It's funny, one of our elderly neighbors from our church group stopped by yesterday to see how we were doing and we were lamenting this very thing. The warm sense of community is being replaced by fearful isolation, and the joy we found in worship is being replaced by a cold adherence to new, empty rituals. And that's if folks even bother to show up anymore. These lockdowns are tearing apart the very fabric of society, exactly as we predicted they would.
... Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth.
Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals. But to be punished, however severely, because we have deserved it, because we “ought to have known better”, is to be treated as a human person made in God’s image.
In reality, however, we must face the possibility of bad rulers armed with a Humanitarian theory of punishment. … And when they are wicked· the Humanitarian theory of punishment will put in their hands a finer instrument of tyranny than wickedness ever had before. For if crime and disease are to be regarded as the same thing, it follows that any state of mind which our masters choose to call “disease” can be treated as crime; and compulsorily cured. It will be vain to plead that states of mind which displease government need not always involve moral turpitude and do not therefore always deserve forfeiture of liberty. ...
Yep. The United Methodist Church is not much better. We left it because we found a Baptist Church that refused to stop services even once. Very few use masks and people still shake hands and hug like there’s no pandemic. No one’s gotten sick because of it either. Satan has found fertile ground in many Christian churches.
Aye, we're seeing the same thing in our Methodist congregation. The local Lutherans are doing much better, still singing and shaking hands and not wearing masks, but that depends on the synod. This is the same thing that happened to the Russian Orthodox Church. When the Bolsheviks took over and adopted an official policy of atheism, in order to ensure their survival the Church began to make concessions of faith, instructing their congregation only in the tenets and principles that were acceptable to the temporal authority. They became an arm of the politburo. Today, instead of teaching people obedience to God, it subordinates His will and only teaches them obedience to the State. Traditional services have become a hollow shell of what they used to be, similar in appearance to the days of old but devoid of the soul that liberated and uplifted the people. And now that spiritual death is, quite deliberately, coming to America. The freedom to worship without government interference is being extinguished in the name of public safety, and weak leaders who fear being shut down entirely are bending the knee to the wrong Lord.
"Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it." - Matthew 10:39
It's funny, one of our elderly neighbors from our church group stopped by yesterday to see how we were doing and we were lamenting this very thing. The warm sense of community is being replaced by fearful isolation, and the joy we found in worship is being replaced by a cold adherence to new, empty rituals. And that's if folks even bother to show up anymore. These lockdowns are tearing apart the very fabric of society, exactly as we predicted they would.
Yep. The United Methodist Church is not much better. We left it because we found a Baptist Church that refused to stop services even once. Very few use masks and people still shake hands and hug like there’s no pandemic. No one’s gotten sick because of it either. Satan has found fertile ground in many Christian churches.
Aye, we're seeing the same thing in our Methodist congregation. The local Lutherans are doing much better, still singing and shaking hands and not wearing masks, but that depends on the synod. This is the same thing that happened to the Russian Orthodox Church. When the Bolsheviks took over and adopted an official policy of atheism, in order to ensure their survival the Church began to make concessions of faith, instructing their congregation only in the tenets and principles that were acceptable to the temporal authority. They became an arm of the politburo. Today, instead of teaching people obedience to God, it subordinates His will and only teaches them obedience to the State. Traditional services have become a hollow shell of what they used to be, similar in appearance to the days of old but devoid of the soul that liberated and uplifted the people. And now that spiritual death is, quite deliberately, coming to America. The freedom to worship without government interference is being extinguished in the name of public safety, and weak leaders who fear being shut down entirely are bending the knee to the wrong Lord.
"Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it." - Matthew 10:39
I'm so happy for you, and glad to know that that there are still courageous Christians left.