Image (C) Depositphotos.com
This article is an excerpt from Godvernment: Government as God
Tom Sheppard
9/4/2020
Many people have lost faith in God and religion. In the past, many people looked to God, religion,
and faith for the solutions to both personal and societal maladies.
For instance, the answer to eliminating
poverty was both through private charitable efforts and an explicit acknowledgement
that “the poor are with you always.”
In the United States, that approach
was working very well, with the numbers and percentage of the populace living in
poverty dropping year after year, right up until the government declared war on
poverty, and then the numbers began to steadily climb.
The answer to eliminate war and promote
global peace seemed to be to convert everyone else to believe in the same god.
Unfortunately, with the rise of ISIS,
we can see that even believing in the same god, and further, accepting one person
as a messenger of god, does not eliminate war.
Just last week, ISIS claimed credit for bombing a market in Baghdad, where
the objective was to kill and intimidate into submission Muslims who are unwilling
to submit to ISIS and their specific view of how the worship of Allah and the teachings
of his prophet Mohammed should be implemented.
The Age of Reason likewise attracted
people away from putting their faith in a supernatural being (God), and instead
encouraged them to put their faith in the collective potential of humankind with
its ability to reason, to innovate, to discover, and to build.
In spite of what some may say, this
is not the first time in history where humankind has made a concerted effort to
remove God from His throne and place humanity there in His stead.
The Tower of Babel is a Lesson in the Folly of Collectivism
You may read it as history, as doctrine,
or simply as a cautionary tale, but the story of the Tower of Babel is about this
very situation.
According to The Holy Bible, up to this point in history, all human beings spoke
the same language, and, most were settled fairly closely together. They were all under the leadership of one king.
The people looked back at the stories
of the destruction of humanity in the Flood of Noah, and they decided that they
didn’t like the idea of God being able to wipe them out, so, they came up with a
plan to make them independent of God and impervious to His wrath or commandments.
They didn’t like His threat of destruction,
and they didn’t agree with how He said that they should be living their lives.
Step 1 of their plan was to make it
so that God couldn’t possibly destroy them.
To do that, they set about building a tower that was so big and strong that
everyone could live in it and it could withstand any flood or other natural disaster.
Step 2 of their plan was to remove God
from His position of authority and put someone in His place that was more to their
liking. So they would build the tower tall
enough to reach into the heavens where God dwells and send in the army to depose
Him.
All of the people understood the objective
and the plan. There was no miscommunication
because they all spoke the same language.
They all played their parts because they were all subject to the same government,
which had the power to enforce cooperation from anyone who didn’t want to contribute
their ‘fair share” of their time and property to this important, world-saving objective.
What happened next was totally unexpected
by them. God, instead of raising flood waters
or sending down fire from Heaven to destroy this tower, this centerpiece of the
war against God, just caused a subtle change to come upon them so that all of a
sudden, where before there had only been one language, there was now a multitude
of languages. Where before there had been
clarity of word, and hence purpose, now there was only the unintelligible babbling
of thousands of confused individuals.
People, quite naturally and necessarily,
gravitated toward those whose language they could understand. In very short order, the massive, concerted undertaking
was utterly abandoned, as groups of people fled away from other groups whose intentions
could no longer be understood through a simple conversation.
Human nature—always suspicious and fearful
of those who are different—asserted itself, and the effort to first defy and then
overthrow the powers of Heaven was forgotten and abandoned.
The abandoned tower was subsequently
destroyed, without the death of thousands, by a combination of earthquake and tornado
(whirlwind).
Today, we have many people who ardently
disbelieve in God and embrace human ingenuity and human resources as the only reliable
source for solving the ills of our day. To
end war, they seek to implement a unified world government. The foundation stones of this are seen in Woodrow
Wilson’s League of Nations and its current incarnation, the United Nations.
For these people, God is the cause of
war—not a solution. They seek to first make
all religions morally equivalent and then prove them morally inferior to humanism,
thus eliminating the divisive issue of the nature of God, humanity’s relationship
to God, and which god is real.
The Humanist Recipe for Eliminating Religious
Conflict
1.
Make people believe all religions are morally equivalent.
2.
Make people believe religion is morally inferior
to humanism.
3. Make
people believe that humanity can, and must, save itself from its own worst nature.
