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Against All Odds

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Against All Odds

Category Archives: despotism

Getting Mind Trapped by the Unachievable

17 Sunday Sep 2023

Posted by Prime Theologian in Apologetics, Christ and Culture, Comparative Religion, despotism, Elitism, Libertarianism, limitations

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christ and culture, church and state, cultural polarization, epistemology, freedom and tyranny

In a recent conversation with my wife, we were rattling off numerous ways that our minds become trapped. What happens is that someone lays out that his or her position as the neutral position, and all other positions, which fall outside this one, are therefore wrong.

I have elsewhere addressed whether saying that “God is biased” is accurate or not, but to set up how this discussion pertains to God, we should briefly address how humans learn. It is impossible to remove what philosophers call “features of situatedness.” After all, I was born somewhere, and I cannot be born nowhere. That is a feature of my birth history (my situatedness). I will speak a certain language, and those words that get used in that language will have certain meanings. Furthermore, some of those words will have loaded connotations not strictly assigned to that word’s denotation. Within the way these words get used, there will be cultural trends, like tattoos becoming mainline in the 80s and 90s. Tattoos, at one time, were associated with ungodliness or at least a certain moral irresponsibility. Today, in the 2020s, within a relatively conservative church in Florida, I’d venture to say that you will see as many tattoos as you do people who do not have them. Within your neighborhood in which you grew up, there was an attitude about tattoos, and that attitude was very different from a similar neighborhood located elsewhere, with families of different economic means, and with communities of various secular or religious perspectives. This is the cultural milieu that silently “taught” us; these features influenced us based on our unique situation. Humans, therefore, learn only in a bias laden situation. To say a human could learn in a non-biased situation would be to claim that somehow “I could be born nowhere.” Bias is the learning environment. The question we must ask is what biases are good and which are evil.

It is not ‘biased people vs. non-biased people.” This is a dichotomy that is indubitably a trap. There are many who believe that they are those who are unbiased. This is self-deception, malice, or the result of culture programming them to have this belief. The real battle is ‘good-biased people vs. evil-biased people.’ However, if this is the real battle, then it inexorably brings the debate to the matter of comparing values-sets or questing for the “best morality.” To frame this discussion as ‘biased vs. non-biased people’ is a trap.

Why is it a trap? It takes solid and sizable mental effort to get out, first off. This trap sets up something impossible to achieve.  Why so? It creates a category that cannot exist. Let’s lay out an example of this using “bias” since I have touched on this already. Humans see the world from a certain perspective; saying the same thing differently, all human perceiving of the world is seen through a lens called bias. There is no human who sees the world with access to all knowledge, which is what it would take to potentially see the world without bias. If we listen to news, media, radio, what have you, we will find over and over again accusations that “someone is biased” or proclamations that a source is unbiased, fair, accurate. What is unachievable is the removal of bias, but such proclamations and accusations silently presume such non-bias is possible. Why is it a trap? If we listen to such voices, we find ourselves striving to do the undoable, or, worse, we seek the approval of those who insidiously suggest their perspective is the “unbiased one.”  The trap itself is nothing more than building a cage without an exit, so that those enclosed in this trap spend all their time trying to find the exit when they could be devising ways to break out of the trap.

Let’s boil this down: no one has an unbiased position, therefore do not waste time listening to those who claim such. How we determine whether a bias is good or evil is by filtering it through a set of values. We should spend our time figuring out what set of values supports a bias rather than spend time and effort trying to be unbiased—which is unachievable. I think we can visually present this idea.

Imagine two great armies ready to meet the next day on the field of battle. They come to parley the day before on so-called neutral ground. What isn’t said is that this neutral ground has the sun at one army’s back and in the other’s eyes, that there is a slight downward slope helping a would-be charge of one army, and that the neutral ground has been thoroughly scoped out by both armies scouts. The two armies represent two competing and opposed biases. The neutral ground is the so-called “unbiased” position. What we find, however, is that the neutral ground is not really neutral, but it favors one army or the other more or less. Therefore, you find ourselves dining in one army camp or the other even if we had meant to be neutral.

In whose camp will we serve? We need not reinvent the wheel; we need only devote time to social institutions that promote traditional Judeao-Christian values. Many presume these values without knowing it already. The media and other informational sources who present themselves as the net neutral position, these are to be rejected out of hand. There is no need for long debates. The world, this secular spectacle we face every day, has not changed over the millennia. The game is the same. On one hand, tyranny accosts our senses and drives us mad: we find freedom in our obedience to goodness, to a transcendent moral norm (God) that power hungry tyrants cannot impact, control, or change.  On the other hand, a society engorged on freedom unhinged from objective moral norms inevitability will be rotted out and destroyed from its acceptance of all lifestyles. Those societies, as God would say, “Let them become a byword.”

Dr. Scalise

The Bonhoeffer Vector: The Deep Church, Wheat and Tares, Medical Experimentation

06 Wednesday Jul 2022

Posted by Prime Theologian in Church Leadership, despotism, Government

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What is missing in the present resistance to the government bio-medical tyranny is a sustained theological attack on it and a theologian driven admonishment to conservative or evangelical churches. In many cases, including at my own evangelical church, the church has become complicit in advancing the government bio-medical tyranny. John MacAuthor’s church in California refused to shut down; this is a great example of what we want to see. Consequently, MacAuthor’s church just won in court to the tune of $800,000, not a bad pull for standing your just and theologically sound ground. What are the indicators of tyranny?

John MacArthur and Grace Community Church win $800,000 settlement from California and L.A. County

Forcing face masks, letting the government shut down the church, advancing or peddling the mRNA vaccines, or advising congregates to “submit to government,” are all examples of tyranny. Has your church been involved in these agendi? We could expand this out and ask if your church supports the BLM movement, which is as much a solidifier of racial tensions as it is a facilitator of destabilization via “identity-class warfare.”

