Wednesday 7 October 2020

Repentance is why individuals can (still) be good, but not (any more) institutions

The special teaching of Jesus is that sin is inevitable and unavoidable, and the key to salvation is therefore repentance. By repentance we recognise sin, and that we have sinned; and we take the side of God and creation, which we affirm as Good.

We live in a world where the totalitarian global bureaucracy is evil: that is, it takes the side of Satan against God and creation. To be an institution here-and-now (in 2020) entails engagement with The System; therefore all institutions (of every kind, including Christian churches) are operating on the side of evil. 

 

The same applies to individual persons, but individuals can repent. As an individual who, like every other individual, engages in sin every hour of every day - we can/ should/ must acknowledge the fact of sin and repent.

If not, we have embraced damnation. 

Repentance is sufficient for salvation, but it is also necessary

 

Thus if we personally lie (and every middle and upper class person lies for a living, on a daily if not hourly basis), then we can and should acknowledge that we lie, and that lying is a sin.  

To be honest is thus to repent one's (inevitable) dishonesty.

Individuals can do this; but institutions cannot repent - or rather, they can do it, but (here, now, 2020) it would be the last thing they did before ceasing to be an institution. Because repentance of an institution must be 'official', explicit, recorded in the organisation's 'minutes'; made public, made clear.  And this is not tolerated. 

(Some lies are mandatory, and to repent them is punished with the full severity of the Establishment.)

 

Because 'official', explicit, recorded, announced... is how institutions 'think'. Qua institution (or rather, a modern institution), knowledge must be clear and explicit, or else it does not count as knowledge. 

Therefore, institutional repentance must be clear and explicit or it is not real. And if institutional repentance - e.g. for lying, accepting known lies, propagating lies - is clear and explicit - then here, now, in 2020 that institution will be destroyed. 

An honest church would be destroyed, therefore all actually-existing churches are dishonest; all actually-existing churches are unrepentant sinners; and the same applies to all actually-existing social institutions. 

 

This is one reason why Christians can (here, now) operate only as individuals; and why a Christian cannot allow institutional loyalty and obedience to be his or her bottom-line of values - not even L&O to churches. 


5 comments:

Jacob Gittes said...

Are small independent churches able to repent? We have such churches here in the USA.

Bruce Charlton said...

@JG. Yes, they could. Have you heard of any that have done so this year?

Andrew said...

@BC - I can think of some Bishops and Priests who repented, and now seem to understand what's going on - but you're right, the organizations as whole never repents.

This is very strange. It is almost as is if the organizations (as a whole) are possessed, or out of control, and progress towards evil always.

Bruce Charlton said...

@Andrew. "the organizations (as a whole) are possessed"

Leaving aside whether they are prosessed, my understanding at present is that it is organisations per se which are evil. So, it turns out that churches really are In Essence *organisations* - and not, as they often claim, mystical bodies of the faithful - and that therefore, as organisations in this world, they Will become evil. (i.e. will join with the side of evil).

In other words: It is not that they are churches specifically which makes churches join evil, but that churches are generically organisations.

Andrew said...

https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/priest-sues-california-gov-newsom-over-tyrannical-covid-19-control-measures

This a Priest from the SSPX. They were able to successfully win a lawsuit in NYC as well to reopen Churches. I believe this is the only Catholic group of any sort that has done this. About a decade ago they appeared to be the only group, as a whole, that made preserving the Faith the priority - over and above obedience to the “Catholic Church” organization as a whole.

It saddens me that as a group they are at great risk of falling away, or to evil, as all organizations do - but there is a strong possibility they will be targeted, destroyed, or forced to go underground first. They are also reaching a succession crisis soon.

AFAIK they’re also the only Catholic group that followed the government minimum government mandates and refused to stop providing Mass, rather than going full bore with restrictions, though I don’t believe they ever publicly repented for complying at all. They’re of course, like everything, far from perfect and cannot be everything to everyone - but it is good to see.

I don’t attend their Masses, but they’re the only organization I feel I can wholly consciously support financially. Other than providing support to an individual (e.g. a Priest) and support to maintain a building for service (rather a Church building, or a home service), any sort of Charity must and should’ve always been doing on an individual basis - one Christian directly to another.