Historically , it's been agreement and fear. (see exception further below). People have no idea what love means. Love today is attachment . Perhaps the love of a mother for a child would be a near exception, but that again is more towards attachment than unconditional love. Unconditional love has no conditions.Mangus MacLeod wrote: ↑September 24th, 2022, 7:45 am
Has “righteousness” ever been the glue that held society together?
People live their lives completely under conditions.
Agreement is where everyone finds strength in a common belief. That belief could be patriotism or religion. On a marriage scale, it is the agreement of "I'll give you this, if you give me that". When either party of a marriage ceases to "be" or "do" what the other wants, divorce is readily available for those violations of agreement. All problems in marriage stem from " A conflict of desires".
The exception that I mentioned above applies to the extremely few people which are translated. When a person is translated, the animal instinct is gone. The woman's fears and the man's drives. Everything works without conflict. Everyone desires the exact same thing in the exact same way. There are no debates, the natural man is GONE.
I've met only one person in my life that was close to this state of translation and these don't act or think like anyone else but the person mentioned was still in "the natural man" with frailties.
Back to the idea of what holds groups together and applying it to the City of Enoch, very few understand that the process of translation is painful. Why? Because letting go of all that you value as a natural man is painful. All your world is based in the natural desires. Your attachments to your job, what others think of you, your ideas of judgment of others, your fixed conclusions on doctrines that you argue about, These all have to go. When you realize that you know NOTHING at all, then you've begun.
So, what group would endeavor to be stripped of the natural man? Your precious world. Your precious. Everyone seeks comfort and this is the exact opposite path away from the process of translation.
A person could make the attempt to correlate the risen state with the fallen state and use utopian speech but.....there is no correlation. As written, the natural man is an enemy to God . The wages of sin is death. The good news is that the natural man is not us. (good news = gospel)