The Bible, eh? You can’t trust that, can you? It’s all made up, isn’t it?
Well, that may be. Or not. Increasingly though, I find it to be more true and relevant to my life and the times we live in than anything else.
They say that only two things in life are certain, death and taxes. And I must add, the resurrection seems a lot more believable than any tax relief this Easter.
In an effort to become a better person, and to solve problems with other people, I have been reflecting on why it has taken me so long to see things in Christianity that have been right in front of me the whole time. Part of the problem, I think, is that when I was taught ‘Religious and Moral Education’ at school, I was already part of a generation that had shunned our great tradition and embraced a sneering pseudo-philosophy, where the only certainty was nihilistic uncertainty.
When I was taught religion at school, it wasn’t at a posh boarding school, with choir practice in a beautiful English chapel with candles and charming – if a little grabby – Anglican vicars. No, It was in a 1960s government constructed slab of a building, by government licensed teachers, union members, authoritarian socialist bullies. No beauty would spring forth in that mechanistic monotony.
They focused largely on ‘discussions’ about literal interpretations of the bible, 7th day Adventists, and the incompatibility of the Genesis timeline with the geological timeline. In other words, they set the table with their questions, before you had a chance to have your own questions.
Partly as a result of this ‘loaded question’ education, I spent many years as an angry, evangelical, snarky atheist. Probably as a way of dealing with living in a destitute secular society.
So, in 2021, it came as a bit of a shock to realise that I am a Christian. I have been all along, and I didn’t even know it.
It was really embarrassing to discover this. I didn’t even know how to bring it up to my wife at first, who is Jewish, by the way.
I also didn’t know what a libertarian was back then (the opposite of authoritarian, FYI), but I later discovered I had always been one. The first clue was probably me thinking ‘If this Jesus guy was such an amazing rebel in service of the ultimate good, why on earth would he go round telling people to pay their taxes and obey the state?’
I had, however, read the bible from a young age so many of the stories were always in the back of my mind.
One of the things that did bother me for a long time – from at least that self-conscious age of 10 – was the render unto Caesar, what is Caesar’s story.
However, I think I understand this issue much better now, post covid.
I think it is related to the idea that it is harder for a rich man to get into heaven than a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.
We have seen this playing out throughout the response to the pandemic in the past couple of years. People who know that what is being done is fundamentally wrong and evil but are afraid to speak up for fear of losing their career, social standing or being ostracised. People have been going along with the mob or the authorities in the hope of being left alone and in the fear of what will happen to them if they fall out of favour with the tribe.
Better to sit down, stay quiet, fill your arms up with mRNA and scapegoat those who ask questions. We don’t want life to be uncomfortable at all now, do we?
Do you know that awful type? The wealthy father that points to a taxi driver, or road sweeper, or some other manual worker and says to their child: ‘stay in school, you don’t want to end up like that poor wretch’. The kind who equate virtue only with financial success.
This is a theme throughout the sermon on the mount. Wealth has taken on a superstitious talismanic quality for many Christians because of this discussion on material wealth. Many people actively strive for poverty (I think unnecessarily) as a reaction to that shallow view of wealth as a virtue, worth bending your principles for.
The lesson is clear to us now, we cannot accept this view if we are to strive for true virtue. When we must take moral stances against the state, our benevolent corporate overlords and our many friends family and colleagues who subordinate themselves to their pay checks at all costs, we must remind ourselves that these people are not special because they have wealth or the power of the state. They have no special knowledge or rights before God. We need only pay them what they will take from us by force, as a form of self-defence, and nothing more.
We must have faith, as equal children of Abraham, Adam and Eve, that we can discern truth in our own lives as well as any servant of Caesar or the WHO. We need not be fearful. We should know that there is freedom, and the Lord will provide us with a way to feed ourselves.
We need to have faith that if Klaus Schwab and company decide to turn off our social credit score, God will provide for us.
We need to be humble enough to realise that if we have wealth or comfort, it is by God’s grace, and not because we are smart, or we deserve it. Not unless we come to our wealth and comfort first by honouring the highest of highs, truth, love and forgiveness.
Now I know that for me, the ‘render unto Caesar’ advice is letting us know that we should not waste our life force in opposition to things that we cannot control. Don’t give those idiots in charge any more of your attention than you have to. Give them back their little tokens if they want them and move on with your life. Focus first on truth and betterment and worry not. More will be provided to you. You will find a way, and God will provide.
