One of the primary sources for the ideas of Karl Marx was the writings of philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau of France. The latter inspired the French Revolution and thereby then the bloody devastation of two World Wars in the twentieth century and a consequential Cold War. The essence of Rousseau imagined the elimination of social relationships, traditions, customs, morals, and laws with the goal of a remaining lone existence of autonomous individuals. Rousseau called it amour de soi, which means "self love" or what he labeled, "state of nature."
Rousseau argued true nature was autonomous individuals, predating society, so that institutions of marriage, family, and church were contrary to nature. I'm focusing on those three, ordained by God and in God's Word. Edward W. Younkins writes:
Rousseau's view is that society corrupts the pure individual. Arguing that men are not inherently constrained by human nature, Rousseau claims that men are limited and corrupted by social arrangements. Conceiving of freedom as an absolute, independent of any natural limitations, Rousseau disavows the world of nature and its inherent laws, constraints, and regulations.This is the meaning of the famous line that Rousseau began his book, The Social Contract: "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." He meant the oppression of personal relationships like marriage, family, and church.
Rousseau has influenced the United States much, much more than people even know. Many understand that liberalism says that the core of personhood is one's ability to choose his own identity. Essential identity is free from family and even responsibility. To find true self, the individual finds the need to break free from divine institution with self-autonomy. In the application of law, the rights bearer is the self-determining individual, who connects to others only by his own choice. State universities push this idea on students to great acceptance.
The idea of "social contract" with Rousseau is individual choice. Each individual authors his own obligation. To accomplish this, concepts of the family are broken down. Parents have been removed from marriage as a part of radical individualism, resulting in less and later marriage, because the youth see it as a social contract wrought with potential personal harm.
Rousseau clashes with scripture. God's Word describes the original state of man as male and female (Genesis 1:26-27) and family (Genesis 1:28), and God Himself instituted the church (Matthew 16:18-19). In scripture, freedom is not interrupted by God's institutions, but provided by them (John 8:32-36). The moral requirements of the divine institutions do not impose on freedom, but express the nature God designed.
Although contradictory, Rousseau declared the state to release the individual: "Each citizen would then be completely independent of all his fellow men, and absolutely dependent on the state." Rousseau was joined by others such as philosopher John Locke, his views arising from 17th century mechanistic physics. "State of nature" replaced creation as the underlying premise. Rousseau took the concept to the extent that freedom meant human opportunity to create one's self without interference.
According to Rousseau, the ability for the individual to create himself necessitates the elimination of the aforementioned institutions, so that the individual can choose for himself what he wants to be and do. In Rousseau's view, the state is the liberator, which seems like a contradiction, because in the real world, the state controls and coerces individuals. Radical individualism led to radical statism or totalitarianism. Many political scientists and sociologists show how that isolated individuals are most vulnerable to totalitarian control.
I have seen firsthand in many different ways the state interfering with God ordained institutions with a grounds of individual freedom. You the reader probably have plenty of your own examples. When my first child entered California State University East Bay, and we went to the financial desk to make a payment, the school would not allow it. Only the student could do business, even if the student wasn't making the payment. The student received the report card and not the parent. Everyone knows that a teenage girl doesn't require permission from parents to get an abortion.
The clearest practical notion of the attack on divine institutions is the arbitrary adult age of 18 that the state continues to attempt to lower to 16. Eighteen-year-olds think they are separate from their parents, free agents to make a decision with the authority of the state. They see their parents as an intrusion on their freedom, on their ability to choose their own identity. They see the parents even as an imposition on their ability to develop their own beliefs. None of this is true and is in direct violation of the teaching of the Word of God. It is pure Rousseau and a lie of Satan.
Patriarchy, the authority of a dad, even a godly one with best interests for his family, has been effectively eliminated by radical statism due to radical individualism. Church authority from the pastor to congregational to elder has been nullified. People are doing what they want to do and feel entitled in doing so. Anything or anyone who steps in the way of that might be "ghosted." This is the climate of ghosting today, ghosting being "the practice of ending a personal relationship with someone by suddenly and without explanation withdrawing from all communication."
According to Rousseau, the terms of relationship are set by the individual like a social contract, disconnected from the God ordained terms of God, church, and even the Bible. If a young person doesn't like what the church teaches, he can easily find a church "woke" to his desires and with all the necessary minimization of authority. Real authenticity is someone who is being true to his self without the compunctions of preset family responsibility. He can't really know unless it is his choice, completely separated from divine institutions.
What is ironic to the thoughts or position of the ghoster is that while he pursues individual autonomy, he is bound to the disposition of the flesh. Everyone is a slave to something or someone. True freedom isn't the absence of subjugation, according to God. The truth sets someone free, but true freedom is from the bondage to sin. The ghoster sees true freedom as freedom from the bondage of divinely instituted spheres of authority. In fact, those are ordained by God to provide freedom. This is a person, who is truly a slave now to his own desires, yet fooled into thinking he is free. The original nature of the republic was the freedom to live within the confines of moral responsibility, which is tied to divinely instituted spheres of sovereignty.