Image (c) Depositphotos.com
While it is inarguable that many wars
and atrocities have been committed in the name of various religions, these horrors
were not perpetrated by God. Rather, religious
wars are typically the result of secular leaders using religion and religious conflict
as a means to elevate their own power by uniting their constituents behind into
one body, dedicated to protecting home, family, and freedom from the moral and physical
predations of this identifiable, external threat in the form of a group that believes
in a different god.
Hitler used the Jews to this end. He leveraged anti-Semitism and elevated it from
individual prejudice into a national threat.
After whipping up a significant number of people into fear and loathing of
the Jews, he used the fists and clubs of his own adherents, posing as representatives
of the majority of people, to assault the Jews and to rob them of property and life.
Having managed to stir up a significant
number of Germans to support his view of Jews as a threat, and having cowed the
majority of his people into silence on the topic, he used this kernel of unity to
set up a variety of laws and policies which aligned the remaining Christian religious
organizations as subordinate to the state and supportive of the worship of Hitler
and Nazism as the cure for the ills and injustices that beset the German people.
Hitler’s socialist success, compared
to the relative failure of Stalin’s international communism, was due in large part
to his appeal to nationalistic pride while setting up an enemy that was in their
very midst and was easily identified.
Marxism and international communism
seek to pit the “us” of the common worker against the “them” of the rich. Unfortunately, the definition of “rich” is a totally
relative measure. Add to this the fact that
capitalism opens a path where common workers can transform into the rich.
In contrast, national socialism, and
Hitler in particular, targeted a “them” who were easily identifiable. The Jews set themselves apart from the world by
their unique religious practices and dress.
They can be seen and attacked without the confusing standard of rich or poor.
Increasingly, Christians are being set
out as a people apart due to their practices and dress. This dramatic separation of Christians from humanists
will accelerate and will soon be sufficiently distinctive that Christians will be
able to be targeted for persecution without the confusing standard of rich or poor.
When government is set up as God—the
supreme source of good in our lives—the worship of any other deity becomes heresy
and treason, a crime against the people, and a crime against humanity. As we know, treason and crimes against humanity
are the most serious violations of the social compact. As such, they justify the confiscation of all
material goods, incarceration, and even death at the hands of the people.
Image (c) Depositphotos.com
In this kind of world, mob violence,
when directed against “them,” will be considered a justified community service. Those whom the mob fails to root out and lynch,
government agents will arrest, try, and hang.
Some, along the way, will be tortured and killed by government agents. This lawless behavior will be not only tolerated,
but encouraged because the end—purging humanity of its “evil” elements—justifies
any measures, because the stated end objective is the salvation of humanity and
our transformation into better creatures.
Ultimately, Hitler led the German people
willingly into the horrors of World War II.
Germany went down the road to war in a religious crusade to establish the
Aryan race in its “rightful” place at the head of the human family so that the Aryans
could lead humanity forward into purity and nobility.
The infamous “Final Solution”[i] was
justifiable to the Nazi leadership because it would eliminate a source of racial
impurity and degeneration. It would remove
what they believed was an obstacle inhibiting the creation of a race of supermen
and superwomen—Aryans—who would be the culmination of millennia of human progress.
Image (c) Alessio Moiola and Depositphotos.com
Just as worshippers of government mistakenly
believe that collectivism removes the causes of war by removing God, they believe
that the answer to large-scale human suffering, such as poverty, is to use the power
of compulsion and bring to bear the resources of the whole of humanity to redistribute
the wealth of individuals from rich to poor and thus eliminate poverty at a stroke.
This forcible redistribution of wealth
is known variously as communism, socialism, progressivism, liberalism and fascism. It is appropriate to lump all of these political
movements under the umbrella of collectivism.
Collectivism is an appropriate label,
because all of these movements seek to abolish all personal property and collect
all the resources of humanity into the hands of government for management and administration
by government officials. This administration
is avowedly done for the greater good of humanity. The reality is that a government elite live in
luxury while the rest of the world lives in grinding poverty.
The missionaries of Godvernment prefer
to ignore the actual effects of this scheme wherever it has been actually put into
practice, in places such as the now-defunct USSR and the nations of the Warsaw Pact,
as well as more current examples of The People’s
Republic of China, Cambodia, Cuba, or Venezuela.
In contrast with utopian qualities of
society that these missionaries (such as Senator Bernie Sanders) preach will result from the implementation of
this forcible redistribution of wealth, we see widespread poverty and deprivation,
a world of scarcity for most and abundance for a very, very few. The only avenue to lift yourself or your family
from the poverty that the masses are locked into is by climbing the ranks of the
governmental ladder to enjoy greater abundance as a reward for the “greater service”
you are rendering your fellow citizens in your governmental role.
