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The Ten Commandments should be discussed three times every day. Author's Profile
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
BY
DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS
The Old Testament features a convenient scapegoat for our natural ambivalence, bigotry and materialism: our spiritual ancestors, the stereotypical Jews. The perennial Jewish Question, How should we treat the Jews, should be asked not only of the self-styled Jews but of our thoroughly Judaized Western culture. Josephus might better say of the lot of us today what he said centuries ago of the early Western philosophers: “Our earliest imitators were the Greek philosophers, who, though ostensibly observing the laws of their own countries, yet in their conduct and philosophy were Moses’ disciples.” If we would know ourselves, we should first of all know the Jews, and to know them we have to know their history.
Fortunately, the Jewish poets and scribes did a wonderful job of recording our same old story. In their eloquent books we find the best and worst of human nature in the portrayal of the progress of the naturally ambiguous religion of ambivalence, of human cruelty and loving kindness projected onto a single national deity. Each man would be god almighty, or at least a wild bull to his domesticated cattle, but that just cannot be. Although he cannot be all that he would be, he can cling to clan and tribe and kith and kin; he can attribute his fatal flaw to outlandish enemies, outlaws who do not participate in his group’s sacred rituals. And there are always enemies within besides himself to accuse him of hypocrisy and found their own cults: Judaism, for instance, spawned two world religions on the principle of “Thou Hypocrite!” i.e., on the demand that the deed match the ideal.
Indeed, hypocrisy is the underlying crisis; an actor on this spinning ball cannot be the person he pretends to be; that person in turn is a masked actor or hypocrite in his won right. Out of self-contempt for his lack of omnipotent identity, man resorts to bigotry, the hate-others-based group-love of mass seclusion and corporate narcissism. Yet the attempt at self-aggrandizement through identification with the higher power of the herd is bound to fall short of the self-contempt gestalt of its individual cattle; self-destructive or groundless hatred for one’s own rabbling rabble eventually atomizes the metaphysical superstructure into rubble.
Now the foregoing might appear to be misanthropic raillery; yet who is not angry at self or humankind at one time or another for our faults? And what is lovingly stamped on the other side of the coin, but the image of the ideal or head person who would be free of faults?
Man would be free but is circumscribed by restraints. The Greeks counseled him to know his limits, but the flip side of knowledge is ignorance, wherefore he exceeds his limits, reaches for the stars, and suffers painful consequences from time to time; but he does not give up even though his sacrifices may not be worthwhile. And the life-saving fear of being trampled and crushed and annihilated as a consequence of the exercise of the native will to stampede from fear to absolute freedom so that the existent being might persist forever without impediment, gives each and every one who is blessed and cursed with conscience due cause for guilt for the damage they have done in the process. We have good cause to love even our enemies lest they retaliate in our moment of weakness; we have good cause to have abiding faith in justice; for it is as plain as day and night that justice shall certainly be done; if not now, then in the long run, for in the end all of us under the heavenly dome are obviously doomed by the summary judgment of Dom, amen.
To each his own to the best of his abilities: Without a natural sense of justice each man and woman would do whatever they could get away with, given their relative strengths, in a war of all against all, where only might is right, hence the ancient Greek religion held that anyone without that certain sense of universal justice, of equality under law, should be put to death. Yet to the unreasonable victors belong the spoils. Religion worships absolute power while politics determines its relative distributions.
We are not surprised to learn that the aggressive and often cruel Hellenistic culture of our Western heritage embraced oriental Moses, the ever-so-meek servant of loving kindness who ordered a multitude executed for disobedience to the laws handed down to him, by the lord of justice, for digesting into succinct expression that they might be better imposed upon his people. Love the Lord or else suffer the direst doom..
YHWH at Sinai was allegedly incensed by the worship of the golden bull made of melded ornaments in Moses’ absence. Bulls were uncommon to
“Now let me alone, that My anger may burn against them, and that I may destroy them; and I will make of you a great nation,” commanded the irate Lord at Sinai. Meek Moses interceded on behalf of the doomed disobedient, and the Lord demurred, but when Moses saw the people dancing around the golden bull his own ire was raised as high as the Lord’s, wherefore he called together the Levites (‘priests’) and had them slay thousands of his wayward followers, including their own brothers and friends and neighbors, in the name of the lord of loving kindness for one’s own kind; and the Levites were washed clean of sin by the blessed blood of the slaughter, that they become a nation pure, standing apart from all humankind. Lest the slaughter go even further, Moses interceded again, and asked the lord to annihilate him too if forgiveness could not be had; the merciful Lord relented again, but with the proviso that he would punish the people for their idolatry over the golden bull at a later date. First things first: the Promised Land must be seized:
“Observe thou that which I am commanding thee this day; behold, I am driving out before thee the Amorite, and the Canaanite, and the Hittite, and the Perizzite, and the Hivite, and the Jebusite. Take heed to thy self, lest though make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land whither thou goest, lest they be for a snare in the midst of thee. But ye shall break down their altars, and dash in pieces their pillars, and ye shall cut down their Asherim.”
Alexander the Great of Macedonia, the “Two-Horned One” mentioned in the Koran in regards to the Last Day, saw the promised lands and seized them for the Hellenes. Moses, oft depicted with horns, had seen his chosen people’s small portion of the promised lands from
The legendary Moses was presumably familiar with the laws of Eygptians, Hittites, Assyrians and Babylonians – Hammurabi had similar laws engraved on stelae erected in
“Then they said to Moses, ‘Speak to us yourself and we will listen: but let not YHWH speak of us, lest we die.’ And Moses said to the people, “Do not be afraid; for YHWH has come in order to test you, and in order that the fear of Him may remain with you, so that you may not sin.’”
Speech and writing are very different: we seem to be born with innate rules of grammar; speech comes naturally to all normal human beings, who soon talk up a storm; but writing is a contrivance that requires painstaking forethought. We can imagine the trouble taken to inscribe two stone tablets on both sides with not only the Decalogue at the head of the Law but with all the ordinances that followed, which fill up about three pages of our modern Bible text in small font – of course the absence of consonants in the Hebrew written language saved space. In fact the written expression of language transforms consciousness and therefore the way we think and speak. Now writing set in stone may last as long as stone; that preservation is undoubtedly an invaluable mnemonic aid to the technological advance of civilization.
But where mere morals are concerned, precautionary words about the magic of writing are in order here: we tend to forget what is written down because we can refer to it later; today most people cannot remember the Ten Commandments writ by Moses, nor can they recite the first four of them in the right order, nor can they explain why the first few must be prior to the rest for the rest to be honored – hence the old prophets forewarned warned them, and said they must remember and obey the Writ or their bodies will become as dung on the ground. Posting the law on every post and on the walls of every court shall not suffice for the active observance required by the covenant: the laws, whatever they might be, must be understood, and must be embedded in the heart (mind).
The unwritten Law of the Unknown God was finally made plain, set in stone; the Writ was inscribed by the Lord’s lightning rod or finger, Moses, whose followers were unaware of the existence of that Lord until Horeb, the mountain of the Lord, was reached during their peregrination. That mysterious mountain, unknown today, is otherwise called Mount Sinai, the dwelling of Sin, the Sumerian crescent-moon god and lord of wisdom who also served as the dominant deity of
“And beware, lest your lift up your eyes to heaven and see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, and be drawn away and worship them and serve them, those which the Lord your God has allotted to the peoples under the whole heaven.”
Sin was depicted as an old man who wears a hat adorned with multiple horns and who rides a bull. He has a long flowing beard; his other symbols are the crescent moon and the tripod, known throughout the world for its stability. Sin was apparently as bullish as El, the Semitic father of the gods adopted by the Hebrews, represented at the head of the alphabet by aleph (alpha), the sign of a horned bull or strong ox. Sin served as protector of the cattle that grazed about the marshes of
Since the ancients told time by the moon, the crescent-moon god Sin was naturally perceived as Father Time, god of destinies and fates hence judge of heaven and earth. And Sin was the generous being of periodic fertility whose regular harvest fed the hungry and who otherwise helped the lonely and poor. Thought fights fear with knowledge of the past, hence the future is in part secured by memory or predictable, but in infinite time it always remains in part unknown. The unknown or universal god of gods, the indefinite and absolute power at the root of the creature’s fear of deathly nothing and love for life has no cause to think in self-defense because ineffable X is indestructible, eternal or timeless. This nuclear power, so to speak, gives the Sun cause to blaze forth the radiating branches or arms of the unquenchable burning bush once beheld by Moses, who was himself drawn from the water of chaos to be the el yoked by his staff to shepherd the chosen people as their number 1.
The moon-god who measures out time is occasionally attacked by the demons that eclipse the regular order that it might collapse back into chaos, hence Sin was associated with inexplicable natural disasters, particularly with volcanic eruptions and earthquakes:
“On the third day the Lord will come down on
The Moon came down to light the volcano: and Moses’ face shone gloriously when he came down from the volcano with the splendid stone, reflecting the radiant light of the law; no mere mortal can bear to see such a blinding light, even when reflected, so he veiled his effulgence that his glorious face appeared as clouded as that of the moody Man in the Moon, yet showing the glowing tips or horns of the crescent moon. And when he descended he found his people had prepared a throne, a golden bull for the leader to ride, and they had proceeded to worship it in his absence, but this idol pleased him not because it was a mere reflection of the power almighty that can smash every stone, even that great stone Sisyphus shoves to the apex of the heavenly vault that it might give the world daylight and roll back down again into night that the Moon might appear for its fates hidden in a cave nearby to do their work, one spinning the thread, another weaving the chord, another cutting it. Nay, not even those tablets upon which the law is writ on both sides, nor the letters themselves, should be idolized, for the spirit must preside over the letter that the strong authority have free reign.
Thus reads Paul’s Second Epistle to the Corinthians: “(God) made us adequate as servants of a new covenant, not of the letter, but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. But if the ministry of death, in letters engraved on stones, came with glory, so that the sons of
Now for Mesopotamians Sin was the strong white bull of the Night, Night being the Nothing from which all things emerge; his crescent horns of light represented the moon-boat, the sacred ark that carries the philosopher’s stone, upon which is engraved the law of existence of the arc between the horns of the poles, from horizon to horizon, from birth to death and rebirth ad infinitum. The moonbeams from his shining face anointed kings with royal halos. Naturally the face of Moses shone like the crescent moon upon
“And it came to pass, when Moses came down from
One form of the Hebrew root-word QRN (karan) suggests radiation, as in the emission of rays of light, the other suggests the growing of grow horns. Jerome translated the Hebrew phrase describing Moses’ facial glory into the Latin cornuta esset facies sua – “his face was horned.” Pious people who would fain disassociate themselves from their animal nature and eschew their forebear’s totemism are offended by the horny suggestion. To appease their divine prejudice it is generally agreed that the depictions of Moses with horns, such as those that appear above the gloriously clouded face of Michelangelo’s sculpture, are the result of a mistaken translation of the Hebrew text. Perhaps most insulting of all is the suggestion that the horns are not those of a powerful bull but rather the horns of a ram, the creature which the hated Egyptians associated with the Ra the solar God; or of the sure-footed, mountain-climbing goat, notorious for the promiscuity celebrated by Pan and the satyrs, not to mention the devil.
