Society
Tim Kirby
February 11, 2022
© Photo: REUTERS/Shelby Tauber

Our God today is the government. They are the utopia makers, Tim Kirby writes.

If there is one thing that is universal about governmental structures across the globe, be they Communist, Western-Style Democracy, Islamic or some other form, it is a 100% assuredness in Technocracy/Bureaucracy as the solution to any and all problems. Perhaps in Western countries where their Constitutions (or Common Law traditions) are supposedly sacred this tendency makes perfect sense. The Founding Fathers built America’s system to be bureaucratic as a defense against the excesses, abuses and whims of a single ruler or ruling party. So, we can be a bit forgiving to the West for falling into this logic trap, because it at least used to work in their favor and to an extent still does. But in Russia (where I reside) due to many historical events no one has any faith in the government, nor do they obey any laws they disagree with, and yet the answer to any tiny problem from Ivan Average is some vague government program. I have heard the same from those living in Italy, China and beyond – that all problems require a legal paperwork solution. But is this really an answer to anything? And why do all “problems” require a governmental solution?

Case in point, it would seem that over recent years numerous religious institutions have been threatened with violence, and some of the threats have become a reality including a hostage situation in Texas that Fox News describes in the following way…

“As Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker was preparing to begin Saturday services on the morning of Jan. 15, 2022, he welcomed a man who had knocked on the window and looked cold inside his synagogue. Cytron-Walker made the man tea and then began his livestreamed Shabbat service. With his back turned to the man, the rabbi recalls hearing a click, turning around, and seeing a gun.

For over 10 hours, this man held Rabbi Cytron-Walker and three other congregants hostage at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas.”

Fox also goes on to mention a few other instances in which those who were attending religious services were actually killed in their houses of worship. Of course, every time some tragedy happens on TV/YouTube our monkey brains impose themselves onto the situation, this tendency is especially true among women but men can and do fall prey to it as well. A sort of “what if this happened to me” reasoning makes the public want to demand action to “prevent this sort of thing from happening again”. We human beings may live in a secular world, yet our monkey brains are still filled with lots of magical thinking. Take a look at Hollywood, which is probably the least religious place on Earth, yet every celebrity’s home is filled with magic crystals and other trinkets of supernatural protection. Many of us, if not most of us, really believe that somehow hate, violence, and other bad parts of life can eventually be completely overcome. Our Medieval ancestors certainly prayed to God to intervene against all the awfulness of their brutal lives as only God could provide the utopia we desire, at the very least after we are dead.

The problem is that today, our God today is the government. They are the utopia makers. The state is supposed to provide an explanation to everything and an answer for everything to demonstrate its omnipotence as the justification for our worship and submission. The God of the Bible was okay with being a bit vague, allowing us to think that “everything happens for a reason” even those that we don’t like, and that there is an eternal battle of good vs. evil happening around us that will go on forever until the End Times.

This older version of God was just fine with having some things go unanswered and as the Father of humanity was, just like a human father, happy to let the kids work stuff out on their own. But our Divine Government that replaced the God of the Bible doesn’t have such a Chad attitude. This authority constantly has to take action and try to solve every issue like a nightmarish helicopter parent the only way it knows how… with legislation.

So the “solution” brought forth by Washington’s human-suit technocrats to the problem of violence (and threats of violence) at religious institutions is the “Pray Safe Act”. The details of which look something like this…

The Pray Safe Act, introduced to the U.S. Senate last week, represents a joint effort on the part of U.S. Sens. Rob Portman (R-OH) and Maggie Hassan (D-NH) to provide faith-based organizations and houses of worship with easy access to security best practices, federal grant programs, and training.

 Cosponsored by U.S. Sens. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Jacky Rosen (D-NV), the legislation would direct the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), working with the Department of Justice, the Executive Director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and others as deemed appropriate, to create and codify a federal clearinghouse on safety and security best practices for both faith-based organizations and houses of worship.

