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I am Jim Miles, a high school teacher of religion and history in the Central Valley of California. I am the lucky husband of Kim Miles, a lovely, wonderful, intelligent, classy lady. I am a musician, a bass-player, veteran of two bands, the most recent of which was called Sol. I am an on-again, off-again blogger, and I present here my own opinions, especially about politics (see the War page, for example), religion, cinema, books, music, and lots of other topics, which you could explore in the tag cloud.
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Benevolent Dictator
Posted on February 27th, 2008 No commentsIf the dictator is perfectly benevolent and infinitely wise, then dictatorship is to be preferred over democracy.
If the dictator rules in a laissez-faire fashion regarding his subjects’ free moral agency, no one would rebel against him; there would be no motive for revolutionary regime change.
If the dictator had omnipotent power, but only ever chose to use it to empower his subjects to pursue their own passions, loves, and happiness, guiding and guarding them from all dangers without and within, then democracy would be a ridiculous suggestion.
This type of dictatorship describes the political reality described in the biblical pre-fall and post-millennium universe. Here in the present, inside this brief window of time, within the sin vaccination probationary era, there exist a few God-friendly governments. This writer would identify them as democratic republics with strong socialist sympathies. Examples would include the post WWII, pre-Reagan United States of America, and many of the current members of the European Union, notably Norway, France, and Sweden. These nations are God-friendly because they have made the sincere attempt to maintain for their society the values of religious liberty and social justice.
Sadly, the United States abandoned its attempts at social justice when the Civil Rights era closed with the Republican Reagan revolution, when the dismantling of the nation’s social safety net commenced. And the rise of the religious right to political prominence has been accompanied by a steady erosion of the wall of separation between church and state. It remains to be seen whether there can be a renaissance of American social justice and religious liberty with an election year upon us.Greed for profit, lust for pleasure, and fear of threats are formidable weapons in the arsenal of those who desire to subvert societies embracing the values of freedom of conscience and social unity. The Common Enemy, Satan and those men who serve his ends as the ruling elite class in earthly civilizations, have perfected and disguised their manipulation of the masses of citizens.
The public relations and advertising industries, joined seamlessly with the mass media, are the main tools used by the ruling classes to manufacture the consent of the governed. In Wizard-of-Oz fashion, the wealthy few behind the curtain of power insulate themselves from public accountability, by retreating from the public consciousness. Taking their modus operandi from the great Deceiver himself, politically entrenched dynasties control the economies and governments of whole nations, of entire regions using the power of the mass media they own, and by enlisting the most lethal military organizations in existence. Whole departmental budgets of these military machines are blacked out from public view, their existence in many ways denied by the governments themselves, operating as they see fit behind the scenes, without the consent of anyone but the most wealthy and powerful players in the world.
By welding religion to political power and material profit, the ruling elite can maintain their parasitic stranglehold on the vast majority of the working and voting populations of the world, remaining trusted and yet anonymous in the patriotic admiring gaze of the public, filtered through the Magical Mainstream Media machine, television. Religion is not the opiate of the masses, as Marx taught; it is, however, used as a manipulative device by the ruling classes to keep the governed divided and easily conquered, passive and submissive, distracted by the tensions between the multitude of man-made boundaries, including denominations, race, creed, color, gender, ethnicity, and social class.
Religious followers consent voluntarily to give their leaders enormous control and influence over their lives and values, often without consulting the primary sources for their belief systems. Some of the most gullible followers are those who mindlessly follow the whims of their adopted religious mentors, whether pastors or gurus or rabbis or imams or monks or priests. This provides those who sit atop the power structures of states with official state religions with an obscene ability to manipulate entire nations in the name of “god.” The true God cannot be pleased with such a situation, and indeed in the Biblical Old Testament speaks out through his prophets against such injustice and unrighteousness with deafening consistency, and reserves the most profound warnings of judgment for those who wreak such havoc upon societies.
In the United States, while Judaism currently enjoys a relatively high degree of social acceptance by the whole, Christianity is withering in the face of an all-out assault upon its foundations by the popular media and the academic establishment. Any and all religions are apparently acceptable, except for the one described in the New Testament. Biblical creationists are openly ridiculed while others putting equal amounts of faith in much less reliable gods, such as wealth, competition, or military supremacy, are passed by without comment. The rise of extremist leaders within Christianity, such as James Dobson, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell, have been convenient targets for popular fallacies like generalization and stereotype. Much as everyday, ordinary Christians might try to disassociate themselves from their all-too-often misguided and power-drunk leaders, whole segments of American society are actively attempting to simply make Christianity go away. It remains a very difficult task to be an American citizen and a Christian who endeavors to reconcile the biblical call to social justice and religious liberty with an ever-dwindling base of support, and the unenviable plight of presidents, pastors, priests, and popes whose deplorable decisions are exhibit A in the case being made against the legitimacy of your own faith.
Above it all, remains God, undistracted from his singular purpose: reveal the truth about himself and his government to every human being, as thoroughly as possible. Through those who have chosen to align themselves with him and his government he works to show the world a better way.
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