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.