1.) It is more accurate to say that where the God of the Bible is not owned and worshipped in a social order the consequence is that the State will absolutized and so worshiped, whether in a de facto or de jure sense. The citizens will become subjects and all will believe that “in the state we live and move and have our being.”
2.) All social orders must have transcendence in order to operate. They can choose either from a transcendent, transcendent (the God of the Bible) or they can create an immanent transcendent. Of course, an immanent transcendent is a contradiction but when a transcendent, transcendent is rejected then something must serve in its place. What happens with an immanent transcendent is that something subjective (usually the State as seen in history) is inflated with a pseudo objective transcendence so as to become that reality against which all other realities find their point of reference in order to find definition. When this happens the social order, as a whole is in transgression against the first commandment.
3.) Perhaps one of the most glaring examples of this in history occurred during the Soviet Show Trials of the 1930s. In that setting Stalin put on trial Communists who had been with Lenin during the success of revolutionary Marxism. They were the old lions of the revolution; Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, and Radek. These men went into the kangaroo court show trial where their guilt was predetermined. Though innocent, they pled guilty to the charges of treason brought against them. Now, many have offered that the false admission of guilt was due to threats against family members of the accused by Stalin. However, the accused knew that Stalin was no man to keep his word. No, their admission of guilt was because they believed the State was God (the transcendent, transcendent). They had based their whole lives as revolutionaries upon the premise that the State was God. Now, the State (their God) was insisting they were guilty and being true believers they confessed to the guilt that their God said was theirs. If your God says your guilty, you are guilty whether you think you are or not.
4.) In this phrase “because being and meaning are both identifiable in terms of the state,” means that if and when the state becomes a social order’s transcendent, transcendent then the state becomes the arbiter of being and meaning. If you are a chameleon, then whatever color you are placed in as a background becomes the standard by which you know what color to turn to. In the same way when men make the state the transcendent, transcendent they play the chameleon to the state. All being and meaning are determined for the individual in the social order by the state in its metaphorical coloring.
5.) All of this is why Socrates chose to drink the hemlock as opposed to be banished by the state. Death was a better choice then to lose one’s being by being banished from one’s meaning maker.
6.) When this kind of situation obtains then reality becomes increasingly inverted. As Rush notes above, Liberty becomes tyranny and tyranny becomes liberty. We are seeing this in our culture. Reality is being set on its head. Men are women, and women are men. Marriage has no stable meaning and can include all kinds of permutations. Theft by taxation is called “paying your fair share.”
7.) Touching this statement by RJR; “it (the state) becomes the priestly agency of its own total power,” communicates that the tyrannical state playing the transcendent, transcendent not only will claim the authority of “King,” but also will exercise the power of “Priest.” This means that the state will mediate its own “salvation” to those living in the social order. Now, because everything is upside down in tyrannical orders as described this means that what is called “salvation,” will indeed be “destruction.” For example, playing the role of Priest, mediating salvation, the current tyrannical state in the West as said; “in order to be saved we need to import millions of third world people into our lands. This will give us more cheap labor.” However, in the mediation of this salvation, the West is being destroyed. Bureaucrats who work for the state often play this role of priest for the state.
8.) All this proves that a God or god concept is inescapable. All this proves that Atheism is a myth. All men take either the God of the Bible as God or they embrace a false god. There is no such thing as someone or some culture who.which has no god.
9.) When RJR uses this phrase; “salvation is a metaphysical unification of all being,” Rush is talking about humanist salvations. Humanist salvations require uniformity of all. This is due to the fact that all godheads must have unity. If the state is the god in the social order then all in the social order must be one with the god of the social order. Unification of all being is necessary. This truth explains why Rome persecuted the Christians who would not pinch incense to Caesar. In their refusal to pinch incense to Caesar they were committing treason inasmuch as that refusal was a denial of the metaphysical unification of all being.
Thank you for this post.
“They had based their whole lives as revolutionaries upon the premise that the State was God.”
Just a little nitpick, which does not change the correctness of your overall argument; the hardcore Socialists (National Socialists included) did not think that the STATE was the proper locus of divinity and infallibility, but the PARTY was. The Party was supposed to control the state, and the rest of society through it – Red China still functions according to this principle. In fact, the Marxists believed that the state would eventually “wither away,” which is why it naturally could not be seen as truly divine – it was ultimately just a tool or vehicle for the divine mission of the Party, which was guided by the prophetic writings of its founders.
And for the Nazis, it was the Race (or “Volk”), not the state, that was the ultimate divinity, the spokesmen of which were the Führer and the Party. For them, too, the state was nothing but a tool for some greater purpose. In the words of Alfred Rosenberg:
https://archive.org/details/TheMythOfTheTwentiethCentury_400/page/n361/mode/2up
“Today, the state is no longer a separated idol before which we are all supposed to lie in the dust. The state does not even have a purpose unless it acts to preserve the concept of folk. The state is only one means to do this. Church, law, art and science must do likewise. State forms change and state laws pass away, but the folkish concept remains. It follows from this that the nation is the first and last consideration to which everything else is to be subordinated. And it also follows from this that there can be no state judges, only people’s judges.”
