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[How about the following idea for hope and change?

Let us replace our Progressive, manipulative, disempowering and variable income tax for a 20% mandatory tithe (to whoever the tithe payer chooses to give, restricted to secular and religious institutions meeting local (state, not national) approval, and published for all to see,), plus 5% for federal government’s basic mandates of military defense, plus criminal and civil judiciaries.

Let the people vote with their own dollars.]

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[Today, our civilization has tasted the sweet indulgences of totalitarian kindness. We feel “entitled”. Our appetites are not sated.  We want more words and bondage. The sovereign will provide.

Voters willingly give up their own (as well as other’s) responsibilities and freedoms for indulgences. The central government mysteriously and magically pays the tab. The politicians play sleight of hand with their accounts. The central bank says: Yes. Print money. Print money.

The smell of malinvestment fills the air.

Print more. Print more.

Perhaps, church indulgences will make a comeback, once all other fiat currencies have collapsed.]

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[Of course, Schoonenberg ignored the phantasmagorical currency potential of indulgences.

Instead, he claimed that indulgences were misleading.

But then, so are all think^group notions when extrapolated to include everyone in society.

The selling of indulgences was an infrasovereign movement that never aspired to consolidate power.

Why?

The unification of church and state was not imaginable at the time. Europeans had forgotten the Public Cult that constituted the Roman Empire. In fact, they fantasized its glorious return.]

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[Imagine this:

At the farmer’s market, in the late middle ages, I traded two apples for 3 and 1/2 days off in purgatory.]

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[Here is the comedic part of that story.

During the Middle Ages, right before the Reformation, printed indulgences almost became the world’s first fiat currency.

What an amazing, inadvertent, combination of printed paper and wishful thinking that would have been.

It was sort of like the euro and the dollar today, but with this caveat:

Indulgences were printed to prepare for tomorrow for the sins of today.

Euros and dollars are printed in order for the sovereign powers to sin for today. Who cares if tomorrow will pay?]

[Similarly, in biology, no creature can be reduced to cause and effect with respect to either its own entirety or the entirety of other creatures.

This is readily apparent when one creature is free to respond to another.

Some modern gnostics contextualize these responses as divine, “the ecology”, or more comprehensively, “Gaia”.

In technical terms:

Gaia₃(spontaneous order and creature₂( potential of creatures freely responding to one another₁))]

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[The appeal of indulgences was obvious. You could buy a few indulgences in order to… um … indulge yourself. No treasure box of indulgences could keep you from going to hell for the big ones, the mortal sins, but they could ease the way for the little pleasures. They could make little sins appear as little pleasures.

After all, the reason why one purchases an indulgence is “to mitigate God’s wrath, His Judgment in the afterlife”. The purchase admits the transgression. The purchase in no way condones the person’s sinful actions (or inactions). Yet, the purchase fosters … delinquency.

Ironically, the word “indulgence” took on “the meaning, presence and message associated with the purchase of the printed indulgence”.

A ducat could buy you one less day in purgatory and a little more fun today.]

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What is that something?

“The something that must be redeemed” is “delinquency”.

How so?

One reason why a person falls into temptation is lack of maturity. A delinquent’s confession may conceal as well as reveal. “The sinner who renounces ‘his’ sin” must still pay a price; that is, must still grow up, even though ‘he’ no longer faces damnation.

This brings us to the old issue of indulgences, which “remit punishments in purgatory” for “payment today”.

Indulgences allow the penitent to “pay up in this life” for “transgressions committed in this life”, rather than pay in the next life.

Indulgences promote delinquency.

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The coincidence of punishment and sin does not remove the judicial aspect, the divine punishment.

A person who has renounced sin and confessed is still held accountable. ‘He’ is still under scrutiny until something has been paid or redeemed.

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[One difference between think^group and think^divine is that think^group may tell you what you want to hear, even though you may deny wanting to hear the message.

Think^group often calls for sensible construction.

Think^divine rarely tells you what you want to hear. Instead, it may tell you what you need to know, such as, “be patient”. Or it may tell you something that you cannot sensibly figure out.

Think^divine often calls for social construction.]