Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id IAA24892 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Thu, 11 May 2000 08:14:13 +0100 Message-Id: <200005110712.DAA03453@mail2.lig.bellsouth.net> From: "Joe E. Dees" <joedees@bellsouth.net> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Date: Thu, 11 May 2000 02:16:13 -0500 Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-transfer-encoding: Quoted-printable Subject: The Human Dialectic of Absolute Premises, Pt. II X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.12b) Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
II. The Church as State
During the first few hundred years after the life of Jesus, the thesis
of God’s presence was accepted by many. These people worshipped
first in secret, and oppression by a state (the Roman State) unified these
believers in martyrdom and as conspiracy of clandestine religious
communion. When however, Constantine the emperor of Rome accepted
Christianity and proclaimed it the official religion of the Roman Empire, a
unifying structure became necessary. Since the dominant structural
model present at the time was monarchy, a monarchial form was adopted.
This choice fitted in very well with the idea of a sovereign God, and
allowed the bishops of each area to speak for their people. Soon the
bishop of Rome was recognized as Pope, and all Christians spoke with
one voice. That voice, however, was many times not what many would
have chosen; many times it spoke for itself and the people of Christianity
were coerced into accepting the trappings of totalitarianism as
incomprehensible to them, but ordained of God as the best way. God,
after all, could not be wrong – God was Perfect Mind. But none of the
elaborate ritual of the Roman catholic Church, and none of its clerical
hierarchy, were outlined by Jesus. It was created by the elite, and much
of it for the elite. For instance, the people of the church have no say in
choosing this elite; it is chosen by itself. Popes choose cardinals; when
the Pope dies the cardinals choose a new one. Election and popular vote
was never even considered as far as the laity were concerned;
appointment by a superior was and is the method of clerical
advancement. The only election is to the highest office, by those
immediately beneath, and it is for life. Diplomatic ties with other
sovereignties were formed with the intention of having the sovereignty
of the Church recognized by the states, so that dual sovereignty was
demanded of their people; allegiance to both King and Pope, and the
Pope first. Vast lands and riches, the price of heaven, were amassed.
Salvation was bought and sold for what the buyer possessed, be it
wealth or widow’s mite. Finally, a Pope granted himself infallibility when
speaking ex cathedra, thus grounding totalitarian authority upon the
declaration of the declarer.
There were difficulties encountered along the way. The Roman
Empire fell. There was a great schism and the Russian and Greek
churches broke away. The iron demands of conformity to the party line
and subservience to the religious sovereign and his clerical nobility were
refused by those who disliked what the Catholic Church had become.
Martin Luther sparked a Reformation that was actually a religious
revolution; the Pope was denied sovereignty over both Protestants and
Anglicans, who spurned Roman Catholicism’s claim to be the temporal
arm of God. Monarchy was opposed by democracy, and conformity by
freedom of religious choice. Now Christianity is a faith embodied in a
multiplicity of expressions and the Roman Catholic Church, while still the
largest voice, is one of many which people are free to choose to or not to
heed in most areas. Only in a few countries is the manner of Christian
expression not a matter of personal choice. It is significant to note that
such freedom has never been given, only taken. Spain and Portugal,
until recently authoritarian states welded to an institutional church, are
the most recent to take such freedoms for their people, but only after the
people took their freedoms from the state.
III. The State as Church
Marx, like Jesus, had not specifically outlined a form for Marxism to
take. He had stated the purpose of his call for revolution, true; a
communist economic system maintained for the fair distribution of the
products of labor (goods and services), centrally administered and
collectively owned. But the structures of responsibility, decision and
communication had not been patterned out or their interrelations
delineated. Jesus preached mutual love between people through
mediation of Mind and Marx preached mutual service between people
through implementation of Matter. Jesus assumes that upon the
Apocalypse, which he expected soon, governmental forms would be
unnecessary, and Marx assumed that upon the advent of communism
that a temporary post-revolutionary organizing authority, the
dictatorship of the proletariat, would quite voluntarily ‘wither away’...
The Russian Revolution took the Marxists by surprise. Marx was
dead and could not lead; Lenin took command. He possessed a faith, the
shambles of a monarchial system, and many millions of religious people.
He instituted a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ modeled on the
monarchial structure, abolished private property, purged the opposition,
and installed himself as leader of a monarchial economic state.
Successors were to be chosen by the majority vote of commissars that
the previous leader appointed, and all members of the government were
to be members of the one party allowed, the Communist Party. The
Soviet government was built in the image of the Roman Catholic Church,
and Lenin became its first Pope. The communist parties in other nations
were required to accept the soviet party as absolute sovereign and not to
be questioned. Things move more quickly these days, for thirty years
after the Soviet republic was born Marshal Tito, the first harbinger of
schism, appeared on the scene. Soon after, we had socialist as well as
communist states, as we have predominately catholic and predominately
protestant countries; the Socialist Reformation has taken place before
our eyes, despite attempts by the Soviet Republic to repress same in
Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland. It is significant to note that
communists may form parties within socialist countries, but until
recently, when the issue was forced, not the other way around. This is a
duplication of the Catholic-Protestant paradigm of one-way (or
predominately one-way) discrimination.
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