"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing"
Edmund Burke
Religious DiscussionTHE CHRISTIAN ROOTS
OF SOCIAL CREDIT Social
Credit, or society’s credit, is that body of knowledge, and
know-how, inherited from countless past generations, contributed
to by equally countless and largely unknown individuals lost in
the mists of time. Each generation has built on what was inherited
to discover new applications of old discoveries and inventions.
The sum of knowledge and know-how so available to the present generation
becomes our Social Credit. To put the matter into perspective, consider the question, who did invent the wheel? Simple in its initial conception, its many applications have become an integral part of the explosion of society’s credit. When David Livingstone went to
Africa he found himself in a society dominated by fear and superstition
where the wheel was unknown, let alone the harnessing of different
forms of power, steam, electric, internal combustion etc., in which
the principle of the wheel plays such a vital role. Society’s credit is a product
of minds released from fear and superstition. Minds which are free
to work in harmony with truth and reality. The greatest force of
energy released into the world responsible for the expansion of
society’s credit came in the form of the birth, life, death
and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Belief in Christ produced an
expansion of freedom allowing individuals to live without fear
of external restraints, whether of force, superstition and the
worship of false gods. It enabled man to tune into truth and reality
to demonstrate the reality behind the promise, One flows from the other adding continuously to our Social Credit. But history clearly reveals the continuing struggle between the forces for Christ, and those who reject Him. Perversion of the use of Social Credit within the will of God has become the key issue in modern economics. Progress towards the consumption of the objective outlined by Christ in his prayer, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven,” is part of the continuous battle between the forces of Christ and those of anti-Christ. The follower of Christ having come to acknowledge the absolute authority and place in history of Jesus Christ has two basic functions, first to seek deliverance from evil by living under the authority of Christ, and second, to encourage his neighbour to do likewise. To succeed is to live by the first commandment, “to love God and your neighbour as yourself”. Automatically such individuals follow that “way, truth and life” which make them soldiers of Christ. They create those social conditions which make a reality of the life abundant, and the creation of Social Credit.The follower of Christ is therefore an instrument of what the author of Social Credit in the twentieth century, C.H. Douglas, termed “the policy of a philosophy”. Every philosophy has a works policy, there is no such
thing as a philosophic vacuum.Whatever belief is dominant
in society will be accompanied by policies which dominate mankind.
Therefore Christians have a responsibility to fulfill the command
of Christ,
“Go ye therefore and make disciples of all the nations teaching
them to observe all things I commanded you.” However the power of Christ is not imposed, it results from the exercise of free will. Free individuals choose freely to follow, “the way, the truth and the life.” Such then become the catalyst to extend personal, world freedom and salvation. Possibly the two best known verses
in scripture set the pattern: “God so loved the world,
that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in
him, should not perish but have everlasting life. For God sent
not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world
through him might be saved.” John 3:16,17. So Christ, mindful of
the mission his Father had sent him on, set about recruiting disciples
who fulfilled both expectations. On the eve of his crucifixion when
his work was completed, in prayer he reported to his father. The
whole of John 17 should be read, but consider these few verses: “I
have manifested thy name unto the men which thou gayest me out of
the world: thine they were, and thou gavest them me; and they have
kept thy word...
“I pray that thou shouldest not take them out of the world,
but that thou keepest them from the evil…” “Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also
which shall believe on me through their word…” “SIN” and “EVIL” W.G. Manifold pinpoints
this vital difference in his book Never a Dull. The preposition
“but” rather than the conjunction “and” emphasises
a tremendous difference, not only in meaning, but in reality also. The failure of today’s Christian Church lies in the fetish with which it berates fallible man for his petty sins, while completely overlooking the power and force of conscious evil. It is akin to majoring in on the pimples on an adolescent’s face while ignoring the terminal tumour destroying his life. Three major moral and spiritual
issues are addressed by Social Credit in their application to the
body politic. If incorrect the Christian Church should show how.