Bacchus the Greek god of wine was horny and many a dame and damsel were corrupted at his festive orgies. But horns are nothing to be entirely ashamed of even when shed. Horned Dionysus enjoyed irrational orgies when in his horn-cups, yet his human form has been associated with Moses and with Moses’ most illustrious successor, the Christ with whom those who drink his blood shall be in the vine as one.
Horns are obviously instruments of destructive force; they were used during the Stone and Bronze ages as weapons and tools, and served well as natural symbols of power. Horned helmets were proudly worn throughout the world, among the Romans, Greeks, Estrucans and others. The Vikings certainly were not above wearing horns or power-drinking out of horns. An American chief such as Sitting Bull did not mind horns at all. Cernunnos (cerna: horn), underworld god of the Gauls, was distinguished by horns. Hindu Agni and Buddhist Yamam are with impunity adorned with horns to this very day – Indra himself is referred to as a bull. Assyrian, Hittite, and Babylonian kings would not be caught dead without a good set of horns. For the occultist, the budding horns of the calf signify successful initiation into the Mysteries – the number of Commandments, Ten, represents the perfection of the Law in Christ, who is crowned with ten radiant horns. On the other hand, we have the ten horns of Revelation: “And the ten horns which you saw are ten kings, who have not received a kingdom, but they receive authority as kings with the beast for one hour.”
The Hebrew altar itself had horns at each end for the priest to grasp. Horns stand for choices. In Chapter 33 of Deuteronomy, Joseph is blessed and promised the best of everything, with choice lands and choice produce, and is referred to as “the first-born of his ox, majesty is his, and his horns are the horns of the wild ox; with them he shall push the peoples, all at once, to the ends of the earth.”
The poets spoke figuratively and the scribes inscribed many a white lie. The Supreme Being is not really a man or a bullish man, much less a monstrous Minotaur. Yet since thought and speech configures and reconfigures sensory experience after the fact, the storyteller cannot help resorting to figures of speech: the book of Numbers informs us that YHWH is “not a man, that He should lie, nor a son of man, that He should repent.” YHWH is not a hypocrite; He makes good what He says; His word is good; His truth comes true: YHWH is for
The highest priests are YHWH’s thoroughgoing iconoclasts: they have evolved beyond the worship of the bullish Lord Baal, and even beyond El, have climbed the metaphysical mount to its pinnacle. We speak of an evolution that spirals from the base camp to the summit where the climber of the golden chain of being takes the fatal leap to faith in nothing in particular, faith in the One that is at once Nothing. The Supreme Being is not a bull nor does the Supreme Being need such a steed. The poetic scribe inscribed this emotional motivation for YHWH’s volcanic wrath: “I, the Lord your god, am a jealous god.” But the poet lied in order to have good faith in something. But YHWH, the ineffable, unknown god, the infinitely variable yet permanent X that is neither tablet nor word nor letter, is not jealous of golden calves or concepts or of anything else for that matter. Thought is fearful flight from reality; concepts separate us from what is; reality has no cause to think. The iconoclast therefore smashes everything in sight, and whatever remains is good. It is said that Moses smashed the first set of tablets to save his people because their idolatry could not withstand the Law that would put an end to it and therefore to them as well; yet he may very well have smashed the tablets to keep them from worshipping the letter of the Law instead of the indefinite spirit that endures forever and ever without such impediments.
Each I would identify with a higher I in order to be something greater, perhaps beyond every grouping to the WE that is I-AM-I, and even to eventually cast off the superficial individuation of divided individuals and return to the original purity where nothing is permanent, the alpha and omega every individual as such fears. Ten is the perfect number, the number of the Decalogue and of YHWH. The number Ten, sum of One through Four, is in points the figuratively triangular Tetragrammaton. In numerical form the aleph, the magic wand, appears with the cipher or nothing pregnant with everything, thus we have the 10 that signifies something that transcends Either/Or, something other than being and nothing, namely the Negatively Existent One, or capitalized Nothing if you prefer. Faith in Nothing, the secret of unconditional love, clings to no thing yet revels rebelliously in the All.
The chosen people were in want of a miracle in the wilderness of Sin. They and their livestock were about to die of thirst, and they proceeded to quarrel with Moses: “Have you brought us up from
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Tuesday, October 23, 2007
The History of the Future
by David Arthur Walters
All the information in the world crammed into boxes and manipulated to order by key-stroking workers in cubicles cannot save the world from the terror that shall overwhelm it. The world is plagued with violence, injustice, and greed, and led by pathological liars, political prostitutes, and faithless adulterers who give hypocritical lip-service to ethics filed away in boxes. The prophet Jeremiah knew very well that sacred symbols kept in a box supported by the force of arms can not constitute radical reform, for such reform must be of the living heart.
Today Pope Benedict seems to think that the resurrection of Greek Reason might confront the Eastern menace and bring a good, Western order to the world. For the Greeks themselves, however, history was a vicious cycle; they described the world as they believed it was and would ever be by virtue of eternal recurrence and transcendental archetypes. They scorned the past, thought the future would bring more of the same, and stuck to descriptive narratives of current events, i.e., contemporary histories, the sort of accounts that are praised by academia for being “modern.”
The Pope’s Logos is not really Greek nor is it reasonable: it stands for the oriental messiah, the King of the Jews, suitably Christianized. His Logos is Jesus the Christ disguised by Greek rationalizations; it stands for a bodily resurrection that defies subtle logic and common sense as well. This sacramental body is the ark or vessel of the spiritual law, the cause or reason that guarantees the believer eternal life in a grand future beyond the vicious cycles and eternal recurrences of traditionally non-historical thinking.
Now the worship of any body, no matter how perfectly it might be contrived, even if it were supposedly god incarnate, is of course idolatry, the most horrid of capital crimes as far as Orthodox Jews are concerned. The messiah is still to come for the Jews, and whether or not he is a man-god is a controversial matter to be finally settled upon arrival. In any case he shall be the real King of the Jews, and he shall bring all the nations together in harmony under the Dome.
The Christians got tired of waiting for the imminent advent of the messiah. They said he had already come and gone and would no doubt return once and for all, God only knows when, undoubtedly when the Jews are converted to Christianity and the Temple rebuilt – as matter of convenience for dispensational millenarians, all Jews and others who do not convert must perish to expedite the salvation of a few enraptured Christians.
The Hebrew messiah differs from the usual oriental messiah who marks the beginning and ending of each identical cycle; for instance, the Hindu messiah appears on a white horse to mark the end of our present dark age and the beginning yet another golden age, which will in turn inevitably degenerate again as usual to the perversity of the Kali Yuga we presently enjoy, represented by a one-legged dark elephant. But the Hebrew messiah raises his magic wand and breaks the recurrent cycle. He leads his tribe forward from that new beginning to the Promised Land, where they might forever dwell in peace and prosperity provided that they behave rightly, which they may or may not do because they are not simply determined by the forces of the past but can make quite a difference in their future. That is to say that the Hebrew was given a moral mission to fulfill or else. He had a law to abide by or not, a covenant to keep or to break, with a guarantee of rewards for good performances and punishments for breaches.
In fine, faithful Jews are loyal to their sense of justice; they believe that come what may justice shall be done in the end for justice presides over all; that sense of justice includes mercy for those who repent for their sins and do what they can to make amends; for everyone sins – they are sins and not mistakes because the perpetrator knows he does a wrong when he does it. The ancient Greeks as well believed that the sense of justice is available to all regardless of their background, wherefore all citizens were theoretically capable of participating in politics; the few who do not possess a sense of justice should be put to death for all they are worth. Jeremiah must have had a sense of justice in mind when he spoke of the radical reform of the hardened hearts of stiff-necked people. Their dishonesty and greed is perhaps only surpassed in our own day. A case-hardened heart is in effect a merciless heart. Once the casket that deadens it is removed, the law written within is enlivened; the idolized ark and the rituals appurtenant thereto may be discarded. Wherefore the early Protestants at first thought that Law could be set aside altogether by Faith, not understanding that it could only be superseded by Love, for only Love knows what is blind to Faith.
The Jews discovered history; they had a sense of linear history or progressive history, a just and meaningful line they could use to find their way out of the desert, or a rope they might use to climb out of the pit. But never mind ancient history, say enthusiasts who place their faith in continuous technological innovation and the supposedly inevitable progress of the constantly updated information age. As far as they are concerned, the study of history, which is essentially the memory of things said and done, is a vain endeavor if its events occurred prior to their lifetime. They flee from history because they suspect that its laws might determine their behavior; they turn to deterministic physical and biological sciences instead, which they believe will set them free. In any case they are certainly not interested in the history of the Old Testament; not only is the book the haunt of bigots but its history tends to support the view that morality has improved very little over the ages.
A meaningful life requires commitment to an end, and that end is a final cause that has its means. In other words, a meaningful life is a story, and a romantic one at that, with heroes and heroines, and often a tragic end, for the highest ideal cannot be realized if the race is to persist with its endeavors. Historical tales require facility in the first three liberal arts – history’s three-legged stool. But now the ancient trivium is trivial: Who needs facility in the most fundamental of liberal arts now that we have been liberated by high technology?
No, the truths of ancient history must not be true today; if they were true, we would be presently determined or made by history instead of making history according to our free will; so let history, especially the remote history of our origins, be done with. If we are in actuality doomed to repeat our mistakes, let us do so unwittingly unto extinction, for the race has to have faith in itself in order to be pleased enough with itself to go on. What that race might be besides energetically informed matter does not really matter; may the apes eventually go where no man has gone before, and place the planets under the banner of genetic evolution. The dumber the matter the better the matter is in the final analysis.
The head controls, hence the more heads the headhunter takes the greater his power: Stone Age men kept the heads of cave bears in treasury boxes. Man took his brain out of his skull and placed it in a toy box to play with. The universal computer is at our fingertips; mental masturbation is ubiquitous. We perform familiar routines almost automatically. We do not need to remember as much or to think for long thanks to the computer – Down with linear thinking!
The dumber than dumb among us are infatuated with living in the presumably progressive now, and might be even happier living as tomatoes; their attention span, about that of a gnat, limits them to immediate, superficial experience. The average reader cannot digest more than 100 words at a time, and those words must not challenge his intellectual capacity. Indeed, without memory banks and operating routines to rely upon, a postmodern person would not know what to do, would be like a dog that runs into a room and forgets why it entered. Our vision of the future is little more than a variation on the present theme, an upgrade of the status quo. We are as zombies – we have become so deluded by the superstition of progress and so hypnotized by the religion of eternal consumption of more and more that we can seldom feel anything intensely, think independently, nor act on our own behalves. In terms of our beloved progress, history is a mistake, and our ignorance of it dooms us to repeat it. The high priests of the contemporary cult reiterate it on a grander scale: even the “word of God” has yet again been misconstrued into the ritual worship of dead arbitrary signs.
Logolatry is the favored form of idolatry today: Witness the perennial misconception that words, signs, or symbols are holy in themselves. The information of the so-called information age is a fetish. Data is sacred currency accumulated in external storage devices to be manipulated externally by virtue of preordained programs. Users click on icons, stroke keys and push virtual buttons – the fear of fathers that their children become mere button pushers has come true.
