Dear diary,
If you value variety in your confessions, then you better go find another motormouth, cuz I only like to harp on the same two topics. And what are those topics? Religion and politics. The things you’re told not to speak of with family and neighbors.
I wish I could “solve” religion in general, the way I solved politics yesterday at the community meeting (see below, where I explain how I solved it). When I think of my good neighbors in this area of Minnesota, my first thot is always: I wish we could venture beyond conversing only about the same safe topics; abandon small talk and broach the forbidden subjects — for I believe we could find, despite our differences, that we share enough thots in common to escape from the maze of disagreement. That’s why I’m attracted to politics and religion: not because I enjoy arguing — on the contrary, I yearn to achieve the delights of accord. Is that naive? Then I am naive. I like the challenge of the impossible. While both atheists and believers grow furious, and each point on the political spectrum appears in disarray, I’m the one with all the answers: I stand calm and composed before every system of thot.
Part 1:
POLITICS
So how did I “solve” politics in general yesterday at the community meeting? Listen up and I’ll tell you. All I did was take a seat among the others who were engaged in their heated discussion, and I said, “What seems to be the problem here?” And their spokesperson explained: “I’m a right-winger and she’s a left-winger, and he’s a conservative and she’s a liberal, and those suits over there are Republicans, and that gang of bosses smoking cigars at the back are Democrats, and there are Independents swinging from the chandelier, and Libertarians attired as overseers (perhaps they assumed it was a masquerade ball) and Socialists sporting short leashes so that they may not mingle with the poor, and even a couple Anarchists keeping the peace; yet none of us here at this meeting can agree on a thing — I, for one, keep arguing in favor of privatized, for-profit health insurance and praising our system of capitalism; but I can never get everyone to side with me (they also won’t buy my idea of ‘One God and One Church’ — I mean, they like the idea of oneness itself but cannot agree on which God and which Church): I think that we should all remain on the same page at all times: we humans are like twigs that are easy to break if we remain separate, but we’re strong if you tie us together.”
The Italian term fascismo is derived from fascio meaning “a bundle of sticks”, ultimately from the Latin word fasces. . . . The symbolism of the fasces suggested strength through unity: a single rod is easily broken, while the bundle is difficult to break.
(That’s a quote from the encyclopedia.) So I answered the above complaint, saying: “Look, drop all these confusing terms. Nobody knows what capitalism is, or monotheism, or whateverism. I mean, I myself understand them, and perhaps you do too; but the rest of this community meeting, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons, cannot discern between their right wing and their left (Jonah 4:11). We need desperately to simplify, if we want our view to sell. So just consider two ideas, and let us define them clearly: the ideas are Democracy and Transparency. (I risk boring my confessor by preaching so often on these terms, but it’s worth it; for, by doing so, I save humankind.) Democracy means every individual gets a say in the government: one person, one vote. This alone would not suffice, because we could all contribute to making the best decisions for our civilization, but if the questions and problems that we’re deciding on are framed by private, secret groups who can deceive us, then all is lost. We therefore also need Transparency, meaning: Government has no privacy from the People, because it is controlled 100% by the People: it cannot hide itself or its acts. All privacy goes to the People, while government remains entirely transparent. (Think how this is the opposite of what we have now, in 2019 USA: for currently the government is wholly secretive with all its spying agencies of intelligence, whereas the People have no privacy at all: this is upside-down! & the way to solve it is to flip the present system on its head.) So we all have a say in governing (that’s Democracy), and we always know the whole truth of any governmental situation (that’s Transparency). This way, even if We the People end up making all the wrong decisions initially, We the People can easily fix them Ourselves; as opposed to praying to our so-called representatives to fix them. (Incidentally, WHO or WHAT do those representatives really represent?) In other words, We the People will vote directly on issues; rather than voting for a rep to vote in Our stead, too often in defiance of Our will. Compare the foregoing to what we have now, where almost all of us United Statesians agree that what we call basic needs should include health care, and these things should be covered wholly by taxes, with no strings attached; and all other affairs of life — whatever lies outside the realm of basic needs — should fall under the heading of luxury, which can be the plaything of the marketplace — I say, We the People all agree about this setup, so it should be a piece of cake to implement; however, since the government is not direct but representative, thus opaque and unamenable to democracy, our bliss gets snuffed. Do you understand? All political problems stem from some group or person being able to govern in private without consulting the populace. The subject of politics is hereby conclusively SOLVED.”
But now my interlocutor rises from his folding chair and says: “Dear Bryan, I will not argue against democracy in favor of priesthood, leadership, and representation, as that term democracy enjoys too positive of a reputation at present (cursed be it); but I cannot abide your praise of transparent governance: on the contrary, I say, the people need NON-transparency.”
I say, “How so?”
