Warning: Proceed With Caution. Joining a Christian church is joining The Totalitarian System

Someone who is on the side of God the Creator, and who desires to attain the salvation of Jesus Christ, must Proceed With Caution when it comes to joining any formal organization. 

This is because we inhabit a totalitarian system; meaning that all formal institutions in our society are connected by a multitude of bureaucratic linkages - as was evident in 2020. 

Both totalitarianism and bureaucracy are intrinsically evil - which means that all formal institutions (politics, government service, law, medicine, corporations, charities, mass media, police, military, science, the arts, teaching etc... all of the social institutions) are (and must be) overall-aligned with the purposes of evil. 

  

This situation is a real and present danger: a spiritual hazard. 

The unwary shall be led-astray. 

And the warning applies as much to religions, churches, and specifically-Christian churches - as to all the other institutions; so that a Christian who joins a church is in spiritual Danger, and needs to Proceed With Caution. 

This does not mean that a Christian ought to avoid all churches - far from it*. 

For many people, a church is necessary; and for others a particular church (when available and accessible) is positively beneficial to sustaining faith.  

But it does mean that - just as a Christian chooses his church with discernment; he must not set-aside that discernment after joining that church. 

In a totalitarian world, no institution should be trusted; because none are worthy of trust. 

"Christian" must not, therefore, be striving to serve and obey any actually-existing church, nor even that particular sub-section of a church which Christian has chosen from the contending factions. 

(Service and obedience to any totalitarian-aligned organization will lead the individual towards evil - later if not sooner.) 

Instead; he ought to be ready and willing to continue evaluating all aspects of the church; including whatever the church teaches, instructs, or demands.  And proceeding (to the best of his ability) on the basis of these evaluations. 

It is a matter not so much of every Christian "taking responsibility" for selecting and implementing his faith - everybody already does that - but of acknowledging the fact that he is responsible: like it, or like it not.  

*After all, many people must work therefore have a job, and will mostly work for an organization or several; everyone will have multiple dealings with government and large corporations; indeed people must join all sorts of institutions. We must join the totalitarian system. Opting-out of The System is not an option. You may try to ignore The Matrix, but The Matrix will not ignore you. 

So what's the special problem with a church? None unless you forget that the church is a part of The System, and think of it as something qualitatively apart. 

Yes, I know about the "Spiritual Church" within the "institutional church", and the SC is - of course - what you want, as a Christian. 

The trouble is that the church will try to insist upon the institution, while leaving the spiritual stuff as... well, nice but optional. Spiritual disobedience is tolerated, even encouraged (plenty of bishops and archbishops who don't believe that Jesus was divine, or don't believe in Satan or hell) - but institutional disobedience? That is what gets priests defrocked and laity excommunicated.   

Romantic mass manipulation

Romanticism is A Fact of modern Man; such a powerful factor in the makeup of modern Man, that those who exclude or ignore the romantic in their ideology (whether that be Christian or Secular Right, or anything else) consign themselves to feeble motivation, feeble courage; and the inevitability of their own corruption by selfish or worldly pressures. 

Romanticism in public discourse has been (over a span of a couple of centuries and more) almost monopolized by The Left - who have made "idealism" and "hope" this-worldly, dishonest, and incoherent. 

The situation is that people cannot live, cannot avoid despondent despair, without hope - and their hopes are channelled into delusions that are manipulated for the agendas of the Establishment. 

Our Romanticism is deliberately stirred-up and encouraged from all directions and in many manifestations - especially via the mass media and in the arts and entertainments: evoked and amplified... then re-directed into channels that benefit the agendas of those with most influence, wealth and power. 

This is normal and routine: some idealistic aspiration, some enchanted daydream - gets colonized, politicized, materialized - and looped-back to feed-into The System. 

 

So, "revolution", the "counter-culture", "radical dissent" and the rest of that species of this-worldly romanticism - all the famous and influential, mainstream or alternative personnel and communication/ institutional manifestations -- are just competing factions among the Establishment: office politics among the rulers. 

We are all Romantics, by nature - don't fight it: use it!

Romanticism is non-optional, at least if we are to avoid futile passivity; and the ultimate challenge is to own our romanticism - make it fully-spiritual not partial and material; and to locate our romantic ideals in a timespan that is eternal in both directions.  

Any questions? Readers are invited to ask

Despite that this is a selfish blog, consisting of me thinking-in-writing some of the notions I get in the early morning; from time to time I do invite questions from readers, and this is one of those times. 

The Northumbrian church project: Anglo-Saxon churches

St Andrew's Church*, Bywell

We have recently begun a project to visit old churches in Northumbria; starting by getting suggestions from a little book by the legend that was Stan Beckesall ; backed-up by a copy of "Pevsner" for Northumberland; plus whatever booklets or leaflets we find in the churches we visit.  

Several of these churches, I have visited before; but they are well worth seeing again! This time we are spending about an hour per church on locating - and trying to understand - the architectural features. 

We began with several churches that contain Anglo-Saxon features; and Bywell St Andrew's (illustrated above) has an exceptionally well preserved tower from that era. 

I am, for the first time, beginning to learn and recognize the distinctions - and gradations - between Anglo-Saxon, Norman (c1066 to middle-late 1100s) and Early English (late 1100s to late 1200s). 

Naturally, there is a technological trajectory; with older churches being simpler in construction, visibly cruder in shaping and selection of the stones, and later churches having innovations such as buttresses to stop the walls bulging/ collapsing, multi-stone round arches instead of single stone lintels over doors; then (with Early English) pointed arches (enabling greater height for the same width of supports). 

The evil Normans must be acknowledged as great builders; and their rapid impact on architecture is very evident. I now recognize at a glance the typical EE "lancet" windows - tall and narrow, often paired, usually deep set on the inside.

