Friday, December 17, 2021

A Pastor's Christmas Epistle on Disaster Clarified

 

Death on a Pale Horse by Benjamin West

A Pastor’s Christmas Epistle Clarified

A Christmas Epistle to David from Pastor John was received referring to disasters and the coronavirus pandemic. The Epistle, damaged in transit, seemed to imply that non-Christians are more prone to disasters than Christians. Wherefore I was moved to ask John for Clarification.

DAVID

It appears that you have doomed all non-Christians to disaster in your Christmas Epistle, Is not that judgment contrary to the Christian faith in Love?

PASTOR JOHN

I made it clear that I do not make judgment. I do not preach hell and brimstone. I do not assume because someone does not believe as I do they are doomed. Destruction comes as a result of cause and effect and it is completely out of my hands. When it is written that salvation is only through Jesus the Christ, that doesn't mean only the people who stand on the corner shouting they believe they will be saved, but what it means is that Jesus made the breakthrough that opened God to accepting humans even if they have never heard of Jesus or attended a church.

DAVID

Excuse me, you may not have intended that meaning but I do not recall that and I have a pretty good memory. Would you mind exactly quoting that sentence or paragraph wherein you write the word "disaster"?

PASTOR JOHN

I don't think so, it's gone far enough. What I said is that the rain falls on the just as well as the unjust.

DAVID

John, I am just trying to ascertain the fact. There is a crease running down the center of that section of your Christmas Epistle. Silence is an affirmation as you may recall from a famous question over religion in England. I guess it's fire and brimstone for me then. Therefore I'm living in the moment and having a whiskey and grapefruit flavored soda with a twist of lemon. The simple question is, did you or did you not say that non-Christians are subject to more disasters? Please quote the paragraph with the word disaster in it. To repeat, I have a crease running through part of one sentence. I am only asking you to repeat the words you sent out.

PASTOR JOHN

Reading meanings into other people's confessions is reminiscent of both CNN and FOX. The conclusion always amounts to Fake News. There are many Christians who think basically about the essentials as I do. That does not mean we agree on every detail, but in the things that matter we do agree. That is the beauty of being a Christian in faith as opposed to an institutional Christian. I know you do not understand. I've spent many years in both the Orient and the Mid East. I know from experience people reared in certain cultures find it almost impossible to change.

The American Indian is a classic example. While men took their children and put them in mission schools to learn how to be a Christian, the resistance to Christianity has been almost universal among the tribes.

As you said in your "If I Were A Christian" writing, "I am happy for them as long as they do not try to save me." Well, I don't try to convert people -- only God and an internal desire on the part of the individual can convert. And I don't condemn people who resist conversion either. I am an ordained pastor of the church, but converting people is not my vocation. I have Muslim friends, I have LDS friends, I have Hindu friends, and atheist friends. They know where I stand but I respect them and feel we can live peacefully and with respect to each other upon the same planet, even in the same neighborhood. I know history disagrees with me, but in the same token I disagree with the way history has considered the Christian faith.

DAVID

That's what you are apparently doing, John, reading a meaning into your disaster statement other than what it means while refusing to quote it, perhaps to evade correcting it. That is the habit of those who say no wrong, are better than thous, and justify themselves with hearsay from centuries ago. Please write out those lines again, because they have a crease in them. They do seem to impute greater disasters on those who do not believe in your religion. That would be a moderation of the “burn in hell if you don't agree” argument by force.

By the way, it seems to me that you are a Christian of one. That brings to mind Kierkegaard's discursus on the Category of One, and the notion is good one, in my opinion, true to the notion of individual salvation advanced by Christianity and its origin in the ancient mystery cults and the reversion of private clubs to scandalous rebellion against totalitarian mores. I have only known one man who professed to be a Christian of One, a man whom I recall you scorned when I first mentioned him—he was a disc jockey and window washer who made a lot of money on high-rises and lived illegally in a cave on the side of the mountain above the University of Hawaii's Manoa campus. Yet you have confessed that you are not a Christian of one, meaning that you are not unique and your perspectival complex fashioned from your social experience although perhaps everyone including even your own wife disagrees with you in some respect. It appears that you have contradicted yourself, which is a sometimes most fortunate habit of our kind and not only philosophers engaged in dialectics for the sake of progress, so I congratulate you on that.

