Over the years, I've experienced the heavy hand of government in many ways. When John in his Revelation warns of the Beast, at least part of what he refers to is civil government. There is a sense in which the Apocalypse is a warning to believers never to trust any human government. I could quote and provide links to reams of material indicating that no government in history has been able to remain benign for long. There is no real need for evil intent by the folks governing -- government by it's nature is just that way.
Today's whine is about government as expressed in the institution of public education. About 15 years ago, while serving as a Military Policeman, I was asked to become the second DARE Program Officer in all of Europe. You can look up the DARE Program if you don't already know what it is. I was chosen in part because of long experience working with youth professionally and as a volunteer. While thus employed by the US Army, I was hurt and had to leave the military. Based on my experience with kids in the Department of Defense Dependent Schools system, I took advantage of Veteran's Rehabilitation and went to teachers' college. I was a "professional educator" for about six years. In retrospect, I can see the rapid decline from a somewhat common sense approach into the pits of intransigent stupidity. My last year in the field saw me accused of being "too friendly" with the students. My manner and methods had not changed at all, but the system had. Perhaps the following amateur attempt at verse will explain how it felt.
How do I say "I love you"
without coming on too strong?
How do I touch you reassuringly,
without it seeming wrong?
I'd love to hug you;
my motive is pure.
To give you a friendship
strong and sure.
Not lusting,
but blessing;
Your heartbreak's cure.Will the world step aside that
I may your sorrows bear?
Or stand in the way and
threateningly stare?
For compassion's strong grip,
it was you who reached first.
You knew I'd not censor
your tearful outburst.
To hold,
not scold,
when you felt accursed.
How did we come to the place where righteous behavior brought me censure? How is that sharing the fatherly compassion of God is wrong? I had been careful all those years to never mention the name of Jesus except as it appears in secular history study, or in response to the mention of His name from the students. The verbal expression of religion had nothing to do with it. Even in secular psychology, it is widely recognized that humans need the physical touch of another human. Why are we now officially in such a panic over that? I could have chosen any number of symptoms to point up the cultural rot, but that one was the most fresh on my mind that day.
It's the nature of The Beast. Way back in Genesis 9, right after the Flood, God notified Noah that all humanity was required to do certain things. We call it the "Noahic Covenant." This requirement had nothing to do with one's personal standing with God, but with humanity's existence on earth. The whole of the human race would be required to have a structure of accountability for their actions. God was promising that the His Creation would proceed in a predictable fashion, but only if we instituted similar order in human society. The objective was to ensure that human life would hold the highest value, that human blood would not be shed frivolously. It assumes that some humans will become predators, if given the chance. Such an attitude is like cancer, and has to be cut out. Those who were not predators had the responsibility to stop those that were. How it is mankind was to do this was not delineated. Here we are some thousands of years later, and we naturally assume this means some form of government. However, what follows in Scripture from that point on is a clear picture that having government is only slightly better than not. As many have said, human government at its best is harmless.
Government has always been the powerful ruling the weak. Never mind how well it works out for everyone involved; without power, government doesn't exist. Power is the ability to project the will of one entity over another, the capacity to coerce a change in behavior. That would be okay if we could keep it all even and objective, passionless and pure. It can't be done. To govern requires a human agent to execute the will of the power. Build the most advanced computer in the world, but it will be infected by human passion in the mere act of designing it. The concept of logic itself presupposes a passion for something, in opposition to something else -- in this case, illogic. That is a judgment in itself. Looks to me like God laid forth a requirement knowing full well it would bring things to an end point somewhere down the road, for to govern too well brings a requirement of deciding when one life is more important than another. The blunt requirement from God is that murderers are to be executed. When do we know enough about the case to decide it qualifies as murder? Act too quickly and you have the tyranny of jumping to conclusions. Act too slowly and you have the tyranny of apathy. Either way, somebody has to take responsibility for grabbing the reins of power and acting.
In its most primitive form, power is exercised individually by means of brute strength, combat prowess, superior intelligence, or simply a willingness to do what no one else will. This continues to work in groups, up to a point. If the group ever gets enough of this, they can exercise power by superior force of numbers. The roots of revolt is the perception by those out of power that those in power have gone too far. It's a trade off. The average mass of humanity will avoid risky conflict whenever possible, so power under restraint may go unchallenged. However, anyone who perceives no risk will indulge in conflict as a matter of course, unless they have something better to do. The urge to power is apparently instinctive with humans.
