Now public-security

           In this essay, I use words and phrases in new ways, not to hide my thoughts, but to express new views of old concerns. Please be patient and learn my words and phrases so that you can then share your experiences and observations that could change my thinking. I write and speak to listen. Civilization indoctrinates us to either love or oppose, even hate, one another. In conflict we often miss possible joy of appreciating most persons.
           Most of us can get along while practicing private pursuits such as sports or fine arts or religion. Each believer’s personal-God seems all powerful respecting private concerns, and believers tend to project their God's metaphysics onto an imaginary public. Most non-theist persons are also inspired to face life’s unknowns; many of the non-theists are also areligious. Yet, most of them pray when they have done all they can do yet sill feel vulnerable. They pray to whatever could relieve their concern, be it the-God, potential energy, chaos, an infinite singularity: whatever is really in control of outcomes.                Objecting to a neighbor’s reasons for good behavior so as to hope for like religious-beliefs seems arbitrary and unnecessary speculation. People can be good neighbors without imposing private concerns, especially the afterdeath, that vast time after body, mind, and person stop functioning. In my exprience, the most violent offense I have suffered is someone applying the Apostle John's 5 modes of hate to me; see John 15:18-23.
           However, the-indisputable-facts-of-reality, hereafter The Facts, show that neither a personal God nor destiny nor government guarantees a person’s lifetime. The people may mutually collaborate to enhance each person’s opportunity to live. Some may choose to merely cooperate rather than collaborate. The rest of the people may be dissidents to both collaboration and cooperation. Embarking on a new political era starting in 2017, Americans may focus, for the first time, on shared opportunity to live a complete life. Rather-than or along-with striving for religious morality or social morality we may collaborate for civic-morality: humble-inegrity in human-connections.

            Maybe there will always be some dissenters against broadly-defined-civic-safety-and-security; hereafter, civic-security. By "civic" I mean faithful in human connections more than obedient to municiple rules. It seems critical for persons who want a civic culture to know code words and phrases dissenters use to defeat civic-security.For example, older readers don’t understand when millennials use “slip it” phrases.[i] Such code words ridicule the age groups called “gen x, boomers, and silent.”[ii] But the “old people” observed, perhaps from Caligula’s example,[iii] that self-interest, or  wisdom, rejects debauchery. In other words, for personal good, fidelity is preferred to debauchery. Observations and experiences inspire fidelity to The Facts. Beyond “slip it,” traditional words such as fornication, together, solidarity, infidel, integrity, the good, democracy, victimization, society, justice, and fidelity seem controversial, too.

Dale Carnegie taught “Act enthusiastic and you’ll be enthusiastic.”[iv] In that spirit, many politicians urge “togetherness,” no matter which faction of the religion-government partnership[v] they advocate. They tacitly assert that the other party opposes togetherness. For example, Secretary Clinton, on November 9, 2016, appealed to campaigners[vi] to stay together for the wishes of “millions of Americans,” even though the voters in their counties (84%) and the Electoral College (57%) unelected Clinton, perhaps primarily for the thought respecting four deaths in Bengazi, "At this point, what difference does it possibly make?" President-elect Donald Trump also appeals for togetherness,[vii] even while promising to undo President Obama’s “signature accomplishments.” Obama spoke of Trump differences in pugilistic terms.[viii] Collaborative goals missing, the people know that togetherness has been proven impossible. However, the people have never collaborated for Security (recall, “broadly defined”). There can be togetherness for Security.

“Infidel” seems harmless until you personally suffer the epithet. My Sunday school teacher had no more authority than an ant. However, some ants have the power to drive a person away. The person treats the wound and resumes self-reliance. But a teacher speaks more than an ant, so I returned and asked for an explanation. The teacher responded, “Phil, I disagree with you and that’s as much as I will say.” The teacher tried to impose opinion rather than The Facts. I withdrew from the society, the Baptist brotherhood, to preserve self-reliance in civic-morality. "Teachers like mine" are infidels to Security. (More recently, I discovered that they are also infidels to Genesis 1:26-28 political philosphy, which in 2021 terms suggests: female&male-human-being can and must independently provide order and prospertity to the earth and its inhabitants.)

Rather than conformity to society, we propose civic collaboration for Security. With Security, each person may pursue real-no-harm private goals during his or her personal lifetime. We encourage integrity beyond togetherness:  Integrity incorporates wholeness and either factual understanding or declaration that you do not know the facts. The civic citizen continues to say "I don't know" when they don't know, until death.