And this robed man in the folding chair, whose name tag I now notice reads Saint Peter, responds as follows. “Transparency will be the death of our great nation. We need non-transparency in the most important sectors; for instance, when it comes to military action — for if the military were made transparent to the populace, then it would be real nice for ye, the people, who get to decide where the armed forces shall march next, and where they shall stay for the night, what type of guns they should carry, and how many civilians they should be allowed to abuse whenever they ransack a village; but think about the ENEMY — we don’t want our ENEMIES knowing all this stuff, for then, by simply ogling the same information, which you declassified, they’ll be able to make counter-plans to defy our transparent stratagems, so that THEIR forces march to the place where we told our forces to march, thus the ENEMY will arrive there first and plant booby traps everywhere. Furthermore, on account of the fact that you made such crucial information freely available, these ENEMIES will find out where our troops intend to bivouac, and THEY will book out all the rooms in that particular inn, so that our soldiers must hunker down in a stinking barn, and toss and turn in a manger all night long, and get zero beauty sleep, so they’ll be not well-rested in the morning, and they will feel un-fresh and thus will fight poorly on the morrow, and this will trigger a losing streak: for our troops will lose that battle, and every battle henceforward, until the whole war’s lost! And I don’t even have to mention that if the ENEMY knows what type of guns our boys are carrying, they will buy superior weapons and use these to vanquish us. Lastly, if our ENEMY knows that Ye the People (in accordance with your stupid idea of transparent governance) have determined exactly how many civilians it will be permissible for our forces to ravish while burning down a village, then the ENEMY will simply make sure to station their own evil combatants near each foreign civilian, to protect them, so that our good mercenaries may not approach them to remove their clothing or even to slay them. Your idea, in short, will basically make war suck. We might even just waive off the whole pastime of bloodlust and inwardly sublimate our aggression so that all fighting remains purely mental forever after.”
“That’s fine by me,” I answer. “What you just said actually proves my point. Transparency will indeed make war look ridiculous; but that’s as it should be. Think about it: If the U.S. populace can actually see what its so-called Defense Machine is doing — what its FBI and CIA and NSA and ETC are doing — then those bureaucrats will finally be exposed & lose their standing as global mobsters. So what happens next? Our enemy takes us over? So what? Who is our enemy? China? Russia? Well then as long as we remain transparent, those new ‘foes’ that presumably shall commandeer the driver’s seat of our nation will not be able to do anything indecent with us, their war-spoils, as we’ll veto any such intention by direct vote. (And if they try to quash our democracy, we’ll spaz.) Then, once all the other countries see how stylish it is to have a transpar·o·cratic government, they’ll follow suit: and the whole world will become one cooperative enterprise, of which every living creature shall be a member. We’ll have interesting discussions in a climate-controlled environment, on folding chairs. What’s not to like!”
Here Saint Peter huffs and says, “By golly, Bryan, you devil, you’ve convinced me again. OK, I admit that I was wrong about divine fascism being the best of all possible systems. Sign me up for this program of yours. What do you call it exactly?”
Part 2:
RELIGION
But I don’t answer cuz I’ve grown bored with Saint Peter, and I don’t believe that his conversion is sincere. Actually, about five minutes ago I wandered off to a different part of the room and struck up a conversation with another group of folks. These are all the people who live in my neighborhood. (Tho all the beings from every galaxy in the universe are attending this super-party, I choose to mingle with the souls who live near me in the town of Thief River Falls.) One at a time, I approach my neighbors and say “Hi, it’s good to see you out here by the mailbox. Do you have a religion?” And they answer which religion they’ve bit the bait of. Then everyone starts to argue about which one’s right. (For only ONE poetic tale can be correct: it is NOT as William Blake claims, that Every thing possible to be believed is an image of truth.) And a certain sector of my local neighbors are atheists. And some are agnostics. And some are even gnostics (actually, only one: me myself)! So there’s much confusion among us, and we begin to pelt each other with fruit from our respective trees, the branches of which we all keep neatly trimmed.
Then I stand up and shout louder than everyone else, which is a sign that I am a natural leader and that I have all the answers. And what ensues is a discussion about The Ultimate Solution to Religion. The neighborhood agrees that I DESTROYED the realm of politics earlier in the meeting, with my double-edged sword of trans·poc·ra·cy; and they declare with confidence that they expect I’ll do the same for spirituality; but I reply:
“It can’t be done: you can’t fix what is not broken. I think it’s great that we’re all so passionately arguing with each other about these different perspectives. Dave likes Islam; Sally likes Catholicism; Paul is a Protestant; Jude’s a Sufi; Emmanuel embraces Buddhism; Josh buys into Bigger-Boat Buddhism; Tom fronts Original Buddhism; Jane’s a Jainist; Phil and Bob and Stormgod and François-Marie and Jean-Jacques are all evangelical atheists; Larry is a militant atheist moonlighting as a New-Ager; Tami is agnostic; Yahweh is a scientist; Waldo’s a transcendentalist; Gandhi’s a Tolstoyan (so is Jesus); Brad and Nebuchadnezzar subscribe to “the weird religion”; Bryan is a Valentinian Gnostic; Yakub believes in Wallace Stevens; the Volcano Island inhabitants all have a crush on Zeus; Zeus likes Athena; Rome stole Athens from Asia; and Prometheus can find no sweeter fat than sticks to his own bones. Which reminds me: Lilith is a Whitmanian. And Zevi converted Saint Paul into a Bryanerd. This is how it should be. There is no solution because there is no problem.”
