The world seems dangerous and often depressing place these days, but I wonder if there is a different, and better, way to look at it. There is little doubt battle lines are being drawn in every culture, between nations, dividing up societies, and across economic classes. Political parties are divided against each other and often, fracturing from the inside. Something has shaken human kind to its core.
I think all of the chaos is largely the result of one discovery, the knowledge of which is sweeping into human consciousness at an ever increasing rate. This discovery so drastically alters our understanding of the universe that virtually all of our social norms and power structures are challenged and undermined. Somewhat abruptly, in just the last 100 years of so (three generations at most) we discovered that none of our ideas about a god as proclaimed by any of our religions, are true.
Dismiss completely the "god or not god" fight, of theism verses atheism. Concede that there may be a fundamental, even self-aware, cosmic motive force somewhere out there. The fact is that none of our religions describe a god that is consistent with the universe. All the gods of mankind are human-centric. The cosmos, clearly, is human-couldn't-care less.
All of our religions are false. None of our gods exist. And we are just now starting to realize it.
None of the religions have any foundation on which to base their claim to power. There are no god made rules about women being subjected to men, gay people having sex, little girls going to school, kings ruling by divine right, or life beginning at conception. The Pope has no special relationship with a god and thus no elevated standing among people. Nor does any other religious leader. No religion has any basis for holding title to its property or claims on land and territory. Every action and every dictate of every religions person made on any day of human history, insofar as it invokes a god for justification, is utterly without merit. Most of human history is little more than a fraud. Most of our social norms and power structures are built on sand.
Reluctantly, ever so hesitantly and confused by the implications, the reality that we have been wrong about gods all along is, nonetheless, sinking in. But it is impossible to overstate how fundamental a shift in human history this will be. There is no guarantee that we will survive it at all. Everything around us is being undone.
So reluctant are we to admit to our place in the universe that people on both sides of the battle lines, even those on the side rejecting the claim that this or that is god's will, still cling to a god belief. For example most gay rights advocates insist that god didn't make the rules about gay sex that the other side claims He did make. Rarely does the gay man simply dismiss the "god said it" claim as utterly immaterial. The same "He said," "He didn't say" bickering goes on over contraception, abortion, women's rights, poverty, immigration, foreign policy (particularly when it comes to the middle-east); in fact across every battle line there is.
It is long past time to make the line clearer. Those on the progressive side should simply stand up and state, "your claim about what god says is bull-shit. I will not buy your claims to power if it is based on one of human kinds religions. If that is the only argument you have then you have no argument at all."
Then the lines should be drawn even more clearly. Religion is most often used to justify acts that would clearly be criminal if done without the claim of a god. But even with the claim those acts are still criminal acts. Discriminating against women is illegal in modern, first world societies, except inside the Church. Catholicism, and many Protestant fundamental groups, insist that god discriminates against women so men must as well; while women are supposed to accept their inferior statues. (This all based on an utterly ridiculous myth of Adam and Eve.) But invoking a god doesn't make discrimination any less a criminal act. Discrimination against gays, minorities, immigrants, even other religions, is also an act of lawlessness.
The big crime in religion though, is murder. Religiously instigated mass murder is an every day occurrence in the world today. Only criminal organization make murder an option for someone leaving the organization. Only street gangs and drug lords use murder to build empires and protect profits. And no street gang has ever sunk so low as to have among its ranks someone who, in the name of that gang, shoots a little girl in the face for going to school. Religion can't make that same claim.
No corporation or company has ever made murder a response for someone taking another job. Corporations don't send out suicide bombers to kill those who work for other corporations. Corporations often use the phrase "cut-throat" as a metaphor describing market place competition, but no throats are actually cut. But religion can't make that claim either. Indeed, all religions find room in their respective ideologies in which murderers easily hide. No other lawful human organization does the same.
Somehow religion continues to get a pass for masking criminal actions as something that doesn't really do any harm to people and societies. But part of the knowledge that comes from realizing that none of gods of human kind actually exist, is the knowledge that religion often acts as a criminal organization.
The battle lines are real, the battles are real. On the one side is a increasingly aware segment of the human family. Even if they don't reject religion altogether they realize the gods of old are no gods at all.
On the other side are the criminals.
One can only hope the criminals are loosing.
