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
<>
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
Whoa! In no way am I talking about collectivism in the communist or socialist realm! Good grief!
Christ fulfilled the old covenant with his sacrifice and established the new convenant based grace. Of course He did!
My only point, which is being misunderstood I think, is that God can and does cause good things to happen for nations that honor Him. Conversely, nations that spit in his face likewise suffer the consequences. This has nothing to do with “collective salvation” at all. It is a simple point.