With Fury and Wild Abandon

So to sum this up, the biggest threat to America is not any foreign agency, but the enemies within. It is my duty to God to seek some shepherd’s protection of the American people, and that means getting rid of collectivists (globalists, socialists, SJWs, etc.) any way possible, and by any means necessary. It means I support halting immigration because, in the current climate, immigration means importing hostile elements. No, not every individual is a threat, but the net effect is. I’m protecting the American libertarian traditions. Once we end this acid erosion of American identity, we can talk about letting folks come here to embrace it.

I will support nationalism quite openly. Any other political orientation that is even possible is a threat to our faith, in the sense that it’s a threat to our free pursuit of it. Everything else threatens to darken and hide the glory of God.

But because my primary skills are in computer operations, and because most people are connected via the Net, that means helping those people stay connected through the virtual realm. A prime example of that is promoting and supporting services that don’t censor them. But it also means helping those people with their own devices — I still make house calls and I still work for donations, including doing it for nothing. I’m going to put the word out that I’ll give these people priority in my tech support ministry.

But something related to this is the much broader advocacy of fighting for open access of all information. I’ve always been rather radical on this issue, and it hasn’t changed. My position is consistent: If something is digitized, it belongs to everyone. You can hope people honor things like copyright, but don’t count on it. There simply is no technological means to controlling access in the long run, and there’s no just means to enforcing it. This has always been a part of my ministry.

But I practice what I preach, making my own books free and most of my pictures are public domain. Only family faces are copyrighted, but I let God handle the enforcement.

Along with this is a renewed effort to explore ways to make our covenant community fellowship stronger and more meaningful via the Net. I sense there is more we can do with the Radix Fidem virtual community that will glorify the Lord, and we would certainly love to build up the forum activity as a way to reach you folks individually. We have to learn how to live in the Networked Civilization, because that’s descending quickly upon us.

Big Tech has already been at work seeking to use the virtual realm to control humanity, and a big part of that is destroying any sense of national identity. A certain amount of that is necessary simply for networking to work at all, but we have to learn how to keep alive those things that protect us from tyranny and abuse. In particular, we need to meet this challenge head-on regarding efforts to destroy faith in Christ. We need to find ways to make genuine biblical living thrive in the virtual world. And not just keep it, but to spread it in the virtual realm as a natural and organic element of being human, even while connected. We’ve only just begun this task.

But to avoid unnecessary questions, let’s review the kinds of things I might say about politics. Some people will think I’m engaging in politics itself, but that would be missing the point. My goal in making any comment at all is to promote Biblical Law, for which the Covenant of Noah is just an introduction. The idea of promoting less government in the current context means making more room for us to practice the tribal covenant community ideal of Scripture. That it also allows other folks to go off in all different crazy directions is simply part of the game. So we generally oppose the typical conservative social restrictions outside of the local community. We want to get away from federal policies about much of anything. At the very least, social policy should remain at the state level, if not lower.

I don’t support any kind of government regulation on the Net. The Net governs itself quite nicely by its very nature. On the other hand, I really do not like concentrations of power and wealth, so Big Tech is actually the single biggest threat to everyone else on the Net. The problem here is that government policy actually encourages this concentration of power. And the reason that stuff happens is because both government and Big Tech can lie to the masses. And the reason they can lie to the masses is because government actively hinders the education process.

None of this is likely to go away overnight, so the real effort at the ground level is to seize our own opportunities and fight for our own freedom to pursue a superior way of handling things. We cannot go along with efforts to enforce dumbing down the entire Net. So our biggest problem is getting people to seize their own freedom and use the better technology and better social interactions. That’s the only way we can do them any good at all. In terms of both strategy and tactics, the only viable response to Big Tech and Big Government is to refuse to play along, even while we maintain our presence on the Net. We have to keep alive the independent-minded approach to using the Net for God’s glory.

Teach everyone to be a shepherd, not a sheep. We will always have more sheep than we can handle, so we need folks to be self-reliant, particularly in how they address the virtual realm. At the same time, we have a divine commission to take care of the sheep. We search the flock for sheep that have that divine touch and calling to become shepherds.

We cannot force people leave their self-imposed prison. We can help them awaken to that awareness, but it remains a rather esoteric pursuit. So we endeavor to do what we can to bridge that gap, and most often that means protecting them from their own ignorance. Yes, it does come off at times as patronizing and elitist, but that’s how you handle hard-headed children, regardless of their actual age. When anyone grows up and decides for themselves what kind of Hell they will choose, we back off and leave them to it. The task after that is to put up barriers to keep them out of our pasture and away from the flock.

That’s the proper strategy in both the virtual realm and in the real world. We don’t seek our convenience; we recognize that sinners are going to sin. We seek to balance things so that we maintain and protect what we really must have for Christ’s glory, and the rest we endure because this world isn’t worth that much trouble. But our focus is not on changing the whole world; we don’t seek broad sweeping solutions across large populations. We seek to protect our obedience to God’s demand that we keep our own covenant household righteous, and that means emphasizing a broad and sweeping freedom to choose.

So our efforts are to block and frustrate everyone’s grabby reach, because it is by definition unjust. We aren’t going to trust any agency to seek our welfare; we vow to fight for it on our terms. We trust in the Lord to guide us in choosing the battles He wants us to fight, but then we fight with furious abandon.