Information is god, and the more we have of it the better, but what does it all mean? Corporate mammoths roam the world gorging themselves on information. Nothing shall be secret in Utopia. Wisdom is for naught for it must be privately pursued, an effort much too arduous when the massive addiction to junk can be easily aggrandized by yet another dose produced by pointing at a pretty icon and clicking the magic mouse – remarkably, the little mouse has been a subject of animistic religion since time immemorial.
Information is now worshiped by all the sects; by philosophy, sociology, psychology, and, as we have seen, by the catholic religion under the guise of Logos. Many people who claim to love humankind can barely stand the sight of each other now that they have so much information about the race; they prefer the illusion of personal control over society afforded by virtual reality. It is impossible to fight the trend with its own means and come out clean, for the fights are won by whosoever has the most excremental information, just as the manure fights back on the farm were won by the kid who was closest to the spreader.
Jeremiah in a pessimistic vein might say that we have played god and have founded our information age on a dunghill, and therefore our corpses shall soon litter the ground as dung. The potty upon which the omnipotent baby sits shall not carry us to the other side. The ark is weighted down with dung. We are being smothered by excremental culture. Too much weight is given to mass media and the revolting mess it dishes out in celebration of injustice, violence, deceit, and greed. Trivia is worshipped as if it were the power almighty. The news of contemporary history has no future but death and destruction. Attention must be paid to studying and writing histories that have a future. Everyone can at least write a life history to see where she or he may wind up given the current course of action or inaction, and then work out a better future if one is called for. There must be a moral to our stories or we are doomed to perfect our present disintegration in chaos.
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
The inspiration of ancient religion is neither faith in visible or invisible idols called gods nor in faith in signs and symbols for same but faith in truth and justice. If the truth be told then justice will be done. We find little faith in truth and justice in the world where might in itself is believed to be right and where the great bitch-goddess Success is worshipped, for an honest and just person will probably fail in that world. Hence few are willing to sacrifice themselves to higher ends. Yet in the final analysis, unless many such sacrifices are made, nothing but the direst of dooms can justify history in the end.
Our ‘contemporary’ world of high technology and low morality is a dog-eat-dog world where the mean attention span of the homogenous mass is little more than that of a dog that runs into a room and forgets why it entered. Indeed, psychologists advise people to take frequent breaks from the war of all against all, to savor the specious present, the false moment dubbed the Now – we are the more easily robbed of our consciences in our sleep. The bell rings, the dog salivates and jumps through preordained hoops while economists chart the numerical growth of the appeasing mountain of trash, junk and garbage; the most precious of the spoils go to the vested interests, the dominant baboons – God of course gets the pungent smoke. Greed runs rampant therefore confidence men are amply rewarded for deceit. Political philosophers say nothing can get done in a democracy with all its factions unless the people are regularly lied to, therefore there is no shame in that. No, there is no shame in advertising falsehoods as long as fools rush in and a profit is made. In any case the voter or customer who does not go along with wrong is always wrong, and if wrong is done long enough, wrong feels right. Seldom is a twinge of conscience to be found throughout the land. Wrongdoers regret misdeeds only when caught, and when released they do the evil deeds again and again and yet again. The forces of darkness of corporate board tribalism and colluding public-private interests preside over the nation. Leaders lie through their teeth daily and only show shame after convicted of perjury – celebrities follow suit.
He who ignores evil is good for nothing, yet false prophets adjure us to ignore evil in the name of their god. Intellectuals have sold their independence: members of the intelligentsia prostitute themselves wherever they can turn a trick. Professional prevaricators with credentials in communications and public relations justify injustice and make wrong seem right. High offices, congresses, and courts owned and operated by the power elite put the oldest profession to shame; their postmodern institutions are whorehouses of the worst sort: souls are leased or sold outright therein. Candidates for the highest offices need no longer be sworn into office with the oath of hypocrisy to do the people’s will rather than keep their campaign promises, for the anti-intellectuals eschew ideology and campaign as professional hypocrites who are more than willing to say anything to get the most votes they can from the shrinking middle class so they can milk the mediocracy apace.
If the Creator does not exist, then whom shall we blame for our original corruption? We are all in the same boat, so perhaps it is not a matter of whom but of what. What, then, shall we blame for our predicament? There certainly must be something to blame besides ourselves. The great volcano god, the Terrorist Almighty, shall not suffice for a cause; we believe his wrathful eruptions are the irregular consequences of our idolatry; yet we still might blame the volcano, for its unpredictable eruptions does give us cause to decline the absolute freedom of chaos, to cling to a regular order and to idolize one form or the other.
Materialism must be at fault. Matter is what we make of it, and we have fashioned for ourselves a god within, an I-almighty. In our vanity we would each be a god, our own doom, a willing cause of our own fate, so let us not blame material causes but consider the god reflected in the currency pool within as the end-all or final cause. But who might that embodied ghost be? We return to whom, and ask, who is behind the vast conspiracy?
Although history is presumably irrelevant today, our ancestors may still be blamed if not worshipped for our present conduct. Their culture is our collective memory hence we must continue to cultivate that culture even if we regret and defy it. We have in fact read the same old books, the sorry history of our kind’s vanity and crimes against humanity, and the promise of salvation if truth be told and justified. An eternal spirit seems to enliven the subject matter, that the past presage the future.
What is the difference between body and mind, matter and spirit? Man wants to own his future hence he has in one way or another always worshiped idols and/or the demons within them. By repeated suggestion we are inducted into the infamous halls of gross materialism and bigotry from which even devout atheists have not escape unscathed – the division of people into believers and nonbelievers, into religious and irreligious, are spurious divisions, for the demon is within: man is innately godly and religious.
What conveys the vast conspiracy of those spirits that obviously perish with the bodies they inhabit? An ark was built to traverse the gap between one bank and the next, and within it was placed the inalterable text for future reference. Where spiritualistic East meets materialistic West it was referred to as torah, the bloody old swearing stone, the enduring rock of faith – faith in justice, that justice would therefore be done some day, even thousands of years hence, in case of breach of covenant. The facts of the dynamic cases are complex and contingent upon their flux; the opposite might be true of every truth. But there is presumably a static or necessary truth; the foundation stone upon which the universe pivots; there exists a transcendent final cause or final reason for all contingencies, no matter how infinite their series. The conclusion is embedded in the premise. This eternal truth, true from alpha to omega, is as certain as I=I or I AM. On that rock all differences in fact are justified, for truth must come true. The logical formality alone, for example that Socrates is mortal because he is a man and all men are mortal, is useless unless the facts exist. Yet the truth within, that I am I, persists although that I may be nothing but an empty proposition.
It is of little or no avail, except perchance to obtain some small satisfaction over the exercise of vanity, to fight over the rubble of once holy cities, the disintegrated fragments of the divine providence. Now everyone may have a portable replica of the blazing rock upon which the primordial promise was recorded for future reference. The oriental testament is still a handy bestseller as is the sequel that claims that the promise was fulfilled for some and shall be fulfilled once again for all at the last moment in the final agonizing hour. In the last judgment or doom the truth shall be known and justice done accordingly. This is the true faith of the either/or, faith in the Truth, the premise that Truth shall come true, that right shall be rewarded and wrong punished one day; and then and only then shall the merely probable relative truths be certainly rectified, and all facts beneath this dome have their Doom for good or ill. To this heretofore unproven truth faith is true unto Doomsday, the proximity of which can be estimated from our lies. Until then we have many choices to make, and may we make the most of them.
Labels: Truth Comes True
Monday, September 17, 2007
BY
DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS
Jerusalem was certainly not the utopian ark of Zion the prophet Jeremiah wanted it to be nor was it the cradle of radical reform so that Judah’s wickedness might be extirpated at its root. King Josiah of Judah instituted some legal reforms. They were all right as far as they went, and included the death penalty for violators, but Jeremiah did not think much of them, for he was convinced that formal observances simply would not change the hardened hearts of the people: those hearts would have to be circumcised of their foreskins to enjoy the Lord. Judah was bound to be crushed for her sins; then and only then, when the full weight of his doom was on her, could she be intimate with the Lord.
“Then the Lord said to me in the days of Josiah the king, ‘have you seen what faithless Israel did? She went up on every high hill under every green tree, and she was a harlot there.’” Israel must be duly chastised for her harlotry. True prophets must believe against all odds that justice shall prevail in the long run. If the moral and cultic terms of the covenant between the Hebrews and their Lord are broken, they must be severely punished, perhaps for thousands of years. Yet the prophets also believe in mercy; the chosen people can rest assured that their sins would eventually be forgiven if only they repent and set themselves aright. And that they should want to do forthwith, for no doubt a day of reckoning shall come for all unjust peoples.
For one thing the patriarchs must renounce and denounce the seed-mixing, feminine principle personally represented by the goddess Asherat. She is the great earth mother; matrix of the gods; queen of heaven; goddess of wisdom; mistress of the sea; mother of Baal; counselor to El; and, naturally speaking, the greatest of all harlots. She was worshiped around the trees on the high hill. If a suitable tree was not to be had, a representative pillar would do, yet her metaphysical symbol was the Living Tree. Harlots have their virtues. Jeremiah himself and eleven other priestly prophets were descended from the marriage of Joshua and the proselyte Rahab, reputedly the most ravishing harlot in the world and one whom every great man had enjoyed.
Now the Ten Tribes Northern Kingdom of Israel had been forever lost when Israel was defeated, but Jeremiah thought that the Lord considered the Kingdom of Israel to be more righteous in her apparent refusal to return than her sister the Southern Kingdom of Judah, for Judah was enjoying adulterous intercourse in high places with sacred stones and trees and the heavenly bodies while merely rendering deceptive lip-service to YHWH during her so-called reform, wherefore the Lord threatened to have the brutal and cruel and virtually godless barbarian heathen from the north cast her out of the Promised Land forever for her blasphemous breach of contract.
Judah’s populace did enjoy a whole gamut of occult pastimes that would scarcely raise an eyebrow in our so-called New Age era. Both the Deuteronomist and Chronicler blamed much of the purportedly foreign superstitious and magical practices on the laxity of King Manasseh; but the Chronicler adds information that leads us to suppose that King Manasseh might have simply done what he had to do for the tiny kingdom’s survival, and that he had in fact repented, effected some reforms to restore the worship of YWHW, and built up Judah’s military force. Furthermore, the nefarious influences were not as “foreign” as the pious scribes alleged, but were associated rather with indigenous cults. However that may be, someone must bear the brunt of the blame, and King Manasseh is traditionally disparaged as a corrupt puppet of the Assyrian empire. And he was not the only rotten apple: it is said that Judah had had only four good kings in 350 years, one of them being King Josiah.
As for the elite religious, Judah’s prophets relied on dreams instead of the word of the Lord – the Lord apparently had big ears, to overhear their interpretations: “I have heard what the prophets have said who prophesy falsely in My name, saying ‘I had a dream, I had a dream.’ The prophet who has a dream may relate his dream, but let him who has My word speak My word in truth. What does straw have in common with grain?” Furthermore, the people did not heed the Sabbath: they carried heavy loads and brought things through the gates of Jerusalem, a most serious breach of the covenant binding them to their Lord.