You may cavil like any good Christian or lawyer on every point ad infinitum to justify whatever you say or do. I have always perceived you as relatively independent, that is, until you seemed to wish a disaster, that is, a more likely Doom or Disaster, by virtue of your faith, on those who disagree with Christian dogma. That is contrary to the professed principle of its faith, namely, Love, although that love often appears in practice as fear-based group love with a wish to see all enemies of that motive burn in hell forever. That is to say, your Christmas greeting seemed to implicitly convey one of the most reprehensible of all logical fallacies of relevance, that is, an argumentum ad baculum: you would have the hell beat out of everyone with a stick who disagrees with it. But I may have misunderstood your coronavirus Christmas epistle because it arrived in the mail with a crease that destroyed some of the wording. Perhaps you will quote the threat of “disaster” to nonbelievers in its original form.

PASTOR JOHN

After rereading my Christmas letter I assume your concerns were aroused from the middle paragraph. Burning in hell is a modern theological exegesis derived from Dante’s “Divine Comedy” and not from Christian Scripture.

When I wrote “Should you or another ignore this Christmas proclamation your future is more susceptible to disaster,” disaster does not necessarily mean what contemporary evangelicalism might dictate. Rather, I would consider that rejecting the simple Christmas proclamation of “Glory to God in the highest, And on earth peace, goodwill toward men!" will eventually result in rebellion, street terrorism, and all the rest. It is not limited to bad men, black men, or evil women. It is the history of Christianity from the earliest years through and to today. Not only Christianity, but most ideologies that men harbor as more important than living in peace are susceptible to this kind of disaster.

It’s often like reading history and assuming those ancient people looked at the world in the same way we do today. When in reality the only way to understand history is to first put oneself in the shoes of the people who lived in that century and look at the events with their point of view.

I am a Christian and each Christmas I attempt to send out a letter summarizing the events of the year with the hope of Christmas communicating a statement of faith and experience. I apologize if my wording causes anyone misunderstanding or anxiety.

No, I am not a “Christian of one.” Even my wife, who is more at one with me than anyone else, disagrees with me on some religious issues. Over the years many people have influenced me, and in turn I have influenced many others. No, they don’t all think as I do on every issue. As I have told many, if they did I would have to change my thinking about some things. In all that it is not the fringe things that matter, but the core imperatives.

Going back to the Enlightenment, I have studied many of the enlightenment philosophers. From them I have learned much, but that does not mean I agree with all their conclusions. I worked for many years as an investigator/inspector for a government agency. At another time I was an Administrative law judge with statutory authority. My training makes it necessary to examine the facts before I write a disposition. In other words I don’t take anything at face value, but want empirical evidence to substantiate every conclusion. That is not just testimony of other people, but factual data to support their testimony.

I know all that seems contradictory to my acceptance of any faith in the New Testament narratives about the life of Jesus any others. Yet, that is the very heart of the issue. I realize it is problematic for Matthew 1:20 to be a reality. I can’t prove that one way of the other. But, when I examine the pure-unaltered-teaching of Jesus, free from later corruptions by Latter Day Interpreters, I consider the alternative an unacceptable world view of life.

From Scripture, the letter to the Hebrews reads, “Without faith it is impossible to please [God]” (Heb 11:6). Many things are problematic and difficult to swallow. We have to acquire a taste for the uncertain flavor of faith. Even atheist have faith in what they chew on.

Referring back to something you said, that “Beck maintains that the real meaning of Kant’s theory is idealism; that knowledge of objects outside the domain of consciousness is impossible, and hence that nothing positive remains when we have removed the subjective element. . . . the idea of God is a symbolic representation of the voice of conscience guiding from within.”

In essence he is asserting that the concept of God is subjective with no external evidence to substantiate God’s existence.

Is that absolutely true? I think not!