Thursday, February 13, 2014
Wednesday, February 5, 2014
Drifting
Every often I feel like a person adrift in the world. Since I live on a sailboat without a fixed address that is true in the most literal sense. But in this case my feeling isn't about my physical relationship but rather a worldview, a sense of place. I don't really belong anywhere. No place is home.
This presents several puzzling issues. We are all social creatures, formed by the times, society, and families we grow up with. The language(s) we learn, the churches we attend, and the media we experience shape much of how we see the world. That shaping can be restrictive in the extreme; for example that of religious fundamentalism or xenophobia, sexism, and racism. Raised in such societies even the victims (women, minorities, or the underclass) will accept the abuse they endure as appropriate, just, and even moral. The Divine right of kings was a belief held, not just by the kings, but by the subjects of kings as well. How does anyone come to feel out of place in the society that formed them? Yet the fact remains many, including myself, do. Sometimes to the point of rejecting much of what forms the basics of the society.
In my case those basics include religion, capitalism, and democracy; pretty much the whole gambit of modern western society.
Like most I was raised a religious person, an Evangelical Christian fundamentalist. That put me at the very center of the current religious foundation of the US. Human kind is fallen and damned. A small remanent will be rescued in accordance with the fall / sacrifice / redemption story of Christianity. The rest will be judged, condemned, and lost. "Lost", to the fundamentalist, means tortured in hell forever. This was the first of the fundamentalist doctrines I eventually rejected, and the first step to ultimately abandoning all of them.
Yet that Christian Fundamentalism still underscores much of American politics. The ridged law-and-order mentality that twists our judicial system, stuffs prisons to overflowing, and shrugs at the abuse of migrant workers has its foundation in a judgmental and unforgiving god. Much of our war mentality grows from worshiping a god who ordered the annihilation of "his people's" enemies; and the assumption that the Christians of the USA now constitute "his people". The continued discrimination of women and gay people is rooted in the interpretation of god's supposed reasons for creating sex. The USA's continuing war on the poor is a twist on the law-and-order mindset. The poor aren't (usually) considered criminals per-say. But they haven't obeyed the godly rules of capitalism as they should. Their punishment is that of being poor, and it is rightly deserved.
Rejecting the religion of the USA as mythology, mean-spirited and evil, makes it difficult to accept the politics based on that religion as anything other than mythology, mean-spirited and evil. Though mythology should be a tool for passing wisdom from one generation to the next, the religion of the US has turned mythology into dogma, the antithesis of wisdom. Ours is a society increasingly "sharp" but fundamentally ignorant and dim witted. We often do what we want to do with little thought given as to what we should do. Since I try to live my life the other way around, only doing what I want if there is a certain element of wisdom to it as well, our is a society more and more distant to me.
Media, in what ever form, has always been a way for a society to tell its stories, to share the wisdom of its mythology. Media in the US had taken on an entirely different roll. It celebrates those doing what they want while eschewing anything remotely celebrating wisdom. That media is paid for with advertiser's propaganda, the worst kind of mythology ever invented. The combination may make commercially produced "reality" programing perhaps the ugliest story telling in the history of mankind.
It is also extremely profitable, part of the reason capitalism is no more attractive than is religion. (In the US the two are deeply intertwined, making it a bit misleading to treat them as totally different enterprises. Something to keep in the back of the mind.) American Capitalism is based on two premises. One is that wealth is equal to value. The second is that accumulating wealth is superior to creating wealth. Both are deeply destructive.
In our society an expensive thing is automatically a valuable thing, yet nothing could be further from wisdom. Indeed, many of the expensive things have remarkably little value at all. A $10,000 watch or a $30,000 necklace are expensive, far beyond the purchasing power of most of the people in the world. Yet neither has any real value. There are plenty of ways to tell what time it is without the watch. The necklace doesn't do anything useful at all. Indeed, the only real attribute of either is that they suggest that the wearer is wealthy, and therefore is a person of value. It is an illusion.
Wealth and value are completely different characteristics. A wealthy person is no more likely to be a person of value then a poor one a person without value. But capitalism, borrowing some of the mythology of American religion, tries to insist otherwise. The elitism of American religion, that of the chosen people being the only ones worthy of god; are echoed by capitalism, where the rich are the only ones worthy of value. As the chosen of god are beyond the criticisms of those who will be condemned by that same god, so are the the wealthy beyond the criticism of those who are poor. Of course the once criticism, above all, that must be suppressed is that the wealthy do not, in truth, deserve their wealth.