To make matters worse, Judah’s morality had been spoiled by good times. Indeed, Jeremiah’s complaints remind us of our own good time with its political cult of selfishness, its tolerance for incredible incivility, and its feel-good religious doctrine of instant forgiveness of the perpetrators of every sort of wickedness, especially when a profit is to be made. According to Jeremiah, everyone including priest and prophet were greedy for gain in his day. Prophets traditionally charged with taking transgressors to task on behalf of the Lord strengthened the hands of evildoers instead. Neighbor took advantage of neighbor. The mouths of the people were filled with lies and slander as each and every one proceeded from evil to evil. The leading men were an assembly of treacherous adulterers. Greedy men had grown great and rich, fat and sleek as they excelled one another in wickedness. The wealthiest of men gave little or nothing to charity. They pled not the cause of the needy nor did they defend the rights of the poor, but unjustly occupied themselves with building roomy mansions of deceit with spacious upper rooms.
A just and truthful man could not be found in all of Jerusalem; otherwise the Lord would not have doomed it. So inured to iniquity were all that none were ashamed. Therefore, said the Lord through the mouth of the loyal prophet, the arrogant shall fall, for justice must be done. Jeremiah tried to warn them in the standard deprecatory language the Lord used to forestall a breach of covenant at the time it was sworn to; in the earliest times oaths were consecrated with blood spilled on the swearing stone (torah). The Lord did not mince words: the corpses of all those who disobey the him would manure the fields and feed the birds and dogs. The bones of kings and princes, priests and prophets, and of the ordinary inhabitants of Jerusalem would be brought from the graves and scattered like dung over the ground. In the Lord’s own condensed words:
“The House of Judah have broken My covenant which I made with their fathers. Therefore do not pray for this people, nor lift up a cry or prayer for them: for I will not listen when they call to Me because of their disaster. I shall appoint over them four kinds of doom: the sword to slay, the dogs to drag off, and the birds of the sky and the beasts of the earth to devour and destroy. They will die of deadly diseases; they will not be lamented or buried: they will be as dung on the surface of the ground and come to an end by sword and famine, and their carcasses will become food for the birds and the sky and for the beasts of the earth. I shall make them eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of the daughters, and they will eat one another’s flesh in the siege and the distress with which their enemies and those who seek their life will distress them. The dead bodes of this people will be food for the birds of the sky, and for the beasts of the earth; and no one will frighten them away. Why is the land ruined, laid waste like a desert, so that no one passes through? Because they have forsaken my law which I set before them. Thus, the corpses of men will fall like dung on the open field, but let him who boasts boast of this, that he understands and knows Me, that I am the Lord who exercises loving-kindness, justice and righteousness on earth, for I delight in these things.”
Jeremiah had relayed the divine curses to his people in their prosperity, but the accursed folk paid the Lord’s words no heed. No one repented, asking themselves what they had done. Fortunately the Almighty is merciful enough to contradict himself and make exceptions to his pronouncements of inevitable doom, although a full pardon is not easily obtained. Judah might have been saved from the horrible Babylonian commotion descending from the north in order to turn Jerusalem into a desolate heap of ruins and a haunt of jackals; the barbarians of course were always from the north – Jeremiah learned of the Scythian incursions by way of example during his youth. Jerusalem might have been true to its namesake, the Seat of Peace, if only she had been faithful. Yes, Jews could have dwelt forever and ever in the land promised to their forefathers if only they had amended their ways, shunning other gods besides YHWH, practicing justice instead of magic, refraining from oppressing the weak and from shedding innocent blood. At the very least, insisted Jeremiah to the bitter end, they should forsake Egypt and capitulate to Babylon in order to save a remnant of Israel, the Lord’s Bride, that she might return to Zion some day: “He who dwells in this city will die by the sword and by pestilence; but he who goes out and falls away to the Chaldeans (i.e. Babylonians) who are besieging you will live, and he will have his own life as booty.” But everyone turned to his own selfish course, “like a horse charging into battle.”
No doubt the bride of a lord, or the temptress herself, is to blame for lordly temptations. The Lord’s only fault is his greatest virtue – his kindness for not keeping his bride tethered lest she trot up the hill where the green trees flourish. Since the jealous Lord who wreaks vengeance on his beloved but disobedient nation is alternatively such a gracious and kind Lord, he would not destroy every Jew as threatened, nor would he always be angry, especially if Israel would only acknowledge her iniquity; then he would bring her, duly chastised by exile, to Zion. And finally his chosen people would in fact be the covenant incarnate hence no written law need be secured in a box for future reference lest the people forget again.
“And it shall be in those days when you are multiplied and increased in the land,” declares the Lord, “They shall say no more, ‘The ark of the covenant of the Lord.’ And it shall not come to mind, nor shall they remember it, nor shall it be made again. At that time they shall call Jerusalem ‘The Throne of the Lord.’ And all the nations will be gathered in it, to Jerusalem, for the name of the Lord. Nor shall they walk anymore after the stubbornness of their evil heart.”
At present, pronounced Jeremiah, all must submit to the Lord’s retribution, appearing in the form of the King of Babylon, and those nations or kingdoms who “will not put its neck under the yoke of the king of Babylon, I will,” said the Lord, “punish that nation with a sword, with famine, with pestilence, until I have destroyed it by his hand. But as for you, do not listen to your prophets, your diviners, your dreamers, your soothsayers or your sorcerers, who speak to you, saying, ‘You shall not serve the king of Babylon.’ For they prophesy a lie to you, in order to remove you far from your land; and I will drive you out, and you will perish. But the nation which will bring its neck under the yoke of the king of Babylon and serve him, I will let remain on the land.”
At least Jeremiah counseled peace instead of war, perhaps as a matter of convenience, perforce to save Judah from absolute destruction by a force that she and her allies could not withstand. And he may have had his private interest in mind as well. Although he was a prophet by trade, his family held quite a bit of land, and he himself was preoccupied at times with real estate deals; for instance: “Now it happened, when the army of the Chaldeans had lifted the siege because of Pharaoh’s army, that Jeremiah went out from Jerusalem to go to the land of Benjamin to take possession of some there among the people.”
He had gone to his hometown, Anathoth, a few miles from Jerusalem. He was arrested at the gate there by a guard who accused him of deserting to the Babylonians. Rabbinical folklore has it that the Lord would not destroy Jerusalem while he was present there, hence he took advantage of Jeremiah’s absence from Jerusalem to destroy the Temple, and that upon his walk back Jeremiah thought the smoke he saw rising from the Temple celebrated victory over the Chaldeans, but after he perambulated the road littered with the corpses of his fellow Jews he soon discovered his error and wept bitterly. On the other hand, the standard account has him arrested and taken back to Jerusalem to be jailed until the king called him out for his famous advice: “You will be given unto the hand of the king of Babylon!”
Now it is easy for a man to voice his personal hostility towards his own society when it might stand against his will, and at the same time to deny personal responsibility for his hatred and to allege that he speaks for the good of all by claiming that his words and thoughts and the animosity or ambivalent hate-based love motivating them are not his own but rather belong to a deity who cannot be called as witness to personally testify. Indeed, many evil deeds have been done in the name of a god whose nature is essentially unknown and may not even exist.
History is a mistake the living may or may not learn something useful from. Most recently the greatest superpower the world has ever known rushed to war in Babylonia at the behest of a leader who claimed to be exercising the will of the Almighty Father; the father, he said, who was higher than his father – all other causes given proved to be flimsy pretexts for doing the mysterious divine will. The results of his works have been hell on earth thus far, but perhaps heaven shall follow if he is allowed to stay the divine course – no doubt god’s justice will be done one way or the other; which way is a matter of conjecture on probability, for at heart the god of such calamities is a god of chance and not of will.
The fanatic Islamist prophet in the Middle East denounced the neoconservative Christian prophet, the president of the so-called New Roman Empire who had identified Jesus Christ as his “political” hero. The neoconservative cult would impose a Pax Americana on the world, beginning with modern Babylonia. Prophets East and West are frustrated Jews whose respective religions were originally constituted by calling Jews hypocrites. The Islamist leader’s deprecation of the Western world’s corruption rings true as it sounds very much like that of the prophets of old, but he differs inasmuch as he takes personal responsibility for the virtually random killing, by directly egging God’s Warriors on instead of following the ancient Jewish example and attributing the havoc and panic and death and destruction to an enemy provoked to violent commotion by a jealous tribal god who, ironically, appears to be a greater adulterer and traitor than the people who betrayed him. To that punishment legitimate Jews must submit if they are to remain on this earth and be restored to Zion.
Which prophet is false and which one righteous remains to be seen, and might never be seen until the final reckoning at the end of the world. Of course one can always take the prophet’s word for it, that his word is not his own word but is rather the word of the Lord spoken through him as the Lord’s own oracle: “Is not My word like fire?” declared the Lord according to Jeremiah, “and like a hammer which shatters rock? Behold, I am against the prophets who use their tongues and declare, ‘The Lord declares. I did not send them or command them, nor do they furnish the slightest benefit.’”
Hammer, indeed! The supreme iconoclast shall eventually smash everything below, and whatever is left shall be deemed to be the one and only good by doom – that is to say, Nothing. Wherefore have no faith in things seen, for all things shall pass: only Nothing is permanent; or, if you prefer the positive negation of definitions, only Absolute Being is permanent. Babylon’s “gods cannot defend themselves from the rust, and the moth,” claims the beautiful rhetoric of the apocryphal Book of Baruch – the book was named after Jeremiah’s secretary. Real estate might be the basis of material wealth, yet things that pass as gods or their characteristic attributes are useless in time of need: “Are there any among the idols of the nations who give rain?” asked Jeremiah himself. “Or can the heavens grant showers?” From the Book of Baruch:
“Their gods, of wood, and of stone, and of silver, are like the stones that are hewn out of the mountains: and they that worship them shall be confounded…. And they are made by workmen, and by goldsmiths. They shall be nothing else but what the priests will have them to be. For the artificers that make them are of no long continuance. Can those things then that are made by them be gods?” And, “They determine no causes, nor deliver countries from oppression; because they can do nothing, and are as jackdaws between heaven and earth…. Better is the just man that hath no idols: for he shall be far from reproach.”
The same might be said of the idols of the mind; the notions of false prophets are of no avail when it comes to salvation from the dire circumstances of the Lord’s doom. False prophets, or those who rely on alien gods and demons and on dream prognostication were, for the first time, explicitly outlawed during Jeremiah’s time, even if the prophecies or dreams came true:
“If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you and gives you a sign or a wonder, and the sign or the wonder comes true concerning which he spoke to you, saying, ‘Let us go after other gods (whom you have not known) and let us serve them,’ you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or dreamer of dreams...but that prophet or dreamer shall be put to death.”
What other vessel than the true prophet is the oracle of the Lord? But how are we to know for sure if a prophet is merely giving lip-service to YHWH? The prophet had better follow tradition and say nothing novel. The unfaithful questioning of authority that arises from false prophesizing shall cause the Lord to abandon the inquirer and to punish the prophet or priest who resorts to ungodly and ambiguous oracles for instant advice and futurist divinations, for thus have the ignorant people been caused to stumble about confusedly and to wonder which words and answers were actually the Lord’s, and eventually to rely on their own authority instead of the authority of the true prophets. “For you will no longer remember the oracle of the Lord, because every man’s own word will become the oracle, and you have perverted the words of the living God, the Lord of hosts, our God.”
