I've gotten the ad now on my Facebook streamer column:
Michael Prell has cleverly coded the title of his book "Underdogma" -
to proclaim aloud that our culture war is being fought against an adversary that uses deceptive means to its goal of making the Liberal Left subculture (see my first blog entry at the very bottom of this page) the dominant force in American society.
We can all come up with catch phrases. But we have to build a mutual understanding on observable patterns that allow comparative analysis, and prove the paradigm matches up repetitively in disparate fields of observation.
There's a huge depth to this, that great philosophers have told about - when Jesus said, "Blessed are the poor," He began a revolution in social studies. To practice that blessedness is to break with stratification from whatever source it purports to derive its justice.
But what is happening in the United States since the first days of Obama's Presidential campaign is, in fact, something "unprecedented" in that the apparatus of governance - that Lincoln deliberately counterposed to all its historical and contemporary congeners at Gettysburg - is no longer being recognized as to have been derived by cause-and-effect from the actions of them who signed the Declaration of Independence and ratified the Constitution.
Our representatives in the Legislature, as of the last 40 days, have practiced patently false representation, and have gotten the full approval of both the Executive branch for doing it, and the adulation of a fawning press.
For over 14 years I've studied this phenomenon that Michael Prell dubs "underdogma" as a spiritual archetype, under the rubric of "the spirit of jealousy."
Starting with a postulate that there is a significant difference between envy and jealousy, I established that a clear Biblical pattern was recorded in 1 Kings 20-22 to exemplify what becomes of a man like Ahab who submits his identity to the seduction of a Jezebel.
Envy of (or call it what the Decalogue does, coveting) that which is recognized to belong to someone else can be transformed in a weak, undirected soul into jealousy, to treat the object of unrestrained desire as if it belonged to himself.
In the Torah a process of adjudicating the jealousy of a husband is described by which he legitimately brings his grievance to the priests for divine judgment; the Samaritans, however, were living a life of apostasy and instead of seeking God through repentance of their idolatry were confident that a mere alliance with the Kingdom of Judah could bring them relief from Syrian oppression.
These ancient realities are there and provide the paradigm for today.
The spirit of jealousy came on this nation in the second Clinton administration in a big way. His narrow escape from impeachment aroused the people to a righteous indignation that is still swelling. We do have a right (as "we people") to be angry that our property in our own government has been violated.
But we must be aware that the false representation of who "we" are as a nation is operating under a systematic guise, where they who "stand for" the underdog are, like Ahab, deceived as to whose rights they themselves are exercising.
This false representation - or false advocacy - is one that is empowered by occult and evil forces that cannot be addressed by means merely political. We as a people are being called upon by "all that is good" to discern the behind-the-scenes activity that is the real oppression.
Its victims are the deceived. They have the same civil rights as we, to access the halls of power. But until we learn that they are deceived and find out whether we ourselves are possessed of a spirit of jealousy, our capacity to exercise conjoined efforts for that good we know we are heirs to, in a republic that is a true commonwealth after the Lincoln model, is still going to be very much reduced from what it must be to win that desired state back.
Lincoln was (I think) deliberately quoting in his famous Gettysburg address from the phrase first printed in 1385. "A government of the people, by the people, and for the people" was written by John Wycliffe in the preface to his English Bible as "a book for" such government.
He fought against an entrenched, oppressive regime that was deceived into thinking it had the exclusive divine right to administer the blessings of heaven but in reality was monopolizing an economic system by restricting access to the means of production and a political system structured by feudal fealties that coexisted under a perennial tension well known to history.
Wycliffe lost his life - after losing his team and then his liberty. He could not, I think, have ever lost his awareness that the life of the soul is graced with knowledge of the holy, and knowledge of eternity through the Word of God that they were diligent to learn and teach.
In that Word we find, in Paul's Letter to the Romans, the prototype for Lincoln's address.
Due to constraints of time and space I must wrest it from its glorious context! But don't let me stop you from reading what precedes it!
"O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God! how unsearchable
are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!
For who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been his counselor?
Or who hath first given to him, and it shall be recompensed unto him again?
For of him, and through him, and to him are all things: to whom
be glory for ever. Amen."
This is in Romans 11: 33-36. If the derivation is as I think, then we the people are the government's right god: we are its creator, we are its means of existence, and we are its judge.
The government that we serve, will never be a government that was founded by our founders, and anyone who intends to transform this government into an Ahab is a traitor.
