The Tenth Commandment prohibits the Nanny State.
I’ve not had to sit holding the hand of a drug addict in cold turkey, but I have been there to counsel and encourage a few folks who did. More often I’ve counseled a few folks who ended up wishing they could do that for someone they loved.
“When an unclean spirit goes out of a person, it passes through waterless places looking for rest but not finding any. Then it says, ‘I will return to the home I left.’ When it returns, it finds the house swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and brings seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they go in and live there, so the last state of that person is worse than the first.” (Luke 11:24-26)
Simply tossing out your demons will not solve the underlying problem which made them feel so welcome. Getting clean and sober is not the whole solution to drug abuse. You have to find out why the substance abuse is so powerfully attractive. People have used drugs and alcohol for centuries without losing control to them. Granted, there are a few folks with something broken genetically which makes them far more susceptible, but that’s another issue. Most people who succumb and are destroyed by it are not merely genetic freaks, but people who had other reasons for failure to cope.
One of the greatest sins is exercising power unwisely. Simplistic reasoning in government is evil. Our modern War on Drug Abuse is directly connected to Prohibitionism. We can easily trace this false philosophy through the likes of the Salvation Army, who, for all the good they do, have from the start embraced an awful heresy. They use lots of words about God’s grace, but their conduct and assumptions behind their programs make no room for grace. The whole solution is the simplistic notion of reforming human behavior, and making things illegal. The Salvation Army is the direct result of the collision of horrific social problems and the rise of the secularist Social Work movement. Social Work arises from the communist doctrine the State is God, and has a valid claim to use all citizens as mere economic units. In other words, Prohibition is actually anti-Christian. It is a truculent refusal to account for the broader context of revealed Truth.
What made alcoholism such a serious problem in England in those days? The grinding dehumanization of the Industrial Revolution, against the background of communist theory arising from the Enlightenment, and the sudden availability of gin at startlingly cheap prices. Gin was cheaper than food, in part because of artificially inflated food prices (regulation affected food, but had not yet caught up with gin). It wasn’t simply the ghastly evil of the aristocracy and upper middle class oppression of the working poor, but the removal of the otherworldly spiritual assumptions. Oppression alone is not enough to create sin; it only dampens social prohibitions against sinful behavior. People encouraged to have an inner strength don’t look for excuses, but these folks were discouraged by bad religion.
The Social Work movement arose attempting to reduce the human misery of the towns built specifically by and for the mining companies to house their workers, who were simply slaves in effect. Their assumptions were simplistic, rejecting the notion of afterlife and the Spiritual Realm. People were merely intelligent animals. The Salvation Army adopted some of the secularist assumptions of that Social Work movement, simply pasting Bible verses on top of it. But both of them embraced the Satanic notion anyone has a claim on the life of another outside the bonds of blood or marriage. The Social Gospel, then, strove to change government policy in favor of the Nanny State intrusions, particularly in regards to things like alcoholism. Their only response to the slavery problem was promoting a communist political agenda.
(Hint: Modern evangelical rejection of otherworldly focus, the middle class obsession with politics and reactionary social policy, is indirectly the result of absorbing socialist theory.)
Karl Marx’s logical influence lives on, despite how wrong he was in his theories. He extrapolated the economic data of what he saw around him, which completely failed to predict the way industrial production and the democratization of credit banking would pull the majority of the workers up into the middle class. Now it’s a part of the communist doctrine to hate the middle class “bourgeoisie” for all the wrong reasons, mostly because their mere existence destroys all Marx’s assumptions.
But the timing, the confluence of events, requires rising above simplistic silly understandings. Queen Victoria gave her name to the culture which belonged to the latter half of the 1800s. It was intensely middle class, materialistic and prissy, obsessed with a false morality. Good religion is impossible when it’s totally hijacked in all religious institutions, and this occurred as a direct result of Victorian culture. The British and American Prohibitionist Movement breathed an evil spirit of life into that culture, and was rewarded with vast political influence. It raised the false dichotomy of either giving into the temptation or fighting it with mere human rules, rules which were formulated by people refusing to accept the limits of human intelligence, but also refusing to take full advantage of what human intelligence could do were it not chained to silly notions in the first place.
Today, the fruit of this evil includes the modern prison industry, which in turn depends entirely on the War on Drugs, which is merely Prohibition 2.0. The result is a deeply cynical regulatory regime which sees government intentionally poisoning any substance which might be abused recreationally so that people die. God is not pleased.
Thus saith the Lord: If you abuse substances, it’s your problem. If your self-abuse leads to abuse of others, it’s for them to intervene sufficient to protect themselves, but not more than that sufficiency. Only if they are family have they any limited authority to get more involved and try to clean up your dependence, and only if this includes filling your life with other things which crowd out the drug abuse. Outside that family circle, no one is permitted to get involved, especially government. If your abuse leads to crime, crime is punished for its effects, not its cause.
The Tenth Commandment prohibits coveting what belongs to another, including their self-ownership. Once you understand this, it’s easy to extrapolate outward why God hates nearly every government in the world today. Our American government is supposed to regulate industry in favor of the people (consumers), but chooses to regulate the people in favor of industry (we call it “fascism”). Thus, the FDA makes popular drugs poisonous, raw milk illegal, etc. And when disaster strikes, at no time does actual human need enter the equation. What disaster agencies cannot control, because they lack the manpower and procedures, and certainly lack the expertise, is simply not permitted. The real story of FEMA and Hurricane Katrina is all the proof we need.