However, there is always a special excitement of finding Anglo-Saxon features, maybe a font for baptisms - chiselled from a single block, a lintel shaped into a slight arch, or even just a few irregular stones at the corners ("long and short" quoins):

* My new knowledge of church architecture would lead me to recognize that the lowest window in the tower - the long thin, "lancet" with a pointed top - was inserted later. This is because such windows were not done in A-S times, and are usually a feature of the Early English style; also the disturbance to the horizontal lines of the stonework can be seen. However, the window is not genuine Early English, but a later pastiche - as seems indicated by its being "splayed" or recessed - which is a feature of the inside of EE lancets, helping to spread light from the window when the walls are thick. But splaying makes no sense on the exterior, since it would cut-down the light entering.

+++

Today we visited St Mary's, Corbridge which is mostly Early English, filled (it seems) with aisles of pointed arches; 

...and with an actual Roman (not Roman-esque) arch, later inserted into the A-S tower; having been scavenged by the medieval masons from the nearby Roman town of Corstopitum/ Coria.  

  

Two reasons why evil is so difficult to explain - the primacy of perspective and motivation

Considering that our life and world - and much of our social interaction - is underpinned and permeated with moral evaluations; we have a terrible problem about discussing the nature and presence of evil!

The difficulty about discussing evil is so lasting and intractable that there are plenty of people, including plenty of rich, powerful, famous and influential people - who will deny the reality of evil, in many and various ways! 

But even those insightful and honest enough to admit that they regard evil as real, have a terrible problem with explaining themselves - at least, they seldom succeed in explaining the nature and presence of evil. 

There are multiple reasons, many psychological and some spiritual, for the difficulty of explaining evil; here I am focusing on two important reasons: perspective and motivation. 

Both problems arise because people are trying to find a way of explaining the reality of evil, and they do this by seeking a way of generating an objective consensus about what is evil. 

In other words, they try to frame evil such that what-is-evil is defined in a way that "everyone" can agree upon (i.e. consensus) - and they seek criteria for evil that are, in principle, externally detectable and measurable (i.e. objective).  

They want evil to be something like a "scientific fact"; as they imagine science actually to be! Or perhaps something more like an engineering principle - something that elicits general agreement among the competent, and that reliably works when properly comprehended and executed. Something pragmatically-true.  

People therefore nearly-always try to explain evil in term of evil actions; and evil actions that are acknowledged to be evil by "everybody" - indifferent to the person's "perspective" . 

This immediately means that the examples of evil up-for-discussion are going to be second-hand and remote - often historical, and concerning other-people, elsewhere. Things like a particular group killing done on the basis of an ethnic or religious identity. Such are what people usually try to understand and explain. 

But in real life we find that we never actually do eliminate the effect of perspective! This is seen in evaluating current events. We find that from one perspective; perhaps a great and historical evil has been, or is actively being perpetrated, yet from another perspective this is not so. 

What appears as an objective and massive evil is denied, explained away, or regarded as compelled. One perspectives great evil is seen by its perpetrators and defenders as merely a lesser and necessary evil, the sort of practical action that is needed to survive in this world. 

I conclude that perspective never can, in practice be eliminated. To put it bluntly, evil people will have Good reasons for performing their "evil" acts. 

Perspective changes everything! And this is one of the arguments used to argue (what nobody truly believes) that evil is "relative" and therefore not really real. 

There are philosophical (or theological) arguments by which an objective model of reality is posited, within-which evil is objective; but these arguments are never universally accepted or believed. 

All philosophical arguments require assumptions, and these assumptions are not universal - so that philosophical analysis does not solve the difficulty of explaining evil, but merely leads to the difficulty being shifted to another arena. 

The other difficulty is that while evil is explained in terms of acts, or events, or phenomena - of a kind that can be defined, isolated and measured. 

For instance murder is first assumed necessarily to be evil; then the discussion moves onto a definition of murder, the detections of particular murders, the number of people murdered...

Yet the whole process is undercut by the fact that "murder" is an abstraction intended to cover a wide range of very specific events; and when it gets down to specifics we find that - in order to accord with innate and general morality - the action itself needs to be evaluated in terms of its motivation. 

In other words the objective aspect of murder turns-out to be underpinned by personal motivation which must be inferred.  

In short, when it comes to explaining evil; we cannot escape the importance of perceptive and motivation; and both of these are substantially subjective, inner-states.  

This is one reason why so many modern people in leadership roles try to assert that evil is unreal: i.e. because they do not wish to acknowledge the primacy of subjective, inner states; when it comes to the most important aspects of life. 

Or else they claim to be able objectively to infer inner and subjective states, using objective criteria...

Given the primacy of morality in so much of life; and that authority will therefore always justify itself in moral terms (even if that morality is an inversion of common sense or intuition) - one can see the necessity of somehow excluding the necessity of perspective and motivation in explaining evil. 

The outcome of which is that evil is not - cannot be - satisfactorily explained - which is where we came-in! 

Since morality is inescapable and permeates our world; it seems obviously important that the nature of evil, and its presence and degrees, be explainable, and that these explanations be understandable. 

The current state of incoherent confusion about evil is surely - and for reasons that I would suppose are obvious - an undesirable state of affairs. 

Therefore, I suggest that when we ourselves find it necessary to discuss or explain evil in this world; we start with an acknowledgment that, for such discussion to proceed with any chance of being useful; it requires achieving mutual clarity about perspective and motivation. 

Presumably (if the discussion is honest and sincere) - an up-front and two-sided declaration of where we personally stand on these matters.

In most instances; these will be found to differ - in which case there is no point in proceeding in the direction of arguing about whether such and such is evil. Instead, the discussion ought to go deeper, to consider the whys-and-hows of our assumed-perspective, and our assumptions concerning inferred motivations.