If not, it should concur and support. The three issues are: Douglas does for the individual, irrespective of his status as a believer, or non-believer, what the Christian Church fails to do. He makes no judgement of their accessibility to the kingdom of heaven. He elevates each individual to the level God designed for them. Whether the individual through his own free choice chooses to accept that place God gives him is an individual matter. Man answers to God through Jesus Christ. But no man has the right of intervention through what Douglas described as the “will to power”, intervening between God and man, superimposing his own power over the individual to control him; even for purposes he may believe to be in his best interests. Administration of justice over criminal activity is of course not an exercise of the will to power. To so intervene constitutes an attempt to destroy the divine relationship which correct teaching and enlightenment should make real to the individual. That divine relationship Douglas understood to be so infinitely precious as to defy analysis. He rejected all Utopian concepts, and repeatedly emphasised that the utopianist with preconceived ends, into which the aim was to fit the individual through the power to organise society, was in direct conflict with the purpose of God. Speaking on Social Credit principles
to Swanick in 1924, he put the matter quite succinctly. “The
end of man, while unkown, is something towards which the most rapid
progress is made by the free expansion of individuality, and that,
therefore, economic organisation is most efficient when it most
easily and rapidly supplies economic wants without encroaching
on other functional activities.” Douglas often stressed the well established Christian principle that to elevate means into an end was contrary to the purpose of God and constituted that form of sin which brought upon itself the greatest retribution through the operation of natural laws. Through his understanding of the principles of association and organisation in industry, against a background of intense practical experience and application as one of the world’s most successful and respected engineers, Douglas understood the reality which Christ was speaking of in Matthew 6:24,34 which the modern church looks upon as some sort of aberration like the babbling of an innocent among thieves. THE UNFORGIVABLE SIN It was this understanding of the real potential and the nature of the right application of correct principles which lead Douglas to understand the depth of evil in the distortion of such truths. Evil which through false economic policies constituted a direct attack on the divine relationship between God and man, resulting in the committal of the unforgivable sin. In his essay The Big Idea written in 1943, Douglas wrote as follows:“There is a certain type of metaphysics, a theory or rather a statement, that animals have a ‘Group’ soul, and that the real test of difference between the animal kingdom and the human race is individuality of the human soul.That is to say, the first ‘duty’ of a human being is to dominate his relationship with the group soul.“This means, if it means anything, that the supreme aim of evolution is differentiation, and that the determined effort to present human beings, and to treat human beings, as a collectivity, is the Sin against the Holy Ghost, for which there is no forgiveness. “Now,
this idea has a curious corollary. It implies that organisation
is a descent, a retrogression. I do not think that it necessarily
implies that organisation is inadmissable, if done consciously
and with understanding by those who are organised.“ There is any amount of evidence to support this theory. Mobs, for instance. And our Great Men always appeal to mobs. And the behaviour of Functionaries — in private life and as individuals, decent fellows. In their function, possessed of devils. Not because of their function but because they assume powers not proper to that function, arising out of collectivity. “Evidently, an organisation which is expressly designed to make use of individuals without allowing them to understand the true object for which they are being used, is inherently Evil. It is a matter of no consequence whatever that it may have been founded by an idealist with an eye on the Millenium. That is why I am confident that the Devil is backing every horse in the race, at the moment. There is altogether too much drive for similarity in organisation to leave any doubt about that, and too much deception about its results.” The Christian Church has the responsibility to define the correct relationship of the individual to his institutions. The question of worship is involved, and the Church is the authority concerned. False worship elevates means into ends and leads to either committing, or being the victim of, the unforgivable sin. The failure of the church to correctly define the divine relationship in the use of money and the function of government has led to both becoming the centre of worship, and the two dominant forces in the power of the world. The result is the growing devastation of Christian civilisation. Douglas, through Social Credit, puts the function of both money and government into the Christian perspective of means by which both serve God and Man. Douglas set out the correct foundations from the beginning of his teaching. In the first chapter of his first book, Economic Democracy, written during the first world war and published in 1919, he placed the invidual in the correct Christian relationship with the institutions of society, those that supply both physical and spiritual needs, and those that govern. In