Instead of the “impossible dream” of 100% civic collaboration, we urge 2/3 of citizens to adopt a voluntary way of living we dub a civic culture. In a civic culture, every society, association, religion, or other endeavor may flourish under statutory law. For that to happen, 2/3 of members of each society must also collaborate for the civic culture. "Civic" culture implies no-real-harm behavior. I realize the real-no-harm provision is difficult, and that is one reason a civic culture, achievable as it may be, has perhaps never before been proposed. Public-integrity is not easy to achieve, especially if civic-justice is not the widespread goal. However, with practice, public-integrity becomes attractive. Furthermore, I think 2/3 of the people already strive for Security, but they have not heretofore had the words and phrases with which to appreciate and encourage each other. Perhaps the key phrase is civic-morality. Perhaps it's public-integrity. Perhaps Security. (In 2021, I promote responsible-human-independence --- RHI.)

The human-being seems clearly the most creative of the animal species. one of the factors that empowers division of potentially sympathetic people is creative-social-language or code words. For example, Socrates asked if a person knows the god by the good or the good by the god: where there is good is there a god? Does "god" confuse "good?" I am loathe to answer my question, and therefore do not try. However, I codify the question with hyphens: To constrain chaos, should human-beings pursue the-God more than the-good?
             A task of a civic culture is to discover code words and share meanings in iterative civic collaboration so as to establish public-integrity rather than impose dominant opinion or democracy---mob rule. (Liberal democracy disrupts the mob and thereby turns chaos divergent.) Public-integrity empowers private-liberty-with-civic-morality rather than dominant opinion. Nevertheless, some persons use personal-privacy ot develop dependency. Civic persons analyze code words and pretense so as to empower candid talk. Civic persons do not lie, so that they can communicate, even to liars. Yet a civic culture is alert and strong to self defense.

“Democracy” does not offer private-liberty-with-civic-morality yet is a current, global object-of-dissent. Any way it’s evaluated, majority rule is mobocracy. With democracy, it is only a matter of time until the majority, collection of minorities, or a minority leads everyone into error. That is one reason willing people in their states, in 1788, authorized the USA and guaranteed each state a republican form of government. See the US Constitution, Article IV, Section 4. The USA is a representative republic rather than a democracy. The USA is organized so as to disrupt democracy and preserve statutory law. However, it is critical for the people to realize the importance of a republic rather than a democracy.

The current hype about democracy in the USA is, for example, a hoax by progressives, who have no patience for either a republic, or the rule of statutory law. The hoax is especially empowered by relatively new development, perhaps forty-five years old, that emerged from Christianity.

Alinsky-Marxist organizers (AMO) assert some variation of “victimization”---race, gender, poverty or other “victims”---and declare: AMO wants retribution and demands it now! The retribution often smacks of Marxism. AMO create civic disruptions that in the passions of the moment inspire misguided “soldiers” to risk personal liberty, even life, while the AMO “holds the soldier’s coat”---from a distance; usually from another city.

We see AMO in crusades for the Democratic Party, income equality, LGBT, Black Lives Matter, and against the Donald Trump's Presidential election,. I will explain how AMO emerged, because it is so prevalent in today’s political disputes. It should be talked about, so as to lessen loss and pain in people’s lives, especially the lives of the AMO soldiers who subject themselves to statutory law enforcement. A civic culture influences, by example, the people toward fidelity to Security. A civic people is empowered by education rather than force or coercion.

Civic immorality led to AMO. A historical review is shortened, as follows:

·         1619 years ago the canonized[ix] Catholic Bible included books, both old and new that still condone slavery as the word of a Christian God. Thus, a Biblical “original sin” predates claims that America---the USA--- is responsible for slavery.[x] But the real question is which Biblical god condones slavery of whom? Who are the chosen people? Could they be black? See James H. Cone, below. The Church claims only the Church can interpret the Bible.

·         503 years ago Machiavelli[xi] noted theistic people’s habitual confidence in the religion-politics-partnership. Politicians live and die but a religious institution may persist indefinitely. Only a dreamer would imagine 2/3 of believers behaving for salvation in death but also collaborating for Security in life. I am that dreamer.

·         409 years ago and before that a few European nations started colonizing America.[xii] Colonizers collected a percentage of bounty in gold, furs, timber, and agricultural products for return to the colonizing land. Starting a couple decades later, the colonizers placed African slaves in the colonies for agricultural labor to benefit the colonizers under Catholic-Christian morality; the doctrine of discovery. Africans sold those Africans as commodities under African morality.

·         European colonists experienced, in America:

o   freedom-from the oppression they would have suffered had they stayed in their mother country

o   hence, the liberty-to establish the life they wanted despite frontier challenges
o   collaboration by free blacks during the Revolutionary War

o    unexpected/unintended responsibility for the Africans placed here as a global commodity and the natives that were oppressed by the colonizers.

