Christianity as Economic Actualism

Christianity as

Economic Actualism

Ye Must Be Born Again

By David Billings

Canticum Sanctum Media

©2018 All Rights Reserved

Christianity as Economic Actualism, First Edition

Copyright © 2018 by David Billings

http://www.economicactualism.com

www.growingupnotold.com

mailto:economicactualism@gmail.com

Canticum Sanctum Media

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the author.

ISBN-13: 978-1-7751226-1-6

To those who practice that whenever two are gathered in his name, he is with them.

I would like to acknowledge the numerous churches of a variety of denominations who have fellowshipped with me but particularly the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as well as William Bruce and Sheldon Jackson for their friendship and proofreading and my family for their love and support.

Table of Contents

Forward……………………………….……

Forward Concerning the Holy Spirit…....

Christ the Economist……………………..

The Sinful State of Man……….………...

Jesus Christ as Savior……………..…..…

Christianity and Economic Deviation…..

The Heroic Christ……………….………

The Demon of the Crucifixion…………..

Afterword………………………………..

FORWARD

Like many of us, my actual spiritual nature has struggled with religion, the socially accepted nominal representation of spirituality I subscribe to regardless of the choice I make. My earliest social experiences of Jesus were primarily from such sermons as Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer or the "Little Drummer Boy. Yet throughout life, I have felt a spirituality in both myself and others that seems to lack social representation.

To many in our present society, Jesus seems to lack relevance. He seems to be lost within history into a time without personal computers, or automobiles or cell phones. Society has moved on from Jesus, just as it has from the Egyptian pyramids.

We may have moved on from Jesus in our mind, but it is more likely that we are moving to meet up with him in a destiny that we do not understand, even though he explained it to us many years ago. This destiny is commonly referred to as the Second Coming of Jesus.

Economics, as the rational component of social participation, is the vehicle by which Mankind progresses from having the image of God to having actual godliness. It transforms some of us from apes into angels. Over the centuries, society had increased the civility of some to the extent that, while we may not be fit for Heaven, we do manage to show the beginnings of such fitness.

Yet for some of us, economic participation does not make us more heavenly, it makes us more demonic. We may increase our nominal image of godliness, but our actual inner spiritual righteousness erodes from our maintenance of the image. It is upon each of us to judge ourselves on this matter, rather than judging others or having others judge us.

But this possibility of an image of godliness causing actual spiritual decay is a spiritual inversion. If we do not guard against it, it can be the most tragic form of existence.

In Introducing Economic Actualism and The Psychology of Economic Actualism I describe how we confuse actual reality with the socially accepted nominal representation of it. This present book is a continuation of these prior works.

However, the importance of spiritual matters far out weighs the importance of economic and psychological health. Psychology and economic wealth are at best, means to obtain spiritual fruit. This is true just as a farmer’s soil only gains its importance from its ability to produce a crop. Without a crop, soil is just worthless dirt. Likewise without the production of righteousness, peace and joy, economic prosperity amounts to nothing.

Economic actualism seeks to explore how we confuse this nominal wealth with actual wealth. It may sound like a new topic, but it is actually an old topic which we have tended to neglect amidst the confusion of modern society.

Christ was the forerunner of economic actualism without using the phrase as more than any other ancient writer, Christ was concerned with our actual spirituality and how it can be damaged by the ravages of nominal representation which society requires us to endure.

I hope this book helps you unravel the mystery for yourself.

David Billings

Forward Concerning the Holy Spirit

The following book discusses Christianity, with an attempt to do so in a systematic method. As a result, it inevitably discusses a delicate topic: the Holy Spirit which is also frequently referred to as the Holy Ghost.

It is often difficult, if not impossible, for a Christian to tell where the Holy Spirit starts and where he ends. It is the Holy Spirit which helps us to understand the message of Jesus. It is the Holy Spirit which is omnipresent and gives God his omniscience. It is the Holy Spirit which wrestles with us on a continual basis.

As a writer, I hope that the Holy Spirit has guided my message. It has guided my understanding of the subject matter, and I shall pray that it guides your reading as well. Without the Holy Spirit, we are nothing.

But I still wrote it. Just as your plumber or your dentist and everyone in our society are guided by the Holy Spirit, but claims the credit, so your author has hopefully been guided by the spirit but has put his name on the cover. But your plumber and dentist can make mistakes, and so can I. I have devoted considerable study of the Bible throughout my lifetime, but I am primarily a social scientist, not a minister. But the Holy Spirit is often a neglected topic of study.