I have studied many of the enlightenment philosophers and they have never proven anything beyond the shadow of questioning. Their theories are no more than speculative reasoning in the long run. Much like the Swedish chemist Svante A. Arrhenius who suggested that “life on Earth arose from “panspermia,” microscopic spores that wafted through space from planet to planet or solar system to solar system by radiation pressure.

I don’t deny the probability that billions of years elapsed in the process of evolving mutations and all that. But the beginning appears to have intelligent design and not a result of some random explosion called the “Big Bang”. How it was done I don’t know, neither does anyone else, scientist or theologian. Any who claim they do are just full of “crap”.

Without faith life is untenable. On page 133 of Kant’s 'Theoretical Philosophy' you sent me, I read, “But I am certain that the being, whose existence we have just proved, is precisely the Divine Being, whose differentiating characteristics will be reduced, in one way or another, to the most concise formula.”

In short “supreme being.”

Well, in the woods a grizzly bear is a supreme being to most other animals. In the 12-step system a “higher power” is whatever a man or woman wishes to place his or her trust in to overcome certain tendencies of addiction. But neither a higher power nor a supreme being is God. If God was that simple to define He could not be God, and I would not be interested in considering him.

In retrospect should it turn out that there is no God, I would lose nothing. I have worked with “derelicts” on the street and realize the depravity of some human nature. Yet, I have found the only plausible alternative to human nature’s deficiencies to be the simple teachings of:

A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another (John 13:34).

Therefore, whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them (Matt 7:12).

Let nothing be done through selfish ambition or conceit, but in lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than himself. Let each of you look out not only for his own interests, but also for the interests of others (Phil 2:3-4). I

It beats hatred, revenge, and ulcers from constant anxiety. Peace to you.

DAVID

I bid you Happy New Year today although Time in itself was said by Kant not to exist except as subjective category rendering our knowledge of the Thing-In-Itself or Reality, and, ultimately, the Supreme Being, impossible by placing it before empirical experience A PRIORI, although many are those who claim to experience hence know God—perception is judgment on sensation, hence experience as such is knowledge—the intuitionists believe they commune transcendentally with God ideally beyond experience. Is that where you are getting your “pure gospel”?

I have taken your advice to inquire into the “pure” gospel you mentioned as the justification the faith you believe I do not understand; to wit: "The pure unaltered teaching of Jesus free from corruptions by Latter-Day interpreters. If you want a clear picture of the first church, you would have to consult the teachings of the Nasuaya (Nazarenes). Not the current denomination of Nazarenes, but those Jewish believers who pretty much died out by about the 4th century. The earliest church was 100% Jewish, and by the second century the church was 90% Gentile. The corruption which tainted church doctrine stems from about the second and third centuries.”

Thus far my research indicates there are no such pure, immaculate, unaltered, or uncorrupted sources, so I am hoping you will reference specific extant documents. It seems that whatever original sources there were if any may have destroyed as anathema or obsolete by the evolving theology or were just lost for lack of propagation.

As for the “Nazarenes,” so named after the Jesus of Nazareth, my superficial research indicates that it is a mere name given by latter day interpreters to a hypothetical Roman-Palestinian group fabricated without concrete evidence by Church Fathers, especially Jerome and Origen, as a source of non-canonical i.e. heretical Jewish-Christian gospels to the extent they were Jewish due to adherence to Mosaic law, a supposed doctrine ostensibly derived and redacted from extant Hebrew and/or Matthew Gospels originally published in Hebrew and Aramaic.

It appears that Jerome associated the Nazarene gospel with the Ebonites so-called. Epiphanius said he discovered the Gospel of Ebionites, and he named Cyris as one of its original sources. The Ebionites believed, or so we hear from Irenaeus and other second century fathers, for instance, Justin Martyr, that Jesus "was the son of Joseph and Mary according to the ordinary course of human generation." The Ebionite gospel, written in Aramaic, omitted, like Mark, the birth stories of Jesus, and the Ebionites or Nazarenes allegedly continued for centuries to repudiate them as fables and unworthy of the messiah. In fact, the Ebionite portions allegedly excluded mention of the virgin birth, was silent on the divination of Jesus as the god's son and sacrifices as well, yet did mention vegetarianism.