·         258 years ago, slaves founded Christian black church in America. (Recently, I discovered literature about the Ethiopian Tewahedo Church, but cannot discern if it is revisionist history.)

·         250 years ago, England began taxing colonial enterprise and European products sold in the colonies. Rebellious colonies changed the style to states, tacitly revising personal status to “American,” each under a state constitution. They requested fellow British subjects in Britain as well as loyalists in the colonies to grant relief and stopped buying English merchandise.

·         242 years ago, Thomas Paine wrote a scathing letter against African slavery.[xiii]

·         229 years ago, having won the war against England, thirteen independent states realized they were in charge and must establish a nation. They planned termination of African-slave trade twenty years after ratification of the constitution for the USA, but could not, did not negotiate a schedule to free the slaves, leaving emancipation to the future generations.

·         156 years ago, southern states proposed to secede from the USA, listing grievances and concluding “. . . public opinion at the North has invested a great political error with the sanction of more erroneous religious belief” (my emphasis). Ministers in the South preached  Bible interpretation that slavery is an institution of God. White soldiers in the North defeated white soldiers in the South. But erroneous Bible interpretation remained! ("More" is an accepance that the CSA religious opinion could be wrong, so it is perplexing that they would fire on the USA at Fort Sumter.)

·         153 years ago plans for emancipated Reconstruction of the South began.

·         139 years ago Jim Crow laws appeared in the South.

·         61 years ago liberation theology emerged and influenced the Catholic Church in Brazil.[xiv] The idea is that elite Christians use the Bible to victimize the poor.

·         51 years ago organizations within black church[xv] motivated the USA to grant long overdue minority civil rights acts, enforced nationwide in 1964-5. Billed early as non-violent, the late 1960s was a decade of riots as black power arose to destroy their own property.[xvi]

·         45-47 years ago Alinsky-Marxist organization (AMO) emerged from four events:

o   Congressmen founded what became Congressional Black Caucus,[xvii] which demanded[xviii] “equality of results.”[xix] (See comment by James Meredith, below.)

o   James H. Cone published his “initial attempt to identify liberation as the heart of the Christian gospel, and blackness as the primary mode of God's presence.”[xx] In short, perhaps:  God is black, The Word came from Africa, and blacks are God's chosen people.

o   ACORN was founded.[xxi]

o   Saul Alinsky “compiled the lessons he had learned throughout his experiences of community organizing from 1939–1971.”[xxii] Alinsky rules position ostensibly non-violent AMO soldiers to march into possible passionate violence. Radical organizers routinely ridicule fidelity.[xxiii]

·         2016 the press is fixated on “equality” yet, quoting James Meredith, iconic 1966 marcher, now 83, “Citizenship is what the March Against Fear was about . . . Not only rights and privileges are part of citizenship. Duty and responsibility are an equal part, and that's the part the black race has failed to pay any attention to."[xxiv]

The emergence of AMO during the last fifty years seems regressive for the people’s urge for civic justice. In general, AMO asserts demands without performing duty and responsibility. The AMO are misguided defenders of civic antinomianism: protests are egocentrically justified regardless of violent, illegal behavior. For example, accepting the results of a presidential election is expected in the USA, but AMO victims marched in the streets after Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton. AMO recruits march without regard for what they may accomplish, so the consequence is continual AMO to disrupt the civic order.
            Perhaps hidden in the above explanation is speculative logic from James H. Cone:  Since God is black and The Word came from Africa, slavery is in fact an institution of God. However, the slave-masters are black Americans. On similar, erroneous religious belief, this country waged a Christian civil war, white on white, with loss of life equivalent to eight million Americans at today's population.
            AMO violence should be avoided like the plague, and the parties that are most affected are the AMO soldiers. However, in a civic culture (wherein perhaps 2/3 of members of every real-no-harm association collaborates for Security), a church may, without objection or ridicule, worship a skin-colored God, even though skin itself is not a supernatural characteristic. In other words, it does me no harm if a civic person thinks God is black. Within a civic culture, any real-no-harm association supports the ideas and arts the members choose. A civic culture offers privacy rather than tolerance.

Justice comes from a civic people, and no one appreciates disrespect. Perhaps ¾ of 2017 inhabitants want real-no-harm living. Many of them practice religious morality as civic morality---always practice responsible-human-independence. For example, President Jimmy Carter cannot separate the two practices.[xxv] However, the time for a civic culture with Security has come. Factional[xxvi] Jews, factional Christians, factional Muslims, the non-Abrahamic religious and the non-religious may each aspire to be “a chosen people” yet make certain their civic life offers Security for all. Each person may admit his or her private responsibility for Security.
           In his inaugural speech, President Trump implied that we may strive for togetherness and solidarity based on blood color rather than skin color. I like that idea and hope at least 2/3 of us collaborate for public-integrity.

