There are no special nations, no exceptional nations, no nations God values or favors ahead of or above other nations. No nation alone has God’s ear. No nation has authority to act as God’s voice.
No nation, no people, no tribe, is in a special relationship with God. God has no favorites among the nations, peoples, tribes of this breathing world. Each is equally near and dear to Him. There is no chosen nation.
Emmet Sweeney:
The Conflict Between The West And Russia Is A Religious One
Americans will stand tall, serene, and respected again when we, through our representatives, throw down our oligarchs, foreign and domestic, public and private, rebuild our churches, and respect the sovereignties of our brother and sister nations.
The notion that The US is a chosen nation, unique and special to God as His own and only, came into US leader thinking from two directions at roughly the same time, the 1943-1947 time frame.
One direction was the academic arrogance of Harvard University, Unitarian as it has been since before Emerson’s career. The other direction was the racial-religious arrogance of most Ashkenazy Jews as that has been since the days of The Second Temple.
Note: False conceptions of government and its responsibilities emanate from Unitarian, not Trinitarian theology. Nothing comparable to the cruel arrogance of the modern American NeoNazi-NeoCon, or Moslem Salafi — joined and cheered as they are by Jesuits and other self-described Christians — is found in Christian or Hindu civilization, which are trinitarian. First Century Jewish Sicarii foreshadow modern American NeoNazi-NeoCons and their colleagues.
In Old and New Testaments, the words chosen people or chosen nation and phrases like them reference people who trust God, who behave morally, and thereby allow others to see — meaning feel — the glory, power, and love of God manifesting as their lives. The people themselves have nothing to do with what’s really going on in their chosen-ness. That would be God demonstrating the power of humility to express the divine love equal for each and all, who are each and all of a piece in God’s eyes: His, even Him.
In both Testaments of The Bible, chosen people does not refer to political, economic, academic, or religious groups or settings. It refers to whomever’s sweetness of word and bearing are felt by others as a presence of love, which is God, and therefore of strength, happiness, and serenity. Both Calvin and Luther understood the phrase in this sense, as does every theologian worthy of the name.
The Great Prophets — Amos, Jeremiah, Hosea, Isaiah(s), Ezekiel, Micah, Habakkuk — understand the words chosen people in this way. They announce that God had brought and will bring political, economic, academic, and religious calamity upon His chosen people — first Hebrews (before Cyrus the Great) and then Jews (after Cyrus the Great) — because the same consider themselves better than other nations by having been chosen as God’s favorites.
Hebrews-Jews came to believe they were closer to God and justification than other peoples are. That was their big mistake. It was — and continues in their unserious descendants as — a doozie.
Several calamities The Prophets attribute to God’s displeasure with His chosen people are said by those Prophets to be meant to make Hebrews and Jews aware of their true condition in the world: one among many, all God’s own and loved equally by Him.
In the climactic calamity of biblical times, the Army of Titus tears down Jerusalem stone by stone, exactly as Jesus the Christ, of Nazareth and God, foretold would happen in consequence of rejection by Jerusalem — lawyers and priests, elites, leader cadre — of His invitation to see aright their place in life and among the nations.
Four great calamities — Egypt, 720 BC, 586 BC, 70 AD — brought by God upon the People Of God did not move the latter to abandon conceit. This is not the record of a chosen people.
Most Ashkenazy Jews today and now very many nominal Christians, especially Jesuits, are full of that conceit. NeoCon they call themselves in the US; the world’s super special, indestructible, world-dominating political-religious brand. NeoNazi is their reality.
Of Sephardic Jews this is much less the case than of Ashkenazy Jews, most of whom do not know how to laugh except at someone.
Faulty reading of The Bible lands one in a heap of trouble.
When one hears the phrase Judeo-Christianity,
one is in the presence of a NeoNazi-NeoCon.
And of The Bible, how many are there? When someone says, The Bible says [whatever], ask him or her, Which one? Tell them that there are well over one hundred of them, and in English, twenty at least. Every translation is a new The Bible. Many translations are translations of translations. In Italian, the word for translation is traduzione. It means defame, slander, misrepresent.
FWIW: My favorite Bibles are The Jerusalem Bible (original, Dominican, Tolkien involved) and the translation by James Moffatt. These are my favorites because they try to approximate the emotional harmonics of the original authors and compilers.
The Bible itself is a compilation of compilations, each having a literary history. Chosen people and phrases like it are in fact of relatively late development in the literary history of The Old Testament. My guess is, shortly before or around the time of King Josiah, Jeremiah, and the Deuteronomic compilers, who were lawyers and priests.
Lawyers and priests of any time and clime have a reputation, deserved, of literary and other self-serving. Jeremiah himself was a priest, albeit exiled by his peers for not speaking smooth things.
The Hebrew people had already divided themselves by this time, had been conquered, looted, and mauled, eagerly were chasing physical as well as ideational / ideological fantasies (idols), and had gone under subjection to foreign powers. Chosen people was propaganda to make at least Judean (surviving Southern Kingdom) Hebrews cheerful in dire, distressing circumstances. Facts on the ground showed what God thinks of chosen people.
An illustrative story is related by N. Kasturi. Making Swami’s agenda for a day of visits, he wrote several names under the heading, Prominent Personalities. Swami summoned Kasturi, assumed some presence of the Narasimha embodiment, pointed opprobriously at the heading, and uttered some words of rebuke. Kasturi, great man that he was, immediately realized and repented his mistake. This picture, from Adwaitha Hermitage, relates the story:
To the phrase itself — and especially as taken to reference political, economic, academic, and religious exceptionality — Jeremiah and other Great Prophets said, in effect:
No way are you special, you strumpets, you whores, sniffing the air like a she-camel in heat! You brought calamities on yourselves by your own perfidy to the divine counsel [expressed by Micah] to be just, merciful, and humble. What do you expect given what you have done? Do you think God — Who is your Lord and just — doesn’t see?
Still, the delusion (idol) of being a chosen people attracts devotees down through the centuries. Cathars / Albigensians come to mind. Scholars. Puritans. Clergy. Professors. Salafis. Shiites. Fraternity Brothers. Sorority Sisters. Bankers. NeoCons. Lawyers.
As mentioned, persons and peoples given to unitarian theologies, including atheism — which is a theology — are attracted to the delusion of specialness.
As grounds for statecraft, the delusion of specialness is lethal. Vital statecraft conducts business in a condition of:
- objective respect for one another’s personal and national sovereignty,
- objective acceptance of multivariance in all aspects of domestic and foreign culture, and
- objective fidelity to the definitive principle of indivisible security in the making of bi-and multi-lateral arrangements, agreements, treaties, MOUs, cooperative organizations, etc.
Multivariance is appreciating and encouraging manners, languages, customs, religions developed for their happiness by the many peoples and nations who comprise this breathing world.
Indivisible security is engaging and conducting statecraft in ways that do not harm the security of other persons or sovereign states.
Authority belongs most to nations whose governance and communications succeed — produce happiness — as multi-racial, multi-religious physical economies — as contrasted to rentier (also here) economies — and gardens of spiritual exercise. Three nations, three brother nations, answer to this description, one of them at present (USA) latently: India, USA, Russia.
Happiness, not money, is the proper goal of persons and nations. At its origin, happiness is a product of proper spiritual exercise. The product, happiness, is ever-expanding direct experience of the unchanging and eternal sweetness of Being Itself.
In today’s circumstances, the easiest and most beneficial spiritual exercise is recitation of God’s Name, whichever of them appeals most to one.
Principle I
Principle II
Principle III
By Artists M and F Graham
At Puttaparthi, Andhra Pradesh, India