 That clearinghouse would be responsible for providing these organizations with safety and security recommendations, as well as providing information on federal resources and grant programs available to that end.

So by this logic, the hostage situation in Texas, if we could turn back time, would have been surely avoided thanks to “safety and security recommendations”, “information on federal resources” and corruption’s best friend “grant programs”. How utterly intellectually insulting this is. This is what spitting in the face to every victim of terrorism in U.S. history looks like. The exploitation of 9/11 for Foreign Policy goals was worse, but that does not excuse this fresh pile of madness.

Rather than accepting that horrific things happen from time to time and that overall, the rate of violence in America is still fairly low in the grand scheme of things, the senators listed above have chosen to exploit a tragedy to bloat the government even further and make grant money dance.

This is not a solution to this supposed “problem”, in fact there is no solution. If someone wants to randomly attack someone and kill them, and they are willing to go to jail or die to do it (possibly due to being insane) then they will do it. This is a fact of life, and the God-Government should really step down from its throne of self-assured omnipotence.

Absolutely nothing needs to be done about these acts of terror at religious institutions as murder is already illegal, as is hostage taking, the police in most nations generally blow the heads off of terrorists anyways immediately (“we don’t negotiate with terrorists”) and the average person knows that if they try something like this, they will surely die. The government, in this case the U.S. government has had all the proper mechanisms in place for this sort of thing since the 1700s. Everyone in society knows that if you commit an act of terror, you’re done.

Perhaps there is that mental health crisis in America that bloggers talk about. Some say that Feminism has had a brutal affect on men, creating the incel culture that is often at the heart of mass shootings. So perhaps there are means by which we could turn back the clock to a time before the idea of random public mass murder was even fathomable. But this would never SOLVE the problem, only reduce it to an absolute bare minimum, to a level of extreme rarity. I don’t mean to say that truly nothing can be done to defuse these events before they happen, but it is truly impossible to make over 300,000,000 people never commit some form of Terrorism including making threats. You can only punish them afterwards or Judge Dredd them on the spot if they don’t surrender, both of which local, state and federal authorities have already been doing properly since the beginning.

Piling on new legislation, programs, packages, assistance and whatever other buzzwords you can think of onto the legal system as a response to acts of Terror is an insult to the intellect of the American populace and an exploitation of those who were the victims of it. Literally, doing nothing in response would be better than exploiting the dead for political masturbation. We are all trapped in an endless loop of demanding to have more and more bars put around the cage of technocratic imprisonment for “our safety”. If we begin to accept that life will never be a utopia, that it could be better, but will never be perfect, then we can finally be free of this truly universal “logic” that affects everyone, not just America.

Mass Shootings, Hostage Scenarios, Terror Attacks – Perhaps the Answer Is to Do Absolutely Nothing?

Our God today is the government. They are the utopia makers, Tim Kirby writes.

If there is one thing that is universal about governmental structures across the globe, be they Communist, Western-Style Democracy, Islamic or some other form, it is a 100% assuredness in Technocracy/Bureaucracy as the solution to any and all problems. Perhaps in Western countries where their Constitutions (or Common Law traditions) are supposedly sacred this tendency makes perfect sense. The Founding Fathers built America’s system to be bureaucratic as a defense against the excesses, abuses and whims of a single ruler or ruling party. So, we can be a bit forgiving to the West for falling into this logic trap, because it at least used to work in their favor and to an extent still does. But in Russia (where I reside) due to many historical events no one has any faith in the government, nor do they obey any laws they disagree with, and yet the answer to any tiny problem from Ivan Average is some vague government program. I have heard the same from those living in Italy, China and beyond – that all problems require a legal paperwork solution. But is this really an answer to anything? And why do all “problems” require a governmental solution?