One of the next door neighbors to our church property has a huge yard and in it, he raises chickens, who got loose yesterday. Chickens were running across our church grounds here in this urban area. It was funny to watch, but I had a dim expectancy for the future of those chickens. They were free all right, just like the ghoster is free, when he separates himself from the sovereignty of the sphere of family, marriage, or a father. Freedom is not the freedom of self-destruction, which God says occurs when a child doesn't obey or honor his father and his mother. It will not be well with him on the earth -- will not be.
Individual freedom is the climate of ghosting. It is a lie about freedom. It rests on an "atomistic viewpoint," a naturalistic assumption that human atoms function prior to social arrangements. This is a mere material world functioning according to mechanistic physics. It is the position of uniformitarianism that speaks evil of divine intervention. Someone is free from divine intervention in his own mind, which is represented by God ordained authority. He doesn't have to fit in with divine purpose.
A "woke" church today from often to always portrays God in varied degrees of coherence with individual autonomy. A ghoster might not enjoy the relationship within a divine sphere authority, so he chooses instead a relationship with his own self-perception of God. His God now has his back, and he's comfortable with that. He is bathing in the love of an ethereal father without the intrusion of the regulations of which he disapproves, his chosen divine father approving of all his social and moral predilections. However, that's not how God works.
God doesn't work through mankind like he is a free agent. God Himself works through these spheres of divine sovereignty. Someone is not free to fit into them or not fit into them as he would, even if a "woke" church gives its ironic imprimatur on the "ghoster." God orders the world for His creation and the freedom still operates within that creation order. A husband is the head of the wife, for instance. Is the Christian wife not free just because she doesn't like how her husband heads?
The protection of true freedom is the protection of the spheres created and ordered by God. The state itself ordained by God protects freedom by protecting those spheres. When a father can't lead his family because of individual autonomy, freedom is lost. Individuals don't have the right to choose their own identity. Identity proceeds from created order. A society isn't free when a boy uses the girl's bathroom. That violates the actual freedom of the girls.
Ghosters aren't free. What they perceive as individual autonomy is bondage. They think they are forming their own identities, but it's actually their slavery to their own lust. Neither is what they think is freedom, the grace of God. It isn't grace, and it isn't God.
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ReplyDelete[removed some extraneous text from the original post]
ReplyDeleteI would say that having God-given rights as under the U.S. Constitution as originally construed and maintaining in it the First Amendment right to freedom of association (the right to associate—— and, not to be forced to associate) does not have an equivalence relation with the radical ideals of the French Revolution. In fact those ideals promote a false and intellectually dishonest sense of comradeship (fraternité, etc.) forged by mob rule and ultimately then, tyranny. Whether of the state church or the personality cult variety, if one draws a distinction. This is where I disagree with you here.
The more progressive vision of individualism however, as described by modern day progressives is just another iteration of the age-old bankrupt "ideology" that much of the "Enlightenment" and most certainly Marx represents. It represents the idea that the machiavellian obscurantist engages the world by holding forth an unrealistic utopian ideal. The obscurantist feeds whatever is the fancies of the masses while repressing brutally by mob rule any who dissent (the scapegoats) from accepting his re-education.
Marx was therefore influenced by something much older than the Enlightenment, he was influenced by the rabbinic tradition itself, particularly his so-called "rav" Moses Hess. The hegelian dialectic formulated by this writer consistently pitted "Left" against "Right," an essential false dichotomy that lingers to this day. Two wings of the same beast. Hess managed revolution and counterrevolution by establishing the theory of racial supremacy of "klal yisroel" in his work and everyone in the world as being either for or against this construct. His work deeply influenced both the Soviet Bolsheviks and the NSDAP of Germany, and it is essentially kabbalist in nature.
The purpose of bringing the world (secular society) under the sway of talmudic ideals has largely continued in its purpose today. We see this with the abrogation of Biblical Anglo-Saxon common law in the United States today. English common law which had been based on the law of God, is now repressed by the Talmudic practice of reinterpretation (pilpul) and legislating from the bench. You see it in the language they use when they speak of so-called "penumbra" and "emanations" of the Bill of Rights. This has entrenched abortion, feminism, the abolition of freedom of association (e.g. "protected groups", disparate impact, etc), and other concepts into legal precedent. You can also see it in legislation such as Public Law 102-14, which attempts unconstitutionally to establish an official state religion in the United States.
All of these things, often bowdlerized and obscured as "humanism," act to restrict the God-given rights construed by the original foundation of the Republic, and it is therefore only a matter of time before the apparent conflict and contradiction between the two by necessity be resolved. This will have to be yet another spiritual battle for the hearts and minds of the American people, whether we shall accept the Lord on the terms of inspired Scripture, the New Testament, or whether many will largely acquiesce, as other nations in former times, to the antichrist ideals (and its proponents) that have plagued this world since the days of the apostles.