Still it remains to be seen who is the false prophet and priest, hence the actual traitor. Perhaps the priestly caste with whom Jeremiah’s priestly family, originally the caretakers of the Ark of the Covenant, often feuded, were the traitors, but who knows for sure?
At the conclusion of one of Jeremiah’s speeches, he was seized by the priests and prophets and all the people, who cried, “You must die! A death sentence for this man! For he has prophesied against this city as you have heard in your hearing.” This commotion caused Jeremiah to give them further warning that, if he were killed, their breach of the Lord’s covenant would be compounded, for his death would bring innocent blood on them and their city, “for truly the Lord has sent me to you to speak all these words in your hearing.” Who could prove otherwise? The proof of the pudding was in the fact that Judah and its capital city were destroyed: If a prophesy comes true when given in the name of the Lord, is it not the word of the Lord, and is not the prophet’s voice His voice?
It was customary for prophets to badmouth their own people for going astray. Prophets ordinarily counseled Judah not to take her own political stands, in effect to remain neutral, and so did Jeremiah up to a point, but then he was so bold as to take a position against Egypt and for Babylon instead of the opposite course chosen by the leadership, and for that he would pay the consequences, even unto his untimely death as a hostage in Egypt, allegedly at the hands of his own people – legends have him reappearing in Babylon, conversing with Plato in Athens, and taking up residence in the British Isles. After all, Jeremiah’s seemingly unpatriotic prophesies not only discountenanced the king and his officials but discouraged the troops, for prophets were given a great deal of credence in those days. And, giving all those concerned further cause to doubt the chosen political course, prominent persons, in Jeremiah’s defense, had pointed out that the prophet Micah had prophesied the very same fate for Jerusalem and the Temple.
The officials in Jerusalem had Jeremiah beaten up and thrown in jail. Yet then the King of Judah had him brought into his presence to ask him if there was any further word from the Lord: “There is! You will be given into the hand of the king of Babylon! In what way have I sinned against your servants, or against this people, that you have put me in prison? Where then are your prophets who prophesied to you, saying, ‘The king of Babylon will not come against you or this land?’” At least there is some sense that the prophecy that comes true has more merit that one that does not, providing it is made in the Lord’s name.
Judah, a smallish kingdom, had vacillated between Egypt and Babylonia – apparently neutrality was not an option. After flirting with the king of Babylon, she double-crossed him, giving him cause to pause his forces in Judah to chastise her. Egyptian forces came to the aid of besieged Jerusalem for awhile, and the Babylonians withdrew. But when the Pharaoh’s army withdrew accordingly, the enemy returned to capture and lay the city to waste, just as Jeremiah had warned the king it would do.
But that was overall the Lord’s providence to begin with. No one can actually see the Lord and survive, therefore the ruthless Lord of loving kindness could not be seen personally wreaking his wrathful revenge, for then there would be no remnant of survivors to be sorry and worship him; in order to ravage Judah for her adultery, he purportedly enlisted Babylon as his ally, his chosen people’s arch enemy, whom Jeremiah perceived as a friend in comparison to Egypt.
Why Babylon instead of Egypt we cannot say. Egypt had mothered several aspects of the Hebrew religion, including, for example, the sacred ark, which was secreted in the temple when not employed in processions, and protected by seraphic wings. Egypt had derived the custom from the African cradle of humankind; still today in some parts of Africa a covered stool is carried in procession and lodged in the place of secrets – a member of the lodge recently confessed that the big secret therein is really no secret at all. The stool serves as the supreme authority’s seat on top of a box into which his sacred droppings are deposited.
Despite all they had learned in Egypt, perhaps the Hebrews – hibirus meant ‘outlaws’ or ‘canal-builders’ – still remembered the tribal warfare with the pharaohs, and resented their legendary captivity in Egypt. Or perhaps Jeremiah, as some of his detractors suspected, figured Babylon would overthrow Egypt, and he had therefore sold out to Babylon in order to preserve his vested interest in things material and spiritual. We believe he did what property holders and prophets were supposed to do at the time, which was really nothing new or reprehensible from the Hebrew perspective.
The gods of old-time religions were as ambivalent and ambiguous, at once as cruel and kind as the people who imagined them. Usually people are not inclined to take deities so seriously when nature proceeds regularly to their advantage, but when nature’s course is violently interrupted to their disadvantage, even atheists among them tend to pray for relief in all earnestness to the very god who crushes them – the supplicant is nearest to the Terrorist Almighty when being crushed. The Almighty, then, is intermittently the Lord of natural disasters, and among those disasters we might as well include grave social disasters such as war and revolution. Today’s scientifically enlightened people do not believe in the existence of an anthropomorphic deity who causes earthquakes, eruptions, hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, pestilences, plagues and the like, and wars and revolutions, in order to punish disloyalty to the god and relative moral turpitude.
Fundamentalists may beg to disagree, and some say America’s godlessness and adultery, sodomy and homosexuality, and the like deviations from righteousness are the causes of such events as Hurricane Katrina, terrorist attacks, and American losses in the disastrous war on Babylonia (Iraq). Scientists disagree: they believe that God has nothing to do with such things, and that given enough time to study and experiment, natural disasters may be more accurately predicted and losses of life and property greatly reduced – as for war and revolution, that sort of calamity might be forestalled altogether if people are treated rightly, said righteousness not to be determined by a deity but by psycho-sociological science. Scientists have a long and arduous row to hoe, however, for their success depends on understanding the fluctuating complex relationships of very large numbers of facts and events, and the outcomes can only be stated in terms of probabilities. Even the safest insurance company shall one day fail, and the mightiest nation as well, God only knows when because our predictions are usually mistaken as to the timing. For some reason, almost everyone lately has had a hunch that the world is doomed for some reason or the other, and that the Time is nigh.
But quite a few relatively intelligent if not wise men and women claim that natural challenges including world wars and the organized immorality of the war of all against all are a necessary part of human nature and are good for humankind, for without such challenges to respond to, no progress of the race to speak of would be possible. Peace is not a place to be resting on one’s laurels, but a place to prepare for the next great challenge, the next hurricane, the next world war, perhaps the apocalypse itself, so that the survivors might dwell eternally in their superior way of life in the Better Place of Nowhere if not in the better places about the wobbling globe where various ways of life prevail.
Jeremiah exhorted the refugees in Egypt to abandon their corrupt ways, to stop worshiping Asherat and to return to YHWH. They would hear nothing of it. The men and women assembled and said to Jeremiah, “As for the message that you have spoken to us all in the name of the Lord, we are not going to listen to you! But rather we will certainly carry out every word that has proceeded from our mouths, by burning sacrifices to the queen of heaven and pouring out libations to her, just as we ourselves, our forefathers, our kings and our princes in the cities of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem; for then we had plenty of food, and were well off, and saw no misfortune. But since we stopped burning sacrifices to the queen of heaven and pouring out libations to her, we have lacked everything and have met our end by the sword and by famine.” Jeremiah retorted that the Lord could not endure the adultery in Judah and had to punish it, implying that the cessation of sacrifices came too late.
Now it may seem that corruption or impurity, the so-called original sin associated with fornication with harlots in seed-mixing cities, once presided over by the Persian devil introduced in Babylonia by the fire-worshiping Dualists whose angels were demons and vice versa, is the way to go – of course the devil’s adversary shall win upon the final analysis of all that has gone before. Having two gods instead of one is certainly more statically logical than self-contradictory hence absurd one-god, or a dialectical three-in-one god whence the synthesis of a hypothetic good and antithetical evil evolves. Still, mutual enmity determines the conduct of enemies; their love of their own kind is hate-others-based self-love. It is a wonder that either one could win in the end and call itself Good. We may arrive at the conclusion that the Lord on high does not really exist, and that tolerance and even the embracement of all sorts of gods and spirits and law-breaking is the cause of our great civilization, not its occasional breakdowns. In fine, there is no virtue absent vice.
Faithless Israel has proved her faith through incredible trials and tribulations, and despite her suffering or because of it she has borne witness of greater things in store for our race. She has been returned to Jerusalem by faithful friends and by faithless enemies who wanted to get rid of her. Her Lord certainly holds a grudge for a long time; perhaps her return is premature. She inspired the world yet is a horror to her neighbors, most of them her cousins. Her Temple remains in ruins, therefore the Messiah is not in sight. Her proud leaders will not acknowledge iniquity. She is considered to be a proxy for the Neo-Roman Empire. She has the awesome power incinerate her enemies with a nuclear holocaust Alas, the mundane powers need a fault, and will not allow her be neutral, in which case she would probably be destroyed. Something awful is in the air up north, something most foul, the smell of burning flesh. Her fate is unknown, but friends and foes expect and unconsciously will the worst, the very apocalypse that shall lift the mushroom clouds veiling the Lord’s glory.
“Babylon is to fall for the slain of Israel; as for Babylon the slain of all the earth have fallen.”
Israel and Jewry are really not at fault. We do not know what is at fault. Maybe the world has grown too crowded for comfort. Many people are angry and anxious: they want blood and they want it soon. Christians have turned from the New Testament to the Old, from Faith to Law, and have forgotten the Love prophesied for the future. Jesus is dead: long live Wrath! The wicked prosper and make atheists of men, yet faith in justice abides among the prophets; in Doctor Luther’s word, “There is a life after this life; and all that is not punished and repaid here will be punished and repaid there.” By Gum, who is not deserving of punishment given his original sin, and when and where will everyone be forgiven and the madness end? Many religious have reverted to crude thinking, the fundamental point of departure long surpassed by sophisticated Jews. The Jewish question is no longer strictly Jewish, nor has it ever been. The world is being roundly Judaized, and is deaf to jeremiads. Each person now would be king or queen of their own little hill; alas, those high places are far from Zion.
Prophecy has grown polite or politically correct – futurists study the trends and predict more of the same perpetually modified by technical innovations. There will be a reduction in national warfare but more local violence. The gap between the rich and poor will widen while millionaires multiply. There is nothing to fear from the poor, since impoverished peoples have endured for centuries without rebelling, but somehow assuage the middle class whose expectations were raised and are now being regularly diminished by economic predators. If everyone has plenty of junk, trash and garbage to recycle along with some sort of hovel, and if the precious articles go to the rich to decorate their mansions and women, all will be well.
Still there is a general sense that all hell is about to break loose. Why? Are we all instinctively subject to a death wish? Our degreed authors who cannot agree in these matters are groping in the dark and we know it well, yet to avoid the real reality we read one useless book after another on the subject and relish the most preposterous of convoluted notions. We might as well read only one book on the subject, and when questioned as to why the end is nigh, say, “Because the Bible says so.”
What can be done to avert the disaster and set things right? There are at least 613 things that can be done. In any event, we are well advised to follow the example of good Jews and to do at least one good deed every day, such as help the sick and poor, employ the unemployed, assist and befriend orphans, widows, aliens and strangers. A good-hearted and tender-minded approach may be difficult in a turbulent sea of wickedness without a rock to stand upon and where nice guys drown. A man who steps out of his house with all good intentions is confronted by organized assaults on his good intentions and the probability that he will perish if he maintains them, so he may turn to the evil ways himself to survive. In his anger he might even will the destruction of his own population if not some foreign scapegoat.
