“Common sense is not so common.” (Voltaire)
Common sense is actually universal to mankind. That statement may be tautological, but only to thoroughly express the claim that everybody has common sense because God made them upright and in His image.
“Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions.” (Ecclesiastes 7:29)
“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” (Genesis 1:26-28)
The disconnect between what Scripture says about human nature being upright and full of common sense, and with the common observations of human nature revealing that it is foolish, clumsy, prideful and sinful begins with the fact that most people must go out of their way to actively choose “common nonsense,” because they cannot handle the implications of the common sense that God had granted to them at their conception. Being imbued with sense would not allow the people to reject God and his righteousness while simultaneously rejecting false gods and the bondage of their civil societies. They must choose either God or Mammon in actuality, so they must lie to themselves to try and have both. They must pretend to give up the internal truth that is common to all men, in order to pretend to be ignorant in order to pretend to be comfortable in their self-deception. They must lie, even to the point of usurping their God-given common sense. In doing so, they usurp God as their god and choose politicians as their gods to rule over them in His stead. Even professing Christians must lie about the nature and desires of God, attempting to make Jesus compatible with their patriotism or their political pursuits.
“A society is in decay, final or transitional, when common sense really becomes uncommon. Straightforward ideas appear strange or unfamiliar, and any thought that does not follow the conventional curve or twist, is supposed to be a sort of joke.” (Gilbert K. Chesterton)
Therefore God gives them up to their pretense, so that they may realize their self-delusions. When they reject the Law of God that washes the inside of the cup, in favor of the legalist systems of men which wash the outside of the cup only, they earn for themselves a reprobate mind, which invariably justifies the perverse justice of bureaucratic and legislative backpedaling into the acrimonious disorder and confusion that we call damnation. When the internalized Law of God which sanctifies men gets replaced by the legalism of men in civil authority, God gives them up to be ruled by the gods of your choosing, and abandons you to the self destruction that comes with it.
“Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.” (1 Corinthians 6:9-11)
When the kingdom of God was preached to those of the kingdom of Rome, under its civil bondage, they were told that they would not be adopted into God’s jurisdiction without repenting of the sins that brought them into subject citizenship. Their bondage did not merely hinge on the idea that they did not believe in the existence of God, but rather on the fact that they abandoned God’s Law and raised up institutions to govern them instead. The “drunkards” of civil bondage refers to those in Ephraim, recalled in Isaiah 28, as a synecdoche for men addicted to “the wine of Babylon” which dulls and perverts the spirit as fermented drink dulls and perverts the brain. Because power corrupts, the rulers in Ephraim were drunk on greed, power, and entitlement which are all covetous and tyrannical traits acquired by emulating the Babylonian government model represented in the nations around them (and all instances of human civil government.) The subject citizens under these governments share in the state of drunken confusion from being turned over to their reprobate minds after tasting the socialist benefits offered by false gods, turning the people into cowards and slaves. Drunkards of Ephraim are those who seek offices of authority (politicians, bureaucrats, and “church leaders“) by endeavoring to get drunk on greed and power. Likewise, their constituents, subjects, and “congregations” gratefully imbibe the wine from their tables to partake in their inebriating benefits.
“The fool hath said in his heart, [There is] no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.” (Psalm 14:1)
The original Hebrew here does not include the phrase “there is“. The phrase was added by translators, in grammatical license, to try and make sense out of the verse for their potential audience. The sentiment should be read as: “The fool hath said in his heart, No God.”
This is not a description of atheism, for the early Christians were called atheists by the polytheistic Romans, not for some philosophical notion of the origin of the universe, but for desiring to be ruled by God alone and not by the many civil magistrates of their bureaucratic society, which are represented by the ceremonial, and nationalist icons and symbols of a superstitious pantheon of institutions that dole out government services. They chose to rely on the providential benefits of God and not the socialist benefits of Caesar.
The fool is the one who says he does not want to be ruled by God. The verse actually describes the foolishness of despising God’s dominion and going out from under His rule only to be, through sloth or covetousness, ruled by human magistrates who offer socialist benefits and exercise bureaucratic authority. This foolishness is also consistently described in another passage:
“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.
Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.” (Romans 1:18-25)
God made man upright, to have the common sense that it is foolish to despise the dominion granted to the obedient by Him, only for them to give up that dominion and become property of false gods through taxation and perverted social compacts. Fools give up God’s glory which naturally inspires men to love Him as their one lawgiver and judge and to love their neighbor as themselves. They exchange His natural law for the civil laws of human civil governments and turn away from Him as their figurehead in order to pursue the godheads represented by animal totems and dead rulers whose names plaster temples made by human hands, like all government institutions and bureaucratic offices. From the Golden Calf and other gilded statutes that formed federal reserves, to busts and Rushmores that represent members of civil pantheons, to anthropomorphic icons of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman origin over temples of government function, to bald eagles and dead presidents on currencies, to sports mascots and the names of famous magistrates indicating bastions of public education, to cartoons representing political parties… all pagan superstitious iconography is shorthand for political foundations in the past and the present. Even the word “creature” in Romans 1 means “civil institution” as it does in the Great Commission:
“And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.” (Mark 16:15-16)
Fools become fools when God gives them up to a reprobate mind after they give up God as their magistrate for the uncleanness of socialist lusts, to dishonor their bodies by making them a surety for collective debt through corvee bondage. They form autonomous machines and give life to bureaucracies through incorporation to turn against them in divine justice for their idolatry. This is why God gives them over to a reprobate mind, for the end result of their self-destruction. In fact, the darkening of “foolish hearts” in Romans 1 that produces a debased or reprobate mind comes from the Greek “skotos“, and is “metaphorically, of ignorance respecting divine things and human duties, and the accompanying ungodliness and immorality, together with their consequent misery.” This is rebellion against doing God’s will in maintaining a free society, where men pretentiously feigning ignorance, giving themselves license and excuse to sin. Hyperbolically, “this is the power of (night’s) darkness, i.e. it has the power of rendering men bold to commit crimes.”
Naturally, the “consequent misery” of pretentiously excusing oneself to be “bold to commit crimes” against God’s Law, entails being kicked out of the Garden of God’s jurisdiction and into the civil bondage of false gods of human civil government who, through democracy and government license, enabled by socialist welfare states, provide society with a chaotic and destructive framework lacking in personal responsibility, which invariably increases the immorality of society exponentially. When man centralizes his powers of choice, desire for provision, and judicial responsibilities into human institutions of force, socialism, and legalism, he creates a power vacuum in society that will be filled with unrighteousness, poverty, and bondage; dispersing decadence, debt, destruction, and damnation.
This darkening of men’s hearts, rendering their minds reprobate, is evidenced in their attempts to suss out the machinations of their own slavery and in imagining false ways to liberty. They will commit themselves to political or economic power in order to render their Satanic system more favorable to them according to their desires, as if institutionalism could ever produce liberty and not more institutionalism. This occurs because man slothfully interprets the notions about life, liberty, and the pursuit of property only in the context of his presuppositions.
As an example, many of those who presuppose themselves to be Christians can only interpret scripture in the context of their bondage. Most people take for granted the things contained within their normalcy bias because they are interpreting the way society works through a worldview that recognizes that they are in bondage, but really have no idea how far in bondage they are. They are fish in a dirty bowl, imagining the water is clean because they have no frame of reference by which to know better. Their “Gospel” may “set them free” from some “poor habits” and secure them from “eternal torment” of some sort, but as long as his real bondage remains the standard by which all of his ideas are subjected, man will always be “learning, never coming to the knowledge of the truth“. He is sowing seeds of the status quo into every idea he has to compete with or reform the status quo. He is trying to recognize the problem on the problem’s terms, adopting the world‘s view of the world in his confrontation with the world. Whatever solution he tries to create from that premise will always have a little bit of the problem remaining in his conclusion concerning a solution. Like the Pharisees, his foolish heart has been darkened. The good news is that there exists a real solution to adopt, only because there is “freedom indeed” in the Gospel of Christ. He came to preach scripture in its original context of true freedom but, unfortunately, modern Christians have chosen to adopt the dead tradition of the Pharisees‘ interpretation of Scripture.
501c3 Churches are not the only institutions that propagate this cycle of darkening hearts and debasing minds, however. Public schools are also designed to create a culture that disregards common sense and wisdom. Public education is not only a wicked endeavor because it is a fruit of socialist covetousness where you must demand that your neighbor work without pay so that his taxes fund a bureaucratic institution to raise your children for you, but neither is its curriculum merely some mistaken, bumbling, botched, and unintentional dumbing-down of federal children. Public schools are a source of propaganda, social engineering, and cultural dialectics invented to create chaos, distraction, and a New World Order in the darkened hearts and minds of those who have given up on God to be their god, in favor of human magistrates.
