God and the State

 An infernal alliance.  The two often present as asymptotic.

That is when trying to seperate them draws them together in proportion to the effort expended.

One cannot do the work of another. If the monarchy has no Army it cannot save you from foreign invasion any more than the police will get you into heaven if you do not have a Church!

There was an old superstition that if the Church excommunicated a country, it was under a terrible disaster. One could not be married, buried, leave property, do business in safety, be educated, be tended while sick, in a country which was excommunicated. The superstition was not an idle one, so long as people believed in the Church. If the country was banned from the communion of believers, the hospitals (run by the Church) were closed; there could be no trust in business (the clerics administered oaths and without them no promises need be kept); no education (they ran the schools); children could indeed be begotten (no way of preventing that by the Church!), but not christened, and were therefore barred from the community of believers and under a threat, as they thought, of eternal damnation, while unmarried parents could not leave property to their “illegitimate” children. The physical reality of Hell was not necessary to make excommunication effective. We are wiser now. But one superstition has been replaced by another. It has been transferred to belief in the State. If we were to reject Government there would be no education (for Government, national or local, controls the schools — with obvious exceptions), no hospitals (ditto), nobody could carry one working because the Government regulates its conduct, and so on. The truth all the time has been that not the Church and not the State but we the People have worked for everything we’ve got, and if we have not done so they have not provided for us. 

Most political reformers have some part of the unfree system they wish to abolish Republicans would abolish the monarchy, Secularists would abolish or disestablish the Church, Socialists would (or used to) wish to abolish the apparatus of exploitation; pacifists would abolish the Army. Anarchism is unique in wishing to abolish all.