“But the truth is, no matter how independent or influential you feel you are, the people you surround your self with will impact your future.  All you have to do to test this statement is take a look back.  You’ll likely discover that many of the things you now regret were done in the company of those you considered friends.  Typically, we don’t get into trouble on our own.  We usually have company.” 

(p. 16, “Community:  Pathway to progress”, North Point Ministries, 2008)

Okay, this is both patently false and presents an obstacle to the premise of this book, namely that the “community” is the the only effective vehicle for positive and righteous existence.

First, it is just not true that “typically, we don’t get into trouble on our own”.  I think this can be unequivocally denied.  Sure, we may be influenced by “peer pressure”, but we must make the decision to engage in behavior.  If we have reached the age of reason and observe right and wrong by the understanding that since we are born for the express purpose of living, LIFE of SELF and OTHER is our greatest moral obligation.  And to arrive at this conclusion takes nothing more than the cognitive ability to make the conceptual distinction between SELF and OTHER (other people, the environment).  The point being:  we are all on the hook for our choices and subsequent actions.  “The devil made me do it” is not a reasonable explanation for why people commit evil acts.  “It’s not my fault, its society/my parents/my company/my wife or husband/God did not give me the grace to perceive my sins (C.J. Mahany)” is nothing more than a full on abdication of our very lives.  If we are not individually responsible for our choices, then we cannot have a rational definition of LIFE; that is, if we don’t really commit the acts we commit, because the impetus is traced to a causal force outside of us, then we admit that we don’t really live at all.  We are all dead men walking.  There is no US to us…no YOU to your life.  And discussion about anything else is purely academic…irrelevant to functional reality.

And…ah….could it be that this is the very point this excerpt from “Community” is trying to make?  I believe it is. YOU are never really to blame for your “sins”.  It’s always your nature merely filling the vacuum that the group creates for it.  So, while on one hand they will explain that you are evil, it isn’t because YOU decided to act on any independent or individual belief, as though you can know anything at all, or exist as an autonomous agent, but rather it is merely your nature, which is attracted to the evil influences of the collective like a positively charged particle is attracted to a negatively charged one; as the moon is drawn inexorably to the earth. The moon and particles don’t really THINK, they just fill the space created for them by the collective environment outside of them.

So, while on one hand the author(s) of this book attempts to appear sympathetic to your history of failure (for failure in the “orthodox” Christian metaphysic is utterly presumed) and absolute existential inadequacy and impotence (for even when you think you are a success you are a “spiritual” failure; and the “spiritual” is the only thing that matters, remember), what they are really prescribing is that same old bugaboo, the group metaphysic.  This segment of the book merely reinforces the fact that according to their metaphysic, all relevant morality and existence is always a function of the group.  “On our own” we don’t really possess any value, which means anything we do “on our own” or “in our own strength”, to proof-text the Bible, is meaningless and irrelevant, which means that we, “on our own” cannot really be described as existing at all.

And finally, I question whether or not the author(s) thought through the wisdom of inserting this section into the book.  On its face, and to the less informed reader I would think that it appears to be nothing more than a rank contradiction to the efficacy and importance of the “community” so categorically subscribed.  I mean, at first glance this is how I interpreted it.  I thought,  ‘Why advocate adherence to the collective and the hive mentality if trouble is best avoided by being alone?’

And then after a more careful examination of the paragraph and in light of the overall context of the book I realized what I already knew:  that there is no such thing as alone in the group metaphysic these people believe in.  Alone you have NO value; no meaning; no relevancy, and therefore no truth.  Thus, alone cannot be defined as any manifestation of your existence, period, if this makes sense.  YOU as a legitimate agent or even meaningful concept is categorically denied in Christianity today.  There is only ever the collective.  It’s just a matter of what collective into which you happen to find yourself integrated, since you WILL, as a matter of existential certainly, be fully integrated into a group, where you WILL be its direct extension.  What the promoters of this book are doing is merely attempting to cull you from your “immoral” collective and bring you into their “moral” one.  And who gets to make the distinction?  Who gets to decide which group is the good one and which is the bad; and which we praise and which we waggle our fingers at and cry “shame!!”?

