Going

The Speaker of the House has resigned under pressure from the wingers of the Republican Party. There is not a single rational person running for the Republican presidential nomination so, on the surface, it appears that one of the two ruling parties in the US has gone completely off the rails. It is what one would expect as a country slides into oblivion. It is what the American people keep voting to support. For, no matter how one looks at the numbers, the Republican party controls most of the government on both state and national levels.

There is a small chance that this will work out well. There is just enough time between now and the next election for the country to feel the impact of Republican madness. Should it come to pass that they are crushed by the voters, there is some small hope that the country can turn away from disaster. Small. There is still the fairness doctrine, the SCOTUS, the tax laws, Citizens United, and out of control military spending. Americans despise educated people and experts telling them anything they don't want to hear. We are a “faith based” society that hates truth, completely impoverished when it comes to wisdom, compassion, understanding, empathy, justice, and peace. We worship power, wealth, violence, and war.

It would be better for the world and the future if such a country were to fade from history. Indeed, history suggests there is no other alternative. The long arc of human evolution bends toward liberty and discovery. As a species we have slowly shed the Kings and Popes, Gods and Prophets. The oppressed eventually revolt, the Kings get led to the gallows, the churches are closed; society convulses and something slightly less oppressive, slightly more just, grows in its place. Americans may be about to feel the full brunt of living under religious tyranny, working only for the benefit of the powerful few, shedding personal liberty so the elite can take their shot at ruling the world. It will follow the path that all such societies follow.  

All may not be lost ...

It is hard to imagine any scenario more ludicrous than the one unfolding in America's nascent presidential campaign. Even more surreal is that the election itself is still sixteen months away, making it hard to imagine that anything happening now is relevant. But it must be since one of these clowns will be on the ballot for the next POTUS. It appears, at least on the Republican side, a competition between the worst excuses for human beings that one could possibly assemble. At the moment the very worst of the bunch is actually polling as the favorite. There could be no better proof that the American political system is broken almost beyond repair.

Which is an improvement over my normal view that the system was broken a long time ago and is now way past the point of being salvaged. An improvement due to a single fact, a Democratic Socialist is running for the Democratic nomination, and is making some real waves in the process. Unfortunately he is a 72 year old white guy trying to derail the Clinton political machine. He is also, already, facing down the entire military / industrial / fundamentalist / neo-liberal junta who know a threat to their domination when they see one. His chances of making to the White House likely bounce between zero and none.

And yet, could it be that the American people are not quite as brain dead as the ruling elite believe? They did spend nearly a billion dollars to get Obama defeated the last time, and all that money bought them was a landslide loss. Certainly they did a lot better in the mid-terms, now controlling the House and Senate, and mostly controlling the SC. (The Chief Justice goes rogue on them once in a while for reasons no one quite understands, but only on social issues. When it comes to the demands of the the rich and powerful he is bought and paid for, 100% prime cut, and ready to serve without question.) Truth be known – and someday it will be – Obama is as much a war loving, Wall Street serving, neo-liberal as any Republican. Most state and local governments have fallen in line as well, so it certainly seems that the conservative / neo-liberal train is still on track to ruin the world.

And yet, could it be that the American People are not quite as brain dead as the ruling elite believe? Maybe, but my skepticism will not be that easy to abandon. The Republican party is utterly hopeless and basically evil, but has a secure following among the religious fanatics and wealthy. There are some small indications that it may finally collapse into dithering, drooling, collection of irrelevancy; the current Front Runner being a good example. Still, unless the Front Runner flames out in such a spectacular manner as to set fire to the entire Republican brand, the indications will remain small and inconsequential.

And yet, could it be?

The openly oppressive and hateful are in some small retreat. Their favorite rallying symbol of the Stars and Bars is being lowered. The LGBT community has forced the religious fanatics out of their closet of phobia, fear, and ignorance. Civil rights have returned to the forefront of public debate, dragging income inequality into the spotlight as well. Police brutality, an unjust justice system, and America's hidden slavery / prisoner abuse pipeline are also cringing under the scrutiny. All of which is provoking the expected backlash. The abusive and the hateful are rarely converted.  They are, eventually,  rendered impotent and inconsequential, fall silent, and then quietly die off mostly forgotten. The world moves forward without them.