“There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student in America believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative…. Relativism is necessary to openness; and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating. Openness—and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance in the face of the various claims to truth and the various ways of life and kinds of human beings—is the great insight of our times.” (The Closing of the American Mind. Allan Bloom. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987, pp. 25-26)
It is not just as though this dumbing down of “civilized” society through human institutions is merely a direct fruit of having been given over to a reprobate mind by God’s judgment. This falsification of information and perversion of wisdom is made deliberately habitual by men who seek power and therefore the internal weakening of their civil slaves by replacing truth with falsehood, eradicating any notion of discernment or wisdom in the people as part of the process. This imposed weakness is disguised as an edification in knowledge and false teachings. Everyone claims to be “seeking truth,” as if collecting information from teachers, published literature, and from all sources available to them is the path to truth. “The bigger one’s library the more truth he has,” but the indiscriminate gathering of information and then storing it all together is an exercise in futility.
Seeking truth is more of an exercise in culling than in collecting. Gathering information is easy… and usually worthless. Culling bad information is the key to finding truth. Truths that are hidden in a flood of lies and untruths get lost in the noise. Truth is not in the volume of information you may collect, but rather in the careful rejection of un-truths. The age of readily available information is the age of ever-increasing ignorance. If knowledge is power, the common sense by which to distill truth from knowledge is the means by which to wield that power.
“…Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth…do these also resist the truth: men of corrupt minds, reprobate concerning the faith. But they shall proceed no further: for their folly shall be manifest unto all men, as theirs also was.” (2 Timothy 3:7-9)
This premise of darkened hearts permeates every single aspect of society, from our myopic and limited ideas about personal holiness, to that which we classify education, to our bumbling understanding of employment and economics. It is common for the foolish mind to presuppose some liberty in his daily life where he can “vote with his wallet” in some presumed economic choices within his supposed “capitalist” economy. He may even express his liberty and power of choice in saying “the Market provides” as some enigmatic, but ultimately meaningless gesture, which is much akin to the phrase “Nature selects” for those darkened minds who seek to replace natural, scientific laws of Nature’s God with the counterfeit of evolutionism.
The concept of the “market” is an idiomatic, tautological reification, supposing creative attributes to an ethereal and anthropomorphized notion of economy. In reality, the “market”, as is currently and commonly recognized, provides nothing. It is itself provided by socialist Benefactors who exercise authority, and is enabled by bureaucratic institutions, and their tools of supposed commerce. It is clearly evident that western society is a socialist society, and that everything we call “economy” is just characterized by as system of compartmentalized goods and services which is inherently pertinent to all communist societies. Our national economies are so specialized and interdependent that we are forced to be reliant on our neighbor to labor and be productive in order to ensure our own survival. From auto mechanics, to grocery store clerks, to hospital attendants, to construction firms, to tradesmen, to bankers, to agriculture, to public education, or any other contribution to society imaginable; there is no concept of independence or personal power of choice that is inherently found in a capitalist free “market” society. Each person in each industry relies on each person in every other industry to perform their functions and tow the line in order to ensure the success of society as a whole.
This is the nature of collectivism, and not a “free market”. The only thing inhibiting our economy from being readily recognized as socialist is a thin, apparent disconnect between what we have to contribute (our labor, goods, and services) and what we extract, at any given moment, from what our neighbor has to contribute (his labor, goods, and services). That disconnect is the illusion of choice through the magic of currency. Which is provided and manipulated by a socialist institution to make efficient our socialist transactions. The so-called “market” is not unlike a food service: a suburban buffet with different food items from which to choose. But the buffet itself, along with its individual edible options are already pre-determined by the arbiters of the buffet, or in this case, the human civil government which decided whether or not our “money” is even acceptable at the establishment long before we ever walk in the door. We cannot choose to go to another buffet, unless we expatriate citizenship for that of another socialist country who will just exercise the same degree of authority over us because we rely on it to provide choices for us through an “economy“.
The false gods of human civil government provide “the market”. They are your providers and protectors. And their providence comes from compelling you and your neighbor to be assimilated into mass cauldrons of human flesh where every single transaction is evidence that you survive because you and your neighbor are enslaved together, and the fruits of their slavery are provided for you by arbiters of your “market”. Your market is just an mob of cannibalism, and your choices within it are just as “free” as whatever is permissible by the license granted by human civil government, which has become your authoritative father as his economic privileges. Your “freedom” is to chose to either be subjected to a bureaucratic economy, or to starve to death. In what world do slaves have “free markets?” We have expounded upon this idea thoroughly here.
Abolitionism is inherently an anarchist endeavor, and vice versa. They cannot be separated from each other. Statism is sin and sin is often characterized by some degree of statism, for when men refuse to be ruled by God in their hearts and minds, they will look to democracy to codify and give license to their desires and foolishness. They will legalize plunder and murder and homosexuality and adultery. They will create authority in their own image in order to fill the vacuum left by God’s authority and the being made in His image as a jurisdictional privilege of that political reality.