Discuss the Holy Spirit with caution and discernment. In the Bible, specifically Mark 3:29, chapter 3 verse 29, and Matthew 12:31, it is stated that blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is the one sin that can not be forgiven. Very few of us speak of the Holy Spirit, but when we do, we must guard against blasphemy. I am not sure how you would blaspheme the Holy Spirit, but I ask you to guard against it even in jest. Perhaps blaspheming the Holy Spirit is primarily saying that Christianity is merely as series of rituals without room for the Holy Spirit, or to say that the Holy Spirit does not exist, or purposely doing Satan’s work in the name of the Holy Spirit.

Actual spirituality exists within the rituals of religion such as Christianity. The Holy Spirit is the essence of our actual spiritual experience. When we join as a community, we do so within a set of nominal standards.

Finding the actual spiritual fruits within the nominal religion, while recognizing the need for nominal standards is an emphasis in Christianity which often suffers neglect. Economic actualism allows us to explore this aspect of spirituality. But I ask you to treat the Holy Spirit as very real, even though we can not see or fully understand it. I ask you to maintain decorum in your nominal communications regarding the actual reality of the Holy Spirit, the one subject for which blasphemy is unforgivable.

I personally fear that many religiously minded people, such as the Pharisees of Jesus’ time, suffer from misspeaking of the Holy Spirit and from not understanding its reality. But while God is the best judge of your salvation’s status, you are the second best judge. No one else, including myself, can do it for you.

I hope that this book motivates your personal Bible study, personal religious ministry and your personal work in the assembly of your choice. Remember that YOU are God’s temple and that the spirit resides in you as that temple. Keep it clean.

David Billings

Chapter One:

Christ the Economist

Jesus Christ is both the most studied and also the most mysterious figure in recorded history. But of all the features of Christ, only one is the most incontrovertible. Christ was an economist. He may have even largely invented the discipline.

A work of the ancient Greek philosopher Xenophon, Ta Oikonomika, tells of the efforts of the poverty stricken though contented Socrates to persuade a rich man of Athens to minimize his consumption and get true joy, an early example of economics though limited to promoting minimalism. Socrates also described four political systems: timocracy, tyranny, oligarchy and democracy which will be explored in The Politics of Economic Actualism. But while Jesus never uses the word economics, let alone economic actualism, his teachings on the subject outshine those of the other ancient philosophers just as the rising sun outshines the morning stars. Jesus spoke with a clarity and brevity that belie the magnitude of his message.

Many Christians associate the topic of economics with long dry discourses and mathematical formulae of questionable value, and so they fail to associate that economics is one of the central aspects of Jesus’ message.

Unfortunately, we tend to associate the word economics with dysfunctional forms of economics that rely on centralized government, stock markets and large corporations. It is a bias of our times that is particularly damaging. Such centralized systems of economics are prone to create economic deviation, as described in my book Introducing Economic Actualism.

These systems tell us we are becoming wealthy, when we are becoming impoverished. They will do this all on their own. Though some individuals, perhaps even the devil himself, love to be in the center of the confusion and nudge it along for their own amusement. Counteracting this tendency is key to Jesus’ ministry. Jesus’ is best pronounced as jeezooz, rather than cheeeezuzez.

When looked at outside of the lens of religious faith, many aspects of Jesus’ character are often misunerstood. Though he is the most studied figure in history, he is also the most mysterious. Unlike other historical figures, we can not even be sure of how many chromosomes he had. For Jesus, by his own admission, was the Son of God. He was part man, part god, whatever that means (Col 2:9, Lk 2:52). We know without doubt that he came in sinful flesh. (Rom 8:3) He had an infancy (Lk 2:1-7). He hungered (Mt 4:2). He ate food (Mt 26:17-30).

His disciples never mentioned anything unusual about his appearance (Isa 53:2). So he presumably defecated, though there is no record of this. He suffered human pain. He suffered human sorrows (Mt 26:38) and human temptations (Heb 2:18).

These facts differentiate him from mythological figures such as Greek gods like Zeus or Apollo, whose actual existence is doubtful. Jesus was not a myth. He was an actual person listed in official government documents. He was like you or I.

Yet he was also without sin (1 Per 2:22). He never committed adultery. He never murdered anyone. He adhered to Judaic laws, which nobody could follow. This makes him unique in human history, and we really do not know why. Did his immaculate conception, the fact that he was born of a virgin (Mt 1:18) give him a genetic makeup which we do not possess?

