Borgification of the Church

By John Immel

All tyranny requires these elements:

Universal Guilt

Incompetent masses

Dictated Good

Abolition of Ambition

Collective Conformity

**************

Some months ago, I ran across a blog article by Cameron Schaefer called Change is a Community Project. His article should be called the Borgification of the Church. For those of you who are not Star Trek aficionados, well…those of us who are will just laugh near you.

I was Locutus of Church. Now I am John free INDIVIDUAL.  My battle cry: Resistance is ESSENTIAL!

But before many of you dear readers can get to the RESISTANCE part, you must first come to understand that it is NECESSARY to resist.  Eventually, we’ll get to WHAT to resist.

Mr. Schaefer is a twenty-something blogger sitting around in his underwear…Oops…I just had an Eric “Phenomenal” Simmons flashback. But the difference between moi and Mr. Simmons is I am going to advocate that you DO read what is being written: right, wrong, or heresy. I fully expect y’all can see the truth. I fully believe you can get the right answer. (With our without my–considerable–help.)

>snicker<

So click on the link and read his blog post.

I expect to see Statist/Collectivist doctrines advocated by writers like Alexander Strauch, or the intellectual thugs at SGM, or the rank and file Catholic priest, or sundry Institutional Church leaders. They have made a career out of slavish commitments to historic dogma in the name of biblical purity. They are who they are.

>shrug<

But who Mr. Schaefer is…well that is something else entirely.

I recognize Mr. Schaefer is doing what most bloggers do: writing about things that are important and offering some stream of consciousness commentary. He isn’t writing a theological treaty. He is not interested in dissecting our individual/cultural mindset as much as observing its failings. He is interested in advocating a solution to our individual/cultural failings by putting forth some potent philosophical and moral commentary. By his own admission, he is offering lessons in skilled living. The content of the lesson is Collectivism. He offers the individual/cultural failings as self-evident: and the solution to those failings as self-evident. This is very telling. It is a measure of how far the statist/collectivist concept has penetrated our culture and permeated the Church.

That is what makes Mr. Schaefer’s commentary so illustrative: he represents the rather typical, rather average churchgoer.

When the man on the street can name the Borg battlecry, “We are Borg.  Resistance is futile,” without a blink, you’ve created a cultural icon. When the average man in the pew advocates collectivist ideology without the blog equivalent of a blink, you’ve achieved the hive mind. The hive mind is…really, really bad.

The global push towards statist/collectivism is an insidious and disastrous trend. If Mr. Schaefer’s blog post is an indication, then the ideology of collectivism has penetrated deep into our public conscience in profound and sinister ways.

I have seen the trend for some time. When I first launched this blog, I posted  A People of Freedom A people of Serfdom and noted that we–in the modern age–are resurrecting historic doctrines that have always oppressed people. At the heart of those doctrines is the push towards collectivism.

Hang on a tick…I’ve got to do something. Since we don’t share the hive mind, I’ll have to make sure we are all on the same page and singing from same sheet of music. I will give two definitions.

Collectivism: a social organization politically and ethically enforcing human interdependence. The intentional subordination of individual will, ability, and objectives to the “greater good” of the collective.

Statism: The state is sovereign and wields all power for its own best interest. Man, his life and substance, is subordinate to State will. This particular political organization has gradations of expression from the mixed political environment of America to the absolute Statism of Sparta.

(Anyone ever seen 300, the really cool film that brings the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC to mythical life? Zach Snyder opens the film with a lesson on Spartan life. Newborns are tossed over a cliff for the smallest imperfection and inducted into military training as soon as they leave crawling behind. Spartan Mothers bore their children with the expectation that the State owned them from birth, reportedly saying to their beloved tykes: “Come home with your Shield…or on it.” This kind of an Uber Christian baby dedication is the supreme expression of Statism.)

The Church suffered a slow induction into the Statist/Collectivist spirit from about 70 AD until it took its final doctrinal form in the writings of Augustine Bishop of Hippo in 370-ish AD. The Catholic Church through the middle ages embodied the Statist/Collectivist theology in the Medieval Three Estates–this social/political theology dominated the Dark Ages until St. Thomas Aquinas introduced Aristotelian rationalism back into western thought.