Not you.  Not me.  Not anyone IN the group, for the group doesn’t get to dictate its own definitions of, well…anything.  The group is merely the group. Full of totally depraved windbags and assholes who together merely prove the metaphysical point:  that the formal manifestation of the SELF is really the GROUP.  And from this is illustrated the ethical point:  It is in the group where your totally depravity attains relevancy and meaning (for the individual, total depravity is without any efficacy, as the individual cannot be defined as actually BEING anything at all).  So, it is only via the group that people realize the actuality of their absolute sin nature; their full on rejection of God and their categorical commitment to works of evil.  You do not attain any goodness from the group, is the point.  No, the group is where the consequences of your total depravity are made manifest; made relevant, made fetid and offensive to God.  The group must from that collective place be led…and by this what they really mean is compelled by FORCE, under the guise of “spiritual” authority (“Authority always equals FORCE”–John Immel).

For how can he who is totally depraved be led?  Being led presumes a relationship where both parties are equally cognizant of the concepts used to communicate; where TRUTH by both parties is understood and reasonably arrived at via the inherent cognitive abilities of each; the understanding of the metaphysical singularity of SELF and the inherent right to pursue SELF, thus.  The totally depraved man cannot actually think; cannot actually understand.  His depravity is absolute (though many Christians say this isn’t true; they are either liars or they are ignorant…or both, as is often the case).  Which means that he can make no distinction between right and wrong, truth or lie.  He cannot conceptualize anything because he cannot even recognize himself or his world as being distinct from pure, infinite evil.  Thus, and again, he must be forced…compelled by violence and fear into “God’s righteousness”, like an animal.  Or worse, a devil.

And this, of course, I realized is exactly what this excerpt is arguing.  The group ALWAYS leads you and me into debauchery.  So why advocate a group at all then?  Because the group is the introduction…the doorway into what they are really advocating, which is the same thing ALL collectivists advocate:  the robbing and murder of the individual in service to the government.  And this is most easily done when individuals are gathered.  And by government I mean the authority of those who proclaim themselves, by themselves, to be the mediator between “god” (or whatever Primary Consciousness) and man.  And in Christianity today who are these mediators?

The authority.  The called.  The pastors.  The priests.  The “men of God”.

And that’s why you see so many churches popping up in so many affluent areas of this country.  Are you educationally or intellectually challenged?  Lazy?  Like to opine about this and that and the folks at the family gatherings are getting tired of and bored by your spluttering monologues and you endless rants about how much you hate liberals, and Obama, or the the moral failures of the youth in this culture, or how everyone is on their fucking phones all time and no one wants to have a conversation (when smartphones were actually invented so people and especially kids wouldn’t have to talk to your boring ass)…yes, are you this kind of person and desire a comfortable income with little to no effort?

Or even better, you want to get rich?

What do you do?

You start a church near rich people.  It is literally as simple as that.

And when all the smoke and mirrors and spiritual piffle and Christanese buzzwords and pseudo-psychology and trite social commentary are removed, THAT’S really why this book was written.  It’s not for you, it’s for them.

“What’s Your Story?

…each person will share his or her story in 10-15 minutes.

…Keep in mind that no big presentation is required.  You are simply expected to introduce yourself.  A great way to do this is to identify three key people who have played significant roles in your life, three events that have effected you, and three places that are special to you. “

(p.11, 12, “Community:  Your pathway to progress”, North Point Ministries, 2008)

Notice in this introductory blurb concerning how best to introduce oneself to the newly organized “care group” (in Sovereign Grace Ministries, I noticed that this title was perfectly ironical) the three suggestions for doing so are examples wherein the person explains how he or she was affected by his or her world, and not the other way around.  Meaning, the person regaling the group with their cliff-notes autobiography are advised to present themselves as the product of their environment…as an effect and not a cause.  They are not counseled to discuss their hobbies or interests, or their past decisions or current desires, or the choices they have made and the consequences of those choices reaped, good or bad.  No, what they are asked to do is explain the three ways they have arrived at that place (the new group), at that time (of the group’s choosing) by the influence or will of OTHER:  OTHER people, OTHER places, or OTHER events.

In other words…

The “people” who have influenced you never includes YOU as having anything to do with the why or how of that influence.

The place…they are not interested in your observations or how you interpret the environment, or what it means to you or how you willfully experienced it.