Mainly I was having fun coming up with names; but now I realize that I left out countless stances, all very important. I’m thinking of Captain Ahab, who worships fire by way of defiance. Also Ishmael tells me that Ahab’s comrade Fedallah is a Parsee. And I didn’t even mention Judaism, which, similar to Hinduism in at least this way, is not really a single coherent religion but rather a plethora of creative possibilities — tales, notions, & who-knows-what; all jam-packed into one term. We moderns cannot grasp the full contents of these treasure chests. We see glimpses of lusters (are they intact and whole in themselves, or subsections of the entirety: shards of something that shattered?) yet we’re clueless where to take our interpretation. Gods that resemble elephants. Gods that get enraged if you so much as suggest that they have a semblance.
Is it better to worship statues or to kick them? Might kicking be a form of worship? (I ask thee, Ahab!) What deity commands his believers “Defile my idol”? I’ll tell you what type of deity says this: A smart one. For the subtlest god in the pantheon is the one who said “Whatever you assert about me: I’m NOT that. I am everything that remains and that hasn’t been thot yet.” Which is sorta like saying “I AM THAT I AM” (Exodus 3:14) — or as I paraphrase Harold Bloom’s paraphrase of this: I will be wherever I will be… and absent myself otherwise.
If it’s the custom among nations to carry an idol of your deity upon a throne overhead in a parade, what should we say about the nation that lifts up a throne without any idol upon it? The chair is empty... Or is it? What does the story of the emperor’s new clothes have in common with the ark of the covenant?
I also like the seers who have the guts to make their god finite and limited. When you’ve spent all afternoon praising an omnipotent, omniscient, invisible entity who is at once everywhere and nowhere, it’s kinda refreshing to say “My god is a bottle of vodka. That’s it. Drink him up and he’ll be gone. That’s all you’re getting. I mean, you can run to the store later on and buy more spirits — god forbid that we run out of vodka! — but my deity is only THIS PARTICULAR LIBATION right here.” I wonder if that’s where the idea came from, by the way: the notion of genies who inhabit magic bottles.
But this way of talking gets old. It’s like chewing gum that loses its flavor too fast. Cuz it’s easy to tell that we’re only playing games with language, if we say “God is a scarecrow” or “God is a hologram from an ancient television”. Yet isn’t all religion a language game anyway, just more sophisticated? Maybe so. Maybe it’s the sophistication that we crave, then. A religion should be just confusing enough to trick us into believing it. Too simple and it’s easy to doubt.
I myself, however, prefer to slalom between sophistication and simplicity: keep moving to and fro in belief, and up and down in it (Job 1:7). When religion veers one way too long, I like to swoop back: do a U-turn.
And as long as stupidity is not akin to tedium, then I like my god stupid. I think god likes to be stupid, too. If you’re the smartest thing in the world, your constant desire will be to put on stupidity. It’s your favorite article of clothing. The emperor’s stepping out in style.
Is that why Jehovah Skygod became Jesus Christ? No, Jesus wasn’t stupid. But he was stupid compared to his heavenly father, was he not? Again, no: he was far subtler than his dad; that’s why his dad got so mad and had him axed. Imagine how you’d feel if you went to the trouble of descending upon a mountaintop to deliver a Perfect Law to your earth-pets, and then your own son outsmarts you by creating a workaround, a giant loophole that renders your statutes unenforceable. Forgiveness! it’s like acid to statutory tablets: it just eats right thru whatever is written there.
Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
That’s from John’s gospel (8:7), where this group of churchgoers stumbles upon a young couple engaged in a public display of affection upon the beach, and the churchgoers believe that their God wrote the Bible whose Law says that anyone enjoying themselves must be stoned to death. Then Jesus voices the quip above, which we can think of as the First Amendment to God’s Constitution.
I always wonder, however, why the judgmental churchgoers in Saint John’s story actually listen to Jesus and abstain from serving justice. Righteous believers never turn down a chance to administer capital punishment. Nobody would listen to Jesus if he said that nowadays.
But that’s the beauty of writing fiction: you can force your characters to act however you like; and everything always advantages the propagandist. What type of author would allow himself to lose the argument of his own scripture? Saint John is not stupid: he’s far from divine.
But what would it do to our U.S. court system if no judgment could be made, and no punishment inflicted, except by pre-aborted fetuses (as they’re the only beings who have not yet violated the prohibition against wealth redistribution)? All our jails would go broke. Yeah, but like warfare and all the other things that it does, the State is not even attempting to follow the Gospel: it only feigns that it’s Christian to lure believers into financing more crucifixions.
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