Case in point, it would seem that over recent years numerous religious institutions have been threatened with violence, and some of the threats have become a reality including a hostage situation in Texas that Fox News describes in the following way…

“As Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker was preparing to begin Saturday services on the morning of Jan. 15, 2022, he welcomed a man who had knocked on the window and looked cold inside his synagogue. Cytron-Walker made the man tea and then began his livestreamed Shabbat service. With his back turned to the man, the rabbi recalls hearing a click, turning around, and seeing a gun.

For over 10 hours, this man held Rabbi Cytron-Walker and three other congregants hostage at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas.”

Fox also goes on to mention a few other instances in which those who were attending religious services were actually killed in their houses of worship. Of course, every time some tragedy happens on TV/YouTube our monkey brains impose themselves onto the situation, this tendency is especially true among women but men can and do fall prey to it as well. A sort of “what if this happened to me” reasoning makes the public want to demand action to “prevent this sort of thing from happening again”. We human beings may live in a secular world, yet our monkey brains are still filled with lots of magical thinking. Take a look at Hollywood, which is probably the least religious place on Earth, yet every celebrity’s home is filled with magic crystals and other trinkets of supernatural protection. Many of us, if not most of us, really believe that somehow hate, violence, and other bad parts of life can eventually be completely overcome. Our Medieval ancestors certainly prayed to God to intervene against all the awfulness of their brutal lives as only God could provide the utopia we desire, at the very least after we are dead.

The problem is that today, our God today is the government. They are the utopia makers. The state is supposed to provide an explanation to everything and an answer for everything to demonstrate its omnipotence as the justification for our worship and submission. The God of the Bible was okay with being a bit vague, allowing us to think that “everything happens for a reason” even those that we don’t like, and that there is an eternal battle of good vs. evil happening around us that will go on forever until the End Times.

This older version of God was just fine with having some things go unanswered and as the Father of humanity was, just like a human father, happy to let the kids work stuff out on their own. But our Divine Government that replaced the God of the Bible doesn’t have such a Chad attitude. This authority constantly has to take action and try to solve every issue like a nightmarish helicopter parent the only way it knows how… with legislation.

So the “solution” brought forth by Washington’s human-suit technocrats to the problem of violence (and threats of violence) at religious institutions is the “Pray Safe Act”. The details of which look something like this…

The Pray Safe Act, introduced to the U.S. Senate last week, represents a joint effort on the part of U.S. Sens. Rob Portman (R-OH) and Maggie Hassan (D-NH) to provide faith-based organizations and houses of worship with easy access to security best practices, federal grant programs, and training.

 Cosponsored by U.S. Sens. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Jacky Rosen (D-NV), the legislation would direct the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), working with the Department of Justice, the Executive Director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and others as deemed appropriate, to create and codify a federal clearinghouse on safety and security best practices for both faith-based organizations and houses of worship.

 That clearinghouse would be responsible for providing these organizations with safety and security recommendations, as well as providing information on federal resources and grant programs available to that end.

So by this logic, the hostage situation in Texas, if we could turn back time, would have been surely avoided thanks to “safety and security recommendations”, “information on federal resources” and corruption’s best friend “grant programs”. How utterly intellectually insulting this is. This is what spitting in the face to every victim of terrorism in U.S. history looks like. The exploitation of 9/11 for Foreign Policy goals was worse, but that does not excuse this fresh pile of madness.

Rather than accepting that horrific things happen from time to time and that overall, the rate of violence in America is still fairly low in the grand scheme of things, the senators listed above have chosen to exploit a tragedy to bloat the government even further and make grant money dance.

This is not a solution to this supposed “problem”, in fact there is no solution. If someone wants to randomly attack someone and kill them, and they are willing to go to jail or die to do it (possibly due to being insane) then they will do it. This is a fact of life, and the God-Government should really step down from its throne of self-assured omnipotence.

Absolutely nothing needs to be done about these acts of terror at religious institutions as murder is already illegal, as is hostage taking, the police in most nations generally blow the heads off of terrorists anyways immediately (“we don’t negotiate with terrorists”) and the average person knows that if they try something like this, they will surely die. The government, in this case the U.S. government has had all the proper mechanisms in place for this sort of thing since the 1700s. Everyone in society knows that if you commit an act of terror, you’re done.