Jeremiah had a few high hopes at first, but the hard-heartedness and stiff-neckedness of his people converted him to a thoroughgoing pessimism. “Thus says the Lord, ‘Cursed is the man who trusts in mankind, and makes flesh his strength, and whose heart turns away from the Lord.’” If we simply revert to the old rituals, or change the system, or just tinker with the machine, we might think that our hearts will change – the heart was the metaphorical seat of the mind in the old days. Indeed, this sort of external reform is preached today by strict behaviorists, as opposed to the behavior-psychology therapists who know that the underlying beliefs must be changed. We recall that the radical reforms associated with the stern laws of Deuteronomy and promulgated by King Josiah, the violation of which called for death by stoning, did Judah little good on the whole. Bad habits and perverse ways of thinking have their rewards. As our psychologists know only too well, neurotic complexes, especially when related to massive social delusions, are terribly difficult to understand and to set aside: “The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick who can understand it?” And, “The sin of Judah is written down with an iron stylus; with a diamond point it is engraved upon the tablet of their heart. As they remember their children, so they remember their altars and their Asherim by green trees on the hills.”
Unless our hearts and minds are changed, we are surely doomed by our clinging to material things – we must let go. All the gods and spirits in the world, if they exist, and especially the mundane as well as the mental idols we cling to, shall be of no avail in dire straits, for they are what led us into the deadly ruts. Neither the Temple nor the Ark nor the Covenant deposited within for safekeeping shall save us. Truly the ineffable word must be inscribed on our hearts if peoples and nations are to peacefully and joyfully assemble under the Dome. The ineffable word signifies the inscrutable and universal Me or the I-Am that can only be known within the heart of individuals: “You will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart.”
In fond memory of
Bruce Campbell Walters
May 3, 1917 – August 30, 2007
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
The argument over posting the Ten Commandments is much more significant that we might suppose. In fact, not only does the Book of Deuteronomy provide for writing them on house posts and gates, but for regularly speaking of them to children upon arising, when sitting in the house, before going to bed, and when walking by the way.
And since people are motivated by fear to love and obey authority, the Contract for the Promised Land also specifies the punishment for infractions: death by stoning. In the event people fail to enforce the law, a long series of curses are bound to follow, the sum of which is Hell on Earth.
To further impress the importance of obedience, Moses composed a Warning Song to be taught to the children of Israel, reminding them of the benefits of obedience and of the terrible consequences that are sure to follow when Israel, as usual, gets fat, corrupt, and abandons its Rock of Salvation.
As we can see, there are other laws set forth in Deuteronomy, besides the Ten described on the Two Tablets, several of which demonstrate a great deal of love and compassion for the oppressed, for strangers, for the needy; and affection is even extended to birds, trees, and oxen. Indeed, if the Rock is not forsaken, the land of milk and honey is assured. Even the severe punishments are evidence of Yahweh's love for Israel.
Deuteronomy provides for ample written and oral schooling of children, so that both the literate and the illiterate have access to the higher education. In ancient times, the education written on the house posts and gates was supplemented by the oral education provided by each father to his son. Unfortunately, before the establishment of formal schools, a fatherless son or the son of an ignorant man received inadequate instruction.
Although the Bible does not mention the existence of schools in the most ancient times, there were in fact a few schools even prior to the Babylonian exile, Be that as it may, it was inconceivable for any Hebrew child to be brought up without learning the Torah.
Immediately preceding the exile and during the centuries following the destruction of the Second Temple, a universal elementary school system for boys was developed. A copy of the Torah was requisite for each school. Each student was required to bring supplies to schools, including little parchment rolls, or readers, which included the Ten Commandments. The Torah had to be recited loudly: residents occasionally sued to keep schools out of their neighborhoods.
The teachers charged with introducing boys to the high life were esteemed even more highly than the boy's fathers. Use of the rod at the school was prohibited in favor of the strap: some boys were strapped daily for their own good.
Most importantly, the pupils were provoked to ask intelligent questions.
The more clever the question, the better it was received and responded to. Simply reading the laws of the good life, and placing the words in a box or book for safekeeping will not suffice for our mutual and continuous education. Neither will posting the laws on walls in plain view: most people will eventually pass them by without the slightest notice or consideration: the sorry business shall continue as usual.
Of course, some superstitious people will worship the Decalogue itself, in the same fashion as those with blind faith in the Eighteenth Amendment in the Constitution, amended to keep people off the bottle. But unless the law is firmly planted in our hearts and continuously cultivated in our respective skulls, it will go the way of the Eighteenth Amendment, which served as a vain fetish for those who disliked alcoholic spirits, righteously hating their demonic affect on the community; alas, the spirits were not in the bottle or in the Amendment.
Therefore, before posting the Decalogue or any other law we must have and be in the spirit of the law. Perhaps asking clever questions of ourselves and of each other shall bring us into a more intimate conversation with and in that spirit. It is only through asking questions that the student is finally counseled by the voice of silence in the perfect eternity where all questions are moot and no further questions are meet.
Discussing the Ten Commandments
Reducing the laws of the good life to writing and placing the words in a box or book for safekeeping, or even on school and court house walls for ready reference, will not suffice for our mutual and continuous education. Indeed, we tend to ignore reminders and positive suggestions once we write them down and place them, for instance, on the bathroom mirror or refrigerator; thus shall we ignore the law unless it is discussed on a regular basis.
Let us assume here for the sake of our Great Conversation that, once we have posted the Decalogue in our schools, students are encouraged to ask questions in order to further their education. They will want to know the origin or basis of authority for the Ten Commandments; they will want to know where they came from, and why they have suddenly appeared on the classroom wall or in the hall.
Moses, in his infinite wisdom, having had the benefits of a liberal education (according to Philo) that strives for realization of the Ideal Free Man, anticipated those sort of questions, and he answered them eloquently according to the circumstances of his day and age. However, it seems that different words are required to meet today's occasions now that some of the cleverest questioners have concluded that Exodus is a pious myth and Moses a composite fictional character thereof.
Even worse, cynical inquirers say the effort to post the Ten Commandments in public schools and courts is the handiwork of a hereditary, vast right-wing conspiracy of ultra-conservatives whose compassion is betrayed by supercilious smirks, empty poses, blatant hypocrisy and other such tell-tale characteristics such as an inordinate love of property; phallic worship; the subjugation of women; love for war; gun-worship; a pro-life stance over the dead bodies of women; "merciless Texas and Alabama justice"; forgiving people so they can feel good about executing them; and so on.
Nevertheless, it can and should be demonstrated that there is something much more profound at stake than politics-as-usual. The text must be examine in its symbolic and historical context; that is to say, in its religious context, for in those days our rigid line between church and state had not been drawn. Furthermore, history is the most comprehensive object of religion in the sense that history embraces the timely existence of man, his common humanity in relation to the Universe, and asks: "From whence, to whither, and why?"
Unfortunately for scholarly research, the original Ten Words (Decalgue) of the Hebrews have been long forgotten: perhaps they were distributed amongst lost tribes. And there is a great deal of scholarly contention over the authority of the Ten Commandments in their known forms, as to whether they are really from the Mosaic period at all, or are later accretions. The main bones of contention are Monotheism and Idolatry, the very underpinning of the tradition itself. And there exists subsidiary issues: exactly what could be or could not be coveted; whether work or trade was really prohibited on the Sabbath; and so on.
Modern students might be intrigued by the fact that the Decalogic issues, now academically obscure, were openly discussed when the Ten Commandments were originally promulgated in the old schools. We can see by the foregoing that there is a danger that modern students might immediately dismiss the Ten Commandments as absurd if not irrelevant to our own times. But that is simply not true. The Decalogue is, of course, very relevant to our time, and the arguments for dismissing it as irrelevant can be refuted during the Great Conversation.
For example, addressing the argument that the Decalogue has no authority because it is part of a contrived myth, we might say, Yes, it is a myth, and, as we know, myths have had an enormous influence on the development of the human race. Indeed, most individuals, cultures, and societies are living a myth. So let us re-examine and re-create the Decalogue myth, let us bring it life again. For only a myth could satisfy such an historical project as ours. One does not have to have blind faith in a myth, for the myth is an 'As If' founded on the truth of real experience and wisdom. Yes, perhaps our homework shall be the creation of a suitable myth to be read before our class without fear of being stoned to death, whipped with a strap, or getting a good tongue-lashing. The fantastic results of our assignment are as unpredictable as life itself; however, perhaps some student might bring to class the following Myth of the Decalogue, in part:
"The original Ark in which the Covenant was deposited contains the secret, perfectly bisexual Name that evokes the ineffable Creator. In response to the Evocation, the Name is divided into Two Meteoric Tablets: one Female, the Community or Bride; the other Male, the Executor of the Laws, or Groom. Upon the tablets are Ten Words, the Seeds of the Living Law, the Heads of all the laws flowing therefrom. The Ark was built to carry the Seeds over the Waters of Chaos, that the Living Order be planted in the Promised Land. The Ark, cleansed by the Baptismal Flood Waters, served as the Natural Womb of Mankind during the perilous voyage through Space."
And the student presenting this homework further states that this explains the secret meaning of the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord and why the altars in some churches are made of two parts, one male, the other female.
Another student states that he likes the myth, but believes that both tablets were not meteoric. One was volcanic, symbolizing Earth. The falling meteor, or Great Falling Light, was the Great Dragon breathing fire, the dragon who impregnated Earth, turning her into a veritable voluptuous Eden or Paradise, an Ark of Life spinning and hurtling through Space or the Waters of Chaos with her consort the Sun. Here on Earth, then, we have the Dragon of Wisdom, the knowledge of good and evil, planted as an Eden also in Man. This story is, claims the student, written in the stars where we see the Celestial Virgin holding back the Dragon. And on Earth we see the dragon Python engaged by Apollo the Sun.
Another pupil then asks, Was not the dragon, or the Brazen Serpent itself placed in the Ark? Yes, indeed, he is answered, and that Wise and Healing Dragon is also known as the caduceus of the son of Apollo and Python, namely, Mercury, the Savior.
But is not the Dragon also Satan? the pupil persists. No, there was no original Satan. The Falling Angel or Star is the Dragon of Wisdom, the Great Benefactor of Man who, in turn, used the gift to distinguish between good and evil. To the extent that a man curses himself, hates himself for his errors, he is the Satan of his own creation, which he wrongly projects onto the Dragon. For the Dragon is the spiritual Sun, the son of Enlightenment, or Wisdom, the anointed, the Savior, the Christos. Hence the Name spelled by the original Ten Words is the Name of the Savior.
Despite the probable arguments against this myth, it presents many advantages to be discussed as part of the Great Conversation. The seeds incubated in the native ark must obviously be cultivated upon landing. The children drawn from the birth waters must be inspired by Life, just as the Ten Words must be taken from the artificial box, book, or plaque on the wall, and be resusticated daily by the breath or spirit of conversation, that each person may rephrase the living law in his own words and thus make it is own. It is by virtue of that enlightening process, using the power of words, that the student journeys to truth and justice (called ma'at by the Egyptians during Moses' time).
Speaking of Egypt, yes, the Decalogue bears repeating in all the schools lest we neglect the source of the Nile and rush off to soon forgotten entertainments. And, yes, no doubt we should re-examine our Original Words, whether they be Ten, Nine, or Eight (Hegelians seem to prefer Three, and Mystics like One, and Dualists are stuck with Two, and so on). Whatever the Number of our cosmic commandments, none of the terms of our pregnant conversation should be taboo. Authoritarian coverups merely insult the intelligence of students and authorize perjury.