In other words accumulating wealth is superior to creating wealth. This is the driving principle behind capitalism, where the lender of money collects interest, gets to lend more money, collects more interest, and thus slowly appropriates the wealth created by the borrowers of money to himself. This is how they accumulate wealth without actually creating any wealth. (Remember, here we are only talking about wealth. Whether or not any of this has any value is an entirely different debate.) Unless very well constructed regulations are in place and enforced, the lender of the money will collect ever larger percentages on the money loaned through increases in interest, fees, and penalties. Our society long ago dismissed any such regulations as necessary (let alone enforcement) and has, as a result, transferred the majority of the wealth of the country into the hands of this new aristocity; the aristocity of the money lender.
Rejecting capitalism puts one far adrift from US society, as "free markets" are assumed to be integral to capitalism. A "free" economy is viewed as the only basis for a free society. Again, two false assumptions. The only free part of capitalism is the freedom of the capitalist to appropriate as much wealth as quickly as possible. There is no inherent check, balance, or counterweight to that accumulation, no "ENOUGH". A world where one person (or family) has accumulated and is living off of the accumulated wealth of the entire planet while the rest of the population dies of starvation is the final state of a world of capitalism. A free market is an entirely different animal.
In a free market the person who creates wealth profits from that creation, sharing it with the rest of society through an exchange of other wealth (be that a medium like money or the trading of goods for goods). But free markets (like capitalism) are not a natural phenomena. They don't exits until people make them up. They are products of regulations, of social contracts, of accepted norms. They are, in fact, the products of governments.
The government of the United States is a carefully constructed sham of democracy. The Founding Fathers built a system where power was very carefully divided between three branches, the Executive, Legislative and Judaical. But that same system was also created, with equal care, to ensure only the only the wealthy, only the land owners, only those beholding to the capitalist or a capitalist themselves, would populate those three branches.It is a system that endures to this very day. With few exceptions at any layer of government, only wealthy hold office.
In those rare cases where the less than wealthy slip into the ranks (after all no system is ever perfect) the system is rigged (some might suggest the word is "corrupt") to treat that person as wealthy, eventually let them accumulate some of society's wealth for themselves, and thus become part of the aristosity they once might have campaigned against. This ensures the system of the wealthy governing for their own benefit endures.
This is not to suggest that a pure democracy would be much better. In its worst renditions the 49.9% are the subjects of the 50.1%. Such a society would be complete unstable and would soon resort to civil war. Then again, a 33.3% vs 33.3% vs 33.4% democracy would be equally unstable. Human kinds best answer, so far, has always been a powerful minority dictating to the rest with some limits set as to what the dictators get to decide. The US constitution is a good effort to set such a limit, both on what the dictators themselves get to decide as well as how bad the majority can abuse the minority.
A longer view of history suggests that the US is actually doing a pretty good job of evolving an ever more just society. From the Revolutionary War through the Civil War, worker revolutions, unions, the Suffrage movement, wometn's rights, civil rights, the end of Jim Crow ... this is all good and encouraging progress. But the progress is uneven and, for most of my adult life anyway, has been slowing and is now showing signs of reversing. Progress, a more just society, always costs someone something. It is costing the new aristocity money, and they are nothing if not greedy. Perhaps this is just a bump in the road of a progressive society, though it looks more to me like a cliff. One whose lip we have already stumbled over.
For myself I need no religion. That, however, is the most personal of things. The religion of others is of no concern to me as long as that religion is not used as an excuse to do harm. (Okay, virtually all religion fails right there, but not all religious people need the excuse.)
I am not a capitalist. It is the system that has brought a new kind of dictatorship to the world. Eventually it will be unmasked for what it is. Those who are the victims will revolt. The system will be removed, something different will grow in its place.
And democracy? To me democracy is a bit like a jail, a necessary assault on individuals who has stepped over the line. Jails are used to limit the damage we do to each other and reign in the excesses of the few. But they are far from perfect and I am not pro-jail. But, so far, we have yet to invent any better solution for people who will abuse others. Democracy serves the exact same purpose; limiting the damage we do to each other and reigning in the excesses of the few. And at the moment democracy in the US is failing as badly as its jails.