Perhaps there is that mental health crisis in America that bloggers talk about. Some say that Feminism has had a brutal affect on men, creating the incel culture that is often at the heart of mass shootings. So perhaps there are means by which we could turn back the clock to a time before the idea of random public mass murder was even fathomable. But this would never SOLVE the problem, only reduce it to an absolute bare minimum, to a level of extreme rarity. I don’t mean to say that truly nothing can be done to defuse these events before they happen, but it is truly impossible to make over 300,000,000 people never commit some form of Terrorism including making threats. You can only punish them afterwards or Judge Dredd them on the spot if they don’t surrender, both of which local, state and federal authorities have already been doing properly since the beginning.

Piling on new legislation, programs, packages, assistance and whatever other buzzwords you can think of onto the legal system as a response to acts of Terror is an insult to the intellect of the American populace and an exploitation of those who were the victims of it. Literally, doing nothing in response would be better than exploiting the dead for political masturbation. We are all trapped in an endless loop of demanding to have more and more bars put around the cage of technocratic imprisonment for “our safety”. If we begin to accept that life will never be a utopia, that it could be better, but will never be perfect, then we can finally be free of this truly universal “logic” that affects everyone, not just America.

Our God today is the government. They are the utopia makers, Tim Kirby writes.

If there is one thing that is universal about governmental structures across the globe, be they Communist, Western-Style Democracy, Islamic or some other form, it is a 100% assuredness in Technocracy/Bureaucracy as the solution to any and all problems. Perhaps in Western countries where their Constitutions (or Common Law traditions) are supposedly sacred this tendency makes perfect sense. The Founding Fathers built America’s system to be bureaucratic as a defense against the excesses, abuses and whims of a single ruler or ruling party. So, we can be a bit forgiving to the West for falling into this logic trap, because it at least used to work in their favor and to an extent still does. But in Russia (where I reside) due to many historical events no one has any faith in the government, nor do they obey any laws they disagree with, and yet the answer to any tiny problem from Ivan Average is some vague government program. I have heard the same from those living in Italy, China and beyond – that all problems require a legal paperwork solution. But is this really an answer to anything? And why do all “problems” require a governmental solution?

Case in point, it would seem that over recent years numerous religious institutions have been threatened with violence, and some of the threats have become a reality including a hostage situation in Texas that Fox News describes in the following way…

“As Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker was preparing to begin Saturday services on the morning of Jan. 15, 2022, he welcomed a man who had knocked on the window and looked cold inside his synagogue. Cytron-Walker made the man tea and then began his livestreamed Shabbat service. With his back turned to the man, the rabbi recalls hearing a click, turning around, and seeing a gun.

For over 10 hours, this man held Rabbi Cytron-Walker and three other congregants hostage at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas.”

Fox also goes on to mention a few other instances in which those who were attending religious services were actually killed in their houses of worship. Of course, every time some tragedy happens on TV/YouTube our monkey brains impose themselves onto the situation, this tendency is especially true among women but men can and do fall prey to it as well. A sort of “what if this happened to me” reasoning makes the public want to demand action to “prevent this sort of thing from happening again”. We human beings may live in a secular world, yet our monkey brains are still filled with lots of magical thinking. Take a look at Hollywood, which is probably the least religious place on Earth, yet every celebrity’s home is filled with magic crystals and other trinkets of supernatural protection. Many of us, if not most of us, really believe that somehow hate, violence, and other bad parts of life can eventually be completely overcome. Our Medieval ancestors certainly prayed to God to intervene against all the awfulness of their brutal lives as only God could provide the utopia we desire, at the very least after we are dead.