Waterwave,
ReplyDeleteHow old when someone can choose not to associate with his own family? Or buck his parents?
"How old when someone can choose not to associate with his own family? Or buck his parents?"
ReplyDeleteThat would depend on what you consider "to associate," as someone will always be passively associated with their own people and nation, as is made use of in 1 Timothy 5:8. Also, one may choose not to associate with some aspect of something that one's family is associated with. But as far as what is chosen to be done is concerned, with regards to "ghosting" someone always has the choice or potential to make decisions like this, that may be disordered and harmful to others; but the consequences of this will obviously be more immediate for those that are dependent such as legal minors, due to the structure of civil society. However, these structures outside of the family are being changed by the progressives to accomodate younger unqualified estrangement of family members, especially to the less well-off families which are most reliant upon a proper legal environment as defined by our legal system, as it was before the takeover by the progressives which has been since the 1960's.
These families are most in need of a respected boundary between the family and the state similar to that which had been intact prior to that, and it is those people which have since borne the worst consequences of the "revolution" which was instigated by the progressives such as Herbert Marcuse, Saul Alinsky, Stanley Levison, Frank Kameny and others. Of Alinsky's eight levels of control, four of them were poverty, debt, welfare and education. The top of his list, by the way, was healthcare.
So the question you ask is how old "can" someone choose, but is the question really how old "should" they be? The answer to the former is obviously as soon as they have sufficient resources to subsist independently, but the latter is never. However, if one's family were alienated by one's own behavior, this is different than simply choosing to actively "ghost" which requires a degree of profoundly cynical materialism or narcissism (of the kind produced in contemporary media programming) to even consider.
Waterwave,
ReplyDeleteIn general, I think there is a freedom to associate or disassociate, even though it is implicit in the first amendment. However, when I talk about spheres of sovereignty that should be protected, I mean a family with children. Galatians 4 says that a son is under tutors and governors until the time appointed by his father, and 1 Corinthians 7:36-38, puts a daughter under her father's authority until she marries. This is the will of God, but with the arbitrary age of 18, does she have the freedom to disassociate for no other reason that she doesn't want to be told what to do any more? She wants her own way? Is that freedom?
This is the sphere of sovereignty idea that I talked about. You said you disagreed or we conflicted in the idea of association. I'm attempting to sort out what you are saying.
One last thing, I don't care if any of this is politically incorrect. I've been trying to make a last minute save for something that only God can protect for us, as it was given to us by him to begin with.
ReplyDeleteLooks like my other comment must've been too long, it didn't get posted. Well that's alright.
ReplyDeleteWaterwave,
ReplyDeleteI didn't delete any comments from you.
Rousseau is the distractor from Augustinian chicanery and Nicolaitan crafted arrogance, inserted by the spirit of Mystery Babylon, Mother of Harlots and abominations of the earth. Colossians 2:8 and Revelation 17-19. Men wishing to understand what happened in the U.S. to the remnant that fled the Romanist nicolaitans and her Daughters, and continued in the word of God to liberty should read Isaac Backus and John Leland....and history not censoring the spiritual warfare in pretended 'neutrality' or 'secularism', science falsely so-called. The craft has been ever at work in their deceptive ways with their Balaamite and Jezebel seducing and subtle attacks. Following continual edification and strengthening through the word of God, men should read the unabridged Foxe's Martyrs and The Martyrs Mirror....and the old Baptist publications disproving the claims of the Augustinian philosophers with scripture. Not many fully escape the subtle fakery of the Augustinians and nicolaitans using the scriptures as a rod as Jannes and Jambres rather than as honest, faithful undershepherds of Christ and watchmen. David Cloud has a goodly compilation of those ancient works, and James Beller is a good place for understanding the point of the philosopher and worldly wisemen attack in America.
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This is the whole point for standing with the Authorized English translation preserved of God according to the scriptural, prophetic promises of God. Scripture is for all men: whosoever will avail themselves of the grace of God in truth and the light of Christ that lighteth every man that cometh into the world....the quickening, sorting word of God doing the sorting by the Holy Spirit of Truth. But there are those who will not come to the light. The 'rest of John 1, 3 & 8', these end at the 2 Peter 2&3, and Jude position. The proud Augustinian kingdom builders and the humble pilgrim churches of those with exchanged citizenship from this dying to eternal life are differing entities.
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Jesus said that those who continued in his words would know the truth that makes men free in every circumstance, for all things are ours ultimately in the inheritance. The inheritance is sure and sealed, but the distribution of the property is not yet. The antichrist counterfeit and his fake, preparatory 'bibles' come first and try the saints to see what their first love truly is.
Kddlporter,
ReplyDeleteIt's not intended to be a distractor, but an additional argument. Do these people know they are following the philosophy that led to WW1 and WW2 and other atrocities. Yes, I think everything has a theological cause. Roman Catholicism in France led to Rousseau. I've written about that here, but the effect of Rousseau in state education, where young people are influenced by the philosophy, isn't a distraction. It's an addition.