On What is Missing

Freshly scraped from me mind and placed … here … under construction

The postulate:

The church was a central pillar in western society until the late 1960s. Its removal has had a dramatic impact on order. The church taught people that they had responsibility for their actions and would be held accountable. This is now absent in man’s daily life, as we see.

How I responded:

I could pick this apart, but it would hinge on understanding that today's churches (or at least enough of them to be statistically relevant) have been high jacked for exploitation.

It isn't that we need more churches … or more church attendance. What we need is those aforementioned lessons to be restored where they have been discarded in bifurcated information ecosystem induced tribalistic jubilation.

It isn't that we need more churches … or more church attendance. What we need is more communal identification … restore that inclination to preserve as precious pictures of community, where it has been supplanted by social media induced idolatry of the selfie.

It isn't that we need more churches … or more church attendance. What we need is to thoroughly saturate the population with a better understanding of mass psychology, of cult phenomena, of the closed information ecosystem's susceptibility to negative propaganda.

What we need is to thoroughly saturate the population with the understanding that world-view rigidity makes even the brightest among us susceptible to all the above.

We need these things because we need … desperately … to tear through the threads of that fabricated reality, grip gregariously the ghosts of critical faculty's former patrons, and patiently proselytize on behalf of the church of shared reality.

There is no answer to this problem that does not require a bubble reduction. Dual reality bubbles break civil society in twain. Even civil church society.

We require civil discourse so that we might make singular through compromise the visions of many … including mine … including yours. Civil discourse requires a common reality … for how else shall one ever manage to find common ground?

What we need is a good, old-fashioned revival … sans repentance … avec understanding. Reinstate the individual as the building block with which community constructs the height of humanity.

When you speak of the church as a pillar, without which order falls to chaos … responsibility … accountability recedes … for lessons once taught are taught no longer, the overreach we must refactor is this…

What is missing is not the church, it is the communal heartwood that once indemnitized society against the spread of apathy, the spread of sociopathy, the devolution of civil humanity.

These pre-1960 churches you remember … they (or at least enough of them to be statistically significant) were that heartwood. They filled that role for the communities within which their rectories were erected.

Filling that role is not an innate instinct of the church. Filling that role is not restricted to the church. I know this … because I have an appreciable understanding of the influence of community upon humanity.

I know this because the lessons you wish to impress upon man … that you feel are missing today, to the detriment of all … I learned those lessons. I did so without a church.

The church was not prerequisite for the learning of such lessons. In the same breath, I welcome the installment of any church into the vacancies where community once stood … so long as they break bread with me … upon common ground … found within our shared reality. The point … really … is this. We needn't limit communal heartwood applicants to exclusively consider the church.