God repeatedly shows Himself concerned with "the collective." See His dealings throughout the Old Testament with Israel, and his destruction of evil-embracing groups of people--i.e. Sodom and Gomorrah, etc.
I can't deny that, but I will stick stubbornly to my point. The vengeful God of the Old Testament was replaced with a New Covenant of Love. The New Covenant requires individual salvation through Prayer, Grace and Faith.
Can a nation be saved, as in Washed in the Blood of the Lamb, collectively? That would be one gigantic Prayer Meeting. What about those in the nation who did not pray and who refused God? Would they be saved anyway?
You wrote: “God repeatedly shows Himself concerned with “the collective.” See His dealings throughout the Old Testament with Israel, and his destruction of evil-embracing groups of people—i.e. Sodom and Gomorrah, etc.”
Of course, you’re talking about the OT where God’s people were set apart as a visible “physical nation”.
They were a “shadow” of what was to come.
Now we have a “New Testament”. In the NT, Christ changed all that by ELEVATING the spiritual over the physical.
“America is the first country in the history of the world that valued the individual OVER the PRIMITIVE collective. Members of a “collective” have no INCENTIVE to excel at anything since there is no money in it.
When those who EXCEL and work hard get the same “reward” as the lazy and unambitious, they just dog off, too, and like in the Old Soviet Union, stay drunk on vodka day and night. Who’s stupid?
Is the Left Insane or Merely Unsane?
http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2011/08/is-left-insane-or-merely-unsane.html
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One of the main things that divides left and right is our very different conceptions of history — not just this or that fact or interpretation, but rather, the very meaning of History as such.
http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2011/08/history-and-how-it-gets-that-way-part.html