Well, government service isn’t quite
the only avenue to abundance. The other avenue
is to become a black-market capitalist. Because
any kind of capitalism is viewed as selfish, it is categorized as criminal activity,
so a life of crime or government servitude are the two choices for anyone not content
to live off what the government decides is adequate for you and your family. If you want abundance in your life in a collectivist
world, you either become a criminal or a zealot.
Image (c) Depositphotos.com
What these missionaries of forcible
wealth redistribution are hoping to achieve is to reshape humankind into the kind
of creature that we ought to be, instead of what we are.
CS Lewis, in his book, The Abolition
of Man, referred to this effort to engineer a better man as an attempt to
use the resources of humankind to create a superman, or a god.
And this is the ultimate collision point
between God and government. These social
engineers and God both have the goal of reshaping humankind into the kind of creatures
we ought to be instead of what we are.
You might think that having a common
goal would allow the social engineers and the followers of God to unite and find
a common cause. Unfortunately, the reality
is just the opposite.
The social engineers are wise enough
to know that alone, and in isolation, they have no hope at all of effecting the
changes needed in society to establish an environment that is conducive to shape
individuals into better creatures, so they seek to marshal the resources of all
of humanity to this end. To do that, they
understand the need eliminate all factions which divide humanity. They seek to return the world to the same state
and mindset as the builders of the Tower of Babel.
One of the single most divisive elements
within human society is religion.
When you consider that religions are
built around the central premise of helping people to understand the meaning of
life, inasmuch as those answers diverge, or the ways to achieve the highest in us
diverges, the potential for energetic disagreement is inherent.
If you reject the very notion of the
existence of a being that is far more intelligent and powerful than humans, or you
acknowledge the possibility, but believe this deity is uninterested in our fates,
it becomes a logical next step that humanity must rely on its own devices to survive
and become better.
Rejecting the existence of help from
God, the earnest seeker after a meaningful life, desiring the greater good of all
humanity logically concludes that any notion that points the hope of people for
betterment away from human institutions is a dangerous, perhaps even fatal, distraction. In this mindset, it stands to reason that religion
and the worship of any and all deities must be eliminated or made irrelevant.
This is, in fact, the conclusion of
those who are actively seeking to drive religion from the public square.
God, on the other hand, has no compelling
need to take these rationalist-social engineers off the board to achieve His ends. While it is true that they are a fly in the ointment,
He knows that one of the fundamental factors in the transformation of any human
being from what they are into what they should be is the element of actual choice.
In this, the rationalist, human-intellect-worshipping
social engineers actually play a part in His plan. They provide a clear choice for individuals.
Each individual can choose to worship
at the altar of human intellect, which dictates that to change the inner person,
you must first change the circumstances (hence the social engineering), or we can
choose to worship at the altar of God, who tells us that regardless of our circumstances,
we must make morally correct choices.
So, the missionaries for collectivism
have a compelling need to shift the faith of human beings from faith in God to faith
in humankind. With God in the picture, the
path to change humanity cannot be compelled because the conscience of the God worshipper
may rebel against the acts which the humanity worshipper deems necessary for his
end goal.
The interesting parallel here is that
God has said, “if ye are not one, ye are not mine.” Likewise, the humanity worshippers are saying,
“if you are not one with me, then ye are not mine.” If they need to somehow get rid of you or silence
your dissent so that they can move forward with the appearance of unity, then so
be it.
Outward Behavior Flows From Inward Conviction
Here again, the difference in the focus
between these government worshippers and God worshippers is startling. The government worshippers are focused on at least
having everyone appear to be unified,
regardless of how the citizens of this world order actually feel. For them, the focus is wholly on the “acceptable”
outward conduct. They believe that if they
can change or control the outward behavior, they can change or control the inner
thinking.
The world believes that if you change
a man’s circumstances, you will change the heart of man. To this end, they seek to forcibly move wealth
from those who have to those who have not.
They hope, in vain, that if they give enough material wealth to the predators
among us, that those predators will beat their swords into plowshares and become
good citizens, ceasing their life of crime and predation. They believe that assuaging an actual scarcity
will alleviate the imagined scarcity, envy, covetousness, and anger that rules the
hearts and minds of “bad” people and convert them into “good” people.
