Modern Western society suffers from a myth regarding individual liberty.
In one of my earliest papers on Hebrew thought, I noted “everyone serves someone.” It was not simply a spiritual statement but a moral principle. That is, in God’s Laws, every human is subject to some human authority on this earth. Most governing authorities are awful, but Christ expects us to be tolerant. Roman civil government was no calk-walk for Christians, but resistance as commonly understood was downright immoral. It still is. The command remains for us to do what’s right even when government is wrong. Perhaps an attempt to flee false justice is okay, but outright violent resistance is forbidden in most cases. I noted long ago you could justify violent resistance to the likes of Child Protective Services, but it might be very bad strategy.
I’ve also warned repeatedly that context is everything, and trying to apply a few choice words as if they were absolutes in all cases is downright evil. I spent a lot of time working in military justice, and it is an abomination to God. That’s because semantic parsing of precise wording in regulations is the law, and the judicial process was mostly a matter of whose parsing is more correct. Of all our allies in this world, the US is regarded as the most egregiously stupid about the precise wording of military regulations, even if it meant mandating things clearly wrong on every level of human understanding. The God of the Bible does not operate that way, and virtually nothing in the Hebrew culture came even close to that hidebound approach so utterly fundamental to military justice.
Part of the reason the military has nit-picking regulations about such silly things as how you will lace your boots is because of the underlying truculence of soldiers determined to fight everything at every opportunity. That truculence arises from the mythology of the free man crashing against an execrable insistence on a molecular level of uniformity.
Western culture is schizophrenic. Virtually the whole thing is composed of mutually antagonistic thrusts. One thing which is both deeply sacred and at the same time so routinely violated is the concept of individual liberty. It’s not a problem with “liberty” as a word, but the underlying pool of meaning. That meaning is a flagrant violation of God’s revelation. One of the three primary temptations in the Garden was the lust to be one’s own god. “Dammit; don’t tell me what to do!” On the one hand, we make a god of absolute liberty, which is a thin mask of damnable lack of accountability and responsibility. Then we pretend we can apply “sensible” limitations based on such things as Zero Aggression or various forms of social accountability. Nice theory, but it is utterly contrary to what God says about human nature.
Western man continues rejecting God’s revelation on the matter because he demands God supply detailed, precisely worded regulations. God says the very demand itself is evil. He says it in the veiled and nuanced way He says almost everything. He demands we submit to His broader personal will before we are permitted to digest the particulars. In other words, He is God, not we. Our natural Western truculence is complete failure before we start. The God who created the Hebrew intellectual culture as the channel for His revelation isn’t going to mold Himself to intellectual demands from another culture. If your approach is particularist and nit-picking, you can do anything you want, but don’t expect God to participate.
Yes, that leaves us all dangling in Fuzzy Logic Land where each of us can come up with a different idea, sometimes even conflicting interpretations, and God still works with us. The measure of holiness is not precision in application or clarity of logic, but ultimate surrender to His personal desires, even if they seem capricious and make no sense at all. The burden is on us to work it out, and the burden includes a grand layer of uncertainty. Deal with it, Creature.
The pool of reflexes we associate with liberty in Western society are mostly wrong. God says we start from the assumption of cooperating until we find, not a justification, but a necessity we do otherwise. Our Western mythology starts from the wrong basis. Everyone submits to someone — that’s a basic truth. The question is not whether but whom. When it comes to the ultimate authority to decide what is in a child’s best interest, would you prefer a secular state claiming a level of control and ownership that makes you a slave? Or would you prefer the mother, with all her flaws, have that ultimate authority? The latter envisions a society where the family household is the center of power over virtually all human activity. The former rips virtually everything from the family’s hands. Hint: The former is an abomination in God’s eyes.
A Hebrew soldier in ancient times would not look for any excuse to lace his boots in defiance of convention. His commanders would not give a rat’s patootie either way, so long as he showed up and did his duty. His commanders would not demand a high-degree of detailed control because they would find the whole thing impossible to lead into battle if they couldn’t rely on a basic level of moral accountability, a sense of duty carried by the individual soldier. And while American military literature does have lots of nice words to say about mature soldiers with a good attitude, the entire system militates against it. From a biblical perspective, an American troop is one of the lowest kinds of slave. He is not a proud warrior but a machine to be driven heedless of any possible interest in his welfare, despite words to the contrary. His “welfare” is measured in terms of monetary investment and maintenance, with a well established expiration and replacement policy.
Let me offer a single item to suggest which system is more noble: Hebrew combat leaders marched into battle at the head of their formations and were the first to strike the enemy. Modern American combat leaders are the last to get involved directly. Hebrew officers earned rank and respect by surviving in battle and doing the most damage to the enemy. I can assure you that modern battle tactics are not a valid excuse for changing the underlying moral imperatives.
Most questions and controversies of our day are answered from this frame of reference.
- Abortion: Would you rather the mother be free to choose or some government bureaucrat who hates God?
- Gay Marriage: Would you rather such questions be settled in a strong family social structure or by some civil government that hates the mere suggestion of such coherence, but prefers you all be isolated and prostrate before bureaucratic dictat?
- Private Weapons: Would you prefer a regime that basically considers all armed persons as competent assets against disorder, or an absolutist state that treats everyone as slaves?
- Pornography: Would you prefer a social structure that protects the vulnerable and only a few rare flakes with full freedom to pursue their limited access to perversion, or the tyranny of someone snooping in your underwear to make sure you don’t show anything to anyone who isn’t duly authorized for state purposes?
You either implement what God had in mind or you surrender to an oppressive system designed by Satan. There are no other options.
Those who find the current regime easy to manipulate in favor of their personal benefit are not good people. That is, the only people happy with what we have today in America are folks who spit in God’s eye. God will not sponsor the sort of craven sheeple who go along to get along and prefer to leverage their feeble morality through the secular state. Those sheeple will not comprehend what is happening to them because they are utterly blind to the moral fabric of the universe. They will sing their happy hymns and dream of a society God will never allow. If you feel a compulsion to activism, at least choose accurately to agitate for what God has said is necessary for improving life on this planet, this fallen plane.
Liberty is always within the context of reality.
I love this