Terminal Salvation

Orphan mentality

Not allowing ourselves to experience genuine unconditional love of God produces insecure, envious, jealous orphans. Insecure people act out of their orphan spirit, drive by a constant inner dialogue of constant comparison and competition. They project their insecurities outward, and use performance-based acceptance or rejection as two complementary tools of manipulation and control, to achieve desired behavior conditioning from people around them.

Control and Oppression

Once a measure of control is achieved, people who made it to the top strive to build systems that would codify their fictional superiority, thus cementing the injustices, unfairness, and inequality. This gave rise to monarchies, slaveries, cast systems, and various flavors of religious hierarchies. The tools of social conditioning that proved to be very useful, time and again, are shame, guilt, rejection, fear, punishment, and pain. These tools become integrated into various social, cultural, and religious expressions, and with a passage of time they got to be perceived as “normal”.

Resistance and Rebellions

Some people are more malleable than others. For various reasons, the don’t mount enough resistance to being treated as second-rate humans, or even subhumans. Others, with a stronger sense of justice and self-worth, resent this conditioning, since it robs them of their essential human dignity and worth. That breeds a constant discontent, which may spill into concerted, organized actions by the oppressed masses.

Revolutions

The oppressed, usually when they hit rock bottom, begin to unite and act together to overthrow the oppressive yokes. This gives us revolutions, which serve as quite imperfect and often violent engines of progress in this broken world. Unfortunately, people overthrowing the old order have just as much, and perhaps even more of orphan mentality as the people against whom they rebel.

Reformations

If either the victorious revolutionaries, or the ruling classes are concerned enough about their legacy and posterity, they will seek to build social, cultural, legal, economic, and political institutions that codify justice, fairness, and equality. They voluntarily cede a measure of their power and control, and by distributing it, they seek to empower others. In doing so, they ensure much of the forward progress of the people groups they represent (usually nations), and avert future upheavals. This gives us reformations, which serve as slow but much more steady and reliable engines of progress in this world.

Losing Collective Power

When groups of people become prosperous, people tend to forget that their prosperity came at a price. They become disinterested in being responsible citizens, and start focusing on consumption, entertainment, and various cultural, economic, and bodily excesses. By virtue of that attention shift, they voluntarily cede their collective power. A similar phenomenon can happen if groups of people suddenly become impoverished (e.g., after an economic crisis or a war). They lose the patience for slow and steady progress, and they begin to yearn for a king-like figure that would come and save them from their poverty and collective shame. By adopting such mentality, they also cede their collective power.

Control and Oppression

As we know from history, power vacuum can only exist untapped for a brief time. Sooner rather than later, opportunists arise, seize the power, and begin to create institutions that codify their fictional superiority. That takes us back to control and oppression.  And the cycle repeats, albeit on a higher level of human development.

Theoligical Revolution and Cultural Transformation

Is there a way out? I believe there is. All of what I described above concerns things that are imposed on people from the outside in. Real transformations are only possible from the inside out. The thing that is sorely needed today is a bona fide theological revolution that seeks to restore the image of God in humankind, to restore the value of humankind to the way God sees it, and to bring the various levels of national and corporate governance in line with expressing the genuine father-heart of God.

Only people who are able to receive the real love of their creator Daddy God are able to give real love. I hold no lasting hope in purely humanistic governments, politics, or man-made religious systems. I have a profound hope in and for the kingdom of God, maintained and expressed by mature sons and daughters of God, who are able express his tangible identity, love, and power in a wholesome, honest, and unhypocritical way.

This has to happen both in our thinking and living, in a truly integral, non-sectarian, and culturally relevant way. Furthermore, it has to be expressed through the full spectrum of institutions and establishments, and not only in philosophical or religious lecture halls. Entire cultures need to be impacted and transformed, before we can begin to see truly substantial and large-scale effects.