Revolt may well be in keeping with the Covenant of Noah. If the government in power becomes murderous, it becomes a duty to resist. I wrote extensively about this elsewhere. The point here is that one cannot possibly find righteousness in the mere act of supporting or opposing their government. One may point to various acts of government (or its agents) as righteous or sinful, subject to debate, but nothing in government itself is good or bad according to Scripture. Each individual moment of compliance or resistance must be measured in light of your calling. Nor can we rightly claim that any particular candidate or official is "God's man" for the job. Just saying that is a sin, unless you are an Old Testament prophet in a land ruled by God Himself. If anything, we can read the warnings from God that no ruler is to be trusted, for all are humans given to failure. Samuel warned that kings were inherently oppressive (1 Samuel 8:11ff). Cruise through the Book of Proverbs and see what King Solomon himself, the wisest man ever, says about those in power.
So what of rule by committee, or partitioned power, or by a majority? What about a rule by laws, strictly binding the agents? Every different form of government tried so far has inevitably resulted in power becoming concentrated in the hands of an elite group, some faster than others. Indeed, the more thoroughly power is partitioned, the more tightly each official holds to their own portion. The more rules of power you place upon them, the more despotic they become over things not covered by the rules. This sickness spreads and becomes more pervasive as time passes. No bureaucracy has ever been cut without a revolt of some kind; they expand and multiply by their very nature. Government as an entity cannot be redeemed. In a fallen world, Utopia is just what the name means: No Place, a place that, by definition, cannot exist.
All forms of government carry the seeds of their own destruction. If we go back into our Western culture to its birth, we find ourselves in the Middle Ages. That time was ruled by feudalism. It can be summed up this way. The mass of humanity prefers stability, and will tend to accept just about any government, good or bad, that brings a perception of stability. When things are unstable, you could die today and your family, too. The few willing to engage in the risks of defending the rest were handed power. As a part of the bargain, they were provided the means of defense as the price, and in feudalism that meant you gave the protector titular ownership of your property, and perhaps of yourselves. This owner was called "lord." Once in power, their dreams of ever greater power called for expansion, grabbing up ever greater sections of property with its occupants. Since everyone was doing this, war was always threatened, if not going on. There was never enough produced by the occupants to pay for all the conquest and dreams, yet the lords could only tax so much before they faced revolt. When folks chafed at serfdom but weren't ready to revolt, they looked for new ways to make a living. As population rose, there were more people than needed to farm. At the same time, new discoveries increased farm productivity. People had time for other activities. Skills arose that brought in more money. The lord became more dependent on money than taxation in kind. To get more money, he ended up having to hand power back to those with money, usually in the form of political grants to towns and cities filled with merchants. Feudalism collapsed under the independence of the new middle class merchants.
As we look back over history, we see the Middle Ages closed by prosperity. Notice that as life improved, and mortality was less quick and less certain, the presence of comfort became more and more valuable. Comfort can be defined in all sorts of cultural flavors, so the form of comfort doesn't matter. Comfort at the end of the Middle Ages meant not being drafted for the lord's wars, nor having your children drafted. Give the lord money to hire soldiers from some other place. Indeed, all violence and competition would be viewed as a problem, and the nobility's appreciation for it made them dangerous. Best to tie their hands as quickly as possible; drab sameness is safer. And God forbid the rowdy rabble that remained poor should be left free to enjoy their noisy entertainment, especially in your neighborhood. As time passes, what is labeled "dangerous" is pushed to lower and lower levels, until merely shouting becomes illegal, or just having an unkempt appearance. In other words, whatever the lords and peasants found entertaining and normal was wholly rejected by the comfort class. In fact, the origin of modern police forces had nothing to do with actual crime, and everything to do with upholding prissy community standards.
While it's certainly a good thing that drunks aren't allowed to sleep on your doorstep, nor relieve themselves in your flower beds, where do we draw the line? At what point is the juggernaut of comfort satisfied? In the West, we have so enshrined comfort as to legislate that people should not go hungry even if they refuse to plan past the last burp from their previous meal. We now call complete life support an "entitlement" to anyone by virtue of the fact that they are still breathing. Thus, to become "educated" is no longer just a right, but a requirement. There is much more to it than that, but the point is that we are ruled by a middle class conscience that can't permit anyone to decide they want to be anything above or below middle class. Those truly contented with poverty are regarded with deep suspicion. Those determined to rise above the drab safety of sameness are quickly shot down.
