Reminder 1: Radix Fidem is not a religion. It is a meta-religion; it is a religious approach to forming a religion. Religion is the collection of human responses to faith. Faith itself is the awakening of a faculty within the soul, a sense of divine Presence that drives you to think and act. It informs the intellect, but is separate from the intellect. Religion is the intellect formulating a response to the divine Presence in the heart. Radix Fidem is the study of how we should each go about the business of thinking and acting on faith.
We have no expectation that we should come up with the same answer as anyone else. To the degree we overlap with someone else’s answers, we have fellowship. If we can get past certain bad mental reflexes, we could in theory create a faith community. However, there is a very realistic sense in which Radix Fidem is not sufficient by itself to be a religion.
So how do you propagate a meta-religion? I expect the core substance of Radix Fidem will grab hold of a lot of people who don’t share enough of my own answers to want to join a community with me. That’s normal; they should be the majority. People who embrace the meta can take it with them into a lot of settings I would not appreciate. My peculiar internal requirements are why I belong to no organized religion in the traditional sense. I’m doing my own thing here. But it’s the teaching and matching conduct that propagates the underlying assumptions.
The complex reality of what our world is like today indicates some things we might not want to admit. One of those is that there will never be a Radix Fidem organization. If there was, it would immediately morph into something else. The likelihood that anyone with leadership capability is going to embrace the core of Radix Fidem is minuscule. Meta-religion doesn’t lend itself to such a thing. Giving it a human organizational identity would kill it.
What we are doing with this approach to faith does not point to that. We are seeking to influence the drift of things, not the outcomes. We want to fold these core ideas into the resulting religion, because we cannot make it a religion in itself. There will forever be a tension between ideals and results. We need to accept that as the norm. You can share my religion, but if you don’t understand the distinction between the core concepts and the applications, you’ll never really understand how to share it. The idea is to liberate your faith from false restraints, to help you share your faith.
Do you get the feeling my apostleship is mostly a matter of seeking to enable loners? Then maybe you’ll understand my religion. Insofar as I’m trying to build a religion, that’s what it’s about. God calls a very large number of people who must follow a very isolated path, and they need a way to approach religion. But Radix Fidem is not restricted to that by any means. This thing should have an influence in how other religions work.
Reminder 2: Whatever it is I’m doing, it’s not libertarian. As part of my research, I’ve concluded that humanity is hard-wired to live in feudal communities — small tribal “nations” with a strong shared culture. Libertarian philosophy is intensely selfish. The only reason I appear to be close to the modern libertarian movement is simply the practical matter that a libertarian policy in the current context sets us free to work toward that feudal tribal idea.
Consider this: libertarians simply cannot grasp that taxation is in their best interest. To them, it’s government theft of resources that it didn’t earn. That’s flatly wrong, according to Scripture. Jesus said don’t bitch about taxes, “Render to Caesar…” The real issue is that what taxes ought to do is in all our best interests. Nobody is surprised that there is a handling cost in taking and then disbursing tax money. But waiting on people who own resources to recognize their own best interests is not going to happen. Libertarian philosophy assumes that mankind is not fallen.
Someone says, “I don’t have children. Why should I pay for schools?” Did you go to school yourself? You owe a debt to the system that gave you an education. Feel free to campaign for whatever you think might improve the education you pay for, but stop fighting the system that makes you pay.
Do you have no personal need for fast Internet? Yet the commercial benefit it brings to your local businesses makes it in your best interest to have cheap broadband access, so when the market offers no good answer, local municipal broadband is a good thing. Same goes with roads and other infrastructure. A ubiquitous postal service is in your best interest, even if you end up paying more for it than you actually use.
If you don’t give a damn about your local community, you are a moral reprobate. We have an awful lot of work to do to correct what kind of community we should have, but until we can get that work done, it’s a huge mistake to promote a philosophy of petty self-centered materialism — which is precisely what libertarianism is. God says there has to be a human government, and taxation is just a part of that.
I understand the academic definition of anarchy, but it never works out the way libertarians dream, because libertarians are utterly wrong about human nature. The reason we have a popular concept of anarchy as chaos and destruction is because that’s what happens every time anarchy starts taking hold. You cannot possibly educate humans to the point they don’t devour each other; the fallen nature cannot be educated out of us. Paul warned that, regardless how badly governments do things, God mandated that someone would bear the sword and govern. For the sake of the gospel message, it’s better than no government at all.
A good biblical government looks nothing like any of the political theories espoused in the West today. But that doesn’t mean we should reject the whole thing and promote anarchy. We should balance between seeking that biblical ideal on the small scale in our faith community, versus speaking the truth to the current situation in which we live. And for the most part, good tactics is mostly a matter of speaking the truth in small increments, addressing specific likelihoods of what the system might do.
Bonus Reminder: Until God Himself destroys the system wholesale — and He will, quite soon — our mission is to be very glad when just a single individual moves closer to our faith. And we can celebrate when that person actually embraces the whole Radix Fidem core assumptions. For this moment, small gains of one or two, here and there, are huge. The time is coming when the system will break down, and each of us will have to figure out how to proceed where we are. It may well be that we do so in isolation from the others in our small online community. So, the burden right now is to make sure you understand things.
Ask questions. Form a stronger frame of reference so that when disaster comes, the internal preparation trumps any lack of contextual resources. Learn to stand in the Day of Testing.
Even Murray Rothbard…the anarchist’s anarchist…had recommendations on taxes. He didn’t say they were all bad. There’s undoubtedly a more moral way of implementing and using taxes than what the U.S. is doing now.