the last paragraph of the first chapter he concluded after observing
that there was every indication that society was in a state of
collapse, that, “Systems were made for men, not men for
systems, and the interest of man which is self development, is
above all systems, whether theological, political, or economic." So
from the beginning Douglas challenged the worship of organisation
as destructive of the prime objective of the God-Man relationship,
the retention of individuality. When the survival of organisation
assumes a priority over the freedom, welfare and self-development
of the individual, means become perverted into ends, and as Douglas
pointed out, is subject to the greatest penalties in the form
of social dislocation. DOCTRINE OF REWARDS AND PUNISHMENT It
is clear that the true teaching of Jesus Christ incorporates
every aspect of salvation, not just the spiritual, but including
physical and mental. The ministry of Jesus Christ never downgraded
one part of that trinity at the expense of another. The achievement
of harmony in that objective makes Jesus Christ Lord of Body,
Soul and Mind. Disharmony results when one part is either ignored,
or overemphasised as the case may be. Douglas contended that the doctrine of Rewards and Punishment was a key element in the destruction of that harmony, and was in direct conflict with the teaching of Jesus Christ. The doctrine of Rewards and Punishment has its roots in the rebellion of Adam in the Garden of Eden against God’s authority. When Adam, prior to his rebellion, lived in the Garden all his needs were supplied. There was no such thing as work entailing reward or punishment. After his rebellion God pronounced judgement, “In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread.” Genesis 3:19. It
has been accepted to this day that the necessities of life are
rewards of work, and the lack of necessities the punishment for
not working. Full Employment is the first commandment of modern
economic doctrine, embraced by every government and every enlightened
(?) economist and social commentator. Douglas took his lead from the new covenant, and its rejection of the old covenant through the teaching of Jesus Christ. “I came that they may have life, and have it more abundantly” John 10:10 harmonises with the revolutionary economic creed enunciated by Christ in Matthew 6:24, 34., the essence of which was that the abundance was such, and so provided, that work was made redundant, “consider the lilies of the field, they weave not, neither do they spin Behold the fowls of the air:for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they...Therefore take no thought, saying, what shall we eat? Or what shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?- . - But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.” No talk here of work by the sweat of the brow. More the promise of the one farmer operating modern machinery to cultivate, sow and reap enough grain to feed more than the five thousand Christ fed with the five loaves and two fishes. Or the computerised production line with the capacity to produce sophisticated machinery without a human hand involved. This is the stuff of the new covenant brought by Christ in which new wine cannot be put into old bottles, or new cloth used to patch old garments. “Behold I make all things new” is the theme of the new covenant, but the Christian Church of the 20th Century sticks rigidly to the old covenant in that vital arena which gives access to the life abundant. And here it must be stressed that the abundance Christ was concerned about was not just concerned with material abundance, but freedom which abundantly destroyed fear, superstition and the worship of false gods. In endorsing Full Employment as a moral policy, the Christian Church has turned it face against the only policy Christ endorses, Full Creativity, which is that vision held up by Christ when he said, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God ... “, a theme harmonised by Douglas in the statement already quoted, “The end of man, while unknown, is something towards which the most rapid progress is made by the expansion of individuality, and that, therefore, economic organisation is most efficient when it most easily and rapidly supplies economic wants without encroaching on other functional activities.” The production of goods and services in Christian terms is only a means to an end, that end is the development of individuality, which potential can never be measured, for the term, “Full Creativity” knows no boundaries. Full Employment as a policy can only be pursued by stifling individual initiative and the urge towards full creativity. In modern terms it was a policy first enunciated by Marx and his followers, in turn embraced by every school of economic thought in the western world without any hint of criticism from the one authority which should have perceived the inherent evil. Writing
in the first chapter, part 2, of Social Credit, first
published in 1924, Douglas writes, “A system of Society
which depends for its structure on the theory of material rewards
and punishments, seems to involve, fundamentally, a general condition
of scarcity and discontent. You cannot reward an individual with
something of which he has already sufficient for his needs and
desires, nor can you easily find a punishment which will be effective
in a world in which there is no incentive to crime. Douglas