The event…they are not interested in hearing about your impact on the event, how your presence and existence defined it and gave truth to it for YOUR life and YOUR context.

And this is deliberate.  This is the setting of the stage in your mind for the group metaphysic they are soon to explain is the only real and efficacious hermeneutic for reality; and then they will demand you categorically accept this hermeneutic in order to be approved by God and welcome in His “community”.  This will eventually be followed by either an explicit or implicit (but fully presented and fully expected and fully required) demand that you subordinate your beliefs, opinions, will, time, and property to the “authority” of the pastoral leadership.  For since no individual in the group is capable of defining truth or morality alone by metaphysical definition, the pastoral leadership will be presented as those who represent, by divine gift and insight, the sum and substance of the moral and epistemological (truth understood) value of the group.  This is for no other reason than to secure power over you and as many as they can “evangelize”…that is, cull from the herd of the unwashed, brainless, hopeless, cosmically-rejected masses for the purpose of exploitation.

This is and was the operating procedure of Sovereign Grace Ministries to a bulls-eye, and the consequences were and continue to be a full on disaster.  And in America right now we have literally thousands if not millions of SGM-like disasters teetering upon the precipice.  And the more we remain blind to the collectivist philosophy which places them there–that Satanic catalyst for every horror and human catastrophe ever wrought upon the earth, from the Garden of Eden until now–the higher and higher the precipice rises.

Now, I understand that at this point I may still seem to be reaching a bit.  Exaggerating; taking myself too seriously; quibbling; nitpicking; exacting.

You might think so.  But then, we are just getting started.

*

“Most of us charge hard after progress.  We seek it in our careers, in our kids, in our marriages, and even in our tennis games.  We work hard, read books, attend seminars, and take lessons, all in an effort to make today better than yesterday and tomorrow better than today.  But what about our spiritual lives?”

(p.15, “Community:  Your pathway to progress”, North Point Ministries, 2008)

Presently we will observe, as an absolute certainty, that individual progress in our autonomous lives is mutually exclusive of and contradictory to our progress in our “spiritual” lives, which is collective.  This is merely a further manifestation of the fundamental parsing of man’s singular metaphysical SELF, his existential oneness, which is the prevailing and orthodox metaphysical theme in Christianity today (most egregiously noted, presumed, and preached in the neo-Calvinist/Reformed movement) and since the days of Augustine.

The worldly and fallen flesh of man’s body represents individual progress; while man’s unseen spirit/soul represents the “real” man…his “spiritual” progress.  This is the non-material man…the “true” man.  The part of man of which he only experiences as a second-hand observer.  The part of man which is fully integrated into the collective of God’s people.  The relevant and eternally (assuming you are actually elected to salvation, which, by doctrinal definition you can’t ever really know) binding part of your singular SELF.  Which is a contradiction, I know.  But understand that all of reality according to the Platonist Christian group metaphysic is really based upon that which cannot be observed “in the flesh”; which means it cannot be observed at all, period.  This is the root of the false interpretation of Hebrews’ “faith is the hope of things unseen”:  What you observe in the here and now with your fleshly senses is not in fact reality, but is merely a “shadow” of reality.  Reality lay beyond the body, which is simply another way of saying that it is impossible for YOU to apprehend it in any way, full stop.  Thus, you must have faith; and “faith” thus defined is, when all the logic is parsed out and taken to its only rational conclusion, a complete concession of and submission to the existential hermeneutic (how you interpret ALL of reality) of the “divinely called leaders of men who stand in god’s stead as your authority”.  Which is simply another way of saying that you exist and were born for the express and ironic purpose of DYING…that is, dying for the “greater good”, or the “good of the community”, as dictated to you by your human authorities, who are those men serving as proxies for the Primary Consciousness (e.g. God’s Will/God’s Plan for Your Life (Modern American Protestantism), the Workers Utopia (Soviet Union, Cuba), the National Ideal (North Korea), the Economic Ideal (Jeff Davis’s Confederate South), the Union of States (Lincoln’s Federal North), the Racial Ideal (National Socialist Germany), the Collective Good (American Liberal Progressive movement), the Natural/Divine/Traditional Morality (American Conservative Christian movement).

Indeed, the great dichotomy and irreconcilable chasm between your body and soul is probably the greatest contradiction and fallacy of reason in the history of religion.