This is the mindset that says, "I don't like it. Make it go away." You may have heard the criticism that we have become a society that demands instant symptomatic relief. When liberalism took over Western Christian mainline churches before the War Between the States, genuine redemption was written out of the program. Jesus was no longer the Lamb of God, but simply a social reformer. While the path from Reformation to Liberalism was long and twisted, our simplified summary review here takes us to urban England, where the Industrial Revolution hit early. Prior to that, there were still millions of poor, but no place for them to work. Coal became the engine of Progress, and it was mined by human hands. When the largest deposits were found outside the cities, the coal extraction companies built housing near the mines, and created massive warrens for their laborers, minus all the redeeming elements of civilization. A part of the Industrial Revolution was the invention of gin, so cheaply made everyone could afford it. Alcoholism became a major element of proletarian life, and its consequences bled over into the view of proper middle class society. Now liberal churches took up the cause of solving these problems by engaging truly useless efforts based on the new religion called "sociology." In essence, it brought about a system that demanded these working class folks act middle class but with none of the income that made middle class folks what they were. In other words, they treated the symptoms alone. Worse, it was the symptoms of a set of problems they alone saw as problems.
From ancient times, humans lived in a stratified society, and for the most part it was taken for granted by all parties. In the Western world after the Middle Ages, it was the middle class that pushed the issue into the front of everyone's minds. They demanded the advantages of nobility without the risks. They maintained a pretense of nobility by copying the shallowest appearances of it, demanding respect from their inferiors more strictly than nobility had. While forcibly keeping the poor "in their place," they also demanded the poor adhere to their rules of behavior. What was civilized and proper was never subject to debate; it was assumed. Picking and choosing what fashions they aped from nobility, the rise of Victorian culture signaled an end to all hope for a return to common sense. Keep in mind, Queen Victoria herself did not adhere to what is reputed to be her silly expectations. What we think of today as Victorian prudish morals is the distortion of the new priesthood of religious liberals. Here in the United States, our expanding middle class hypocritically adopted the distortion wholesale. Fanatical temperance while keeping a liquor cabinet, prudish public morals while keeping bordellos busy, demanding charity while raping consumers -- the minority who practiced this were the political leadership, in one way or another. It was these who shaped American social and legal foundations as we entered the 20th Century. In a short time, the natural structure of human society was turned on its head.
The former public school teacher, John Taylor Gatto, is well worth reading. He did the research to discover the conspiracy in public education taking place in plain view. As one who examines conspiracy theories as a hobby, I find that most popular theories remain plausible for having elements of truth. Conspiracies are real, and we have long historical record of their existence. Few ever succeed. Public education is one that succeeded. Briefly, it was the bright liberal minds ruling American business of the early 20th Century that decided the national destiny of economic greatness depended on making the majority of the population into worker bees, ready hands to run the factories, but without too much thinking. While they failed to understand that heavy manufacturing would not last long as a mainstay of the American economy, their plans for education did take root. The idea was that in the public school system, students would be conditioned, but not educated. They should be complacent consumers, never satisfied, but not bright enough to know they were being manipulated. The masses would produce and buy. The new lords of the economy would rule. Those whose native intelligence could not be suppressed would be siphoned off for research into improved technology, or other useful pursuits, but by no means should anyone outside the ruling caste be allowed to join easily. This required creating a class of "professional educators" who, rather than being the cream of the crop, would be no better than anyone else, and hopefully not intelligent enough to do anything harder. Education was to be a conditioning process, and it required trainers not wise enough to recognize that. This part of the conspiracy largely succeeded. You can google for Gatto's name and find on the Internet articles and speeches published with references to the documents wherein these plans were laid out. If you can afford them, his books are even better.
By now you see whence the title. With the aid of the mainstream media, a small elite group now rules much of the world. The Real Conspiracy is the government itself, acting wholly in plain sight. By cultivating the means to making the majority a comfortable middle class, apathy is the harvest. While training everyone to demand accountability, and cynically making noises accordingly, the real agenda slips below radar. Eventually this will fall apart, and things for which the elite rulers could not possibly plan will happen. This empire will fall, as has every one that came before it. In the meantime, we live in an age when a genuine interaction between humans is the greatest threat to the regime. It's to their advantage that sex become ever more a form of recreation, and to keep upping the ante on demands from the perverts. This allows polarization between them and the morally minded, by encouraging them to over-react. At all costs, keep society divided over silly distractions, splitting them into two camps on as many different issues as possible, so they consume all their energy fighting each other. The ruling clique can pretend to represent this or that side so as to stay in power. Those of us who truly care about people are the biggest threat to the world's rulers. Apathy from the masses is their safety.
