me and you can go to heaven." Lenin demanded real commitment.
It is worth nothing that the early Christians did not have the conscious goal of trying to save or to reform the Roman Empire. They accepted that biblically the world is a dark and sinful place ("And we know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in wickedness"). Their goal was individual salvation, and declaring and living the truth and love of Christ - and in the end, their impact was much greater than it would have been if they had set their sights on political goals.
What if things are going to go from bad to worse? What if God's judgments are being stored up and our society will not be changed until God jerks the rug out from under our feet and the whole globalist technological contraption comes down like a house of cards, amid great destruction and unheard of suffering?
Forgive me for stating the obvious, but it should be said - the Communists were able to use many strategies and tactics that are not available to the Christian, including lying, murder, theft, false witness, brutality and cruelty. And, they failed in the end, all of their efforts were for nothing.
If this is the ordained time for the AntiChrist to rise, then indeed, defeat is inevitable.
I intend to go down fighting.
There is an alternative hypothesis which has significant Biblical backing: the AntiChrist will rise when Christians stop doing their jobs. Take note of the stories of Sodom and Gomorrah and Jonah. Also note how Moses laid out choices in the last chapters of Deuteronomy. Moses both said that doom was inevitable AND he called for his audience to choose life.
It is a choice for each generation.
Today's persecution of Christians in the US has been cranked up into the gurly-man range. Do you really want to preemptively give up? Or do you want to put your hands on the plough?
The bad guys have been winning many a battle by default.
It does not necessarily have to be the antichrist. Many Christians have lived through historical upheavals and it was not the end times.
If you want to go down fighting, that is well, as long as it is a spiritual warfare as described in Ephesians 6. Pat Robertson with his presidential campaign and Jerry Falwell with his Moral Majority were confident in the political clout of the Christians and they failed completely. And people had such hope for Reagan and Trump and conservative Supreme Court nominations and things are now worse than they were before.
About Sodom and Gomorrah, that is an example of a doomed society with wrath hanging over it, and God did not send them a prophet to call them to repentance. Jonah, however was effective, and his calls for repentance fell on receptive ears. But I do not see anyone in America today that seems authentically sent by God to call America to repentance, especially as the nominally Bible-believing churches are themselves so weak, conformed to the world and full of sin.
About Moses giving the people a choice between obedience and disobedience, blessing and wrath, at times the Israelites chose one, at times the other. In the end their rejection of God was so great he raised up the Babylonians and Assyrians as instruments of his wrath. Americans to day have that same choice - and what do the majority of them choose? And what if God himself is behind so many of America's troubles? The same God who blessed us with peace, freedom and prosperity in the past can and I believe is now taking them away. As Job said in the midst of disaster, "The Lord has given, and the Lord has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord."
I do not want to preemptively give up, and I want to put my hand to the plough - but I do not want to plow the sand ofthe seashore or engage in a worldly struggle by worldly means.
True, the bad guys have been winning by default for many years - but what are the causes of that default? Until those are recognized and set right it will be the same old same old. And how can the church be any sort of a light when it is full of sin, conformity to the world, and false doctrines? Where have the Christians been for the past 100 years while the forces of secularism slowly but effortlessly took over the government and the courts and the educational system and the corporate boardrooms and the public schools?
Not that I advocate theocracy or a Christian struggle for political dominance, I do not. Our policy vis a vis the government should be that of the Christians in the book of Acts.
Government-wise, we should aspire to Christian compatible government, not Christian government. Democracy is government by the median. If legal = good in your view, then you are not fitting through the Narrow Gate by definition.
Christians are supposed to practice self-government AND influence through example those who lack faith. "Let your light so shine before men that they see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven."
I leave it to Jesus to judge the homos, drug abusers, swingers, etc. I've been naughty too.
But I will redirect the might of the state when public school teachers teach kindergarteners that they can be any gender they want to be. And when druggies poop on the sidewalk, I'll invoke the might of the state to sober them up.
There should be a very large gap between the threshold by which naughtiness is frowned upon and naughtiness which triggers police action.
I'm not sure what the punishment for Drag Queen Story Hour should be, but it should be at least an order of magnitude more than Joe Camel Story Time.
If you do not advocate theocracy, that is good. I don't either - yet some people do AND many people think that your "Christian compatible" government would be a theocracy, if it forbade certain un-Christian activities and protected Christian rights.
True, we have the right to seek Christian compatible laws and candidates, but that is not what we have been getting for a long time, is it? The possibility of Christian compatible government (whatever that might be) is getting more and more remote every day - and meanwhile the churches are becoming increasingly like the world. "The walls are broken down, and the gates are burned with fire" and "the foundations are undermined, what can the righteous do?" We can't even maintain our own churches and lives in godliness, let alone change the world.
As to the Christians in the book of Acts, they did not say "Legal = good" and neither do I, but neither did they have the goal of reforming the Roman system. True, we live in a government that allows us some participation, so we have some opportunity to make our voices heard, but the downhill trend continues and with increasing rapidity.
I agree, "Christians are supposed to practice self-government AND influence through example those who lack faith. 'Let your light so shine before men that they see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven.' "
As to naughtiness which triggers police action - now the courts are refusing to enforce duly enacted laws. There is no law in our meaningless cosmos, now there is less and less law in society as a result.
We read that Lot in Sodom "vexed his righteous soul from day to day with their unlawful deeds." But what could he do about it? Exactly nothing. His own sons-in-law mocked his warnings.