The fathers of the catholic, that is, the universal church, supposed from their research that, besides the Ebionite gospel, a Hebrew gospel of Matthew was extant. Indeed, I believe it has even been lately claimed, by what authority I cannot say, that no less than Matthew penned the gospel of Hebrews, his objective being to emphasize the Jewishness of Jesus. Clement and Origin of Alexandria may have used the Hebrew book towards the end of the second century, but the language suggests it was written for Jews in Syria and Palestine. Experts on this subject may have cause to believe that the Matthew, Hebrew, and Ebionite gospels are synonymous or one and the same.

In any event, all that seems to remain of teachings antithetical to evolving theology are the inimical refutations of church fathers to evidence they did not preserve. The search for the pure, unadulterated teachings and authentic biography of Jesus identified as the Christ seems to lead to a dead end in the dead sea. I wish I had the originals, since they would be worth at least a billion dollars, funds I would put to good use.

I am hoping you may have access to the pure teachings you have advised me to search for, or at least that you have a good and honest story to support your faith, a faith that I certainly do not deny you have although I suspect it is unique to you in its coincidence of qualities, which is what I mean when I refer to a “religion of one.”

PASTOR JOHN

You have sent me nothing I have not reviewed before. There are no facts here, just a circular argument that has continued unresolved for centuries. As for Marcion of Sinope, I have walked the streets of Sinope, Turkey on the southern coast of the Black Sea. The city has great historic value. The problem with Marcion of Sinope is that he preached that the god who sent Jesus into the world was a different, higher deity than the creator God of Judaism. He considered himself a follower of Paul the Apostle, whom he believed to have been the only true apostle of Jesus. Thus rejecting all other books of the New Testament. That put him outside from the teachings of Jesus and the earliest church oracles. If you want a clear picture of the first church, you would have to consult the teachings of the Nasuaya (Nazarenes). Not the current denomination of Nazarenes, but those Jewish believers who pretty much died out by about the 4th century. The earliest church was 100% Jewish, and by the second century the church was 90% Gentile. The corruption which tainted church doctrine stems from about the second and third centuries.

DAVID

I'm glad you know everything there is to know on this subject already or have reviewed everything even before I have said it. You have made it perfectly clear who your god is. You have said you would not engage in a “circular” disquisition. I suppose by that you mean an endless rationalizing of your own faith, which I suspect is innate, mysterious even to yourself, and wanting elaboration and a definite creed. They say that a line extended towards infinity meets itself hence is a circle. It is there that the cat realizes it is chasing its tail, and is saved from the vicious process.

You mentioned that you were a fact finder for the government, and that you studied the Enlightenment, the principle of which was applying reason to the facts to arrive at logical conclusions, yet at the same time you have faith without facts in an alternative means of enlightenment, call it intuition if you will, relating it to what Matthew said about what you presume to be the Virgin birth.

"Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit."

You admit that the conclusions arrived at by alternative means, say, pregnancy without intercourse or with a god or from sitting on a toilet are problematic or contradictory to what we know about reality. Yet you consider the dogma acceptable after studying what you call "the pure unaltered teaching of Jesus free from corruptions by Latter-Day interpreters," for which there is no evidence produced except what you and others of like mind imagine. I have not heard of any pure unaltered teachings of Jesus, and hope you will reveal them. The current canon of scripture is known to be not only hearsay long after the death of Jesus but altered by the transcribers. Extant evidence does indicate that the Virgin birth and Divinity of Jesus are the product of a synod convened centuries after the fact.

Marcion's original canon, now lost but reconstructed from the indictments of his enemies is known to have characterized the god of the Old Testament as a Devil provoking natural disasters, and the god of the New Testament as only good and of one spirit, namely, the Monad. It is likely that this is the “Holy Spirit” said to visit Mary, and that her pregnancy was metaphorical in reference to her enlightenment, the allusion otherwise being a defamatory suggestion of adultery making an immaculate conception necessary to save her reputation.