This presents several puzzling issues. We are all social creatures, formed by the times, society, and families we grow up with. The language(s) we learn, the churches we attend, and the media we experience shape much of how we see the world. That shaping can be restrictive in the extreme; for example that of religious fundamentalism or xenophobia, sexism, and racism. Raised in such societies even the victims (women, minorities, or the underclass) will accept the abuse they endure as appropriate, just, and even moral. The Divine right of kings was a belief held, not just by the kings, but by the subjects of kings as well. How does anyone come to feel out of place in the society that formed them? Yet the fact remains many, including myself, do. Sometimes to the point of rejecting much of what forms the basics of the society.
In my case those basics include religion, capitalism, and democracy; pretty much the whole gambit of modern western society.
Like most I was raised a religious person, an Evangelical Christian fundamentalist. That put me at the very center of the current religious foundation of the US. Human kind is fallen and damned. A small remanent will be rescued in accordance with the fall / sacrifice / redemption story of Christianity. The rest will be judged, condemned, and lost. "Lost", to the fundamentalist, means tortured in hell forever. This was the first of the fundamentalist doctrines I eventually rejected, and the first step to ultimately abandoning all of them.
Yet that Christian Fundamentalism still underscores much of American politics. The ridged law-and-order mentality that twists our judicial system, stuffs prisons to overflowing, and shrugs at the abuse of migrant workers has its foundation in a judgmental and unforgiving god. Much of our war mentality grows from worshiping a god who ordered the annihilation of "his people's" enemies; and the assumption that the Christians of the USA now constitute "his people". The continued discrimination of women and gay people is rooted in the interpretation of god's supposed reasons for creating sex. The USA's continuing war on the poor is a twist on the law-and-order mindset. The poor aren't (usually) considered criminals per-say. But they haven't obeyed the godly rules of capitalism as they should. Their punishment is that of being poor, and it is rightly deserved.
Rejecting the religion of the USA as mythology, mean-spirited and evil, makes it difficult to accept the politics based on that religion as anything other than mythology, mean-spirited and evil. Though mythology should be a tool for passing wisdom from one generation to the next, the religion of the US has turned mythology into dogma, the antithesis of wisdom. Ours is a society increasingly "sharp" but fundamentally ignorant and dim witted. We often do what we want to do with little thought given as to what we should do. Since I try to live my life the other way around, only doing what I want if there is a certain element of wisdom to it as well, our is a society more and more distant to me.
Media, in what ever form, has always been a way for a society to tell its stories, to share the wisdom of its mythology. Media in the US had taken on an entirely different roll. It celebrates those doing what they want while eschewing anything remotely celebrating wisdom. That media is paid for with advertiser's propaganda, the worst kind of mythology ever invented. The combination may make commercially produced "reality" programing perhaps the ugliest story telling in the history of mankind.
It is also extremely profitable, part of the reason capitalism is no more attractive than is religion. (In the US the two are deeply intertwined, making it a bit misleading to treat them as totally different enterprises. Something to keep in the back of the mind.) American Capitalism is based on two premises. One is that wealth is equal to value. The second is that accumulating wealth is superior to creating wealth. Both are deeply destructive.
In our society an expensive thing is automatically a valuable thing, yet nothing could be further from wisdom. Indeed, many of the expensive things have remarkably little value at all. A $10,000 watch or a $30,000 necklace are expensive, far beyond the purchasing power of most of the people in the world. Yet neither has any real value. There are plenty of ways to tell what time it is without the watch. The necklace doesn't do anything useful at all. Indeed, the only real attribute of either is that they suggest that the wearer is wealthy, and therefore is a person of value. It is an illusion.
Wealth and value are completely different characteristics. A wealthy person is no more likely to be a person of value then a poor one a person without value. But capitalism, borrowing some of the mythology of American religion, tries to insist otherwise. The elitism of American religion, that of the chosen people being the only ones worthy of god; are echoed by capitalism, where the rich are the only ones worthy of value. As the chosen of god are beyond the criticisms of those who will be condemned by that same god, so are the the wealthy beyond the criticism of those who are poor. Of course the once criticism, above all, that must be suppressed is that the wealthy do not, in truth, deserve their wealth.
