self

Tuesday February 22^nd, 1^st Corinthians 3:  ¹⁶ Don’t you realize that all of you together are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God lives in you?  One element common in earlier religious thought, but not so much in our modern religious thought, is the dominance of community identification over individual identification.  Before the time period from the reformation to the enlightenment, a person’s identity was as part of a tribe, city, nation or community.  Post enlightenment, the individual took precedence over the community.  As with any social change the lines are not so clear cut and you can always find examples to the contrary, but in general there is a vast difference between one’s self identity in relationship to the group between the time of Christ and now.  Since the time of Reagan’s presidency, we see the economic component to that, with the winners winning more and more and the children of God scrambling to survive.  What we miss most in this transition is the responsibility the one has for the many, as well as the responsibility the many has for the one.  In community, there are the “well to do” and “not so well off,” but in true community no one has too much at the expense of those who have too little, and everyone at least has enough.  The modern libertarian concept of individual rights over the common good is contrary to the teachings in scripture and any attempt to fit them together is square peg and round hole mechanics.  The message is not that we are our brother’s keeper, but rather that we are our brothers brother and our sisters sister.  The scriptures call us to live a life where rights, responsibility and relationship go hand in hand and where power, prestige and pilfering profit are an anathema.  Free market libertarians are simply trying to boilerplate community economics onto international anonymity.  The results are rights, power, prestige and pilfering profit without responsibility and relationship and a landscape strewn with victims.