Are We Using Language to Confuse Ourselves?

Are we using language to confuse ourselves?

This is RJ Rushduni with a report on our threatened freedom.

Too often in our time, the terms we used to organize our thinking are created by status

agencies and served to mislead us.

One such set of terms created by the Internal Revenue Service is profit versus non-profit.

Profit-making activities are taxed, non-profit enterprises and agencies are not.

People have come to classify activities in terms of these two terms, as though they described

reality instead of a status-taxing category.

Should it be not much more realistic to classify things without reference to the IRS?

If the IRS were to disappear in the next decade, how useful would these terms be?

After all, they have reference only to tax status.

I submit that the terms productive versus non-productive are much more useful.

Creative schools and libraries are non-profit, but they are at the same time among the

most productive agencies civilization has ever known.

To eliminate them would be to eliminate civilization.

Civil government is emphatically non-profit.

Often it is not productive of too much good, but one kept within its limits can be productive

of social order.

The family is a non-profit community, but it is most emphatically a productive agency,

and its decay is the decay of society and civilization.

Because we have emphasized the profit versus non-profit perspective, we have tended to

falsify our view of light.

In every area, intellectual, industrial, and personal, we have downgraded the productive

man in favor of the profiting man.

Production has thus been displaced by administration by the visible symbols of profitable power

and church, university, state, and business, which have gained ascendancy over the productive

mind and hand.

Religiously speaking, this means that form has become more important in substance, and

pragmatism has replaced theology.

When we look at the world through categories governed by the IRS, we have beggared ourselves

intellectually, and we have allowed the tax man rather than the Lord God to frame our thinking.

We need to remind ourselves of St. Paul's words, study to show thyself approved unto God,

a work that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.

This has been RJ Rushduney with a report on our threatened freedom.