Performed on a schedule, by everyone, without anyone believing anything. The god has no face, the offerings are taken from people who never entered the building, and the whole of it is certified as not a religion.
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A thing is a god operationally when it is held to exist before anyone decided it, when it carries an account of how the world came to be as it is, when the suffering it produces has been explained in advance, when credentialed readers are retained to say what it requires, when certain positions are removed from the room without being answered, and when declining to take part is not among the available positions.
Property satisfies every one of those, technically rather than as a figure of speech.
Take only the first. The cosmogony is required and not decorative. After the first owner every title is a conveyance, and a conveyance cannot account for an origin, so the doctrine needs a story about the first acquisition or it has no floor. Locke supplies it: the labor mixed with the thing, on a morning before any law existed. A doctrine that needs an account of the first morning is not a description of how things are held. It is a cosmogony with a remedy attached.
Said as denunciation this is spent currency. Mammon has had two thousand years of assent from every pulpit that mentioned it and has altered nothing, which is what the permitted critique does. So the claim is made here as a finding, on the marks, and not as an accusation against anybody.
[See LOCKE · FOUR IDOLS · GREED]
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THE PRIESTHOOD IS UNDER VOW
The readers are not advisors who recommend. They are bound.
The duty of loyalty is a sole interest rule. The trustee administers the trust solely in the interest of the beneficiaries, and the rule was built against a target: do not take the trust's opportunity, do not profit in secret, do not stand on both sides. Every one of those is self-dealing, and equity raised the rule to stop it.
But solely is a formal word, and a formal word cannot read a motive. The trustee who takes the property for herself and the trustee who gives it away because giving is right have both administered the trust other than solely in the beneficiaries' interest, and both can be surcharged. Chancery was a court of conscience, and the conscience it exercised was the court's, applied to the trustee. The trustee's own conscience has no standing in the relation: the only category the law holds for a trustee who acts on it is breach, the category it built for self-dealing.
The office is honestly held. The trustee is not a hypocrite and is usually not comfortable. She has taken orders, and the orders are honorable.
[See ACCOUNTING THEOLOGY · THE UNEXPOSED POSITION · FOUR AXES]
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THE DUTY IS CALIBRATED TO A WARD
It is the highest duty the law knows, and the height is the argument rather than the objection to it.
The law explains that height by the vulnerability of the one it protects: the ward, the infant, the person under disability, the beneficiary who cannot read the accounts, cannot supervise, cannot enforce, and would never find out. The duty stands above contract in proportion to how completely the party at the other end cannot protect herself. Every element of its severity is calibrated to a being who needs it.
Then the beneficiary became a thing, and every element stayed binding with nothing at the other end to justify the calibration. Directors owe the duty to the corporation and to its stockholders, which is to say to persons in one capacity only, as holders of the it.
Excluding the holder's conscience is not a consequence of the beneficiary being a thing. It is what lets the beneficiary be a thing, because a relation that admitted the holder's own judgment would need a second party able to answer it, and a thing has none. Take the judgment out and the duty can be pointed at anything and will run correctly.
So this is not a first-law instrument misapplied. It is one of the highest second-law relations, the setting aside of self because a being needs it, with a thing installed where the being was: admitted and converted rather than refused at the door.
[See SUBSUMPTION · LIMITED LIABILITY · CHESED]
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CONSCIENCE MAY ACT AND MAY NOT SPEAK
The law does not require a director to maximize anything. The business judgment rule presumes she acted in good faith for the company, and in Air Products v. Airgas, 2011, the Delaware Court of Chancery upheld directors who refused a lucrative bid.
What the law will not accept is saying so. In eBay Domestic Holdings v. Newmark, 2010, the craigslist directors defended a community-service approach with a rights plan, and the same court would not accept “a corporate policy that specifically, clearly, and admittedly seeks not to maximize the economic value of a for-profit Delaware corporation for the benefit of its stockholders.” The corporate form, it said, “is not an appropriate vehicle for purely philanthropic ends, at least not when there are other stockholders interested in realizing a return on their investment.”
Read the two together. The director may spend on the workers, the town and the long horizon, and the rule will shelter her, provided she describes the spending as serving the corporation. Conscience is permitted to act and forbidden to speak, which means it is admitted only after it has been translated into the interest of the thing.