*

“And what does progress from a spiritual standpoint look like?  Admittedly, spiritual growth can be a little hard to measure.  Because God is involved in the process, it’s a bit mysterious.”

(p.15, “Community:  Your pathway to progress”, North Point Ministries, 2008)

Keep this self-admittedly nebulous declaration in mind.  This is the fundamental equivocation which forms the impenetrable defense of  this doctrine and group metaphysic against all denunciation and criticism from anyone for any reason in any context.  The root philosophical premise–that is, the essential premise of the entire philosophy–is that there is no actual or discernible distinction between man’s SELF and God’s Sovereign Will.

This is important.

It allows these collectivist mystics to punt ALL of their many and serious contradictions into the great cosmic abyss of God’s mystery.

It is easy to understand then just why they immediately, in the introduction, before they move on to anything else make this clear:  How this all works is a mystery at the end of the day.  How you can both be you and the group (NOT you) is simply a contradiction you’ll have to accept because to deny it is to deny the power of God to “make all things possible”.  This is rank deception and, again, is intended to nip any and all metaphysical or doctrinal disagreement in the bud.

Because the “truth” ultimately boils down to mystery, they can move the plumb line for truth anywhere they require in order to maintain control.  If you zig, they zag.  I call it Whack-A-Mole philosophy.  You can never pin them down because there is no benchmark of reason in their doctrine; and this is because their “truth” is not a function of reason, because reason they rightly assume is an extension of observable reality, which they do not concede is a legitimate reality.  Rather, real “truth” is a function of the utterly exclusive and unknowable (to you) realm of the “spirit”.  “Spiritual” progress then requires that you forsake reason as the necessary presumption for truth and abandon your senses as an efficacious bridge to reality, and instead wholly subordinate your mind to the mystics who claim a clairvoyance that you as an individual cannot possibly possess.

It is amazing how many otherwise educated and erudite people simply nod in agreement when they are fed this cold porridge.  They are told that they–no matter how successful or prosperous or educated or admired or powerful or revered in the community they are (usually much more significantly so than any Pastor, who is usually intellectually unimpressive and educationally nascent)–yes, they are told that they do not really know anything at all, and that their success is in reality a laughingstock of farce and completely discarded by God–who supposedly loves them with an immeasurable love–as pure piffle at best, and wicked arrogance at worst.  And these people think that this is just the most profound and breathtaking wisdom to which they’ve ever been exposed.  Incredible.

It would be utterly comical if it weren’t so deadly and so indicative of the danger this “Christian” movement represents. Even the most astute among us seem unable to resist its guile.

Stay tuned for part four.

,

Yesterday I mentioned the primer, “Community: Your Pathway to Progress” and I gave you a small preamble (thanks, John Immel) to my examination and criticism of this gem of Christianity-as-channeling-Karl Marx, which essentially preaches the gospel of collectivism both forthrightly and with child-like giddiness.  Today I will begin my formal critique of said primer, offering my thoughts as to the underlying metaphysical and epistemological contradictions, deceptions, and outright lies which form the offensive thrust of the nefarious objective:  to control individuals for the purpose of acquiring power.  Which is really nothing more than the right to destroy anyone and anything in the interest of pursuing an entirely false, irrational, and impossible standard of “truth” and “morality”.  A utopia which, being wholly without reason and demanding the wholesale removal of LIFE in order to be realized, is actually nothing at all.

However, before I do that I would like to comment on a little remark by someone down in North Carolina this week as we were discussing the collectivist particulars of a certain paragraph in “Community”.  She said, “I don’t care about that.”  And went on to explain that if she finds the doctrine at her church odious or irrational she simply ignores it, and goes about the business of church presumably as if nothing disagreeable were really taught from the pulpit at all.

My opinion is that this is a very dangerous approach to church at worst, and renders the “church-going experience” utterly irrelevant at best.  If you find yourself in disagreement with the doctrinal ideology of the church “body”, why on earth remain?  You are setting yourself up for inevitable failure in more ways than one by tacitly affirming the beliefs by your participation and yet functionally rejecting them.  Believe me, the “church” makes it a point to discover those who approach the doctrine this way.  They do not consider such members friends, nor people to be trusted with any modicum of responsibility.  They may suffer your presence while the tithing remains consistent and/or you aren’t causing any problems (that is, challenging their “authority”), but you will never experience the kind of spiritual growth, friendship, and support one would presume is the only real benefit of such a collaboration.