That's why it's so important for the system to quash any hint of godly human intimacy between adults and children, between teachers and students. Keep it superficial. If you can't, color it with sexual overtones so it becomes a political football. Isolate every soul, that none may find Christ, for He is only known through His people.
One honest reading of Genesis shows humans are unique in the Created Order. By reading between the lines, one can fairly conclude that humanity is at one level the purpose for all the rest of Creation. We are the only beings mentioned capable of communing with the Creator. We chose by default to avoid that communion, and God has honored that choice. Instead, we are filled with a burning desire to reinstate the communion, but are fallen enough not to easily recognize the true nature of that longing. So we find a jillion other ways to fill that need, and some appear to come close, close enough to build a following. One strong strand of thought is simply to deny that man has a spirit, thus has no need. That longing is labled a mere perception, and it needs to be trained away. Lots of tags are applied to that strain of thought, but I'll call it "secularism" here. It makes man the chance recipient of a status merely at the top of the food chain. It's a direct assault on the claims of God in Scripture.
The Beast of government would rather take the place of God, but in practice it's pretty hard to build a communion and devotion on that. We see flashes of it here and there in various forms of propaganda, but for the most part, no one takes that seriously. It's part of dreams for the future, once the human culture has been completely twisted. The next best thing is simply denying that man has a God-shaped void in his heart. Perhaps it the notion has to be destroyed before it can be replaced. At any rate, the current trend is to dehumanize humans. On the surface, this brings a sense of release followed by hedonistic pursuits, since it ultimatly doesn't matter. On another level, it steers the mind away from the deep, abiding sorrow of isolation. Only allow the mind to go there when the hands are no longer so productive. Color the trappings any way you like -- the structure of modern society is to efficiently warehouse humans while not in their productive years. Public schools are not about education, but controlling a population not allowed to work. Retirement centers operate on a similar design. Meanwhile, build a culture that encourages the productive middle-agers to have no time for their kids or their parents. There may be no single entity planning all this, but there is certainly a plan.
It's no blazing revelation to say this is all at the behest of Satan. His is the planning, but I seriously depart from those who see our current situation as necessarily the last stages of Creation before the End Times. I firmly believe we have yet to see mankind at its worst. I've looked into the mirror of Scripture at my own soul, and I assure you we are not there yet. Dehumanizing governments have risen and fallen throughout human history. The Apostle John singled out the Rome of his day as a symbol of that Beast. Granted, the current empire is the closest of all so far to become wholly global, but it has yet to reach what I believe was the level achieved in primordial Babylon. We lack as yet the universal, united effort of mankind to displace all of Heaven, guided by a single governing entity. We might note that the Unites States is the leader in Western oppression, but we are a long way from universal dominance. Besides, there are just too many points at which genuine good is still being done. Satan rules indeed much of the human race, but not yet in the sense many claim.
The human mind behind government has yet to plumb the depths of power; the tools are not yet perfected. However, we can find many places where certain elements come very close. I wrote a comment on John-Thomas Richards's blog about how absolutely deception is required in the US government. The idea had been building, and that was my first effort to put it in writing. Restated, I remarked that while serving in the US Army Military Police, I came into contact with a horrific level of officially required deception. It rankled me to no end, and my resistance to it got me into some trouble now and then. I fully understand the point of denying information to the enemy in war, and the necessity of keeping hard-to-grasp truths out of the ears of the immature. I have yet to post my Parables series anywhere, so I can't link the full explanation, but Jesus clearly taught in his Parable of Pigs and Pearls (Matthew 7:6) that some folks don't deserve to hear the whole story. This would not excuse the wholesale denial of useful information of folks needing a chance to make an informed choice. This was one area where dehumanizing the subjects is highly developed.