In any case, let us call our myth a myth for living a living myth, a myth coming true rather than the absolute truth in itself. By all means, let us discuss that myth in full.
Such a discussion would raise certain questions about the desired degree of flexibility in a living law: if the Decalogue as posted were strictly construed today, and enforced according to the determinate sentencing given in Deuteronomy, hardly anyone would be living today. Further questions, regarding, for example, the nature of hypocrisy would surface, and rightfully so, along with many, many other issues and definite problems of application.
Then each school would be an ark of freedom tempered by the ideal, an open society animated by the diversity of conscience that each person has willingly made his or her own by means of independent effort and mutual discussion. The aim of this education (drawing forth) is the cultivation of the ideal person by good example and independent effort. It is not a method of forced indoctrination and inculcation by rote.
The First Commandment of education is, Think! This is not something new we have added on. In fact, it is this very divine and dynamic faculty that the Hebrews raised above all those idols of fear and greed that are the cult emblems of ignorance, superstition, death and destruction: this is the positive aspect of their iconoclasm. Therefore Yahweh is a jealous god as far as the bride Israel is concerned: idolatry is adultery.
Finally, we should not leave this present discussion without mentioning the importance of memory. We speak of history. Memory is history, and philosophy is its application. Untold millions of copies of the various versions of the Ten Commandments have been published, but who can recite them, let alone interpret them? Many of those who want them posted in schools believe that the injunction against murder is the First Commandment, when it is rather far down on the list! Who can say why? Many can. But that is a subject for another discussion. Suffice it to say here that the patriarchs have forewarned us that sacred scriptures have been and will be used to justify any sort of conduct good or evil: that is why they have warned us to discuss them, to question them every day.
In view of the fact that so many people have difficulty recalling the most popular versions of the Decalogue, or, for that matter, the Bill of Rights, the Seven Deadly Sins, and other important lists, it does appear that the cultivation of memory is the key to the recovery of the Lost Civilization, the Atlantis submerged so long ago by the Deluge because people had forgotten their lessons.
Who can remember even some mundane everyday thing in our money-loving age such as whose head is on a fifty-dollar bill? Well, some can, but that is not the point. The point is that much more is involved than Posting the Decalogue. Our future and the future of future generations depends on it.
Never Ending Conversation ....
Tuesday, September 23, 2003
Diremption
by David Arthur Walters
A ''diremption'' is a violent divorce or split, sometimes identified as a "fall" into self-conciousness, which presents an objective world in opposition to the willing subject, now conscious of itself as an independence restrained, therefore, at once, dependent for its existence on outside forces to which it must respond in one way or another to perpetuate its existence. Hence human self-consciousness is, in its radical division or the division at its root, is a moral division, a consciousness of good and evil that is not identical to the awareness of pleasure of pain that other animals experience - to humans, ''good'' might be painful, while ''evil'' might be pleasurable.
In other words, the individual is separated from its mother and is born or falls into the world where it soon discovers it is not omnipotent, that it is opposed to an it or object or objection. Everything in its essence would continue forever in its existence unimpeded. The individual infant is in fact born free as a matter of ''natural right'', for ''right'' is ''freedom'' and the infant, in its initial, unreflective feeling of omnipotence, is absolutely free by the essential ''nature'' of life, which is absolute freedom or love: "What is love? Love is your life." (Swedenborg). Whom do you really love when you are separated from the one you love?
So the infant individual is cradled in love but then encounters resistance to its will and is enraged at the violation of its inherent natural right, but it comes to perceive that its hate may further endanger it, and, fearing retaliation, works out a compromise by projecting its self-love onto others, by loving others and imitating them for its own good, thus becoming a self-conscious person in the sense that a ''person'' is a socialization of the individual that would be absolutely free if only it could. The person masks the individual actor that it might survive, but the in-divid-ual is aware of its internal division.
The individual somehow ''knows'' it is not its real self but is playing a role, is really a hypocrite, an actor with an underling crisis, a ''hypo-crisis.'' The pleasant external smile of the person may disguise the inner pain, even to the point where the person is, as a matter of habit, unaware of the split, unaware of his own hypocrisy and ambiguity, for the full awareness of the same can make a man "sick", in need of a doctor.
While the normal man lives an anxious life distracted by social illusions, the sick man or woman is said to be closer to the reality of existence, or closer to God, or to the utlimate Power over him or her. And the nearer to death, the more intimate the individual, which would be absolutely free from restriction, is to the omnipotent maker that is Power over all individuals.
The Greek doctors were ''saviors'', physicians of mind and body who could heal the sick in body and raise the depressed to life. For example, Luke, Paul''s partner, was a "beloved physician." Of course Jesus was their Savior of saviors. The personal saviors did not simply provide the sick man with some drug or procedure, and with psychological counseling to restore him to normal mental health, for they saw normal life itself as a disease unto death, and sensed that, unless the patient were raised to and reconciled with the Power or Spirit, sending him back to a vicious society where individuals are divided within and without - amongst themselves in a war of all against all - would be like feeding a man to the sharks in order to save him, or, as our sick society does, heals a condemned man in order to execute him.
So diremption is a violent divorce. The person suffers from that wound. Antibiotics and serotonin reuptake inhibitors will not heal that wound. What is prescribed is the Word, the Good News. He needs redemption. In that alone is he, as a painful synthesis of mind and body, reconciled to the spirit that transcends both.
"This we find in the Gospels, where the infinity of Spirit - its elevation into the spiritual world (as the exclusively true and authorized existence) - is the main theme. With transcendent boldness does Christ stand forth among the Jewish people: 'Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God,' he proclaims in the Sermon on the Mount, - a dictum of the noblest simplicity, and prenant with an elastic energy of rebound against all the adventitious appliances with which the human soul can be burdened. The pure heart is the domain in which God is present to man: he who is imbued with the spirit of the apopthegm is armed against all alien bonds and superstitions. The other utterances are of the same tenor: ''Blessed are the peacemakers; for they shall be called the children of God." (G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History)
Ten-Percent Revolution
The 'Holy Bible' is a best-selling book today. It was not always so popular but was virtually the private property of a tiny priestly minority. It was written in classical language, and few people were literate. The cost to produce a single copy exceeded the cost of building a substantial house. In some parts of the world, the local spiritual leader had but a single copy in his possession, and we know of cases where people were charged with plagiary for secretly copying the text.
With the advent of the Reformation, the invention of printing presses, the advances in literacy, and translations of scripture into vernacular languages, anyone may easily obtain and read a cheap copy of the Book - propagandists hand out the New Testament free of charge. Although the translations and interpretations of the ancient texts regularly distort the Word, which was and still is not fully understood in its original forms, many readers insist that they understand the Book and therefore do not need a priesthood or any other elite to enlighten them on the true meaning of its contents, thank you very much.
The liberal publication of the written Word in its perverse forms constituted a stunning blow to monarchy and aristocracy in religion and politics for church was married to state. Revolt was in vogue not only among the swinish bourgeois but among disenchanted nobles as well - ordinary folk do not ordinarily like revolutions and tend to be rather conservative. Intelligent monarchs curried favor with the vulgar people to keep the nobility checked. Certain compromising adjustments were made to constitute constitutional monarchy. The divine right of kings was losing its glamor as the word spread that the voice of the people is the voice of god. Certain enthusiasts or "god-possessed" people enthusiastically opposed the Love of Jesus to the Law of Moses. The peasants revolted, wanting a Kingdom of God right here on Earth - Heaven forbade it and 100,000 were murdered in the name of god by the prince's soldiers. Fortunately the lawlessness eventually took milder forms, and the most sinful 'antinomianism' against the sex-obssessed religion was eventually limited to free love. Many protestants tucked god away in a safe place and took up feel-good faith in Anything Goes - as long as it is profitable. The deists kept the moral code and took up the worship of science; they considered the deity as a sort of clockmaker who winds up the universe - the rest is up to us, thank god! Some who were displeased with the pursuit of happiness in property and with the money-god became seekers of divine enlightenment. There were certain finders among them, while the others came to believe the light is in perpetual seeking.
That is not all to the fall of god's secular estate. 'Republican' (democratic) deists took the Old Testament to task for its fundamental contradictions and its outmoded hateful attitude posing as love; that is, hate-based love or love founded on hatred of others, who must be murdered and whose land must be seized by order of the tribal god, or who must be stoned to death for non-violent or minor infractions - and innocent babies must be murdered and generation of kids killed for the sins of their fathers such as idolatry.
Of course the Old Testament was appreciated as a historical work, and its inspiring poetry and prose was admired; but as fundamental law it was, on the whole, said to be no better than a pile of incoherent rubbish; and the judges who abided by it were called foolish and hateful bigots, friends of injustice and diabolical enemies of humankind.
Thus the progress of relatively secret sacred scripture to best-selling book spread religion but did much damage to its god in the process of vulgarization until one day someone looked around and said, "God is dead." At least when scripture was kept in the hands of an educated elite, a relatively reasonable spin could be given to smooth out inherent contradictions. The religious authorities constantly debated the application of points of law. They were not ignorant of the fact that human customs change (even for the better!) over time and that change is part of god's evolving law. In fine, the law must be flexible. What fool would want to reinstitute today, for instance, the rudimentary customs of Neanderthal man? We think he had some religion; it might have included cannibalism and the collection and deposit of cave-bear power-heads in a 'bank' - an early form of capital-ism.
Wherefore the authorites behind scenes argue out the best course of action to fit the present needs. A gradual 'causistic stretching' or stretching of the law takes place. At first the dissenting opinions were destroyed. The oral explanation of judgements given to the people by the rabbis or teachers seem reasonable enough since they were the synthesis of a reasoned dialectic. In practice the law became milder and seemingly in direct contradiction to specific torah commandments, but there was an explanation for that.... Today we might complain that the judges are "legislating in violation of the separation of powers."
The Catholic church incorporated the hierarchical or patriarchal structure of the Jewish religion along with other systemic aspects. A comparison between the educational methods, including publicity of law, between Church and Temple would be a fascinating study - one issue faced by the Church was how to handle the conversion, often as a result of hostility, of many disparate, illiterate peoples. In any event, we know that when the Catholic cat got out of the bag, when the scripture was published to all, and each person thought that he was competent to interpret it without the advice of counsel, the political power of the Church was nearly destroyed.
Democracy was the watchword as the divine right to rule was dispensed with. But the arbitrary right or divine right to arbitrate was actually retained in a subtle, occult form in the new priesthood, the judiciary. The legal priests are assisted by juries. Juries were first of all instruments of government, but they too emerged as representatives of the people, a people's conventical instructed by the sitting priest - juries have an extraordinary power which they are seldom deliberately made aware of.