But even if they don’t find out…and even if you don’t care that they will never consider you a fit nor moral servant of Christ, and one whose salvation is likely dubious at best, you will still do more damage to your life and your family than benefit.

You may acquire some friends, even some who are doctrinally like-minded as you and reject the theological interpretations of the “elders”, and you may experience some tangible benefits such as a place to harbor your kids for an hour and a half every week or some valuable home-schooling connections or a golfing buddy or two.  But these benefits will only come at the cost of how you define reality.  That is, they will occur only in spite of who you really are.  And that is no kind of life.  I submit that there can be no true friendships, no truly edifying experiences or tangible benefits which come from mixing mutually exclusive assumptions about the worth of your life.  Your social life and your spiritual live with be a farce…a mere illusion of what you really think is going on.  Attending a church wherein the leadership presumes that you are not really yourself, and therefore have no value as an individual human being, and thus have no right by metaphysical definition to your own body or property can only end one way, sooner or later:  disaster.

And the irony is that the person of which I speak once attended Sovereign Grace Ministries for many years, and left only relatively recently amongst the morbid and fetid chaos, hypocrisy, and abuse.  And having been a fifteen-year member of Sovereign Grace Ministries myself I can say this:  Doing what this person is doing…the willingness to sweep the doctrinal disagreements under the rug did absolutely nothing to benefit that institution, its pastors, or laity.  It merely prolonged the suffering and human destruction, and promoted the full-on illusion for years and years past the point where it stopped being fun.

In short, if the church you are attending does not have a working definition of YOU, it means that they cannot possibly have a working definition of God.  So what exactly are you expecting to get out of it?  If you say relationships, I say they are based on lie.  If you say tangible benefits, I say they cost your soul.  You must continue to deceive both yourself and all with whom you share the sanctuary every Sunday morning, not to mention your children, who are presented, at best, with the strange and irrational and confusing dichotomy of a mommy and daddy who tell them not to believe the doctrines they are taught, and yet continue to willfully place them in classrooms with teachers who possess many kinds of authority, spiritual and educational and corporeal, who teach those very doctrines as being from God.  Think twice about “not caring” about the forcing of collectivist ideology down the throats of unsuspecting Christians, as rankly observed in this little primer I have next to me in this chair.  It will inevitably return to reap anguish upon your head, just as it has in the past.

Even now I could say to this person that we will never be close friends.  Because I utterly reject the metaphysical premises you either explicitly or implicitly concede by assuming that the church you are attending is just a fine place to hear about God and Man.  It isn’t a matter of getting along.  It is a matter of being able to define just who it is that we are supposed to be getting along with, and in the interest of just what we are supposed to define as God.  I cannot get along with someone who does not concede that they actually matter.  Because that person cannot by logical extension assume that I matter.  And if neither of us matter according to this person’s metaphysical assumptions, then there is no point in being friends because there is no friendship, period.  For friendship is moot.  Friendship based on absolute existential meaninglessness is not a friendship by definition.  And this is why, as much as it pains me to say it, I simply cannot stand being around Christians anymore…well, certain kinds of Christians.  Those who have to pray every meal and those who never miss church and those who have daily “devotionals” and those who evangelize their faith to the checkout girl or the waiter and have fish on their cars.  I just can’t do it anymore, because those are the people who always tow the reformed doctrinal line.  And my root metaphysic according to these church-going Christians is that I am a piece of shit.  And I refuse to associate myself with people who think that my absolute essence as a human being is shit.  And who think that they are shit, too.  We are all a big collective of shit going to hell “but for the grace of God” and the kindly ecclesiastical taskmasters He gives us to prod our blind asses along the narrow road.

Over. It.

*

“This study has been designed as an introduction to community.  As such, the focus of the first part of the study will be on getting to know everyone in the group.  Then you’ll spend some time discussing the importance of community itself.” (p.9)

So goes the first paragraph.  Sounds nice, right?  Benign.  Gentle.  Innocuous at worst.  Sure, everyone gets to know each other.  That’s nice.  Everyone matters.  Everyone is special.  Everyone is important.

