It is difficult to extract useful information from this dogma.
It’s not supposed to inform you, it’s supposed to “turn your heart” toward surrender to God, and obedience to the very well-paid hypocrites who tell us what they want us to think - and how they want us to think - and who they want us to believe, and who to blame. The Catholics worked out the basics of ‘submission theology’ well over a thousand years ago - so well that despite the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, the Renaissance, the rise of freedom and individual liberty, the New World, the modern world, their basic cover stories remain in place, their influence remains huge, and intellectual processes are STILL hooked to their imaginary structures.
Consider, for example, that ‘the “real” Christian’ believes that the ENTIRE PURPOSE and FUNCTION of free will lies in the voluntary surrender of that precious will and its accompanying freedom to the people who claim to be speaking for God. They think they’re surrendering TO God, but it’s not god telling them what is right, what is wrong, and what to do: it’s the humans on the radio, on the TV, in the pulpit, in Sunday School who know how to manipulate 2000 years of intentional psycho-emotional programming to cut people off from the world as it is around them, from the people in their lives who are NOT Christian, and from their own hearts.
This is because in order for the scheme to work (sorry, scheme being to “capture” the United States, replace the Constitution with the Bible, and run the USA as a theocratic state “in Jesus’ name” until his triumphant return to the world, where he will torture and murder all the not-Christians and all the not-“real”-Christians so the ones who’re okay with spending eternity singing to & praising an insecure God can get on with it in peace) - for it to work, they need all their human connections transferred over to the belief system itself and its figureheads, keep believing, keep sending money, keep voting Republican, ‘cause “someday” the Jesus bus will be back on the road, and he’ll want submissive, unreasoning, obedient servants for…something. Because the incredibly-overdue, so-far-missing-in-action Lord and Savior of the Earth(tm) loves “us” (them) so much, he needs to take “us” (them) somewhere else so he can love “us” (them) better.
Anyway…TL;DR = “we” (humans) are supposed to obey, submit, and not think are supposed to choose it “FREELY, AND OF OUR OWN WILL”…which is exactly how Count Dracula wanted Jonathan Harker to enter the Castle…. We’re not supposed to BE informed…we’re supposed to be servants and BEHAVE.
Endnote: after 10 years of being groomed for the ministry, I discovered that the people who run things, in church and out, are not “believers”; for them it’s about population control, crowd control. The story of Jacob and Esau comes to mind, in which Jacob, beloved of the volcano god who is not to be named (thus, The Unspeakable Name routine), swindled his own brother Esau out of his inheritance, and his place in the family. For this Jacob retained the favor of YHWH The Unpronounceable, and was powerful among the Jews…and we really don’t hear much more about Esau…just another jettisoned loser, I guess. Point was, and is, that the international business conglomerate known loosely as Christianity is run by the same sort of cynical con-men we had running the country until recently - the spiritual descendants of those who twisted the Bible to justify treating humans as livestock, and to exonerate them of their own unbiblical cruelty and inhumanity.
“An unexamined belief isn’t worth having” - me
