The Ten Truth Rules Going the Way of the Dinosaur
I think there should be a law against paparazzi. It doesn't matter that too many celebrities are boorish ding-dongs, no one should ever have to endure a TMZ exposition, or really inquisition. It is inhumane, immoral, and just flat-out evil.
Thing is it is very hard to have a law against someone taking a photograph of someone else. Oh there are such laws -- you may be sued if you use someone else's image for monetary gain without their permission. I still kind of wonder why that doesn't apply to paparazzi. Maybe celebrities just don't care and really do live by the Oscar Wilde mentality: "Worse than being talked about is not being talked about."
My point is that for hundreds of years there was some kind of social prohibition against nosying into other people's lives. There was indeed an accepted moral standard for just not being a busy-body. Didn't need a law. And for those who simply didn't get it, for the most part walls and fences and guns and "No trespassing signs" did the duty.
Then came television.
Now we could peek into anyone's private lives with complete and wretched impunity. In the 1950s we all really became nouveau voyeurs. We were now able to have our prurient desires to gaze upon the titillating peccadillos of anyone we wanted from the comfort of our own dark basements.
Then came video cameras. We could be our own voyeur production company.
Now we can murder anyone from anywhere in the world and never have a finger laid upon us because we can do it so anonymously and corporately. No one need know who I am and where I am amongst the mob.
There is no etiquette or set of social standards for what happens with a small mobile device, let alone any meaningful laws that govern what someone puts up on Twitter. Twitter itself has a set of standards but those lean so leftist that it just makes the murder more noble and righteous.
Recently a police officer was convicted of murder when his use of force to constraint the suspect was captured on video. As the trial progressed some journalists and many social media users suggested doxxing jurors and witnesses. The judge made mention of this particularly related to remarks made by a member of Congress who declared there should be violence if the verdict was not favorable.
How do these things contribute to murder? For one -- saying nothing about the merits of that particular case regarding the Minneapolis police officer because I don't know all of them so I shouldn't be making any statements about it -- when a video such as this one of a police officer doing his job (whether or not it is considered excessive) gets into the woke mainstream, all kinds of assumptions are made including about how much force a police officer should make without feeling like he or she will be punished in some way. A criminal needs to take you out in some way, and you're hoping a police officer will use all force necessary to stop him or her? Someone is cell-phone-videoing the incident? The criminally-minded individual is black and the officer is white?
You're much more likely to be dead.
And that is about as accessory to murder as there is. It is. Because we can be anonymous or slink in with the crowd or even hailed as a hero like the one who took the video of the Minneapolis police officer, it doesn't change the verity of this truth.
This is the world we live in now. This is why foolishly arrogant mob justice is now the standard for our supposedly civilized, law-honoring, rights-respecting country. And it has to do not as much with that social media -- that just makes it all so easy.
It has to do with the evil in human hearts and the institutionalized codependency that reigns in the System provoking it.
There was once a long, long time ago a set of Truth Rules God shared with us so we might perhaps not have to endure all this shit. It was called the Ten Commandments, I think you are familiar with them. Oh I know that God also told us we can never be justified by them and need Christ for our righteousness and our salvation, I know that.
But they are still the most important Truth Rules on the planet. And they are slowly being discarded by a society that now, by the recent poll numbers, feature a population with fewer than 50% claiming to belong to any religion -- first time ever dropping below 50%.
One of the reasons those Truth Rules are being so summarily dismissed is because so many are now living by the Frankfurt School truth rules. The main one is this: If you are classified as oppressed by the authorized woke leftist mandarins, and a large part of that oppression comes from the evil western heteropatriarchy's rules most notably those in the Ten Commandments, then you are exempt from having to follow those rules.
Don't think this is happening? Look at what is happening with the commandment against adultery. It is absolutely categorically unequivocally the fact that this prohibition means only a sexual relationship in a marriage between one adult male and one adult female is the proper, true, and moral one. You may disagree, but that is what it says.
Today it is acceptable, even encouraged to rail, rage, and remonstrate against it because that sexual constraint is a product of the oppressive western racist sexist hegemony, and your own personal sexual expression is part of your liberation from that oppression. Not only that, but you now have a courageous and industrious legion of supporters leading the new woke utopianism who will fight the man like crazy on your behalf.
The one related to the new paparazzianism? That is about the commandment there against bearing false witness. So many people are called racist now it is deafening. And they are so labelled only because their personal characteristics match many of those tarred as guilty of perpetuating the evil hegemony. The wokaristas don't know who these people are! Thus, they are bearing false witness and employing those fascist mandarins to prosecute them -- the Critical Theory rules are themselves extraordinarily oppressive!
The fact that the New Woke Leftist Fascism is taking over in the name of tolerance inclusivity equity diversity (none of which really are) is not lost on many. That many, however, are being drowned out by the new voyeur class hegemony that is really just 1984's Oceania, which has really just always been a more spiffy version of Rome. It is just so new and special and different now that our cell phones make us all the best, funnest, most ferocious enforcers we can be. The Great Inclusivity & Equity Leader would be so proud of us.
As I think about it, if you're living by your own life rules doing your own thing, God might just be worse than the best cell-phone-videographer! He does see everything! Ouch. But even the most zealous leftist understands "The Code," whatever behavior it is that is acceptable for interaction in some discursive community. Maybe the woke gestapo is not such a bad thing! Without it we wouldn't know about the proper way to do things...
Indeed it is also not lost on us that the Ten Commandments themselves are quite overbearing and burdensome -- but that doesn't obviate their meaning. It isn't just that they are Good Life Rules to live by, but they are expressly designed to draw us to Christ. Rules are rules, whether from the religion of churchianity or humanismanity or any kind of hifalutin-anity. We can never follow them perfectly and will always be subject to Cain's enforcement apparatus whether that comes through the Ordained Patriarchy or the Frankfurt School.
Only Christ liberates.
And yes, He is the objective, transcendent, teleologically, absolute Truth Rule. Fall into His waiting arms and you'll find everything you've every wanted you thought was in working for any of these System ops.
That's the Grace Freedom we all really want.
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Photo is by Sebastian Sammer at Unsplash. Thank you.
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