B. U. G. S.

Born Again Christianity has reached its stagnation phase. In my youth it was growing wildly, and now it has stopped or the curve is reaching the asymptotic stage.

There are a couple of clear reasons for this. First of all, Born Again Christianity has become an industry. Those who control it now depend upon it for their livelihoods.

Secondly the same thing has happened to evagelicalism that brought down the Mainline Protestant churches in North America and the Catholic Church in South America: it put its cards in THIS world, and it LOST.

I asked before, what part of “My Kingdom is not of this world” do Bible-thumpers have trouble understanding? When the main Catholic church threw itself into being a tool of big landowners in South America and a major part of the priesthood sided with the Communists in the name of Liberation Theology, everybody had assumed it had Both Sides covered.

But both Communism and the big landowners have been discredited.

While the Catholic Church was seeking power on both sides in South American politics the evangelicals were out there conquering the next world. I saw a documentary on a back area of Bolivia or Peru, the announcer said “We are the first Westerners here,” and at that moment they came on a lake some Born Again missionaries were doing baptisms.

I used to get my ammunition reloaded in the dormitories of our local Born Again theology school. Out in the African bush you would often find that the only people were mercenaries and missionaries.

Christianity in Europe has simply collapsed. Someone will write in that “they have proven” this is no longer true, but it is routine for a giant church to have a tiny group of people sitting in the front.

What caused Nietzsche to say “God is dead” was that the churches had taken on Galileo and lost, and then they had taken on every new theory in the eighteenth century and lost.

There were still lots and lots of healthy churches in America, but at the top of the intellectual ladder, from which ideas filtered down, it seems to Nietzsche that it had doomed itself.

This is of interest to us because this whole section of moving toward how or PRESENT established religion is dooming itself.

Born Agains are now more interested in Pro-Life than they are in the next world, where Jesus said HIS Kingdom is. If they had had their way, the tens of thousands of babies born from in vitro fertilization, babies who were wanted, would never have been Born.

For the moment, Pro-Life is a boon to Born Again Industry. You keep your congregation contributing and you don’t go where learning to reload ammunition is a survival skill.

Christianity survived because it backed down from crap like this.

Every church in London denounced Jenner’s satanic practice of putting germs from cows into human beings. But as their congregations began to die or come into church disfigured for life, they somehow totally forgot their theological objections.

Those objections are as valid today as they were then. But an industry drops any product that becomes enormously destructive to its very existence.

Prohibiting abortion is no longer on the Born Again list of possibilities, so they have branched out into crippling any research that they decide involves embryos. Eventually, as in the case of vaccinations, they will get in the way of people in wheelchairs walking and replacing diseased or aging body parts.

Then this silly crap will be seen as silly crap.

You see, the nice thing about these social issues is that they make the preacher or priest feel he is being realistic and practical. It gets him off the simple fact that either Heaven and Hell are real or he is a guy who lives on nonsense or even a guy wearing a dress for no reason.

When the church sticks to all or nothing, Heaven or Hell, not of this world, it can grow. But if the fight is over THIS world, and it goes beyond doing to others what they do to you, it goes to stagnation, and then on down.

If I were a doomed embryo I would be happy if I could be used to get somebody out of a wheel chair. But any discussion of the Golden Rule in human affairs is denounced today as Humanism.

So Born Again has stagnated.

Next I will explain my ideas as to how this is what is happening to the established religion we are under right now.