Uh…but wait.  Are they?  This paragraph…indeed, the entire primer never mentions anything about the importance of the individual to the group.  Never mentions the fact that “group” is really nothing but a concept; a figment of man’s impressive imagination, but not actually existing…and thus, requiring the life of the single human being in order to possess any relevancy at all as a concept.

According to this introductory paragraph, the only thing with any explicit or implicit importance is “the community itself.”  In this short blurb the individual–the only thing which actually exists at all in this entire opening salvo–has been subordinated to the community, which exists as a SELF of its own.  You see, YOU are only important within the context of the group; and by this they mean…well, what kind of important do they mean?

Right.  Spiritually important.  Which means important to whom?  To God.  Which means that spiritually important is the only relevant kind of important.  And since this is a direct function of the group, God can only see the group, never YOU, individually.  For God is a rational God, you understand.  He wastes no time on the pointless–on the functionally non-existent–when He has the group by which is Will and Desire is rendered upon the Earth.

This is merely the initial introduction…the tip of the spear of the group metaphysic I mentioned in part one of this article.  You do not exist.  Only the group exists. You alone are nothing.  Thus, you must sacrifice (murder, destroy, erase, consider infinite nothingness) your SELF and relinquish the sum and substance of your body, mind, and possessions to the collective, which, as I explained in part one, is really the relinquishing of all these things to they who claim the right to rule the group by divine mandate, as the chosen representatives of the Primary Consciousness.  For you protestant Christians, particularly my reformed friends, this means that your pastor or pastors are God as far as you are concerned.  They are the bridge between your metaphysical depravity and God’s metaphysical perfection, which would normally be mutually exclusive.  Without them declaring the standard of truth which is also the moral ideal, to which ALL humanity must integrate itself (the root premise of the group metaphysic), you would be lost forever.  Adrift in a sea of absolute evil.

Still not convinced, huh?  Still think I’m taking this way too seriously?  Still think I should approach this primer like the person in North Carolina and simply care less?  Take a break?  Get a job?  Got too much time on my hands?  It’s all just a mystery anyway so let go and let God; for to be concerned with such things is for the lofty professor, and patriarchs of philosophy’s past who argued over such things and yet never arrived at anything other than paradox, and the ivory tower intellectual who gets paid to write about things that have so little relevance to rote humans living out their boring little lives…articles by the score which almost never see the light of day by any but a very few and very strange people with serious affect problems and no social acumen?  Still think this is little more than hyperbole?

We shall see.

Stay tuned for part three.

This weekend my family and I made our annual week-long trip to North Carolina to visit some friends…a couple and their three children.  Since this vacation is primarily about my wife and daughters getting some time with Mrs. X and her three children, I had a significant amount of time, being relieved of the normal duties of home, to putter around and sort of simply exist (Mr. X works the entire week we are there, and as he and I share very little in common, this is an understandable and acceptable arrangement…so, what I mean to say is that there really isn’t anyone in particular with whom I am expected to interact).  When this kind of situation occurs I find myself slipping happily into hours and hours of thought, staring out into space, twirling my glasses and occasionally closing my eyes.  But this time I was fortunate to be confronted with a specific task, and it manifested itself in the form of a little…well, I’d call it a primer (much larger than a pamphlet but much smaller than a book), which I found in the freebie bin outside a small Christian book store my wife and her friend like to frequent when we come for a visit.  This primer is titled, “Community: Your Pathway to Progress”, and it is published by an organization called North Point Ministries (here).  This primer was published in 2008, so keep in mind that it is a fairly recent periodical, not some throwback from decades ago and thus no longer relevant as indicative of the current American Christian psyche.

As I am always on the lookout for collectivist ideology inserting itself, as it is so often wont, into many organizations and schools of thought, but particularly into today’s evangelical Christian “orthodox” theology, which thanks to the Protestant Reformation provides the perfect host body for such evil, I was immediately intrigued by the title.  Back at our friends’ house I wasted no time in cracking the cover of this little virulent critter and was, to my delight, greeted with what can only be described as a perfect and perfectly concise exercise in modern evangelicalism laundering the ideas of Karl Marx…collectivist philosophy fully committed to what I call the Group Metaphysic.