As a leader, I was required to lie to my subordinates at times about what the system was planning on some things. The more I looked into it, the more I realized that this was all taken for granted at higher levels in the command structure. There were claims of operational guidelines based on long experience with humans in the military structure, but those was based on the very worst assumptions of human nature. The unwritten rule was, if any plausible excuse could be found, hide the truth. This fed one's ambition for promotion, so that one gained the right to a more complete revelation. In a moment of honesty, a fellow believer lamented having chosen the field of Military Intelligence. He had lived long enough, and thought deeply enough, to know he was violating his conscience every step of the way. He was high ranking officer, by the way, with a clearance he couldn't reveal -- a genuine expert. Without giving anything away, he confessed that much of the process for deciding what to classify was sloppy at best, and plainly evil most of the time. Having seen the process at a Joint Service and international level, he assured me I should never trust anyone with federal enforcement power. To get and hold such a position without going hopelessly insane requires contempt for the masses.
To say that a particular government official is lying about something, or that there is some sort of coverup going on, is something we should all take for granted. It is the required mode of operation. While there is the appearance that parties are warring over widely divergent views on critical issues, the net result shows they strongly agree on the truly critical issue: government must have more power. Send your best crusader to Washington, DC, and they will suffer one of three fates: they will be compromised and sucked into the system (and begin lying about it), they will be smeared on some vice and sent packing, or they will be marginalized and rendered harmless. Real reform will not happen, regardless of the particular flavor of reform you hope to see. The only reason we have any hope of seeing through this has little to do with media exposure. The mainstream media is a part of government, though never quite completely controlled by elected or appointed officials. They are effectively an arm of the ruling regime, and will not jeopardize that for anything, appearances notwithstanding. Do not expect ever to hear significant revelations of behind the scenes dealing from them. Truth and accuracy are hardly their real market. We hear about the conditioning in journalism schools that produce an almost uniformly "liberal" journalist class. What we do not hear is the conditioning that puts marketing and sales concerns first, and public service nearly last. No editor will permit real investigative reporting, except in the rare market of marginal publications. Sensationalism and propaganda are the standard fare.
This brings us the Internet. For now, the Internet is a "disruptive technology." You can google for that term, but here it means the best plans of governments can scarcely control. Also, bear in mind that "government" includes anything with siginificant input into the decision-making process, which naturally includes such as huge corporations. Oddly, the Internet was born in public institutions. Typically, the government drones lacked the intelligence to detect its disruptive power, and it was released into general public use. Now Leviathan has been awakened to the threat, and is beginning early steps to reclaim this tool. For now, genuine controlled is mostly denied The Beast. In the past, I have likened the Internet as the equivalent of the Roman Roads. It was born of a governmental purpose, and served it well; my first contact with email was in military use. Military information management loved it. In Rome, it permitted quick movement of troops and messangers into every remote corner of the empire. However, by its nature, it could not be denied for use by disruptive influences. To a large extent, what Rome was when it began building the roads was fundamentally changed by other things that came over those roads. The Apostle Paul is a primary example of that. The Roman Roads were a symbol of the ease with which one could traverse the empire with a disruptive message and be sure it would be understood. That's the paradox of uniformity: it's a great tool for exercising control, but equally useful for destroying it. Such is the Internet in today's empire.
The Internet is as yet uncontrolled much by any government. There is, of course, another paradox in this freewheeling network of information sharing. Since we have already somewhat rejected the official channels of information, how else can we determine which voices are of God? In the vast mountains of information, how do we detect truth? No one can read it all, and no one wants to, but by what means do we narrow down the search? And for those kinds of information not directly related to Ultimate Truth, how do we simply find good facts? Anyone can post and publish on the Internet; it requires only an access point and a willing host. This does work in our favor, though.