There is no abolition of anything without seeking the literal Kingdom of God, a competing nation and government (that does not exercise authority) to the foolish kingdoms established by statists. Even if some of those statists are professing Christians who take the Lord’s name in vain by committing themselves to democracy in futile, useless vanity. Of course, the Bible tells us that debased minds will be hard-pressed to understand this message of internal common sense:
“But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost: In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.” (2 Corinthians 4:3-4)
“For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.” (1 Corinthians 1:18-21)
The Adversary, through a spiritual jurisdiction incumbent upon a political one, warps the minds of civil slaves, causing them to believe in the campaign promises of false christs, and baptizes them into the kingdoms of bondage through social security enrollment and birth certification.
“Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not. For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.” (Matthew 24: 23-24)
We have detailed here many examples of false gospels of civil magistrates throughout history, and the great feats of empire that can be accomplished through civil bondage and socialist worldviews. Their worlds were invariably ordered and disciplined but, like all authoritative empires, end in social collapse through moral and economic bankruptcy. The order of human civil government is always short-lived and skin-deep, because it is a refraction and perversion of the natural order of Godly civil government.
“My people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children.” (Hosea 4:6)
Alternatively, “ignorantia juris non excusat or ignorantia legis neminem excusat. (Latin for “ignorance of the law excuses not” and “ignorance of law excuses no one”.)
This truth claim naturally has something to do with the reason why unbelievers and statists have no argument against Christ’s anarchist Gospel, but can only suppress it and ignore it and try to stamp it out. But as long as people refuse to know their Bible, they will continue to ignore their bondage and pragmatically go to the ballot box for their salvation. As long as Satan keeps professing Christians on the hook of political efficacy, the Kingdom of God will never be established in America.
It is common sense that anarchy does not lead to chaos. What it does lead to is the rejection of the fundamental sins of outsourcing your God-given responsibilities to love your neighbor and execute justice and show mercy and provide for the needy to the satanic cabal of human civil government that exercises authority over society while pretending to play benefactor. This is the opposite of pure and undefiled religion, by definition. Anarchy prevents chaos by demanding and enabling personal moral fidelity to social virtues and community ethics.
The (un)righteousness of false gods in tailor-made suits with partisan politics, corridors of power, and campaign managers will invariably destroy a society. When you have man-made authority and contracted welfare-through-taxation, you do not need family to hold you accountable or a voluntary network of freewill charity to sustain you. When you have anaerobic departments of “peacekeepers” and military subsidized by forced contributions, you do not need voluntary self-sacrifice to protect your neighbor, your children, or yourself, so those faculties in a man whither and entropy into negligent uselessness, and then religion becomes impure and defiled.
“Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.” (Thomas Paine, Common Sense)
Do you find abortion to be wicked, homosexuality an abomination, imperialism to be revolting? You still have a conscience. Do you find human civil government to be an efficacious instrument to improve society and call its markets “free”? You have lost your common sense.
“The known and willful support or perpetuation of an error is a crime against humanity and a sin against Him who is Truth. To cling to error or defend error when one has reason to suspect it may be error reveals a heart that does not fully love the truth for the truth’s sake.
To strenuously support and shield from scrutiny what we believe when we are aware that its truth is questionable reveals a heart that is not completely candid. We are supposed to be children of light, and to be afraid to shine light upon what we believe shows a love still for darkness.
Although all men have an innate and genuine thirst after truth and corresponding disgust for error, there may exist, strange as it may seem, extreme opposition to the acceptance of certain truths–an absolute hatred of them, because they differ from what we now believe, because they require changes in us which we do not want to make, because they require the confession that we have been mistaken and have held error—so the mind will not give them fair treatment—It hardens against them and imposes unjust tests and will not give them the courtesy of fair and respectful attention. Prejudices, vicious habits of thought, pride of opinion and of denominational belief, ignorance, suspicion, bigotry, blind following of religious and denominational leaders so becloud and benumb the mind that it cannot and will not see its own errors, or the truth of others–when with a little unprejudiced examination the truth could be seen.” (Randolph S. Foster, Studies in Theology, Vol. I, pp. 9, 10, 18, 31.)
“AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market who promised these beautiful things.When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: ‘Stick to the Devil you know.’On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: ‘The Wages of Sin is Death.’In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: ‘If you don’t work you die.’Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!”
Abolish Human Archism 