His father, Joseph, was a descendant of King David and the heir to the Jewish throne just as European monarchs inherit their birthrights (Mt 1). The genealogical record of this is well preserved. If Jesus did not have his incredible ministry during the last three and a half years of his life, he still would have been a historical figure, but he would have been an obscure figure from the royal family of the house of Israel.

But his earthly father, the carpenter Joseph, thought his wife was insane and needed to be put away when she first told him of her pregnancy while the vestiges of her virginity were intact. Women have a membrane, called a hymen, over their vagina which is broken by intercourse or other penetration and the bleeding from this hymen on a white bed sheet was used as evidence of losing virginity in ancient times. This vestige of virginity was an important aspect of Judaic custom (Deut 22:13-15) so we can have confidence that Mary was a virgin when she gave birth. If Mary had not been a virgin, Joseph would have known and her status as a betrothed member of the royal family would have made it an aspect of the public record, even before Jesus’ ministry. It would have been like Princess Diana showing up for the royal wedding while pregnant, but without the cameras.

Jesus was instead, conceived by the Holy Spirit. This historical anomaly, as strange and mysterious as it appears, seems to be the simplest and most logical explanation to the phenomenon of birth from a virgin. As a descendant of the Holy Spirit, rather than being the descendant of a human male father, Jesus would seem to be a strange new species hybrid. He was a one time occurrence, almost as if a giant pink whale which had grown amphibious limbs swam up onto the beach of Manhattan Island in order to begin speaking and playing the trumpet. Though Jesus’ physical appearance was said to be remarkably ordinary (Isa 53:2), his intellectual capacity and his ability to be free from sin make him very peculiar.

While the reaction of a phobic stricken crowd was to slaughter the beast with unbridled barbarity, the words that this pink whale spoke and the songs that he shared were carefully recorded and studied over the following centuries. The message was not understood at the time, however.

We know that Joseph was the heir to the Israelite monarchy as his royal lineage is listed in Matthew, Chapter 1. But it did not seem to occupy his time or give him cultural prominence. Joseph was a carpenter so we can imagine that Jesus’ early life had something to do with that profession. But carpentry was a broad field. We do not know if Joseph built furniture, or casks, or houses or boats to fish the local waters. Maybe he was a part time lumberjack. Or maybe he even was part of lumber teams that supplied wood for Roman crucifixes. It may have been a task that the Romans paid well for. Crucifixes were part of the local wood working economy so, in the eyes of a God judging the entire woodworking economy of that period, all of the carpenters would have somehow profited indirectly from that market. How Jesus separated himself from that activity, if he did at all, is not known. Jesus may have even had a hand in building larger vessels to explore the Mediterranean or the waters beyond. Records form the ancient library in Alexandria and ancient Roman coins found off of the coast of Brazil suggest seafaring was often more advanced than official records admitted to.

We do not know where Jesus lived from the age of about 13 to 30 years of age. Some hypothesize that he went abroad. Some suggest he even visited Ireland. Or that he traveled to India and was influenced by Buddhism. Chapter 2 of the ancient Hindu Bhagavad Gita, which predated Jesus, describes a soul as eternal which the Old Testament does not mention but which many Jews seemed to assume. This may be similar to how a modern American scientist builds upon Sir Isaac Newton’s work without crediting him. We do not know if Jesus had any influences from the various forms of paganism. We only know that he claimed to be the sole source of salvation from paganism’s defects (Jn 14:6) and that he alone was the path to the father. But his opinions on any potential merits of Buddhism, Hinduism or other pagan beliefs have been muted over time.

We know that the New Testament, when stating that godliness has benefits both in this life and the afterlife, also claims that physical training has some benefits (1 Tim 4:8). But we do not know for sure if this physical training refers to Greek calisthenics. The New Testament was written in Greek and it contains references to competitive running (1 Cor 9:24) so this would seem most likely. But any opinions of Jesus regarding yoga or lotus sitting have been lost. The kneeling position many Christians have used to pray throughout history would seem to have health benefits, but Jesus’ opinion on the health benefits of the physical position from the Lord’s Prayer have been lost as well. The New Testament may even have been speaking of Roman military training as the physical training with benefits. One of Jesus’ last statements were to sell your cloak and buy a sword (Lk 22:36), perhaps this inspired the apostle Paul when he wrote to Timothy.

We do not know if Jesus ever owned a home. In Luke 9:58 Jesus claims that the foxes have their holes in the ground but the Son of Man had no place to rest his head. During Jesus’ ministry, he was a homeless person, traveling from home to home as a guest. But we have no idea where