Some may recall the brouhaha over allegations that US NSA affiliates using high-tech intelligence gathering capabilities (ECHELON) provided information on European commercial negotiations to the US government. What is not commonly known is that while the mass of telephone traffic can indeed be intercepted, a wholesale analysis is not possible. What is possible is selecting keywords and phrases, or specific sources, and highlighting them when they appear in the traffic stream. Similar restraints are at work in the US "Carnivore" machines that can be installed at any and every ISP in the US. Even if that has been done already, only certain narrowly defined messages can be caught. Furthermore, computerized analysis can only go so far. While it's quite possible that the Carnivore boxes can be the means to take over the current Internet in the US, since they are clearly part router in function, as a means of mass surveillance they would be of little use. I'm not convinced the federal budget is big enough to field that many machines, anyway. There are also any number of entry points to the Internet that simply cannot be accessed that way.Another very important part of government secrecy is feeding sufficient quantities of false leads and legends to the kooks. Plausible kooks help to keep attention away from the truth. For example, Area 51: anyone acquainted with government information security can easily discern what that's about. Allowing lots of people to allege an alien spacecraft crash or landing serves to obscure what might have actually been of importance there. If anything of significance happened there, something worthy of cover up, it is far more likely to have been some monumental blunder. I can just envision some huge, expensive project gone bad, killing everyone who was working on it. Rather than face public exposure of the project, latch onto the first crazy possibility, promote it behind the scenes, and officially deny everything. In a similar way, the government allows us to believe that Carnivore can filter everything, and their denials are carefully calculated to provoke doubt. They simply don't have the manpower to catch everything, but they would like for us to fear they can.
While the Internet remains a vital tool of government and International relations, it is also a vital tool of liberty. No amount of conditioning could stop the mass adoption of Internet access. The momentum is currently against significant legislative limits. Each state is demanding the power to tax online sales delivered within their borders here in the US, but the popular demand is against it. Thus the recent extension of the Internet sales tax ban. Also, it is one more way the feds can remind states they are subservient. Rather than engage the usual oppressive regulation over the Internet, the current federal plan seems to be control by other means.
The public is not allowed to investigate all the details of the settlement between Microsoft and the Department of Justice. It's entirely possible even the judge in the case was not told everything. However, I am convinced at least part of the deal was to ensure MS will move forward on certain things that will enhance government power. When the campaign against Microsoft began during the previous adminstration, it was never about protecting the consumer, but about protecting government power. I am one of those tin-foil-hat folks who believes there are back doors in many MS products, with keys in the hands of certain US intelligence agencies. Furthermore, I strongly believe Digital Rights Management (DRM) makes the ruling elite very happy. By whatever means MS institutes the controls over electronic media transfers, it will include unpublicized access for federal agents. However it is this gets sold to the public, it's part of the mass conditioning reflected in such things as airport body and luggage searches, surveillance cameras in public places, and all manner of privacy invasions in the name of security.
Within the empire, I'm not sure whether government has decided Open Source is good or bad. There is currently a good deal of institutional ambivalence. My guess is the recent rise in popularity of Linux was unexpected. As long as adoption doesn't rise above a certain level, it won't be much of a threat. Besides, quite a few government agencies have adopted Linux and Unix for security reasons. Perhaps the greater danger is not adoption by US citizens, but by foreign governments, those that are not fully under imperial control. Like the Internet itself, Open Source was something the government once contributed to, but which took off on its own. I look for increased efforts to marginalize Linux, and it wouldn't surprise me if it turned out the ruling elite were backing SCO to hedge their bets. Fortunately for the government, the mass of public school graduates have been highly conditioned to demand the expensive entertainment media and technology that is generally unavailable to Open Source until after the commercial version is firmly rooted in the market. The current regulatory environment favors keeping the technology closed source. Still, while the mass of worms, viruses and spam are driving a call for greater regulation of the Internet, the Open Source solutions to some of this are a problem for Washington, DC.
Anything that is completely open and hard to quantify is a threat to government, regardless how useful it may be otherwise. For us, the governed, whatever problems we find with such things are more than outweighed by the benefits. It is not possible to have a perfect world while mankind remains in a fallen state. Liberty is an imperfect friend, but one of our best friends. The long history of humanity is one of pendulum swings when liberty is too high and the innocent suffer, then nearly non-existent when everyone suffers. We are currently swinging to the latter, but there are plenty of avenues yet for exercising freedom in serving God.
History is full of multiple streams. First, every individual life is its own story. Every event is yet another sort of story. Events can be strung together according to themes of the historian's own making, and very little in the record of human events is not a story told from a perspective. The cynic reminds us that History is the story told by the winning side. When I wrote that feudalism had fallen as a form of government, that was an academic generalization. That is, it was an assertion which all should assume has qualifications. If we make no such generalizations, we might as well not bother studying the past to learn its lessons. The Social Sciences as a whole, which includes History, is the study of human nature. Human nature appears to be amorphous, yet somewhat predictable. Thus, feudalims was a standard human response to a specific situation. Given similar situations, humans will return to feudalism. Examine any major criminal enterprise, or even simply youth gangs in urban centers, and you will see elements of feudalism. Youth gangs form as a response to a particular set of threats, threats as perceived by the gang members, even while they carry on an otherwise civilized existence. We can only ever grasp certain threads in human behavior.