In respect to the church advocating for submission to government outright because the bible says things like “honor the emperor (1Peter 2:17),” or “submit to authorities because they have been put there by God (Romans 13:1, paraphrased),” or “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s (Mark 12:17),” we need to know if these church leaders understand where governing authority resides and issues from in the American constitutional Republic. “We The People” form the Constitution by which all government officials are governed; all government authorities have their “just powers” by “the consent of the governed.” The buck stops with the individual as the base layer of government authority. It may not feel like that since our government officials here in the U.S. are running rampant violating the Constitution recently, but the behavior of a ruling class criminal syndicate does not dissolve the Constitution or church leaders’ responsibility to understand, as a minimum, the supreme law of the land, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The gift the founding fathers left America is the marvel of “we the people” being the governing authority, being compelled only by morality and our relationship with God with no need to submit to a government since we the people ourselves are the government. We do not have an emperor or a Caesar who is some autocrat that “is the government.”

To apply the Scriptures I cited above, a church leader must understand how governing authority is constituted in the nation in which he or she resides. If you are not in America, that early Christians were civilly disobedient in their meeting, in their taking of communion, and in their denial of the imperial truth, that Caesar was the son of god, provide you a way forward and a basis for civil disobedience. The claim, after all, that Jesus was the Son of God, was directly violating one of Rome’s most ardent claims about Caesar (that Caesar was the son of god). The ethos of early Christians’ relation to the government is one of largely non-violent civil disobedience and suffering the consequences. For Americans, the 1st amendment creates the sacred ground of following government directives so far as they do not violate your religious convictions because our government officials are not the State, to which we must submit to follow the Scriptures mentioned earlier. Citizens, in the American system, constitute the ruling class because the citizens constitute the supreme law of the land, the Constitution. For people elsewhere, not even the Romans 13 text requires unconditional submission. That text goes on to note that the government is there to punish evil and so there is nothing to fear if you do good (Rom. 13:3). Arguably, if your government advances evil practices, it should be vigorously resisted. The famous saying, “the only thing it takes for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing” might be rephrased for the church: “the only thing it takes for utter despotism to destroy humanity is for church leaders to advise submission to despotism.”

To cite Archbishop Vigano: “It is not surprising that these mercenaries are allies of the children of darkness and hate the children of light: just as there is a deep state, there is also a deep church that betrays its duties and forswears its proper commitments before God. Thus the Invisible Enemy, whom good rulers fight against in public affairs, is also fought against by good shepherds in the ecclesiastical sphere. It is a spiritual battle . . ..”

https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/archbishop-viganos-powerful-letter-to-president-trump-eternal-struggle-between-good-and-evil-playing-out-right-now/

The biblical idea, as stated by Jesus, is that there are wheat and tares or wolves in sheep’s clothing. We are faced with a deep church, and the influence of the deep church is not just in the catholic and liberal protestant churches. However “gospel-centric” an evangelical claims to be, if such a leader advances utter bodily despotism (this bio-medical tyranny I have been discussing) contributing to the loss of freedom of speech and/or freedom of religion, how can they be true to their claimed “gospel-centricity?” Is not freedom of religion and freedom of speech both necessary for communicating the Gospel? To adapt a quote from St. Paul, how will they hear when you are not free to speak?

Therefore, the deep church’s influence is infiltrating even evangelical and conservative circles of churches in insidious ways. To be clear, a church supporting corporations or government through corporations (fascism) in violating bodily autonomy is a church deeply committed to tyranny; if you do not have authority to decide what goes into your body, how much less authority do you have over the words that leave your body? The point is that submission to a government’s claim over what goes into your body is such a violation that it is virtually giving up all authority and rights. If the government has such a dominion over your body, your tongue, what you say, will likewise be in that dominion. In some sense, this is the sacred cow of despotism, an autocracy that claims a right to your insides. This is not hyperbole friends, Yuval Harari, the WEF’s prophet, is advancing and advocating for internal biological surveillance. Lastly, a big indicator of the Deep Church’s ascendency in the walls of your evangelical/conservative church would be a commitment to being “a-political,” usually justified by claiming to be wholly “gospel-centric” while tolerating or accepting one feature or another of this bio-medical government despotism. It is patently false to imagine anyone can be “a-political” and remain human. This too is a deception. Behaviors declares political affiliations and all persons in society contribute to the order of that society (order is government, FYI). Commitment to being politically disinterested (really many of these churches are serving their masters at the IRS and their sacrosanct 501(c)3 status) while enacting tyrannical government agendi is radically unself-aware. The battle is real, and it flexes along the lines of corruption common to humankind: money and power. The churches claiming to be conservative must reform their thinking to oppose all government behavior that violates freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and, by extension, bodily autonomy, or freedom of my body. There is only one Lord and Master over all creation, and it is not some government despots, using computers in some strange bunker to monitors my insides. We will not trade the God for these false gods, and the World Economic Forum does think themselves as ascending to godhood in their own terms. God’s provision of significant freewill over each man’s, woman’s, and child’s body entails a denial that any human or group of humans have any right or claim over those bodies. The theology of 1776 that framed the Declaration of Independence must be returned to by the churches. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” endowed into each human by the Creator, as the Imago Dei (image of God), is sure ground for declaring that “liberty” maintains the freedom of my body from governments of any type. After all, if God did not want humanity to have bodily autonomy from Him, God did not have to frame the world and humanity as He did. If God prescribes bodily autonomy, let no government rob any piece of that prescription.

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