goes on to observe that “Civil Law is concerned almost
wholly with matters which can be referred ultimately to the Money
System.” Chained
to a charter intent on maintaining Full Employment, obviously to
suggest the Reserve Bank should also finance leisure made possible
by the advance of technology is a complete contradiction. But imagine
the situation if the charter of the Reserve Bank did contain a
provision that wherever human labour was dispensed with through
the advance of technology, purchasing power to the degree or percentage
of production which came into existence without the aid of human
hands, should be distributed to the populace in the form of a personal
dividend! Needless to say, what is happening, even taking into account the thousand and one obstacles placed in the path of producers by legalism gone quite mad — the disincentives of burdensome taxation, bureaucratic parasitism etc. — the continuous efforts of producers in harmony with science at all levels, is to make it easier to produce greater quantities of production with less human labour input. But
under the Civil Law which gave the Reserve Bank its charter, the
role of the Bank is to sabotage not only such production, but the
efforts of other service organisations whose role it is to make
the lot of society easier. By its policy of drastically varying
the rate of credit flow through what is known as “Pump priming”,
analogous to the erratic flow of water which was a feature of parish
pumps in days gone by, the producer has no certainty of continuity
in a market, which if there was a measured flow of credit against
demand would not vary .01 of 1 percent in twelve months. How often do we see press reports that hospital services have to be curtailed because of shortage of funds? Or that LocalGovernment is unable to complete road making, or other construction projects because they have insufficient funds? Always on investigation it will be found that there is no shortage of materials or skilled personnel, just that elusive item, money, the means of effective demand. Civil Law, debt finance, plus its blood brother, speculative finance, combined with policies on employment divorced from truth and reality, makes the Reserve Bank of Australia an instrument to destroy access by individual Australians to the Social Credit. Those responsible for the policy, as opposed to those who administer the policy, must face “the wrath to come.” For ensuring that money is an object of worship rather than a means of effective demand on society’s credit they are guilty of ensuring a false god comes between man and access to the only true God. It is possible to see clearly the destruction of large sections of the infrastructure of Australian society due to the policy administered through the Reserve Bank. That policy is driving large sections of the rural populations off their farms, destroying their homes and their heritage. It is doing the same for large sections of secondary industry, destroying the ability of the Australian people to provide with their own hands the means to feed, clothe, and house themselves. Those who make policy are of course, politicians. The party system has destroyed the ability of the individual to protect himself against the excesses of government. When individual representatives were free from external influences and were responsible to those who elected them, they were careful to do the bidding of their electors. Personal responsibility operated two ways. But with the emergence of the party system representatives found that people no longer counted as a source of power, so naturally they bent to the wishes of the new power source, and all those mysterious forces of power operated through finance and its mendicant, the media. The emergence of the proposal to adopt the Swiss system of Citizens Initiated Referendum and Voters’ Veto is now sweeping Australia as a backlash to this betrayal, and should be supported by every Christian who still retains an understanding of the nexus between personal responsibility, policy making and a Christian social order. As the party system devalued the role of the representative, it devalued the individual elector. In devaluing the individual elector, the party system had to elevate other elements to a position of importance. Money became that element. For every disaster suffered by the nation the politicians refuse to accept responsibility and point to that mysterious force which they accept operates with a sovereignty of its own without being subject to parliamentary restraint. Reference
is continually made to our adverse balance of payments accompanied
by our growing debt. That debt is never their responsibility, it
results because the Australian people “are living beyond their
means". Justifying their failure to protect Australia’s
national financial sovereignty they then allow Australian assets
to be bought up by the invaders. The inroads of that process are
now devastating, with the politicians actively engaged in destroying
the ability of Australian producers to supply the basic necessities
of life. As debt, betrayal, the worship of the money god are all inextricably intertwined, the following correspondence is of value in understanding the process. On
24 February 1985, in my capacity as Chairman of the Christian Alternative
Movement, I wrote to Mr. Paul Keating, the Treasurer, expressing
concern about
“the morality of current financial policy leading towards increasing
escalation of national and personal debt, and the consequences for
each individual Australian of such policies”.