“No change of circumstance can repair a defect of character.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In contrast with this focus on changing
outward circumstances, Christianity teaches that if you change a man’s heart, his
inner circumstances, he will change his outward behavior.
“As a man thinketh in
his heart, so is he”
(Proverbs 23:7).
God knows that the outward behavior flows from the inward conviction.
Godvernmentalists are not ignorant of
the reality that winning the heart and mind creates the best sort of convert. It creates a convert whose actions will never
consciously deviate from the party agenda.
They would love to apply mind control to get people to accept their agenda
in both their thoughts and their deeds.
Toward the end of winning hearts and
minds, collectivists have worked long and hard to twist the content of our public
educational system to support their views of capitalists as selfish, greedy gluttons
and God worshippers as ignorant, backward, unenlightened barbarians.
They started this educational indoctrination
in our colleges and universities back in the 1960s. The campus protests back then were assiduously
fomented by a variety of collectivist agents.
The college students of that day are now sitting in our government with their
hands on the levers of power.
Hillary and Bill Clinton were totally
caught up in the collectivist agitations during their college days. They bought into the collectivist agenda, but
they are not alone, and the collectivists are not confined to any one political
party. Although the Democratic Party is more
wholly and overtly won over to the collectivist cause, a significant segment of
the Republican Party elite is supportive of the collectivist agenda and approaches.
Those starry-eyed college students,
seduced by the promises of equality and brotherhood in the collectivist song book,
eventually got their college degrees and moved on to become politicians and professionals
of all sorts. Many moved into education and
journalism, seeing that the hope of changing the world is most easily achieved by
bending the minds of the rising generations to fit the collectivist mold.
They have almost wholly taken over the
mainstream media, the film industry, and our public education system. They have become the movers and shakers in their
spheres, and they consistently exert their influence to convert others to their
worship of humankind and faith in the created instead of in the creator.
This successful proselytizing of the
mainstream media—both news and entertainment—accounts for why the media and Hollywood
have been perceived as waging war on God and Christians, because Christianity has
traditionally been the majority religion of U.S. citizens.
Conclusions
What does all
this mean to someone who believes in God?
In this collision space between God
and government, it is easy to demonize those who are seeking to banish God from
the public square. The demonization is usually
driven by a failure to understand the motives behind those who are pushing out God.
Not only is demonization of collectivists
an un-Christian act, it is also the easy way out. Demonization does not require any understanding. But failure to understand the motivations of collectivists
means misjudging where these folks will actually draw the line in their efforts
to banish God. Driving the worship of God
from the public square is a milestone in their efforts, but it is nowhere near the
end-game.
The end-game of those who are trying
to banish God from the public square is to make the worship of God extinct. They cannot accept less, because anything less
means that humankind is not united in its efforts to transform ourselves into the
creatures we should be.
[i]
The origin of the "Final Solution," the Nazi plan to exterminate the
Jewish people, remains uncertain. What
is clear is that the genocide of the Jews was the culmination of a decade of
Nazi policy, under the rule of Adolf Hitler. The "Final Solution" was implemented
in stages. After the Nazi party’s rise
to power, state-enforced racism resulted in anti-Jewish legislation, boycotts,
"Aryanization," and finally the "Night of Broken Glass"
pogrom, all of which aimed to remove the Jews from German society. After the beginning of World War II,
anti-Jewish policy evolved into a comprehensive plan to concentrate and
eventually annihilate European Jewry. https://www.ushmm.org/outreach/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007704
Food for thought!
See Tom's political views on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/TomSheppardPoliticalViews/
Follow Tom on Twitter: @ThomasKSheppard
Tom Sheppard is a business consultant and coach to small business owners and individuals. He is a recognized author with dozens of titles in business and fiction to his credit. One of his endeavors is to help those who want to see their own book in print. He does this through his trademarked Book Whispering Process (TM).
The author is not an official spokesperson for any organization or person mentioned herein.
(c) Copyright 2020 A+ Results LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Your comments are welcome. Please observe some ground rules. No profanity, vulgarity, or personal attacks. Profanity, vulgarity and personal attacks not only betray a lack of vocabulary and imagination, they also are the hallmarks of bigotry, and bigotry is the hallmark of someone who is fundamentally insecure in their views. Facts are always welcome.If you believe Government is NOT the answer to all our problems, you will want to read
Godvernment: Government as GodClick on the image below to buy your copy today
Godvernment is available in both paperback and ebook format through Amazon.
