The Great Big Club Owns You

Wait! I forgot to add a critical component of The Great Big Club George Carlin famously riffed on a number of years ago in his viral routine. In my last post I'd mentioned that all the rich and powerful people are in a big club and "You aren't in it." I'd added that the club is really the Roman Catholic Empire and that whether you like it, tolerate it, or revile it to the point of wanting to blow it up, you're in it if you aren't in The Kingdom instead. 

The emphasis was on the fact that even if you are part of the noble crusade against the evil oppressive imperialist fascist hegemony, you are a Roman Catholic, merely because you are being delightfully played to do all the resisting and rebelling and obsessively intoxicating revolutioning so many thrill to do because they absolutely despise having their concupiscence called out by any judgmentalist forces.

And Rome is there to respond in kind. "Don't box me in, copper!" -- Rome gleefully reciprocates.

Which means, of course, (the part of the Carlin routine to add here in this post)...

They own you.

Everything out there that is not The Kingdom is Rome. Everything. Every single thing. If you aren't believing on Christ, the Christ Who is God in the flesh come to rescue humans from their own responsibility in the abject wickedness all around, then Rome owns you no matter how vehemently you object. Many just give in and let Rome manage their sinfulness anyway, devoted to being card-carrying dues-paying every-Sunday-church-going parishioners. 

It does such a good job of assuaging the interminably suffocating shame, people are great with the standing and sitting and standing and kneeling and standing and sitting up and down and up and down the whole show just making it so they can feel good about being told how to be good and wholesome and not-mean just so they don't have to feel so damned dread-filled and guilt-ridden all the time. The liturgical gyrations are all the same for all the other World activities whether religious or secular or pious or lascivious or anything.

Perfectly fine. The World System is what it is. It does what it is supposed to do, exactly that thing for the purpose of keeping people from murdering and being murdered until they do see the horrors of their own sin and turn to Christ in deep abiding faith and rigorous joyful hope and actual true reality.

Otherwise the actual true reality is, whether a Radical Selfist or a Devout Romanist...

They own you.

I've been reading a book called Christless Christianity by uber-Reformed White Horse Inn host Michael Horton, and interestingly he has a chapter called "Your Own Personal Jesus." Huh, the URL address title of my webzine! Right out of the gate he shares this from an article in Entertainment Weekly of all places:

Pop culture is going gaga for spirituality.... [However,] seekers of the day are apt to peel away the tough theological stuff and pluck out the most dulcet elements of faith, coming up with a soothing sampler of Judeo-Christian imagery..., Eastern meditation, self-help lingo, a vaguely conservative craving for "virtue," and a loopy New Age pursuit of "peace." This happy free-for-all, appealing to Baptists and stargazers alike, comes off more like Forrest Gump's ubiquitous "boxa chocolates" than like any real system of belief. You never know what you're gonna get.

What makes this labyrinth so hard to get out of is the Jesuits have so brilliantly devised so many alternate spiritualities that the very basic element of repentance, understanding, and resolute belief on Christ just gets lost in the morass of choices. Every one of them that isn't Christ is indeed propped up by System Ops, and that includes every extraordinarily appealing major world religion or sect or cult or any of it.

Right now so many Americanists are enraged that the enraged Islamicists are taking over and doing their thing in places the Western industrialized world has never experienced. Good Catholicists rage against that, and then there is more conflict, and then those who like Communism and that EVERYONE EQUAL NO MATTER WHAT GOL-DANGED IT! start to heave their fury all over the place and, and, and...

Then you get those exhilarating crusades and entertaining culture skirmishes and fantabulous trolling wars and just lots of death.

And the best smiling Romanist Karens can then step and wag a finger and invite you into their domain of nicer distractions for some relief.

Everyone wants to have something beyond their benighted existence to latch on to. When that gets boring they hook up with something else. Doesn't matter what it is, those militant Romanist Ops are always coming up with something new to grip people's affections. Doesn't even matter if you are in nice with one of those churches that at least at one time contended against those things Roman Catholic, you know, the "Protestants," and the "Reformation" heroes of the faith and all that protesting and reforming -- again look at what the Lutheran and Methodist and Congregational churches have become.

They still own you. They own you if you're signed up with Caesar's instruments of judgement reserved for those who just plain don't want to live richly and respectfully by God's covenant firmly established by Christ's shed blood and made secure by the seal of the Holy Spirit.

You're still in one of the corners of The Great Big Club one way or the other.

And once again to painfully belabor the point, sorry, God is fine with that. By the protocols established in the fourth chapter of Genesis and a dozen other places in Scripture about God's authorization of those who do evil to ruthlessly mitigate the evildoing of the reprobate -- although far from His presence and from The Kingdom -- the World System is The Great Big Club the rich and powerful of whom do own you...

Unless you actually want real freedom in Christ.

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