In other words accumulating wealth is superior to creating wealth. This is the driving principle behind capitalism, where the lender of money collects interest, gets to lend more money, collects more interest, and thus slowly appropriates the wealth created by the borrowers of money to himself. This is how they accumulate wealth without actually creating any wealth. (Remember, here we are only talking about wealth. Whether or not any of this has any value is an entirely different debate.) Unless very well constructed regulations are in place and enforced, the lender of the money will collect ever larger percentages on the money loaned through increases in interest, fees, and penalties. Our society long ago dismissed any such regulations as necessary (let alone enforcement) and has, as a result, transferred the majority of the wealth of the country into the hands of this new aristocity; the aristocity of the money lender.
Rejecting capitalism puts one far adrift from US society, as "free markets" are assumed to be integral to capitalism. A "free" economy is viewed as the only basis for a free society. Again, two false assumptions. The only free part of capitalism is the freedom of the capitalist to appropriate as much wealth as quickly as possible. There is no inherent check, balance, or counterweight to that accumulation, no "ENOUGH". A world where one person (or family) has accumulated and is living off of the accumulated wealth of the entire planet while the rest of the population dies of starvation is the final state of a world of capitalism. A free market is an entirely different animal.
In a free market the person who creates wealth profits from that creation, sharing it with the rest of society through an exchange of other wealth (be that a medium like money or the trading of goods for goods). But free markets (like capitalism) are not a natural phenomena. They don't exits until people make them up. They are products of regulations, of social contracts, of accepted norms. They are, in fact, the products of governments.
The government of the United States is a carefully constructed sham of democracy. The Founding Fathers built a system where power was very carefully divided between three branches, the Executive, Legislative and Judaical. But that same system was also created, with equal care, to ensure only the only the wealthy, only the land owners, only those beholding to the capitalist or a capitalist themselves, would populate those three branches.It is a system that endures to this very day. With few exceptions at any layer of government, only wealthy hold office.
In those rare cases where the less than wealthy slip into the ranks (after all no system is ever perfect) the system is rigged (some might suggest the word is "corrupt") to treat that person as wealthy, eventually let them accumulate some of society's wealth for themselves, and thus become part of the aristosity they once might have campaigned against. This ensures the system of the wealthy governing for their own benefit endures.
This is not to suggest that a pure democracy would be much better. In its worst renditions the 49.9% are the subjects of the 50.1%. Such a society would be complete unstable and would soon resort to civil war. Then again, a 33.3% vs 33.3% vs 33.4% democracy would be equally unstable. Human kinds best answer, so far, has always been a powerful minority dictating to the rest with some limits set as to what the dictators get to decide. The US constitution is a good effort to set such a limit, both on what the dictators themselves get to decide as well as how bad the majority can abuse the minority.
A longer view of history suggests that the US is actually doing a pretty good job of evolving an ever more just society. From the Revolutionary War through the Civil War, worker revolutions, unions, the Suffrage movement, wometn's rights, civil rights, the end of Jim Crow ... this is all good and encouraging progress. But the progress is uneven and, for most of my adult life anyway, has been slowing and is now showing signs of reversing. Progress, a more just society, always costs someone something. It is costing the new aristocity money, and they are nothing if not greedy. Perhaps this is just a bump in the road of a progressive society, though it looks more to me like a cliff. One whose lip we have already stumbled over.
For myself I need no religion. That, however, is the most personal of things. The religion of others is of no concern to me as long as that religion is not used as an excuse to do harm. (Okay, virtually all religion fails right there, but not all religious people need the excuse.)
I am not a capitalist. It is the system that has brought a new kind of dictatorship to the world. Eventually it will be unmasked for what it is. Those who are the victims will revolt. The system will be removed, something different will grow in its place.
And democracy? To me democracy is a bit like a jail, a necessary assault on individuals who has stepped over the line. Jails are used to limit the damage we do to each other and reign in the excesses of the few. But they are far from perfect and I am not pro-jail. But, so far, we have yet to invent any better solution for people who will abuse others. Democracy serves the exact same purpose; limiting the damage we do to each other and reigning in the excesses of the few. And at the moment democracy in the US is failing as badly as its jails.
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