It sounds trite, but it isn’t. For those of us who’ve viewed the pandemic response by governments as a terrifying over-reach that has destroyed the notion of consent, removed all credibility from the West and turned our entire society into an open-air decentralised prison camp (de-concentration camps, if you will). The scariest thing has been the conformists, urging us, like zombified agent-smith avatars, to conform. Trust the state. Love Caesar. Be a rule-taker, not a rule breaker.
It is has been terrifying. We are the character in I am Legend (the book about vampires, not the cabal-re-written Will Smith movie about – you guessed it – vaccines saving the day). We are surrounded by people who wish us harm and death for disagreeing with them. We are surrounded by concentration camp guards, and Stockholm syndrome victims, who would snitch on us in a heartbeat, and applaud the choke-slamming brutality seen by police in Australia and Canada in recent months.
Pay unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, is a line for us, in these times. It is a reminder to be realistic about what we can fight, and what we cannot.
And it is nested within the wider story. We must bear our cross and willingly sacrifice ourselves. Even if it means facing our death so that others who cannot bear our particular cross can benefit from our sacrifice.
If I, a grown-up, cannot stand up to fat and stupid politicians and say ‘no, you’re not allowed to inject me with random experimental gunk, prevent me from working, or tell me I’m sick when I’m not’, then what chance do my children have?
Jesus tells us to pick our battles. Then he shows us how to fight one. By voluntarily sacrificing ourselves, and not sacrificing others.
But I didn’t know any of that before now. The last two years have been revelatory.
I’ll admit, there was a lot of influence from my YouTube heroes before they all got banned. Styxhexxenhammer666, Stef, James Delingpole, Jordan Peterson, Owen Benjamin, and recently, Kanye West. (I know, right? Blame Delingpole)
The believability part dropped into place for me by making simple comparisons and accepting the thin end of the wedge.
You don’t have to believe that Jesus was literally God on earth to see the incredible relevance of his message to our times.
The first part was letting my guard down. Accepting that there is value here in this book.
I’m well versed by the four horsemen in the anti-Christian argument. If God is good and loving, then why does he hurt people? The book has been edited. There are no dinosaurs in it, etc.
Jordan Peterson makes the counter argument – Just because it is artificial, doesn’t make it not real.
Further, if it has been refined and protected for millennia, across geography race and culture, then that is evidence that it has value to human beings. Religion is a human universal, and if we believe in the science of evolution, then that proves that there is an evolutionary utility to religious belief that out-competes and out-survives atheism over time. I.e. We are religious creatures, and the book only reflects us. We are not meat robots programmed by a manipulative book.
In an interview with Molyneux, Owen Benjamin said ‘When Jesus said this wine is my blood, and this bread is my body- that dude was clearly stating that if you aren’t into metaphors, this club isn’t for you.
So why is it all in code and symbols? JBP thinks it’s all about Jungian dream decipherment and the intuition of artists. Maybe, partly. However, I believe what we’re seeing all around us now with social media censorship around covid, Ukraine, etc is a real-time indicator of the true value of Christianity – the messages are a kind of Noah’s Ark. An inoculation against the evils of society that are ever-present within us.
Matthew 4:13 Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing, see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.
The reason our virtues are written in code to decipher is:
- If they were just stated as moral principles or facts, the mob or the authorities will simply attack them and/or us, as shown by Jesus’ final betrayal by the cancel culture of the day. That is how the tall poppy gets cut down.
- By letting us decipher the meaning ourselves, it becomes our own knowledge through visualisation and cross-reference to our own experience.
Thus, the code is both camouflage protection and delivery mechanism.
In the same way when learning to drive a ship, you can read all of the books and have every technical aspect explained to you in diagrams. However, to actually learn the skill of doing rather than just knowing, you need to watch an expert ship-handler many times to visualise the approach before you start to copy him yourself.
In this way, when you come to act by yourself, you have the visual mental model of how it should be done, deeply ingrained in your subconscious. This allows you to make the constant little corrections when you have to drive the ship yourself, much more instinctively than by conscious thought.
You’ll have many past examples living in your memory as micro-simulations to help guide your instincts as you learn for yourself the only real way to learn anything – by doing.
So, we can see the immediate day to day relevance of the Bible now, by reading the stories, visualising them as real, and integrating them into our own lives by cross-reference.
Practical Applications – Self Defence
Do people want you to hand over more than half of your productivity to the predatory classes because of some end of the world plague, famine, flooding, warming, cooling, whatever? Just say no. God did a flood, and now we have rainbows, because he’s not going to kill us all again. We’re done with doomsayers.
Do people want you to sacrifice your children to mega-corporate medical experiments with no liability or indemnity? Or force people who disagree with government edicts out of society? Or kill citizens of a far-off country because their predatory class and our predatory class are shit-talking?