However that may be, we do know from surviving text that Marcion learned from persons who actually knew Paul when Paul was in Rome, and he considered Paul to be the predominant authority. We also know that during the first two centuries of the Christian era no birth date of Jesus was touted and his birth was not celebrated. Christmas is a vestige of the Pagan celebration of solstice.

The most primitive Christians were Marcionites whose leading or holy spirit was Love, in contradiction to the hatred they perceived in the wrath of the Hebrew gods. The Marcion church nearly overwhelmed the Roman Church before it was persecuted and extinguished by the catholics (universals or univocals). This seems to be a possible explanation for the hateful aspect of the later Christian religion with its two contradictory, inexplicable principles forged absurdly into one.

Hopefully, you will consider this reasonable hypothesis as having a bearing on your unwitting yet normal tendency to logical confusion, which, fortunately, appears to be transcended by the Monad aka the god Love, duly opposed until the end of the cycle by the Demon whom too many bigots unwittingly serve.

DAVID

Do you believe the Christian God caused the 1918 Influenza disaster to punish the world for the Great War? Or were both the War and the Pandemic punishment for being bad?

On the other hand, if God does not punish humans, then what good is God to anyone except as an excuse justifying doing whatever one wants in God's name according to whatever seems to be good or desirable according to the time and circumstances?

PASTOR JOHN

You wrote asking “What good is God...?”

In order to understand the good of God one must look at the overall revelation of God. Even in most non-Judeo/Christian religious beginnings there is a vague identity of God and human origin. In the Jewish/Christian as well as Islamic texts Scripture begins with Genesis. Chapters one through three give the background. The creation all culminates with human life. The initial revelation identifies Adam (whether one man and woman or the character of all men and women everywhere may be a matter interpretation – all were given free will and were not designed to be robots and function as programed.) These, whether 2 or 2 thousand, ended up in rebellion and God proposed a plan to bring about reconciliation.

He (use of the male gender is simply a literary contrivance of Jewish cultural as God is not to be confused with human gender). He established a system for teaching the difference between good and evil. This system was essentially spelled out in the decalogue. The first part of these ten commandments is directed at mankind’s responsibility to God (commandments 1 through 4). The second part is directed at mankind’s responsibility to each other, (commandments 5 through 10).

The Jews got carried away and came up with an additional 600 commandments that made it impossible for anyone to be reconciled to God

Yeshua ben Joseph (Jesus) reduced that myriad of rules and laws down to two:

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments (Matt 22:37-40).”

The thing God desires is that individuals look into their own lives and find a path that satisfies their needs. Should individuals choose to reconcile with God – their future is to be united with God. (What that means I do not know, and neither does anyone else – regardless of what religious gurus claim). If they fail to reconcile with God there is NO burning torment in Hell, as that is a human invention. The only thing that can be verified from Scripture is that they will be separated from God in the second death.

God is not a vindictive tyrant imposing holy punishment and natural disasters to discipline humanity. This concept was amplified upon by such as Dante and other manipulative Machiavellians attempting to somehow build their influence of power over the people they wished to control.

The philosophy of human desire to control God is ancient. Long before the Greeks, and going back even further than history can record. My uncle Frank (who died at the age of 100) was raised among the Lakota Indians, his father owned a trading post in Northwest Nebraska prior to the Dakota’s becoming states. He, a Christian, said that he felt the Native American concept of God was familiar and seemed a connection to the foundations of the Christian God.

