Do you really understand what “tithe” in the Bible really means? It is restricted to food items, agricultural products. You cannot tithe any other kind of thing. Food is the only thing you can offer to God that He alone “consumes” in the altar fires. All other offerings are used to support various ritual activities and the priests.
Biblical Law commanded that we bring offerings of all kinds of human activities that can be used for His glory, but the word “tithe” specifically means only food. While it could include the products of hunting and gathering, the emphasis was on domesticated agricultural production. Everything else was just an offering, not a tithe.
God does not tax any other human output. Try to understand the levels: individual, community and cosmic. The individual truth is that your whole existence belongs to God in feudal submission. On the cosmic level, no one can really offer anything to God that He doesn’t already own. But on a community level, God taxes the community through tithing. God requires a consciousness of community. The fundamental shift in God’s dealings with humanity with the Flood was to end individualism; the essence of the Code of Noah is that mankind is required to form communities.
And those communities are based on tribal identity. Modern western “democracy” attempts to suppress the very thing God requires, by reducing all tribes into a single empire. This is defiance of the edict at the Tower of Babel. Western governments encourage a kind of faux tribalism that is dissolved in every kind of human interest other than a genuine decentralized tribal existence. That includes left/right and urban/rural. As is often noted, those two are close parallels.
Matt Taibbi raises a very long-standing feud between rural and urban folks. It’s not a question of which side is righteous, but that the rural folks can survive without the urbans, but the urbans cannot live without the rurals. The urbans forget that they are not at all essential, that if things collapsed, they would starve, but the rural folks would keep right on living.
Agriculture will happen as long as humans are alive. Every other human activity is rooted in that. The urbanites produce nothing. They do not create wealth; they collect it. This can benefit the rural folks if done right, but it’s all too easy to abuse them. And that’s what is happening in the West, simply because the essence of western culture is predatory in that fashion. The shepherd is God’s primary symbol of godly manhood, but that image is entirely absent from western culture.
The whole AI/transhumanism thing (an urban mythology) is based on the notion that human labor in agriculture can be replaced with machines. This permeates our western mythology; it’s part of every futuristic fiction — food production can be fully automated and humans can live just fine without natural foodstuffs. Whether or not it’s materially possible is not the right question; God will not let it happen. If you don’t grasp that, then you don’t understand Him at all.
By definition, urbanite = leftist and rural = conservative in general terms here in America today. The divergence and conflict between left and right is artificial nonsense. There’s nothing sacred and holy about rural folks and agricultural pursuits. Rather, this is a fundamental issue of reality itself, reality as God made it. Trying to rewrite Creation is the sin here. Every time some urbanite government official comes down on a reasonable exercise of agricultural pursuits, God is offended. Creation itself has been violated. While God’s patience is beyond the horizon of any individual human, it does have limits.
We have already been warned in God’s Word, if we have the heart to obey. Be aware that God’s wrath will crush the arrogance of the western lefties, not because they are lefties, but because they defy His will. The righties are not righteous, but most of them are rural, and they will be useful for what God has in mind after His wrath is complete.
Can confirm, as a worker bee sub-urbanite, that I literally don’t produce anything, but more provide a very specific service to a much larger service. Too, that larger service is providing a service for the illusion of fractional reserve banking. It’s illusions all the way down.
“The whole AI/transhumanism thing (an urban mythology)” – I’d add the simulated universe theory, which is a non-falsifiable replacement for the supernatural domain. I suppose our world is a simulation in some sense, but it’s more relating to our damaged perception of how things are as a result of the fall, not because the universe is just an elaborate game…though in some ways, it really is that.