“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.”
– Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
One of my favorite internet commentators, ZenPundit, was recently talking about the religiosity and the secular nature of the American sovereignty movement, he has a far deeper interest in things religious than I now or ever would but scintillating commentary nonetheless. He makes this observation:
“But but but… please!! Even Christ recommends we should “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s”. And When the Taoist Chuang Tze expresses his lack of interest in governance, he does so not by way of refusing to pay parking tickets or taxes, but by politely refusing an offer of high office.”
Now I find every objection possible to the notion that the Book of Abraham invariably and unmistakably dictates through emanations (dare I say penumbras) from Romans that all rulers are just and they must be obeyed even if they violate God’s law such as the funding and protection of the pro-death practitioners in the abortion business.
It finally struck me why despite my legion of objections to the Sovereign Citizen movement and my anecdotal exposure to them in north Idaho that further soured my impression why there is still a remnant within their actions that resonates with me.
They seek a legal or religious means to opt out, drop off and no longer participate in a system they object to. But they seek to be sovereign citizens.
A citizen is by way of the Oxford Dictionary: “a legally recognized subject or national of a state or commonwealth, either native or naturalized”; a subject or one may say an object in society to be steered by the state in the way that pleases the rulers. So to me it is a contradiction in terms much like a literal interpretation of a text or rigid flexibility in a fixed variable. These things cannot stand together.
You either is or you ain’t.