xYx








Saturday, December 16, 2017

Ten Commandments for Bigots

Josiah Smashing Idols


TEN COMMANDMENTS FOR BIGOTS

BY

DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

December 16, 2017

I recently republished three essays I penned in 2013 about Judge Roy Moore’s purported worship of a stone fetish in Alabama, a huge granite block upon which the Decalogue is inscribed. My criticism was about his deeds before the whole world, and not something he was accused of doing secretly. He raised himself above man’s law in that case, citing God, and that is what we call “bigotry,” after the practice of pious people of yore given to saying “By God.” My argument was that it is the ethical rules metaphorically engraved on the heart, remembered and thought upon that should be sacred, and not a block of stone upon which words are inscribed. It occurred to me that Moses himself, mindful of how people worshiped a golden calf, would take a sledgehammer to that stone fetish in Alabama, for it was not the principle they held dear, but some perishable thing of this world, just as primitive people worshiped stones and mountains, not understanding that those things too were bound to pass according to natural law. As for the biblical commandments now received as numbering ten and in a certain order, they are readily available to everyone and are frequently referred to, yet few people can remember them, so I recommended that everyone keep a copy on their person for daily reading and consideration until they can cite them by heart and explain why they have the order they do. I was pleased that a bigot was disposed to object to my essays against idolatry, for he taught me ten rules that bigots might used when bigotry is criticized. This is the first draft of Ten Commandments for Bigots. The rules are unnumbered as of yet, and the reader is invited to improve on the composition:        

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF BIGOTRY

 Act as if you are God Almighty.

 Above all be a self-righteous bigot because “By God” proves you right.

Have faith in bigoted politicians.

Call bigoted politicians Constitutional scholars as proof that their opinions are correct.

Do not bother to read the critiques you object to.  

Consider all criticism of bigotry as blasphemous.

Adjudge critics ignorant a priori.

Do not dispute critical propositions except to parrot hackneyed phrases such as, “claptrap liberalism.”

Idolize a government building to prove yourself righteous.

Cite an inscription as supreme authority because engraved in stone.






Wednesday, October 24, 2007

ON THE HORNS OF MOSES
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 Arabia, the region believed to be the origin of the Semitic race. Perhaps bull worship was derived from the hated Egypt of their former bondage if not brought down long before by Hebrews from those Sumerian lands where cattle were wont to graze and where the ambivalent bull symbolized strength and whose name was synonymous with ‘hero’. The wild Mesopotamian bull of raging storms that devastated the land also brought nourishing rain and protected his cattle. Just as every Hindu god of note had his white elephant to ride, every Mesopotamian god and king had a preferably white bull for his steed or as his throne. The great Lord Baal, for one, who ruled the world under authority of El – whose bullish Phoenician letter, standing on its horns, is the ‘A’ that heads our alphabet – was associated with the bull. Moreover, Zeus took the form of the sacred white Cretan bull when he carried Europa, the astonishingly beautiful Semitic princess, off from Phoenicia to Crete, where she reigned as queen. Crete was cradle for the catholic Hellenic religion at Delphi – the pythias who uttered oracles while sitting on the mystical tripods there were Cretan nuns. We further note that the appearance of a white bull in America signified a cleansing apocalypse for its original Americans. Despite YHWH’s ire at Sinai, King Jereboam of the Northern Kingdom of Israel placed images of bulls in sanctuaries, where they were adored as likenesses of YHWH. And as we shall see in our discussion of horns, YHWH was otherwise likened to a bull. Why, then, the Lord was so outraged at Sinai, is one of the eternal mysteries that results in a great deal of blasphemy by way of explanation. Freud might speculate that the golden bull worshiped there, a young bull or calf, represented an attempt by a rebellious son to replace the old father bull.

“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 Mount Nebo in Jordan although he never set foot on it, yet he was the universal model for those pioneers who colonized continents with Moses in mind. Mount Nebo, incidentally, was the residence of Nebo, the Assyrian-Babylonian messenger-god of speech and writing; his symbols were the clay tablet and stylus; he recorded the deeds of people that they might be judged after death. “This is the land which I swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, saying, ‘I will give it to your descendants.’ I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not go over there,” the Lord said, giving His messenger’s people the right to seize the land he saw from its inhabitants. Nebo’s Roman equivalent is Mercury, messenger to the gods and god of travel and thievery. The Greeks viewed Moses as a messenger of god and as a consummate lawgiver. Wherever law rules, wherever truth is told and justice is accordingly done, peace shall prevail in the end. That destination is of course the Promised Land.

The legendary Moses was presumably familiar with the laws of Eygptians, Hittites, Assyrians and Babylonians – Hammurabi had similar laws engraved on stelae erected in Babylon six centuries prior. But the script of Moses was divinely underwritten. Reward for performance and punishment for breach were guaranteed upon acceptance. Stone outlasts generations of human beings, including those who lay claim to immortality and insist that this world is vain and shall vanish while they forever persist in their own vanity of vanities. Prior to the invention of writing, awful oral curses were duly made over covenant stones or torahs in order to violently engrave the memory and thereby ensure good faith performance of the terms by the parties thereto.

