“Ponder the ease with which one can drive away one’s closest companions with the frivolous consumption of an ill-considered plate of beans!”

Forgive me, but fourteen years of Irish catholic sermons, followed by approximately two years of pretending to go to church while circling the same block twenty or thirty times in order to avoid said sermons has affected me on a deep and meaningful level. Whenever I hear someone quote a saint or apostle, the devil rises up inside me and forces my fingers upon the keyboard. ; )

But since you argue that the Age of One cannot empowered individualistically but only when individuals combine to work collectively, how about Matthew 18:20: “When two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” If we human beings do not live in society, we live nowhere.

….there’s a quite a page on that subject at

http://bible-truths.com/lawvslaw.htm#Defining%20Righteousness

The “letter” of the law, while being “abolished” for those “in Christ,” is established as the “schoolmaster” to bring us all to Christ.

Speaking of the law, the first covenant, we are told “…He taketh away the first that he might establish the second” (Heb. 10:9). “The law [of Moses] is not made for a righteous man but for the lawless and disobedient” (I Tim. 1:9).

Seems it’s even stricter when one is “in Christ”. Behavior becomes more righteous than with the Laws. ie: before you had to actually physically kill to be guilty of it; when “in Christ”, merely becoming unjustly angry at your brother in your heart is considered unrighteous – as the righteous man asks not what is permissible, “but what is commendable”.