Friday, January 04, 2008

What Separation Of Church And State?



The more history I read, the more I see humans collectively as a horde of robots. Read this Will Durant excerpt:

The piety of the people had by 1500 made the Church the economic master of Scandinavia. In Denmark half the soil was owned by the Church, and was tilled by tenants verging on serfdom. Copenhagen itself was an ecclesiastical fief. Clergy and nobility were exempt from land taxes: the nobles because they served at their own expense in war, the clergy because they organized worship, morals, education, and charity. The universities at Copenhagen and Uppsala were of course in ecclesiastical hands. The Church required a tenth, annually, of all nonecclesiastical produce or income; it exacted a small fee for every building raised, every child born, every couple married, every corpse interred; it claimed a day of gratis labor from every peasant yearly; and no one could inherit property without making a contribution to the Church as the probate court of wills. These imposts were defended as financing the ministrations of the church, but complaints rose that too much of the proceeds went to maintain bishops in regal splendor.



Now just replace the "Church" with the "State". Do you see the clear and powerful parallels with today's Big Government America?

The "imposts" today are income and corporate taxes and are much higher than 10%. They are defended as necessary for "infrastructure" like roads, schools, cops, high school football, and keeping 'old coots' from eating dog food. The "regal splendor" that they nourish is best thought of as a vast bureaucracy, career politicians, and their army of self-defensive lawyers.

Today no one can inherit property without a proper contribution to the State either - the death tax. Marriage also now bears a tax penalty. "A small fee for every building raised"? Hah! Construction is barely permitted today, even on private property - and never for a "small fee".

Universities today are run, not by "ecclesiastics" in the old sense, but rather by a monolith of evangelical socialists. Why the heck are the best and brightest young people, college students, all geeked up about dimwits like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton? Well, Cuius regio ejus religio - it's a scholarly Latin expression meaning "whose region, his or her religion" or "the religion of the ruled must be that of the ruler." Muzzling dissent has been the most efficacious form of brainwashing throughout the ages.

While 16th century Scandinavia sported Copenhagen as an "ecclesiastical fief", today one might as well call the numerous blighted urban areas, with their government housing, schooling, and welfare fiefdoms of the State. (For good measure they fraudulently stuff the ballot box.)

The Old World clergy used to organize "worship, morals, education, and charity." Well, today's high priests of Statism have ramped it up a notch. They've graduated from organization to coercion. Thou shall worship the "environment". Thou shall not offend. Thought crimes like "hate" have been codified and sins of yore like envy have become standard tools of the State. A new moral order has been cast based upon diversity, relativism, and whatever ideo-fad that might tout favorable demographic trends (e.g amnesty for border hopping identity thieves). It goes without saying that the State has both cemented and enlarged its penchant for "charity". Welfare, entitlements, subsidized student loans, affordable housing, Head Start, ....the list is interminable. Charity my ass. It's all at once coercive redistribution, class-baiting, mind-enslavement, and LCD politics by incumbents eyeing 51% majorities.



Ah, the good ole days of 10% taxation and swift executions. Now we get lifelong torture via emasculation and the harassed productivity of 50% tax brackets. Who today wouldn't take compulsory Sunday mass attendance in exchange for a return of 10% taxation?

Modern day Statism has all the hallmarks of yesteryear's worst religions. I am hardly the first person to assert this, but the State simply became the Church. Secularists in Europe took down the Papacy by pouncing on its warts - then they incorporated the very same ones into their rule.

The odds are that whenever you hear someone today mention the "separation of church and state"....you are listening to, if not a modern day Statist, then one of their brainwashed minions.

1 comment:

Taylor Conant said...

Well, thought I had a really brilliant comment to make to all of this but not anymore now that I've finally found time to get to it.

I agree with you. You might enjoy reading the chapter on "Monarchy and War" in The Myth of National Defense which if I remember correctly discusses some of the ways in which the State replaced the Church as a religion that people were willing to fight and die for. Interesting historical anecdotes in there whether my memory serves me or not.

The Church and the State are both totalitarian in nature. I explored that topic a bit in part of a paper I wrote for a class, available here: Fascism and the Catholic Church: 1922-1945