One might say that Communists and Nazis were more sophisticated kind of idolaters, who (when criticized by Christians) would not admit that they were actually literally worshipping some dumb idol of a god, but rather the divine power that was speaking through it – the same excuse the RCs/EOs use for their icons.
Very helpful Viisaus. Thank you for that correction.
A thought has occurred to me, regarding this infamous “latria/dulia” distinction that RCs and EOs use to defend their image-worship – that this principle might actually be useful, if only used in the right place. (Like the buzzsaw can cause horrible damage when aimed falsely, but is a useful tool in the right place.)
Simply this: the Kinists can, and they should, say: “We are not WORSHIPPING our race or our forefathers; we are merely VENERATING it.” No idolatrous adoration of our genetic line, merely respectful veneration.
I would like to see how the PC RCs could respond to that argument!
I also found these words of Rushdoony very insightful:
“The doctrine of the infallibility of Scripture can be denied, but the concept of infallibility as such cannot be logically denied. Infallibility is an inescapable concept. If men refuse to ascribe infallibility to Scripture, it is because the concept has been transferred to something else.”
Disagreement over the proper locus of divinity (and thus the source of infallibility) explains some of the bloodiest clashes between the idolaters of different stamp. For example, the Liberal-Leftist war with Nazism was, in my opinion, the fight between Enlightenment intellectualists, who worshipped HUMAN REASON (as an abstract concept) and militant nationalists who worshipped ARYAN BLOOD.
Anti-Christian secularism got started in the 17th century, and then began to flourish in the 18th, through naive worship of human reason, and the alleged certainties it could reach, applying the sure principles of mathematics and geometry in human affairs. Progressive-minded people got drunk with excitement at the new scientific discoveries, and lost any sense of wise Christian humility. As the American reactionary thinker George Fitzhugh put it:
https://www.ditext.com/woodward/fitzhugh.html
“The trouble started with John Locke and the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. “The human mind became extremely presumptuous” in that era, he wrote, “and undertook to form governments on exact philosophical principles, just as men make clocks, watches or mills. They confounded the moral with the physical world, and this was not strange, because they had begun to doubt whether there was any other than a physical world.””
But after Darwin appeared, many of his eugenicist followers began to suspect that human reason, which now had been proven (to them) to be of low animal origin, might have been somewhat OVERRATED by the idealistic Progressives of earlier generations. Like primitive idolaters, right-wing Darwinists began to value INSTINCT over reason, admiring the unscrupulous vitality and cunning of predatory animals, and thinking that men should again become more like them, no longer being so “alienated” from nature. And they blamed both Christianity AND classical pagan over-intellectualism for this alienation from nature.
This was the origin of Nazi “anti-intellectualism” which came to the conclusion that RACE INSTINCT was to be preferred to overly abstract Enlightenment egghead theorizing – especially since it could lead to such disastrously dysgenic conclusions as egalitarian ideology (and also atomistic individualism, which such forms of pagan intellectualism like Epicureanism promoted). It was the physical Nazi jocks vs. the bookish Enlightenment nerds, one could say.
The Nazi thinker Walther Darré expressed with few words this fundamental disagreement between reason-worshipping (“Vergottung der Vernunft”) Enlightenment pagans and race-worshipping (“die Heiligkeit des Blutes”) Nazi pagans:
https://archive.org/details/DarreRichardNeuordnungUnseresDenkens194044S.ScanFraktur_201708/page/n41/mode/2up?view=theater
“Den prahlerischen Ideen des Jahres 1789, den Ideen von Gleichheit, Freiheit und Brüderlichkeit, die den Verbrecher wie den Edlen werten, und ihrer lebensentfremdenden, die Heiligkeit des Blutes veruntreuenden Vergottung der Vernunft setzen wir entgegen das Gesetz unseres Blutes.”
True Christians who value BOTH spiritual and physical realities, which are exemplified in the dual natures of Christ, should obviously disagree with both of these parties.
Yes… infallibility is an inescapable concept. RJR makes that point many times in his lectures.
Ayn Rand raged against “racism” for precisely this reason – that it contradicted the idolatry of human reason she was committed to:
https://ari.aynrand.org/issues/government-and-business/individual-rights/racism/
“Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men.
Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty.”
While the Völkisch neopagan idolaters of race were not afraid to embrace this brutish animality:
https://archive.org/details/scientificorigin0000gasm/page/34/mode/2up?view=theater
“And this position was maintained by Haeckel and the Monists with the utmost seriousness and dedication. They held to no Hegelian ideas about history as the process of unfolding of reason, nor to any Marxian conceptions about the conquest of nature by the social and technological forces of production, nor to any Comtian stages of intellectual development. To the Monists, rather, civilization as a distinctively human creation literally did not exist. ‘History,’ Haeckel wrote, is ‘wrongly taken to mean’ the history of ‘civilization, morals etc.’ What he meant was that the ordinary history of the deeds, thoughts, and institutions of men was a pale and insignificant reflection of reality. For him, any consideration of civilization apart from nature and its laws was simply not worthwhile. Real history, he insisted, ‘joins what is called the history of the world to the stem-history of the vertebrates.’20”