Although the law is supposed to be man-made, reasonable and even scientific in our day and age, in contradistinction to the a priori or found law of god's will, we still find judges thumping the Bible before and after they thumb the secular statutes. They say the law is really based on will and not on reason, and when their peers disagree on appeal with their blatantly irrational, arbitrary, and tyranical judgement, they claim their peers have placed themselves "above God." The over-ruled judge might even be so arrogant as to disobey the ruling of his superiors "in the name of god." That is, he refuses to submit to the first rule of law, the rule of law! And he sets his own opinion up as divine law. He might as well admit that he or his superego is god almighty. We are reminded here of Khomeini's seizure of power; the Shia clerics had maintained a traditional distance from Iran's secular state; Khomeini was merely a "legal advisor" until he issued his ruling or fatwa which literally gave him the self-declared right to decide what was good for the community even if it were actually a terrible evil; technically, he was equal to the Prophet; actually he was superior to the Prophet - he was Allah on Earth.
We might discover this sort of judge to be an elected judge. Ironically, the "democracy" which fought for the people's freedom from a tyranny which was exercised in the name of a god owned and operated by a power elite and justified by rationalizations of mumbo-jumbo, now wants to restore the archaic system. Of course the democrats who fought for democracy were a revolutionary minority who did their level best to protect the minority from majority mobocracy (ochlocracy). So the truth of the matter is this, that the mobs in some states of mind really want to be ruled by a tyrant who cites an unknown god to justify his fundamentalist interpretation of secular law. Since the legislature is elected by the majority too, severe laws are on the books or can be written for him to more easily apply and interpret. And since the top executives are also elected and supported by the majority of the legislature, there is no real separation of the secular branches of government.
Therefore again we see that democracy conceived only as majority rule is no guarantee of liberty. The judiciary is a sort of secular priesthood which is supposed to be independent of the special interests of warring politics and religions. But we see it drifting along with the political majority. If the trend continues to the right, we might see a born-again, right-wing authoritarian government placed into office by a fawning electorate. Attempts would of course be made to stack the courts with Bible-thumping judges. We can only hope that they are highly educated and reasonable. Even then we shall have tyrants on the bench, and in Congress and in the White House as well. We are told not to worry since there will surely be another swing towards individual liberty, a shift away from pseudo-religious fascism to the true-conservatism that protects the liberty of minorities. If not, no doubt another set of traitors will arise to fight for Liberty. If we count all traitors of the Revolution for American Independence including soldiers and sailors, we sum up a small minority of the population - some scholars estimate the number as less than ten percent of the population.
I am not surprised
The case at hand is only one case but the issue is of importance to all those who love liberty. I have posted this article on this particular case and other articles on the general issue at several sites over the past few months. I have received various comments and am familiar with most of the positions taken.
I am not suprised that many commentators do not read the entire text they comment on, and, instead, render a knee-jerk reaction to some portion or phrase because they think their ideology or theology is being attacked. I understand. I have done that myself. I happy that individuals have written long comments and articles on this case and on the general theme. While doing so, on them insisted that this case is unimportant or impertinent, that it has no bearing on the American scheme of things, that it is not representative of a shift to the born-again self-righteous authoritarian government. They are sorely mistaken in my opinion.
I can understand why people might be embarassed by their ignorance of the significance of this issue and might want to remain ignorant as to why every citizen interested in liberty should pay careful attention to it. They would sweep it under the rug in order to remain ignorant about what is going on behind the scenes as the checks and balances are destroyed under their noses. After all, it is supposed, we have authorities to look into these matters, and most of us do not have time to be looking over their shoulders. But I have been interested in this significant issue for several years and have gladly even given up football to keep up with it. Of course I am not astonished when I am told to shut up, when it is suggested that I am somehow wrong (a moral term meaning 'bad') for doing what I consider to be my civic duty in voicing such objections as I have presented above.
I am not even suprised when someone comes along and blatantly preaches ignorance over reason although that would result in a bestial utopia ruled by one king of the jungle over another.
As for the stone in this case, the stone itself is irrelevant and so is the judge's unwitting violation of the first four of the ten commandments inscribed thereon. Humans have been setting up stone festishes since the dawn of history. That might be objectionable to iconoclasts and is demonstrative of primitive ignorance but it is not illegal unless prohibited by law. And it was prohibited by federal and state judicial decrees in this case. This particular judge's disobedience and contempt for the rule of law is relevant, and that is the fundamental issue. I personally have no objection to the judge's fetish or anyone else's idolatrous stone- and word-worship on private property. I can enjoy it for its aesthetic value, and, my taste being what it is, this monument to the Hebrew god pleases me. Of course everybody in Alabama knows what is going on. The judge deliberately pushed himself and the shrine, which represents his view of religion, into the public courthouse because he wanted to make a scene.
Many people in Alabama favor his agressive stance, especially those who since the Civil War deeply resent having their traditional symbols torn down and removed from public places. Nonentheless, everyone in Alabama and everyone who is literate and takes the time to do their research knows that the judge used (or abused) the Ten Commandments to get elected to the position where he now has shown contempt for the rule of law. Oherwise, it would have gone unnoticed. I do thank him for that and I thank those who brought legal objections to it because the controversy works to expose the ignorance and bigotry of those who would be removed from office or not elected to office providing that the controversy is aired.
I have on numerous occasions recommended that the Ten Commandments and other laws both religious and secular be posted in suitable places so they can be discussed - not worshipped. Just posting them and revering them is futile and absurd. Judges and priests and kings and presidents who swear by them are notorious for violating them. That is why they are regularly crushed.
Saturday, September 20, 2003
Thou Shalt Love God or Else!
Thou shalt love YHWH or else! YHWH's contract with his Bride Israel specified that the Chosen People should love YHWH above all, or else. Or else what? or else all hell shall eventually break loose, and everything good shall be lost. That is why the first commandment enjoins us to bind ourselves to the Tribal God Before All Other Tribal Gods, eventually converted into the One and Only Universal God. If we do not love the Absolute Universal God, Who, as Supreme Lord, is the Supreme Socialist Dictator, we shall be ripped into shreds vainly loving the distinctive particulars of an infatuated existence.
Religion is the organized worship of Power and politics is the relative distribution of Power. Thus we find the Leading Principle of ancient religious politics expressed in the form of a Contract with YHWH posing as "the Lord." He covenants that, in consideration for being universally loved, the lovers will have Holy Land upon which to lovingly flourish and, furthermore, the Chosen People shall possess all the appurtenances attached thereto and all the goods thereon unto their heart's fondest desire; provided, however, that if the Covenant is broken by a few people, the Iron Hand of the Law shall spell out D-o-o-m for the whole tribe!
Alas, after thousands of years, men of all persuasions are still learning the hard way. Fortunately, the Lord has been forgiving. We recall that Moses himself talked the Lord out of crushing the Chosen People for worshipping the Golden Bull while he was getting the Commandments. So in that case the Lord was merciful, and the Chosen People got a Big Break - Moses had his Levites kill a mere 3,000 of their brothers and friends for their idolatry, a very mild chastisement which made the slayers holy by baptising them in blood.
Therefore the god feared is loved for one's own damned good. That is, Love must arise from fear, in hopes that a lawful, loving, cooperative response will be more successful than a grasping, competitive, hating one. But there is empirical evidence tending to prove that hate engenders hate, and that the best weapon of all is Love. So Universal Love is eventually declared the ideal for Mankind, but, alas, along the Way to Love certain obstacles present themselves.
Love became so popular that some people, not understanding Love's origin in the Law or fear of punishment, and unaware that Love is the acquired habit of observing Law, foolishly believed that Love can replace the Law before everyone, down to the last man and woman, has donned the Habit of Love. The politically astute Supreme Commander, in an Appendix to the Contract, stipulated that everyone should love each other as they love YHWH. Of course, this implies that they should fear one other too, particularly those God-fearing, Self-righteous judges among them who have direct access to the Lord. They must not permit evil in their ranks. No! Evil-doers must be executed. Evil must be hated and punished, but Good must be loved and rewarded. The Taliban judges knew that - the Afghan courtroom was simple: the Book on the Bench, a Sword for beheading and mutilating on one hand, a Whip for whipping on the other. And Alabama judge Moore, a person of the Book, agreed with the Taliban, quoting his book Book. Sodomites must be executed forthwith before others misues gentalia and orifices. Blasphemers, female, thieves, adulterers, idolators, murderers - all must be murdered. Remember, the Greatest Love of is to love the Supreme Commander - those Manichean devils who don't must be executed - only the Red Dragon is honored by being enchained in the pit.
That is the Deal, the offer we had better not refuse: take it or leave it. Yes, we can leave it if we will, and to the criminal extent that we leave it, the sinful individual will is free. The Law might seem harsh on individuals, but it is necessary if we would have divine order prevail instead of anarchic chaos, or instead of the infinite nothingness prior and subsequent to the order of life.
We should never forget that, before all and first of all, there is a Power higher than any individual or group, and it is in our best interest to submit to it just as it behooves women to submit to men - do not cry "rape!" in response to "Thou shalt love god or else! Anyone who does not obey may have his free will, he may believe that he is a god unto himself, and he is, but he is also a "god" spelled backwards.
Of course those who love YHWH should love one another as well, after they love YHWH first of all and always, for the Law of the Universal God necessarily applies to the distinctive particulars that it may be realized on Earth as a Concrete Universal or Person. Wait a minute, have we not contradicted ourself here? Never mind, this all works out in mysterious ways. Just remember this: as it is abstractly in heaven, so is it concretely on Earth.
Since the power of individuals is relative and dispersed, it is nearly impossible to make them love each other; therefore they must be enjoined to love; but if they fail to positively love each other, they might still enjoy the benefits of society if they obey the negative injunctions - the Thou Shalt Nots - and vote for right-wing authoritarian governments who have faith in private property and "might makes right."
It is lawful to hate and to kill enemies including missionaries of other religions; but one sort of hatred must by all means be avoided: Groundless Hatred of brother against brother, of Jew against Jew. Because of their Groundless Hatred, Jews lost their Temple, the Seat of YHWH and the Law and the Nation to the Romans. Hence the Jews are not supposed to have either religious or political center back again until the appearance of the Messiah. In the meantime, we have much to learn from them. The Catholic Fathers learned a great deal about Church Politics from them and the Byzantines. The Principle of Divine Leadership must be employed on Earth, and to that end a Hierarchy of Powers leading up to the Power is necessary: nothing gets done without the exercise of power. The High Priest is infallible!
Yes, power can be abusively employed - used contrary to the Contract; that is the technical definition of blasphemy: the use of Power against Power, YHWH against YHWH. Of course, technically speaking, the Leading Principle is not the sole property of any one man or group of men, but some may represent it more than others in their various powerful offices. You see, men are not powerful, their offices are powerful.
Mind you, lest power be abused, the prohibition against Groundless Hatred must be extended to all Mankind in the context that men should not hate each other without due cause; for instance: men should not hate others just because of their race; all that is required is that they be members of the one and only legitimate religion. As nwe know, Hitler was one of the many unholy examples of the abuse of power. His case reinforces the theory that the Universal God must be feared before all, or else all hell will break loose. Therefore the Universal God is to be loved as the Law. Love on Earth is the expression of the Highest Law.
It appears that any absolute distinction between Love and Law is dangerously false, as was proven by the example of Luther and others who learned the hard way, that there is no Love on Earth without Law to secure it, and had to back track and ask the worldy prince's professional soldiers to "stab and kill" 100,000 peasants who were audacious enough to fly the Rainbow Convenant Banner and to demand with pitchforks and sticks a Kingdom of God on Earth.
In any case, "Thou shalt love God or else!"
