Somebody figured it out a very long time ago: The best slave is the one who thinks they are in Heaven.
Westerners struggle to comprehend a value system that puts people above property. Our society even treats life as property in legal theory. Ancient Near Eastern feudalism was all about people. You wanted loyalty first, then competence and industry. No matter what else happened, if you had good people, you could always recover and find a new path to prosperity and peace. We could spend all day contrasting differences in outlook, but the ultimate moral value was people over property, and control was exercised through cultivating affection.
The world has always had sinister souls, so it doesn’t take any particular genius to imagine that you could fake affection and get similar results. It wasn’t fakery to do what you knew was morally right against your personal lusts. If the best moral character knew that you often had to portray and act on affection as a principle regardless of what you actually felt, how hard could it be to fake it all the time? When you introduce a psychopath with a secular mind into this environment, they can manifest as the ultimate predator.
When the rabbis began drifting over into Hellenism, they didn’t mention it outside of their collegiate circles. They already had a problem with arrogance and elitism, so it’s no surprise they kept it as their secret against the rubes they exploited. It was always about slavery, regardless of the frame of reference you used to justify it. Once it became institutionalized, there was no hope of reform. This is at least part of why Jesus was rejected and executed by His fellow rabbis; they saw Him as a threat to their class as a whole.
When the religion He spawned took off, it took a huge bite out of their slavery. The Judaizers were seldom honestly trying to share their great faith; it was all about keeping their elite placement above the peasants they owned or could easily own with a little more nudging and nagging. But they knew better than to play the hand of forceful authority with those outside their dominion. It was much easier and cheaper to seduce them back into the fold. Besides, it played into their arrogance that they could pull it off with little violence. In many respects, it was just a game.
The Apostles had little to gain, in worldly terms, from their church planting and mission activities. Instead of scraping off large sums from the offerings, they taught the local churches to use their resources in other ways. They were careful to encourage each church to send their own representative to convey the relief collection for their fellow Christians in Jerusalem during the Judean famine. In other words, transparency was a major point in all they did, along with a stout insistence on voluntarism. You were always free to build your own religion, but they were quick to insist on the same transparency for anyone pretending to influence those in their care.
The most time consuming hassle I have on this blog is from doctrinal seducers. Almost no one has come here defending Zionism and precious few have bothered to press me on my rejection of secularism in its various forms. However, I have faced a lot of bickering and sophistry from one particular identifiable group of believers who don’t appear to manifest much love in their efforts, nor much transparency. That is, they promote a collection of beliefs associated with the teachings of Jehovah’s Witnesses without ever openly espousing that label. It’s possible they are not members, but their arguments and methods of debate are the same.
Feel free to examine the teachings of this organization. There are ample resources online. I have no objection to anyone following their own sense of calling. My only concern is the tiresome attempts to hijack this blog. You can check back in my early posts, but I’ve always maintained that the purpose of this blog is to present my narrative. I am willing to explain and answer questions about what I teach, but I see no need to defend any of it in a debate setting. Ask a question, ask for clarification, but don’t demand I answer all your objections. That kind of approach is exactly what I’m teaching against in the first place as part of my broader rejection of Western Christianity and Western intellectual traditions. JWs are distinctly Western in theology and methods of presentation.
Some of them are fine folks, good friends and decent neighbors. Some of them are cantankerous and hateful SOBs, just as you find in any identifiable group on this planet. Most of those I encounter in meat space are somewhere in between, but I have yet to have one visit here, honestly self-identify, and behave with compassion.
I suppose, given sufficient time, I might face similar harassment from other religious groups and individuals who cannot live-and-let-live. It won’t matter what they call it, but attempts to engage in debate are unacceptable as a form of intellectual exercise I dismiss from the start. I’m not the only person who finds it a relic of the dying Western mythology and an artifact of the Fall. Don’t like what I write? Don’t read this blog. How hard is that?
The pastoral point here is that if you share much of my religion at all, you will run into this often enough to become just a tad wary of it. This is why I blather at length about philosophy and logic and the various types of each. It’s also why I often allow comments offered in debate so that you can see how I answer them. Make your own preparations. It’s not persecution per se, but typical of what you should expect in this life. Plenty of folks genuinely define God and faith differently, but sometimes I have to wonder about the sincerity of a few.
1 Peter 3:15
