Let My People Think

Posts tagged ‘culture’

A brief history of human institutions

Cain and Abel

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”.
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History

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Meet Jesus Christ, our new CEO

Jesus in the BoardroomIn modern Western Christianity Jesus is thought to be confined to the church’s very limited sphere of influence. That typically includes issues of afterlife, personal morality, interpersonal relationships, and an assortment of marital and sexual issues.

As far as leadership, governance, and financial issues are concerned, those are typically confined to running a registered non-profit, which serves as an organizational shell for a given religious fellowship. Things like national governance, corporate governance, banking system, debt issues, welfare, immigration policies, healthcare, and many others are considered to be the prerogatives of a secular state. And since we accept the idea of separation of “church” and state, many honest-to-God Christians are quite content with such distribution of responsibilities.

So naturally, our Christian worldview is largely circumscribed by this bias, and typically doesn’t go outside of these unquestioned, culturally imposed boundaries.

However, this limited understanding is not supported by the Scriptures.

Here’s one litmus test for your theological prism. When you think about Sodom and Gomorrah and the reason for God’s displeasure with those cities, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? More likely than not, your answer is focused on issues of sexual nature. Now that you’ve answered this first question, then my next question is – are there any other reasons for God’s displeasure with those two cities that come to mind? Anything at all?
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History, Just Thinking

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