John Steward of Jesus
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Death promoters

September 16, 1980

Reading “The Way We Are” by David Rhoads and the chapter on “The Will to Death” in Law and Liberty by R.J. Rushdoony has helped me to see that the rapidly mounting tension developing in the world may be the final battle (for this wave of history (this “age”?)) between the forces on the one side which are creative, productive, life-promoting, and life affirming, and those on the other side which are rigid, consuming, life-destroying (death-promoting), and life denying (death-affirming). One might say it is the forces of heaven against the forces of hell.

The fundamental dynamic moving bureaucracies is not that of enabling and facilitating productive and life-promoting activity, but rather of helping to put a stop to it. Productive activities lead to wealth, vigor, and recognition. It is such activities which are being stopped by government bureaucracies. Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, front page, section two, described a foundry recently closed for such reasons. This death promoting process detests evidence of creative production. Creative individuals must be regulated, regimented, and taxed to inactivity (death). This death wish for all is often coupled with a strong desire for personal power, used to hasten the death process. Jimmy Carter’s contradictory “human rights” activities perhaps reflect this dynamic (either his own or his advisers’).

Postscript (same date)
The man whose emotions are loyal to his God in the heavenly realm and therefore who is not subject to a tyrant, is often the same man who recognizes the non-earthly source of evil, in the devil. This implies that his enemy is non-earthly and spiritual.

He does not have to find a scapegoat, in the form of a human enemy, to make sense of history. He can forgive the man whose  loyalties were misplaced.

The man whose emotions are loyal to a group on earth, and who therefore accepts the authority of a tyrant, often finds the source of evil in another earthly group, and frequently finds a scapegoat in a human representative of that group. Thus evil becomes personalized in a man, just as good and authority may be. Because another human being represents the cause of evil, jt is easier to stir up hatred and revenge in such men, and possibly more difficult to cultivate forgiveness.

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