WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin
- KNOW THEM BY THEIR FRUITS -
“Judge not, that ye not be judged.” Matthew 7-1.
Organized religions clearly reveal the weapon/peace antinomy. Each preacher, priest, rabbi, mullah, imam, ulam, monk, etc., exposes to our direct observation the practical outcome of that cleric’s belief. Religious hierarchies have sheltered a few peace mentors: their early originators like Buddha, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Mohammed, along with their lovers and today’s marginalized mystics. Also many weapon mentors: secondary organizers like Paul, Augustine and the Caliphs, their followers and today’s religious bureaucrats and clientele.
The modern Catholic Church describes its hierarchy as a combination of “introverts” who prefer the stately tradition of generally messing with peoples’ private lives and making them miserable; and “extroverts” who favor loving forgiveness and its grace in the spirit of St. Francis. Answer me this, since I’m an introvert through and through. Since when do introverts mess with other people’s lives against their will? Now extrovert sociopaths, yes indeed…
Regardless of their religious creed, peace mentors hope that heroic love, justice, truth ‒ in short, PeaceWorld ‒ will triumph in time under the watchful gaze of a loving God. They relate with highly principled advocates of that hope, regardless of their ideological and theological differences.
But weapon mentors use religion (and other cultural memes) to set themselves and their people apart and justify more brutality. They fight – often to the death of innocents entrusted to their care – even though they and their declared enemies may share the same creed and symbols. They reject the common bonds of Learning, which rejection fosters the conflict they crave
Let me repeat this because it is so important. Psychopaths of various religious affiliations use faith to justify their homicidal tendencies. They abuse the faith of non-psychopaths (from volunteer combatants to suicide bombers and their supporters) to multiply the terror of destruction and casualties.
Our political systems and ideologies are byproducts of blind human faith: the bastard offspring of prior weapon religions. They illustrate the weapon/peace antinomy quite nicely. Just substitute the verbiage of ancient beliefs with more recent ideological jargon, then observe the same contradictions unfold as, like oil and vinegar, weapon and peace mentors split up then merge around their respective preconceptions. Note how the weapon/peace antinomy remains carefully unexamined thus intact.
For weapon technicians like us, religion is a group obligation rooted in social obedience. It is ceremonial, objective, conformist, reductive, repeatable, stolid, recognizable and rational. Madness is loathsome to it. Orthodox religions follow a well-worn script easily memorized and analyzed. They strive to overwrite the collective superconscience by imposing their own dogma, myths, and prejudices.
Ceremonial religionists tend to be compulsive, censorious, time-bound, historical, archival, secretive, absolutist, simplistic, formulaic, linear, rigid, menacing and humorless. They emphasize form, structure and mode of transmission. “Our medium is the message.”
Weapon managers rip off the richest, most captivating religious symbols — before which everyone must kowtow. More often than not, these revered memes were part of a prior religion now banished and forgotten. Religious hierarchs reject the sacred in and of itself. Any real-world manifestation of it is dreadful to them because it evades their control and exposes them as fancy dress clowns.
Only a handful of long-dead prophets may experience sacred wonder. The rest of us, the unchosen, must settle for mandatory religious formations or nothing. As far as traditional religionists are concerned, the more complete our submission to this pointless nonsense, the better.
To the primal consciousness, everything is sacred. Its rituals and ceremonies merely enhance the sacred wonder any clear-minded witness can glimpse during dreams by day or night. Sacred worship is rooted in self-awareness. It is an individual gift: subjective, irreproducible, passionate, intimate, dramatic, chaotic, adaptive, situational, transcendent, dream-driven and drug accelerated. It verges on insanity: a narrow birth canal into the sacred, set aside for a select, tormented few (shamans male and female). It is often conveyed wordlessly, through music and dance as practiced by the Sufi, American Indians, some Africans and others; plus sensory and extrasensory clues. In general, sacred religions are obsessive, creative, naturalistic, timeless, cumulative, magical, pragmatic, anecdotal, spontaneous, holistic and playful — sometimes to the point of malice. If possible, they strive to tap into the collective superconscience but not over-write it.
As far as its practitioners are concerned, who would dare impose such constraints on the limitless Sacred — except lifelong regimented religionists? Unlike them, primal seekers underline content, meaning and outcomes. “The. Message. Is.”
Human faith has undergone crushing entropy at the hands of faithless sociopaths in charge of organized religion. It has degenerated from a state of reverence and awe shared by everyone, into a traffic jam of baroque inventions interchangeably ridiculous: each relentlessly incompatible, exclusionary and compulsory. The only justifications that remain for today’s mass religions are the weapon technologies they’ve spawned to safeguard their vacuity.
Each new weapon dogma tries to outdo its predecessors in cruelty, arbitrariness and damage. It is deaf to its own hypocrisy and immune from improvement. Its practitioners’ habits of anti-thought, gross simplification and rote repetition may be passively neutral or actively vicious, depending on the prevalence of ignorance and misery under their sway. Those zealots merit contempt, disbelief, ridicule and pity in direct proportion to their fervor, numbers, political clout and firepower. Any religion that condones its mass brutality automatically invalidates itself and its gullible adherents.
Mass religions blunt our awareness of the sacred. They can stifle sacred wonder and turn a majority away from God, but not replace wonder or God. No wonder so many people stop believing in anything any longer unless drawn nearer to God by misery and death! Organized religions assume they can only flourish in the state of misery and ignorance they foster among their believers, and couldn’t prosper amidst comprehension and abundance they reject as ungodly.
In truth, the opposite would be more likely.
The best religious rituals and formulae amplify our unique perception of the sacred without doing it harm. We crave this sense of wonder, this remembrance of things past from which we have exiled our soul. What we really crave is an ancient wisdom more profound than mere, ceremonial dogma; one that would complement it like nothing else could.
In the meantime, we should witness to our God or not, wear and display our religious symbols or not, neither be forbidden nor required to do so as long as it’s with reverence in private settings, with respect for the beliefs of others in public, and always calmly, without menace. This could only happen free of resentment and contradiction on PeaceWorld where peaceful religion is sacred and the worldly ones no longer hold sway.
IN FRENCH
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COMMENT? markmulligan@comcast.net
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