The Tangent College
There is an old saying which I used to hear a lot. Initially I did not understand what it meant but its significance has grown over the years.
blood is thicker than water – and this particularly applies to the understanding of religion.
Please consider – “Religion peaceably divides, while reality violently unites.”
Religion is a complicated subject that has numerous meanings. As I’ve covered in the past, religion is both man-made and cultural.
Religion is also familial. It peaceably divides by drawing people into religious families. Cultural religion has its origin in the family. Blood is thicker than water means that for most people their family ties are stronger and more significant than their ties to the truth. If the truth comes in conflict with family beliefs, most people will side with their religious family in spite of the truth. The religious mind considers this loyalty a type of goodness. But is it?
The most extreme example of family “blood” loyalty is that of the Mafia who would famously say “you don’t go against the family”. Most were all “good” Catholics attending mass with no self-consciousness that their murderous and extortionist activities would be considered immoral, against God or even contrary to the teachings of the Church. And of course their corruption was similar to much of the corruption within the Roman Church family itself. Their only morality was to the family. In this way, the Mafia family forms its own religion based on loyalty.
But this loyalty, though not as extreme, also applies to most other religions. The tie to one’s own religion is like a tie to one’s family. As members of a Mafia family would fear for their life if they would dare abandon the family, so does the religious person fear for his eternal life if he were to walk away from his religious family. This family guarantees his eternal security. And even if they do not fear for their eternal life, most people will stay loyal to their religious tradition in order to keep their family and friends, for fear of being alone.
The water (truth) of the word becomes secondary to familial blood. It is why the Pharisees claimed their salvation was rooted in having Abraham as their father. Both Jesus and John the Baptist uprooted this idea by saying “you are of your father the devil”, “before Abraham was I AM” and “God could from these stones raise up children to Abraham”, respectively. For this the religious Pharisees beheaded John the Baptist and crucified Christ. Today they would be called anti-Semites.
But somehow Dennis Prager is testing your knowledge of Christmas and claiming that “secularism” is the great evil of the 20th century. He is the perfect embodiment of a good religious man peaceably dividing Christians and Jews. -I won’t talk about how I think your religion is foolish if you don’t talk about how you think my religion is foolish. Peaceable division, agreeing to disagree. Sometimes it is necessary but it is not the most preferred and it does not advance the truth. He often times also has mentioned that blood does not matter when adopting a child, which I agree with, but then he claims that blood does matter with regards to Jewish identity.
I have always inclined towards water over blood. Water being the truth and blood being family and religious tradition (dogma). So much of religion can only be explained by family loyalty.
–How can a Roman Catholic continue to attend a church that maintains the infallibility of the Pope while personally believing this Pope, in particular, is reprehensible and leading the church astray? How does the Catholic Church justify shutting down Holy Mass, which according to their own doctrine is necessary for eternal salvation, in the face of a any virus. I guess faith and loyalty to the government and people’s feelings outweighs faith and loyalty to God. The Scriptures clearly state “you shall call no one on earth “father” for one is your father that is in heaven”, and yet every priest is referred to as “father”. Yet despite these and many other contradictions with the “water”, good Catholics remain loyal to the church family.
– How can a Calvinist go out and seriously evangelize for the Christian faith when his own doctrine informs him that his evangelizing is irrelevant because everyone is already predestined one way or the other? But no, the church doctrine is considered right and reason and empirical evidence are suspect because they do not agree with the family.
–A Baptist leader Franklin Graham announces that Jesus, the Word of God, the only begotten son of God, who healed the blind and raised the dead, who died on the cross bearing the sin of all mankind, would have taken the vaccine if it was available in his day. And yet these Baptists under the tutelage of Graham remained loyal Baptists regardless of the truth.
But of course there is no end to these examples.
(Aside from Christ the three greatest figures in the Bible are Abraham, Moses, and Elijah/John the Baptist)
Consider Abraham when God first calls him:
Now the LORD said to Abram,
“Go forth from your country,
And from your relatives
And from your father’s house,
To the land which I will show you;
God told Abraham to leave his family and their country which means their traditions and religions. God began to form a relationship with this individual, Abraham. It is essentially the same message that Jesus offered to his disciples to leave their families and follow Him. Peter and Andrew immediately left their families and followed Jesus.
Consider Luke 9:59-62 As Jesus attempts to call another disciple – “And He said to another, “Follow Me.” But he said, “Permit me first to go and bury my father.” But He said to him, “Allow the dead to bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim everywhere the kingdom of God.” And another also said, “I will follow You, Lord; but first permit me to say good-bye to those at home.” But Jesus said to him, “No one, after putting his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.”
There is a continuous urging throughout all of Scripture to follow the truth, alone if need be, and separate from ties that bind; the two biggest to being family and religion. But most people are unwilling to do this. Even Jesus failed at convincing many to leave their families, traditions, superstitions and religions.
God never calls families. He only calls individuals. Consider the family of Jesse whom Samuel rejected all except one, the very last one, David. And David left his family.
The truth is that the Bible rarely talks about or even uses the word “family”. And yet so many of the modern day Christian organizations have the word “family” in them. The Bible almost never “Focuses on the Family”. There is a disconnect here that few dare to point out.
This is a very big topic and I could certainly go on and on but I will stop here and hopefully something I said would inspire you to seek the truth in spite of blood, family, and religion.
But now I wish to switch gears to another topic.
_________________________________
Briefly back to politics, everyone’s favorite subject!
Listen to: Isabella Riley Moody on the Stew Peter’s show “Warmonger Nikki Haley HUMILIATED: FAILS EPICALLY Over Ukraine Geography Question” This is a great sum up of many things; the neocon opportunist Nikki Haley’s joke of a campaign, the cruel joke of the phony Republican debates themselves, and all the problems with the old joke Donald Trump whom millions still cling to as some sort of lingering savior. Some people ask me what I think of Donald Trump and this video lays out my opinion perfectly. He ends up to be the best statist bozo in a room filled with statist bozos. Nikki Haley is the pretty female bozo that continuously plays to the uni-party middle attempting to appeal to some nonexistent road between woke and neoconservative Republican thought. Like all these bozos she can’t manage to simply tell the truth because her whole life has become a lie, like almost every other politician. But the circus must go on!
And tough guy Trump, the uni-party’s scapegoat, says he is here to save “our democracy”; which of course means “their oligarchy”. I suspect that he is working more for them than for the people as he claims.