Just say no. God already sacrificed his son, the best human being who ever lived. No human sacrifice can ever be greater, so we’re done. No more human sacrifice, thank you, please. And if you still need to quench your bloodthirst, here’s some wine.
Do people want you to believe that you can ‘save the planet from evil humans’ by buying Vegan lasagne from bloody Sainsburys? Nope. Jesus said ‘All food is clean, but it is wrong for a man to eat anything that causes someone else to stumble. It is better not to eat meat or drink wine or to do anything else that will cause your brother to fall. So whatever you believe about these things keep between yourself and God.’
That would be the exact opposite of the virtue-signalling, prayer-in-public, pagan festival of Veganuary now, wouldn’t it?
Do you want to speak the truth to power? Do not expect to be loved or embraced by the mob, or those who serve power. Protect your livelihood in advance by becoming a self-employed tradesman and work for cash in hand, like that wee joiner from Galilee.
And pay your tax, if you must. But don’t pay any mind to them beyond what they forcibly extract from you. Don’t believe their lies.
According to Mr Delingpole, the most repeated sentiment in the Bible is ‘Be Not Afraid’. Well, that’s pretty much the opposite of what everyone who wants to take advantage of you says, isn’t it?
That is the power of the bible and the message of Christ. When people tell us to pay attention to them and their fear-mongering, we have a host of answers ready-made with which to tell them to get lost.
Practical Suggestions Leap Forth:
1. Get a backup profession that doesn’t require a state license (I chose tiling and cooking)
2. Switch off TV news – All of it. Don’t surrender your mind to their paradigm
3. When advertising comes on, put your TV sound on mute/zero
4. Do not hide. Maintain good relationships, and be honest
5. Cultivate things that they cannot tax from you – relationships, reciprocity, knowledge
6. Do not be afraid. Consider the birds, etc…
Just think of the madness of our world, when we’re told to be afraid of:
Invisible symptomless illnesses that kill indiscriminately (so long as you’re already past your life expectancy, with 6 co-morbidities)
- Rich people & Poor people
- Criminals & the police
- Food! The new pagan cult of avocado worship, based on the fear of carbon!?
- Drugs that the government doesn’t like, but that we really like
- Being employed & being self employed
- Russians, covid, the weather, etc.
Every story on BBC news is a variation on ‘isn’t the world a terrible and fearful place, and that’s why we need more government’.
I don’t care that the world financial system is about to collapse, and they’re trying to hold on to their power through cold wars, hot wars, one-world government, censorship, population reduction and inflation.
I’m a working-class Yankee-Jock hybrid, and I’m going to plod on and have faith that they cannot take things from me that are not theirs. They cannot take away my skills, my relationships, my knowledge or my soul. So let the chips fall where they may.
The Lord will provide, even for the cancelled. And when it is time to bear our own cross, we must do it willingly and immediately, in the knowledge that sacrificing ourselves is the only sacrifice to make.
And we must not worry about the global cabal planning to restrict all our freedoms.
Cooncil Comforts
Have you walked around a council estate in Hartlepool or Grimsby recently? It’s quite liberating. Those people already have a ‘parallel economy.’
They still know their neighbours’ names. They still go buy food from markets that have probably stood since the Danes arrived on these shores. They’ve already endured 108 years of state interference in their lives. They just knock back a couple of cans at the end of the day and get on with it. They are freer than most.
There’s a reason the proles were the most free people in 1984. They know these idiots at the top are useless, and that their promises amount to less than nothing. They’ll pay their taxes, paying no further mind at all to promises of eutopia or threats of catastrophe.
It’s only those new to being disappointed by the state, that still cling on to the hope that if they believe hard enough in their cause or politician of choice, then utopia will ensue.
The working class, however, pay only unto Caesar what they must.
One thing we in the working class know full well is that your boss who thinks he knows what he’s doing doesn’t have a bloody clue. He only knows how to pay people to do it for him.
It’s the same with these elites. They think they’re in charge. They think they’re going to change the world. But most of them haven’t changed a lightbulb for 40 years, so why are we worried about them?
In truth, if we stop worshipping money, approval and violence, then they have nothing to offer. The power for that lies within us.
We’ll beat them because God is truth, consent and love personified.
The battle is in our own hearts and minds, and those of any friends and family we can possibly influence with our example. Turn off the TV and speak to your neighbours. That is how you defeat the parasites.
Don’t let them tax what isn’t theirs. Your relationships, your time, your emotions, your skills and your soul do not belong to Caesar.