The
admission is clear. It is possible to issue money free of debt,
and this could hardly be denied as Royal Commissions of enquiry
into banking had already established that fact, backed by impeccable
authorities. But "debt free currency is no longer issued anywhere
in the world.” Without going into its world-wide implications, let us look at our own Reserve Bank of Australia. It is an active instrument of deliberate inflation, for every dollar it creates out of nothing and injects into the Australian community carries with it a burden of debt which did not exist before, and the process ensures that the debt burden can never be eliminated! The moral implications are tremendous and go to the heart of true religion, the worship of the only authority behind true religion the one true God, and the dethronement of that one true God by a false god. We
now come to those who are really responsible for the mounting devastation
of Christian society. In Australia, as in every other western nation,
money supersedes the authority of God. Access to life is now through
a new god, money, and the authority entrusted by Christ to use
all His authority to expose and defend His flock against enslavement
to false gods is the Christian church. Why
has the Chistian Church failed to recognise the obvious, seemingly
completely blind to a fact it should recognise with the greatest
clarity? It
seems apparent that the doctrine of Rewards and Punishment has
elevated both Church and Government into agencies of judgement
over the individual. Instead of being representative servants of
God they have elevated their function above that of God. “Judge
not that ye be not judged,” is a statement potent with
terrible implications for those who usurp the function of God. Those
who have seen fit to justify the use of money as a means of control
resulting from elevating themselves to a position of judgement
are in mortal danger of incurring the wrath of God. Christ continued
this teaching by exhorting those whom he perceived to be involved
in mammoth hypocrisy, “first cast the beam out of thine
own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out
of thy brother’s eye.” The proposals of Social Credit as given us by C.H. Douglas parallel this teaching, and incorporates the utilisation of the financial mechanism to make freely available to every individual the unearned unmerited Grace of God in its application to the economy, and in direct defiance of the doctrine of Rewards and Punishment. There is no doubt that Douglas, after fulfilling a commission of investigation into the problems of industry for the British Government, finding that the problems generated from financial causes, sent a cataclysmic shiver of fear through the Financial establishment and Hidden Government when he proposed democratisation in the, distribution of the money supply. It was the first time the monopoly control of money had been challenged. Douglas recounts in The Big Idea the reaction of one British Cabinet Minsiter, “Whether Major Douglas’s proposal is sound in theory, I do not know. It is a matter of little consequence. I can assure you that no British Government would remain in office for three weeks, if it attempted to put it into practice." Only
the Christian Church can make a reality of genuine democracy, that
form of democracy “which evolved in the face of God”. Douglas has bypassed the power of Finance and Hidden Government. Protesting its love of God, the Church now has to demonstrate its love of neighbour above and beyond the sops handed out by the welfare state, in exchange for which the present Church is happy to hand over the servitude of body and soul. When the Christian priest or pastor elevates the elements of bread and wine signifying the body and blood of Christ he is elevating elements which symbolise the very source of life, in fact the triumph of life over death, and all that means in the triumph of reality over unreality, the supremacy of the one true religion over myth and superstition. So long as man has faith in that symbolic act commanded by Christ to be done "in remembrance of me”, then the triumph of Christ in the lives of mankind is assured. But the Christian Church has allowed the money symbol to become elevated to a position of superiority over the symbols of bread and wine. Instinctively
Christian men are deserting the Church in droves, their instincts
telling them even if they don’t quite understand why, that
the Christian Church no longer exercises the authority of Christ.
Behind them they leave a Church turning to women to sustain it,
with all the wrangling and division over the newly acquired status
women should now possess as a result of becoming the dominant factor
in the Church. Christian women look to the church to be their aid
and comfort in the battle to protect their homes and families against
the inroads of evil, but they were not elected by God to fill the
role of man in the fight against evil. Many Christian men now consider the modern departure of allowing women to dispense the bread and wine as just another indication of departure from Christ’s authority. There is absolutely no indication that the cult of women priesthood will challenge the powers of evil to justify their newly acquired status. However when the Christian Church challenges and defeats the power of money all other ancillary questions will be quickly resolved. The
day the Church challenges the power to create all money as a debt,
declaring with the authority of Christ that no such symbol should
have such power, and that all money should be created free of debt
and distributed from the point of creation to every individual,
it will put to an end the division and decline of its authority. The
gift is offered, the Church is the means through which the door
can be opened to men receiving it and using it to the Glory of
God. “Woe
unto you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for ye shut up the
kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves,
neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.” The Gift by Geoffrey Dobbs Dedicated to Professor Milton Friedman who said: “there is no such thing as a free lunch.” I did not earn this April day That rolled so gaily out of night, To merit such there is no way: What man deserves so rich delight? Whose work is worthy of the Sun? Whose pay in Moon and stars is due? And how on Earth can anyone Be owed this planet white and blue? Yet there are learned men who say That nothing in this life is free; Thus freely giving - even they Their Maker back His charity Comments to the Religious discussion
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