Using History to predict human behavior in the future is a useful academic exercise, but one that often fails for lack of information. That information often includes things that cannot possibly be known in advance. Some particularly intelligent minds have made fairly accurate predictions in a general way, usually by their ability to step back and recognize objectively what was going on around them. They have always been cynical, and it is their negative prognostications that have been so accurate. I won't even pretend to be in their class, so I can't predict how our current form of government will die. As I said, every government carries the seeds of their own destruction, and so it was with our constitutional republic. It died sometime ago, if you ask me. It has died in steps, and each is yet subject to debate. Still, we are headed in the direction of most modern governments, by edging toward the police state. Reading numerous anti-government websites, one gets the feeling there will be an armed insurrection any day now. That remains possible under any government; it's how the United States came to be, along with quite a few national governments elsewhere. What I can't predict is whether these disparate groups will unify at some critical moment and succeed. I do expect more seiges, like Waco, though perhaps not carried out the same way by the feds. Any you'd be a fool to think something on the order of 9/11 can't happen again. Yet I cannot predict in any general way how the current regime will end, and whether it will be a clear line of departure, or simply a long evolution.
For now, the call to arms and to resistance does not clearly coincide with my calling in Christ. Surely, there are ways I am already resisting; this series itself is a form of resistance. Having written diatribes against the current administration, it may well be I'm one of those on the Watch List. I find it unlikely, only because I'm in such large company. What I truly focus on are those aspects of the current situation that militate against Christ and His Gospel. Those aspects that I can identify are surely of Satan, and it is my duty to oppose them. Furthermore, that Gospel includes some indications how I should go about fighting evil. One of my favorite songs, one I have yet to find since the last time I heard it on radio, includes this line: "Satan is our Enemy, and Love is our weapon." The song goes on to describe the fight as not defensive, but offensive. It echoes that line from Ephesians 6:12: "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood..." People are not the Enemy, merely his tools, so fighting them is purely incidental.
Our Christian battle is one of hearts, minds, and ideas. I agree with Cornelius van Til that every human born has something in them that witnesses the verity of Christian truth, and convicts them when they see holiness in action. Even if I don't call His Name, as I agreed to do in public school employment, my actions and motives were all too obvious. When those actions of clear conscience got me fired, my fight was not with the school system, or even its leadership. It was with Satan. I cannot support the public school as an institution, and now support alternatives. I tutor on the side without charge to any who ask, anyone whose children are poorly served by public school. My writing encourages homeschooling and private church schools. If the day arrives I am asked to help establish any alternative education program, I'll do it with all my heart.
There aren't many people out where the Lord has led me. Yet people are the field in which I sow the Gospel. Obviously, I must use some other way. Whether by email, on my blog, or on a website, you are a part of that other way. The Internet is surely usable by God, just as anything else in Creation. In my experience, that is best done using Open Source. Let each be convinced in their own minds what God requires of them for computer use. Unlike some things in this world, computer systems are not yet divided between holy and evil. Both hardware and software, we most all choose what best enables our service of God. My service has come to require I run FreeBSD. That won't work on my current fancy machine, so I'm trading down to a lesser one that is known to be fully compatible with FreeBSD. If serving Christ were to mean not touching computers, I'd toss the whole bunch out. Yet for now, it means that most of the people I reach will be out there in virtual world.
Something I hope to do in the future is find email penpals in other places around the world. Most penpal sites today are oriented toward match-making, so it's been a bit frustrating. Thus, the method is still a problem. I'm not conceited enough to believe my writings are yet so wonderful that I will draw a huge readership. In due time, I suspect I'll be somewhat better known than now, only because others believe in what I'm doing. I'd prefer the simple pleasure of speaking live to groups, but that is currently not open to me.
As I walk in the light I now have, who's to say what I'll be doing next year, next month, next week? If my examination of government oppression is the end of the matter, there was no point in writing. Complaints must have a purpose, or they are just whining, an irritating noise. I call government the Beast, and always it will be sooner or later, but as such is merely the tool of oppression. The Oppressor is the real enemy. If you become wrapped up in the methods, you risk becoming harmless to him. How will you fight him?
Ed Hurst
19 May 2004
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