“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 Arabia. Sin’s title in Arabia was al-ilah, “the deity,” namely, Allah, the greatest of all gods, who would eventually become, for Mohammed, not merely the chief of the 360 gods at the Kaaba in Mecca but the one and only god whose sign appears on mosques, minarets, and flags. In fact astrological religion headed by the moon god and his chief star-goddess once dominated what we now call the Middle East; after all, the heavenly bodies are obvious to everyone on Earth. And now Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike take care to repudiate the origin of their faiths in the universal worship of the heavenly bodies: the Old Testament repeatedly denounces moon worship; for example, in the fourth chapter of Deuteronomy, we find this injunction:

“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 Ur. Both Ur and Haran, places mentioned in Genesis, were Sin’s cult centers: Abraham and his family “went out together from Ur of the Chaldeans in order to enter the land of Canaan; and they went as far as Haran, and settled there.” Sin’s oracles from Mount Sinai down south were issued in the form of commandments that even the gods must obey, hence Sin, although he was son to Enlil, was considered to be the father of the gods, wherefore his cult tended to monotheism. The wilderness Sin was known in the more comfortable quarters of Babylonia as the somewhat older, full-moon god called Nanna, the beloved, friendly god of many a prayer. Nabonidus, the last neo-Babylonian king, tried and failed to replace Marduk, the chief god of the pantheon, with Nanna.

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 Mount Sinai in the sight of all the people. And you shall set bounds for the people all around, saying, ‘Beware that you do not go up on the mountain or touch the border of it; whosoever touches the mountain shall surely be put to death.’ …So it came about on the third day, when it was morning, that there were thunder and lightning flashes and thick cloud upon the mountain and a very loud trumpet sound, so that all the people who were in the camp trembled…. Now Mount Sinai was all in smoke because the Lord descended upon it in fire; and its smoke ascended like the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mountain quaked violently.”

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 Israel could not look intently at the face of Moses because of the glory of his face, fading as it was, how shall the ministry of the Spirit fail to be even more with glory? For if the ministry of condemnation has glory, much more does the ministry of righteousness abound in glory.”

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 Mount Sinai, wherefore he was depicted with crescent horns.

“And it came to pass, when Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the two tables of the testimony in Moses’ hand, when he came down from the mount, Moses knew not that the skin of his face sent forth beams while He talked with him.”

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 Israel “like the horns of the wild ox. He shall devour the nations who are his adversaries, and shall crush their bones in pieces, and shatter them with his arrows.”

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 Egypt to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst?” Wherefore the Lord had Moses take his magic wand in hand and strike the stone so that water would pour forth from it. The question quarreled over, “Is the Lord among us or not?” had been answered by the Negatively Existent One. If we take this truth to heart, that Nothing is perfect and permanent, there shall be plenty of bread and water for everyone.

Ø

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

DOOMSDAY IS NIGH AGAIN

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.

Monday, September 17, 2007

Meditation on Jeremiah


MEDITATION ON JEREMIAH

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.”

Wherefore we speak mystically of the mystery, and say Nothing exists and is pregnant with the cosmos. From the invisible stone everything springs when struck with the magic wand. “And concerning this, the Children of Israel wish to know in their minds, like as it is written: is the Tetragrammaton (YHWH) in the midst of us, or the Negatively Existent One?” All and nothing is the substance of the ineffable word; that is, Being and Nothing. The religion that has faith in nothing in particular, the religion that is not bound to anything but X, is essentially nondenominational, and is free to do good works for all. It may be impossible to tell the atheist from the theist, and the atheist might even be canonized. The seeker does not necessarily have to believe in a god or gods, as did the heathen, or to mouth the pagan word ‘god’ to seek and find the spark within the fallen shard and restore it to the tree of light that none be left behind.


In fond memory of
Bruce Campbell Walters
May 3, 1917 – August 30, 2007