The problem is that today, our God today is the government. They are the utopia makers. The state is supposed to provide an explanation to everything and an answer for everything to demonstrate its omnipotence as the justification for our worship and submission. The God of the Bible was okay with being a bit vague, allowing us to think that “everything happens for a reason” even those that we don’t like, and that there is an eternal battle of good vs. evil happening around us that will go on forever until the End Times.

This older version of God was just fine with having some things go unanswered and as the Father of humanity was, just like a human father, happy to let the kids work stuff out on their own. But our Divine Government that replaced the God of the Bible doesn’t have such a Chad attitude. This authority constantly has to take action and try to solve every issue like a nightmarish helicopter parent the only way it knows how… with legislation.

So the “solution” brought forth by Washington’s human-suit technocrats to the problem of violence (and threats of violence) at religious institutions is the “Pray Safe Act”. The details of which look something like this…

The Pray Safe Act, introduced to the U.S. Senate last week, represents a joint effort on the part of U.S. Sens. Rob Portman (R-OH) and Maggie Hassan (D-NH) to provide faith-based organizations and houses of worship with easy access to security best practices, federal grant programs, and training.

 Cosponsored by U.S. Sens. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Jacky Rosen (D-NV), the legislation would direct the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), working with the Department of Justice, the Executive Director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and others as deemed appropriate, to create and codify a federal clearinghouse on safety and security best practices for both faith-based organizations and houses of worship.

 That clearinghouse would be responsible for providing these organizations with safety and security recommendations, as well as providing information on federal resources and grant programs available to that end.

So by this logic, the hostage situation in Texas, if we could turn back time, would have been surely avoided thanks to “safety and security recommendations”, “information on federal resources” and corruption’s best friend “grant programs”. How utterly intellectually insulting this is. This is what spitting in the face to every victim of terrorism in U.S. history looks like. The exploitation of 9/11 for Foreign Policy goals was worse, but that does not excuse this fresh pile of madness.

Rather than accepting that horrific things happen from time to time and that overall, the rate of violence in America is still fairly low in the grand scheme of things, the senators listed above have chosen to exploit a tragedy to bloat the government even further and make grant money dance.

This is not a solution to this supposed “problem”, in fact there is no solution. If someone wants to randomly attack someone and kill them, and they are willing to go to jail or die to do it (possibly due to being insane) then they will do it. This is a fact of life, and the God-Government should really step down from its throne of self-assured omnipotence.

Absolutely nothing needs to be done about these acts of terror at religious institutions as murder is already illegal, as is hostage taking, the police in most nations generally blow the heads off of terrorists anyways immediately (“we don’t negotiate with terrorists”) and the average person knows that if they try something like this, they will surely die. The government, in this case the U.S. government has had all the proper mechanisms in place for this sort of thing since the 1700s. Everyone in society knows that if you commit an act of terror, you’re done.

Perhaps there is that mental health crisis in America that bloggers talk about. Some say that Feminism has had a brutal affect on men, creating the incel culture that is often at the heart of mass shootings. So perhaps there are means by which we could turn back the clock to a time before the idea of random public mass murder was even fathomable. But this would never SOLVE the problem, only reduce it to an absolute bare minimum, to a level of extreme rarity. I don’t mean to say that truly nothing can be done to defuse these events before they happen, but it is truly impossible to make over 300,000,000 people never commit some form of Terrorism including making threats. You can only punish them afterwards or Judge Dredd them on the spot if they don’t surrender, both of which local, state and federal authorities have already been doing properly since the beginning.

Piling on new legislation, programs, packages, assistance and whatever other buzzwords you can think of onto the legal system as a response to acts of Terror is an insult to the intellect of the American populace and an exploitation of those who were the victims of it. Literally, doing nothing in response would be better than exploiting the dead for political masturbation. We are all trapped in an endless loop of demanding to have more and more bars put around the cage of technocratic imprisonment for “our safety”. If we begin to accept that life will never be a utopia, that it could be better, but will never be perfect, then we can finally be free of this truly universal “logic” that affects everyone, not just America.

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

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The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.