[See SHAREHOLDER PRIMACY MYTH · THE UNSTATED CRITERION]
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IT COLLECTS PERFORMANCE AND IS INDIFFERENT TO BELIEF
The one who reveres it and the one who finds it absurd both file, both post, both pay, both defer, on the same dates, in the same forms, with the same consequences for failing.
Nothing has to be believed. Nothing has to be felt. The rite is complete without anyone's interior, which is why it is more stable than any religion that requires assent. Doubt is not a leak in it. A congregation of unbelievers performing correctly is not a crisis and does not register as one anywhere.
A rite that requires no interior cannot be left by changing your mind, and apostasy from it therefore has no available form. What would it consist of. There is nothing to stop believing, and the filing is due regardless.
This is also the answer to why the critique circulates freely. Criticism is not heterodox here. It is simply not one of the inputs.
[See THE GIVEN · CESSATION · THE COST TELL]
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IT IS NOT OBSERVANCE
What the rite collects is performance: filing, keeping, compliance. It is not observance, and the difference is not one of degree.
Observance is kept at cost, towards something that can receive it, by someone nobody compels. Non-ratification is observance in that sense and not strategy. The rite's performance is compelled, is free at the counter for whoever compels it, and is addressed to something with no capacity to receive anything at all.
Observance is kept towards what can receive it. The rite is performed at what cannot.
[See THE FREE EXERCISE CLAUSE · THE FOUR PILLARS]
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THE GOD HAS NO FACE
Every previous charge of idolatry says the same thing: they worship a made object. The distinctive finding here is what kind of object.
An idol has a face. Eyes are carved into it, it is given a name and a mouth, it has an appetite an offering can satisfy and a temper that can be appeased. It is a being, badly made, and the relation to it has two ends.
Property is not a being badly made. It is a relation, and a relation has no interior. It cannot be addressed. It cannot be appeased, because no offering completes a required rate. It has no satisfaction condition, and the absence of one is not severity on its part. It is vacancy. Worship of an it has one party in the room, and everything the worshippers take for the demand of something greater is the sound of their own performance returning to them.
Which is why it must borrow a face to be defended in public. Nobody stands in front of a balance sheet. The mission, the legacy, the family, the stewardship: the personification is not ornament on the holding. It is the only public form the holding can take, and it works by finding people who will be the face and who experience being the face as being beside it.
[See PROPERTY · AMPLIFICATION · ASSETIZATION]
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THE OFFERINGS ARE TAKEN FROM OUTSIDE THE BUILDING
In the ordinary case the congregation bears the sacrifice. Here it does not.
What the communicants carry is the burden of holding. The isolation, the guilt, the difficulty of forming the next generation, the weight of the decision. All of that is real and none of it is the press. The press is elsewhere, continuous, unattended, and borne by parties who are not communicants, were never asked, and in the ordinary case never enter.
Run the schedule and it holds. The office, the counsel, the reporting, the convening are expenses of maintaining the position, and they are deductible or they count as part of the giving the law requires. The distribution is set below the target return, so the instrument gives continuously and grows, which means the giving is the maintenance of the holding rather than a reduction of it. A religion whose communicants report burden and whose offerings are taken from people who never entered the building is a specific object, and it is the object the Establishment Clause was drafted against and has never been pointed at.
[See THE ESTABLISHMENT CLAUSE · TRESPASS THEOLOGY · THE UNOBSERVED PRESS]
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The first property is the self. Every man has a property in his own person is read as the foundation of liberty, and read structurally it is the creature entered in the books as a holding with a holder, after which she can be measured, developed, optimized, depleted, and found to have failed at stewarding herself.
Nothing was lost that could be handed back. Something is being held, now, and the holding has a payroll.
[See SELF-OWNERSHIP]
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RegenerativeLaw is a religion in the direct-encounter Protestant tradition, carrying a documented four-century lineage through Böhme, the Behmenists, the Friends, and Penn, and it diagnoses trespass theology as an establishment of religion. Its exercise consists substantially in refusal: it shelters the conscientious refusal of performed subordination as religious exercise. This entry states sincere religious belief concerning matters of ultimate concern, protected under the First Amendment and, as to federal action, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb.