One thing we should do is warn people of the resurrection from the dead and the coming day of judgment. We are not merely chemical-biological machines that disintegrate at death but have immortal souls that will live forever and we will be held accountable for every every act and every word and even for the thoughts of our hearts, and our destiny is heaven or hell.
Our legal system is like a Vogon spaceship: not so much created as congealed.
A single act can trigger dozens of offenses. Lots of opportunity for double and triple jeopardy.
Part of the path out is to encourage more economic independence. We used to have farm programs which attempted to preserve the small family farm. We had antitrust law to keep corporations from achieving government like power. We had limitations on the number of television and radio stations a single entity could own.
With corporations achieving government like power, it kind of makes sense to extend the Bill of Rights onto corporate governance. But this leads to mass government meddling in private associations. And mass social engineering. And separation of Church from everything.
I'll be writing on antitrust alternatives when I get to Rule 13.
Our legal system has become fantastically complex. And as you say “A single act can trigger dozens of offenses. Lots of opportunity for double and triple jeopardy.”
Not only that, they do not need a real offense, they can just make up something, as they are doing with Trump in this alleged fraud case in which there was no loss and the supposed victim is willing to do more business with him.
You mention encouraging economic independence. That sounds like a good idea, and there are many things that could be done – but more likely than not they will not be done. Possibly if Trump gets elected he can reduce some of the government overreach as he did in his first term, but the government is so huge now and the bureaucracy has so much power, that I am skeptical of any solution.
Separation of the church from everything? The American churches have historically been fragmented. Protestants, Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, liberal, conservatives, etc. etc. At no time in America has any one church ever had any significant religious influence over government policies.
The general influence of the Christian religion however, has been significant – but that is the result of many individuals from many different churches sharing some common beliefs. It is not the result of a church interfering with the state – and people with religious views have just as much right to make their voices heard and to try and influence legislation as anyone else.
If many Christians support a specific candidate or work to get some law passed or correct some abuse, that is not the “the Church” influencing the government, as if the Catholics or the Lutherans or the Methodists were undermining democracy.
Antonio Gramsci's influence on Communism is underappreciated, and the man is underloathed.
Gramsci may not be known to the public at large but I think anyone interested in modern Marxist mutations knows something about him. Andrei Znamenski's book SOCIALISM AS A SECULAR CREED says this about him: "Gramsci pointed out that a class that controlled media, culture and education exercised hegemony over society. Therefore, the chief task of radical intellectuals was to gradually take over the 'superstructure' from the bourgeoisie and exercise 'cultural hegemony' of socialism on behalf of the proletarian masses."
That really describes so much of what has happening in our society. The basic Marxist hatred of normality and real life has been retained but the method of revolution and destruction has been modified as Marx's stupid fantasy of a worker's revolution proved to be totally false.
I read some Gramsci a long time ago, it doesn't require deep study. Just let the leftist intellectuals take over. They will show us what life is all about.
Have visited Italy more than a dozen times but never managed to see Rome. It is on my list. 41.876°N 12.480°E https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d4/Antonio_Gramsci_Grave_in_Rome01.jpg/180px-Antonio_Gramsci_Grave_in_Rome01.jpg
https://www.findlatitudeandlongitude.com/?lat=41.9000&lon=12.4833&map_type=G_NORMAL_MAP&zoom=7
I know what I must do.
If you feel like explaining your last sentence, go right ahead. If not, then not.
Gramsci represents the failure of modern secularism.
Somewhat similar: https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-rights-future-must-be-parallel
Quite similar! Just restacked.
I saw the link at the Tree of Woe and thought at first you meant the original Joseph, not Joseph Stalin, lol. *But* the same principles are evident in the original Joseph as well: he was willing to serve and do lowly jobs. He almost lost it all because he got himself distracted and played along with Potiphar's wife. In the end he made it to the top and revolutionized Egypt - e.g. all the common people became Pharaoh's slaves (now, whether it was a good thing is open to interpretation...)
Not exactly a ringing endorsement of letting your leaders have foreign servants.
I find myself more aligned to this approach recently.
The dissident right is ineffective for many reasons, but the crux of it is that they are still working within the left’s paradigm. There is a confusion over principles, and over what the general mission should be.
If I may be so bold as to suggest the true mission of the Right: a Divine mission, which is to establish/re-establish the divine order. As it always has been. Contrast this with the Left’s mission: which is to tear down and ultimately destroy said Order for the purpose of evil.
How many on the Right today are actually aware of this?
As C.S. Lewis wrote, the most dangerous evil is Bent good. That is, the perversion of Good is more dangerous than pure wickedness. But Left and Right have been guilty if evil acts for good causes. The Left tends to be worse, because the Left takes on more causes, and the Left obsessively pursues and impossible cause: complete equality.
The Right has its impossible causes as well: trying to eliminate recreational drugs, for example.
This observation does not mean good causes should be abandoned. Inequality is currently excessive. Hard drugs are doing serious harm. But mindless ramping up the Might of the State to fix these problems can cause more evil than good at some threshold.
Jesus did not do away with the Law. He demanded that his followers go beyond the Law and rely more on setting a good example vs. meting out punishments.
-----
Doing more good without resort to force is a means to reduce force.
Charities fueled by ongoing volunteer effort and donations are harder to corrupt than charities funded by either government or endowment funds.