The Ten Commandments
Warning Signs On A Fence Line
This will for supremacy, to dominate, is a killer.
Senator Lindsey Graham covets for himself and for his associates what he estimates publicly as 30-something trillion $$ of value that is Ukraine. He doesn’t see people. He sees money.
There is an item in The Decalogue about that attitude and desire. Breach the Line of The Decalogue and one goes into harm.
The Ten Commandments are not counsel to be taken under consideration. Nor are they commandments to be obeyed. No commander gives directives that can be ignored or disobeyed.
The Ten Commandments are, rather, serious signs of warning, hung by its Builder, on a fence line surrounding a pasture of life teeming with everything and everyone needful to cheer a human heart and mind.
The signs of warning read, Breach This Fence And You Will Experience Harm. By negative indirection — always the strongest way to make a point — the signs of warning affirm: stay where you are, stay who you are, rely on the One God, respect the neighbor and what belongs to him in properties and persons, honor the parents, tell the truth, etc.
Breach this fence line -- The Decalogue -- anywhere along it and your act of breach itself harms you. Moreover, you then will be on the other side of the fence, in utter confusion, begging your fellow breachers to help you, who themselves beg you to help them.
The Good Shepherd is one with will and power sufficient to induce and pull the idiot sheep back across the fence line into the territory of safe living intended for them and where — only — they can be happy.
The Ten Commandments have, to many, the disagreeable ring of an edict.
The Ten Commandments give us as their field of kinetic operations everywhere, always, and equally for everyone. These are universal warning signs. They are unrestricted by time, space, causality, or substance.
The Ten Commandments imply that punishment awaits before, during, and after any breach of their jurisdiction. Thus, poet and psalmist commend fear of God as initiation on the path of wisdom.
Dharma — Righteousness — is the kinetic force of The Ten Commandments. It doesn’t sleep.
The ontological force of what Paul Tillich and his Prussian colleagues — following The Great War — called Christian Socialism is the idea that government serves the whole of the people, not just clans and families among them.
We see this idea in Hohenzollern Prussia, e.g., Frederick the Great, and Romanov Russia, e.g., Catherine the Great. Bismarck also, and Lincoln, generated policy from the ontological force of Christian Socialism: government by the whole nation for the whole nation.
Stalin, a Christian seminary student, put the idea to use in order to guarantee Soviet Russia independence before, during, and after The Great Patriotic War.
We also see the idea in colonial North America. Here the concept was built-out before, during, and after The War of the American Revolution. Clergy and laity of The Church of England (and its offspring, such as Puritans, Separatists/Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists), The Presbyterian Church, The Lutheran Church, and par excellence The Moravian Church did this.
North American pioneers such as these economized Christian Socialism into US American national habits of mind and practice. Economy in its root means build out, construct useful things.
The Mac Arthurs and Lees were Episcopalians — aka, The Church of England as evolved here after The War of the American Revolution — Mac Arthurs High Church, which predominated in the northern colonies, and Lees Low Church, which predominated in the southern colonies.
The Army ipso facto, sui generis, and par excellence is created by the whole of the nation to serve the whole of the nation, not to cuddle factions therein. This is Christian Socialism ab extensio. Note please in this context, that the difference between Russia and Prussia is one consonant.