What this means is simply that the root of human existential essence is not found in the individual person, but is purely a function of the group–the collective–into which a given person happens to find him or herself absorbed.  In this case, it is “the church”, but it can just as easily be the Party, the Tribe, the State, the People, the Masses, the Workers or other Social Classes, the Race, the Culture, the Movement, etc., etc.

Now, this of course is nothing new to Christianity.  Christianity since the days of Augustine has always been wholly devoted to the idea of the absolute denial and destruction of the individual in favor of the group metaphysic.  It is precisely how power over the masses can reside in the hands of either a resident autocrat or an oligarchy:  you tell people that they are literally non-existent without the group and then proceed to serve as the functional head of the group, privy to the ideals and doctrines and ways of the group as prescribed by the Primary Consciousness, having a special relationship with it that the individual members of the group cannot have, by metaphysical definition.  The Primary Consciousness can be, and usually is, or at the very least represents, god…meaning the Divine Will.  Now, in Christianity, God, naturally, serves as this Primary Consciousness.  In Marxism the Primary Consciousness is the “Workers Utopia”; in National Socialism it is the Racial Ideal manifest via the Aryan State; in the modern American Liberal Progressive Movement it is the “Common Good”; in the modern American Conservative movement it is “American Exceptionalism” which is always fused with an implied and impossible moral standard by which human beings are judged good or evil according to how well they adhere to said standard.  For example, homosexuality and homosexual marriage do not fit the moral standard and therefore are antithetical and even harmful to America.  In all of these examples, humanity gets is collective worth–which means its actual worth–from its integration into the ways and means and beliefs of the Primary Consciousness as dictated (forced upon them) by the “divinely” enlightened and appointed leadership (which is somehow in a unique metaphysical position to interpret the Will of the Primary Consciousness…and they never have a rational explanation for just how this is possible).  And naturally this always involves group integration.  Since the Standard of Truth, which is simultaneously the Moral Ideal, is a direct function of the Primary Consciousness and is thus outside of you, the individual, it is impossible for YOU, alone, as an autonomous SELF, to be reconciled to the Standard.  YOU as an individual must be discarded, denied, sacrificed (preferably figurative, but literally just as well), and you must join your fellow man in group integration for the sole purpose of affirming and promoting and propagating the Will of the Primary Consciousness, which is, ipso facto, the Collective Will. Never the individual will.  Never your will.  Never your SELF.  You, as an individual are, frankly, a cosmic farce.  An existential illusion.  A lie.

So like I was saying this is nothing new to Christianity, which has been responsible for countless murders, wars, oppressions, theft and torture in service to this evil philosophy.  However, it seemed to me a rare and fortunate find to stumble upon such a concise Christian primer on the subject that is so gleefully committed to and so flippantly expressive of the utter destruction and pillaging of the very thing Christ came to save:  individual human beings.  Keep in mind that the producers of this primer are self-admitted emissaries of the Gospel.  That is, they are a church of self-described Christians.

Take for example this quote:

“Although a community group is not intended to be a support group, a Bible study group, a spiritual book club, or a social fellowship group, there are elements of each in every healthy group. The fundamental purpose of a community group, however, is for members to intentionally connect with each other so that they’re “doing life together” and growing spiritually.  (p. 65)

So, what does this mean, exactly?  Well, it’s not really that difficult to interpret, so you likely already have it.  Simply put, it means that these Christians are specifically NOT meeting in order to discuss problems, or to learn the Bible, or to share resources, all of which are I submit fundamental components of “spiritual growth”, (in contradiction to this quote’s very last assertion), but to learn how to “do life together”.  This is a rank nod to the group metaphysic…the idea that the collective alone actually exists, and therefore must fundamentally replace YOUR individual life.  “Doing life together” then really means the rejection of life in service to the group, which by “God’s Will” possesses the only just authority over and ownership of you and all you are and all you own.  The author or authors of this primer are openly declaring that the purpose of their groups is not to grow as Christians, and/or to evangelize the world so that individuals become Christians, but rather to become collectivists. To fully embrace the group metaphysic.

In short, it’s not about Christ, it’s about control.  Because control over people and their property is the ONLY real and rational motivation for promoting and securing the mass consumption of collectivist ideology.  And the only reason for control is power.  And the inevitable outcome of this kind of power is the death of man.  And so this ideology is not only not Christian but is, I submit, utterly Satanic.

Stay tuned for part two.