(I feared V.P. Mike Pence, like Jimmy Carter, could not separate pursuit of his personal-God from public service, and would betray running-mate, President, and Commander-in-Chief Donald Trump and a civic-people of the US. Unfortunately, Pence helped me understand Genesis 1:26-28: the-God will not usurp the human-being's opportunity to practice responsible-human-indpendence.)

Copyright©2016 by Phillip R. Beaver. All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted for the publication of all or portions of this paper as long as this complete copyright notice is included. Revised on December 7, 2016 to add an explicit slave-master idea stemming from Cone theology. Revised January 27, 2017 to incorporate President Trump's thought. Edited 2/17/17, 4/27/20, 9/15/21

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[i] Review various phrases with “slip it,” such as “slip it in,” in the list at urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Slip%20It .

[ii] Paul Taylor and the Pew Resarch Center, The Next America, 2014, 2015. [Just as Karl Marx could not predict the future, I opine that Pew Research is not prescient. The human need to discover how to be faithful to the-indisputable-facts-of-reality cannot be defeated by dominant personal opinion.]

[iii] Claiming exemption from civic morality. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caligula#Claims_of_divinity .

[iv] Online at  dalecarnegiewayindy.com/2011/05/18/if-you-act-enthusiastic-youll-be-enthusiastic/

[v] This is the age-old practice of the people who hope for a good outcome for the soul or other private concern waiting for their personal gods to solve temporal living problems, empowering the church to be eternally involved in governance of life, while politicians come and go in subjectivity to death. See the text of what I dub “Chapter XI Machiavellianism” at http://www.constitution.org/mac/prince11.htm . A civic people may end the church-politician partnership, because at last each person regards his or her religion a private practice that he or she protects from public collaboration or imposition.

[vi] Hillary Clinton’s concession statement of intent to press for “hopeful, inclusive and bighearted,” American where “we are all equal in rights and dignity,” regardless of behavior, online at youtube.com/watch?v=Bcck7hr9Su8 . She strangely orders “fairness,” ending with LGBTs then the disabled. I want my group, the non-believers identified for exclusion from the domestic wars brought on by the church-state partnership.

[vii] Online at youtube.com/watch?v=e1C3ulHTXSw .

[viii] Online at youtube.com/watch?v=Wr2USTE3L98 .

[ix] Online at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_canon#Latin_Fathers .

[x] President Obama on “the scars of America’s original sin” at about nine minutes, fifty seconds of youtube.com/watch?v=b08XF_8TFa8 and in 2008 at constitutioncenter.org/amoreperfectunion/ .

[xi] Online at constitution.org/mac/prince11.htm .

[xii] List from which colonies in the USA can be gleaned, online at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_colonization_of_the_Americas#List_of_European_colonies_in_the_Americas

[xiii] Thomas Paine, “African Slavery in America,” 1774, constitution.org/tp/afri.htm .

[xiv] Online at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_theology#History .

[xv] Today, black church may represent 6.5% of the population, broken down 4% Baptist, 0.5% Methodist, 1% Pentecostal, and other. See pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/ and click on 6.5% at “Historically Black Protestant.”

[xvi] Online at americasbesthistory.com/abhtimeline1960.html .

[xvii] Democratic Select Committee. See avoiceonline.org/cbc/history.html .

[xviii] Quoting Charles C. Diggs, online at history.house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/BAIC/Historical-Essays/Permanent-Interest/Congressional-Black-Caucus/ . A government that attempts to provide equal results regardless of personal behavior is, like communism, doomed for failure, IMO.

[xix] Results emerge from performance.

[xx] Online at amazon.com/Black-Theology-Power-James-Cone/dp/1570751579 .

[xxi] Online at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Community_Organizations_for_Reform_Now#1970.E2.80.931975 .

[xxii] Online at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_for_Radicals .

[xxiii] See Alinsky’s rules at matthewvadum.blogspot.com/p/saul-alinskys-24-rules-for-radicals.html .

[xxiv] Online at concordmonitor.com/Civil-rights-marchers-U-S-still-needs-to-address-inequality-3635924

[xxv] Jimmy Carter interview, online at christianitytoday.com/ct/2012/januaryweb-only/interview-jimmy-carter.html?start=1 .

[xxvi] Not one religious institution has unity: They are all divided, often as deadly enemies.