God's Problems

The Jewish Guardian Angel the West wrapped around, like a storm gathering around the eye, is growing tired of its burden.

 Democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. The family as godhead. To the Ancients, monotheism equated with monoculture. One people, one rule, one god.

 The formative experience for Judaism was the forty years isolated in the desert, giving the Ten Commandments to the Old Testamant. Basically rules for a functional society. Obey God, or whoever is the Big Guy, don’t screw around with your neighbor’s wife, or take his stuff, etc. Not quite yet trial by jury of one’s peers, freedom of speech, etc, but a start.

 Democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. The family and cycle of life as godhead. The young god born in the spring, of the old sky god and the earth mother. 

 Though by the time of the Olympians, Zeus didn’t give way to Dionysus. Tradition prevailed over renewal. Much as older generations are loathe to give way to younger ones and younger ones resent it.

 The anarchies of desire, versus the tyrannies of judgement.

 Given this tension also represented serious economic and social polarization, it provided fertile ground for Christianity to take root. The story of royal blood crucified for questioning the establishment and risen in the spring.

 Jesus was all peace, love and turn the other cheek, except when it came to the moneychangers. That’s when they crucified him.

 Yet when Rome adopted Christianity as state religion, three hundred years later, it too had started to be overtaken by tradition. So it was the monotheism that mattered, to validate The Big Guy Rules, as the Empire rose from the ashes of the Republic. With the origins of the Trinity buried by the Holy Ghost.

While it might have been a political convenience, what it did was to base Western civilization of the premise of ideals as absolute.

Logically a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. More the light shining through the film, than whatever B grade melodrama is playing out on it.

Truth, beauty, platonic forms are ideals. The village alter is an ideal. The creed and the heroes of a society are ideals. It is like the eye of a storm, or the grain of sand at the center of a pearl. The black hole at the center of a galaxy. It is the necessary locus of structure.

Yet there are multitudes of such entities spread across infinity. So to claim one’s own is the only one universal creed, than not only are all others false and misleading, but their very existence is an affront to the one absolute creed. There is no live and let live. No marching to the beat of a different drummer.

When the West went back to democracy and republicanism, it required the separation of church and state, effectively culture and civics. Which is schizophrenic.

So not only is it all against all, it’s myopically naive, like a geocentric cosmology.

 Good and bad are not some cosmic conflict, between the forces of righteousness and evil, but the basic biological binary code of beneficial and detrimental, the 1/0 of sentience. What is good for the fox, is bad for the chicken.

 So while our cultures are like stories we tell children, nature is like a supercomputer, that doesn’t always give us the answers we want to hear.

 When the fear of God died, as the moral policeman, what was left was Nietzsche’s Will to Power. Though those most adept at that are not the knights in shining armor, but the amoral assholes who lie, cheat and steal as a matter of principle. So the crazies, the idiots and the thieves have all the power.

What we have today, is simply the point of reductio ad absurdum.

The problem is that as these people have the moral character of bacteria, they have the strategic aptitude of bacteria as well. As they break down the social organism that is the strength of humanity.