The millennia of the Dark Ages stand as historic fruit of the statist/collectivist doctrines that dominated that time period.  Unfortunately, most people think of those years like a JR Tolkien novel: romantic, chivalrous, honorable, magical, and abounding in the simple foods of milk and honey. I like Dungeons and Dragons as well as the next maladjusted social outcast, but this nostalgia was NOT the Dark Ages.

Think Dark Ages, think rats. Think plagues, and famine, 50% mortality rates. Think wearing the same sparsely washed clothes for…years.  Think of not bathing because the Church tells you it is selfish to do so. Think of death from catching a cold. Think of not living much past twenty. Think of terror every day you wake up fearing that God will bring sickness, kill your flocks or steal your babies. You do what you can to appease that God and then appease the demons that come with the new moon, or the witches that fill the forests. Think of being stretched on the rack, having a limb chopped off, put in an Iron Maiden, placed in the stocks and pelted with sewage for the smallest social offense, because the Church affirms its absolute right to “discipline” the evildoer. Think of being owned by the guy in the castle who taxes the hearth that keeps you warm and won’t let you chop wood in his forest for heat. Think of living inside a hut made of little more than mud, sticks, and grass, and know that modern homeless people build better shelters out of cardboard and shipping pallets. Think of living in your garage…with ALL of your pigs, geese, and chickens. Think of the excrement shoveled and piled outside your door and being required by law for carting that sewage to the communal property for fertilizer. Think of knowing that fertilizer would make your garden grow better; your Croft land has lost its life. Think of never being able to leave your croft: you are a slave. Think of working from the age of three. Think working 16 hours a day; to work less is to hear a sermon on sloth, or indolence, or selfishness. Think of the Bells for Church services morning, noon, and night where you are told that it is your divine obligation to submit to the authorities appointed over your life. Think of wars that ranged the length and breadth of Europe as Lords demanded service to go plunder another Lords holding–all in the name of God.

This is the real Dark Ages.

Theologically and Politically, Man was organized into three distinct groups in the Medieval world called the Three Estates: Serf, Aristocracy, and Clergy–those who work, those who fight, those who pray. The statist/collectivism of the Medieval Three Estates is effectively Christian Eugenics.

Eugenics is the philosophical belief that humans should be socially engineered and genetically altered to serve “society.” Christian Eugenics then is the philosophical belief that God engineers people to take a specific role in “society.” Because God appoints their place, individuals have a moral obligation to serve as cogs in the massive machine of human existence playing out a preordained role:  a role that is part of the “Prior work of Grace.”

For a thousand years, the Feudal (statist/collectivist) assumptions, directly founded in  Augustine’s statist/collectivist theologizing, produced one of the darkest millennia of Western History–a history whose fruit is death, destruction, and oppression–indefensible by any standard; a theological and political organization that cannot reasonably be embraced by men who suggest they have humanity’s highest and best interests at heart and Divine blessing as their guide.

It took Man the better part of 1500 years of Western history to BEGIN understanding that it is individuals and INDIVIDUALISM that bring the greatest manifestation of liberty, freedom, prosperity, and health. And another 200 years for individualism to be given a place where divine blessing could empower human potential without the state plundering, or the collectivist theologizing condemning thinking as divine sedition and burning folks at the stake.  The greatest manifestation of !!!!CHANGE!!!! has its expression in INDIVIDUALISM.

I will give Cameron Schaefer–and other’s like him–the benefit of the doubt. He probably doesn’t know the origins of the collectivism that he advocates, nor its utterly evil historic record; which means his commentary is offered in idealistic ignorance. He has accepted those ideas with little or no critical evaluation, and is (admittedly) mindlessly parroting what he’s been told.

No one wants to be accused of mindless parroting, but the alternative is the utterly self-aware advocacy of evil. And make no mistake, advocating statist/collectivism is evil because the outcome of those social organizations destroys people.

The Borgification of the Church is taking many forms from sundry voices, driven by hijacked Bible passages and demagogued through the historic Assumptions, Presuppositions, and Filters of Augustinian influence.

The call is to all INDIVIDUALS….

Resistance is Essential!