Still, there is very little talk of the massive corruption that has crippled our democracy. If there is any real anti-war sentiment brewing, it has yet to show itself. Denying simple facts and worshiping mythology are perfectly acceptable positions to hold. And no one is talking openly about the very foundation of our society, rampant consumerism driven by the continued, flagrant, wasting of finite resources, as being unsustainable.

And yet, there sparks the faintest hope that all is not lost.

Short, ugly, and forever forgotten ...

The failure of gods, and those who claim to be the followers of gods, to make living fuller and better rather than shriveled and harder, is all the proof anyone should need to grasp that the gods do not exist. It hasn't worked out that way of course. World over people are following religion into hate, war, death, and personal denigration and debasement. The middle east is a cesspool of Islamic inhumanity and its residents are, by far, the most religiously degraded members of the human family at the moment. Still, much of humanity is following a similar path. In the US it is the Christians who are on the leading edge of evil.

American Christianity took its hard right turn toward doing harm when American Christians decided that coupling faith with political power was the way to “save” the nation. I was a member of the church back then, an ardent and committed follower of Jesus. Most of my doctrine came from the words and stories attributed to Jesus, which focused almost exclusively on how a person should live their own life, and included how they treated others. Compassion was at the base of it, along with tolerance, an effort to understand. A genuine and selfless love lie at the foundation for it all.

The “Old Testament” was sacred of course, but as the background story of history that focused human hope on the teachings that Jesus shared. In a like manor most of the rest of the New Testament” was expository, also sacred, but exposing the efforts of people to put those same teachings into practice. And, quite frankly, those efforts often seemed contradictory, sometimes deeply flawed, and clearly influenced by the context of the societies they inhabited. Paul's fondness for the imagery of slavery and his relentless misogyny were clearly the marks of a man limited by his society of some 2000 years in the past. The Bible was a source of wisdom and understanding in all things spiritual. No one with any sense suggested it as a text book or "owner's manual".

For some reason, along with the lust of political power came “literal” interpretations of scripture. That seemed okay at first, how could a literal interpretation of “love your neighbor as yourself”, the Sermon on the Mount, or the story of the Good Samaritan, go wrong? An American society measuring up to the standards demanded by the sorting of nations into goats and sheep would be a testament to just how far a human society could go toward justice and peace. But those weren't the parts of the Bible the American Church took literally. In fact the Church leadership spent more and more time demanding that the stories of the Old Testament be taken literally, and less and less time bothering, if they bothered at all, with the stories of and about Jesus. Stories once told mostly to children were insisted on as facts of history. Anyone who dared disagree was declared an enemy of god's own word. Every Sunday morning was more hate, more intolerance, more anger, and an ever increasing call to do battle the very people Jesus had called us to love. It wasn't long before the Church was a place I didn't understand, didn't fit, and could no longer endure.

I often wondered why the backlash of those who followed the teachings ascribed to Jesus, against American Christianity, never materialized. Many of my believing friends became professionals (for lack of a better term) in the Church. Ministers and Preachers and the wives of Ministers and Preachers; some going on to be Professors in theological seminaries and universities. In just a few years people who once favored the story of Jesus and the women brought before him to be judged, took to the pulpit to judge everyone from gay people to political liberals to unmarried mothers. Eventually even the poor and the homeless became targets of contempt. Churches grew bigger and more expensive while the preachers took to limousines, Rolex, and TV. I don't recall hearing of a single one of the people I knew rejecting this bastardized Christianity and walking away. But now I think I know why the backlash never came.

Those who would have been true to the teachings of Jesus, who would have lead the revolt against those who turned the Church toward power and greed, are simply not Christians anymore. They left the church, abandoning faith as the central theme of life. The demands of the Literalist and the Judge are those of nonsense and evil. But grasping that leads to the understanding that all of Christian doctrine is based on mythology rather than truth. The Fall, the Curse, Hell, blood sacrifice, the very idea of a god-man, the doctrines of Christianity are irreconcilable with the ideas implicit in many of the teachings of Jesus. Humility, love, understanding, a desire for truth, forgiveness and compassion are the truth of his doctrines. Many of the “Real Christians” followed the teachings of Jesus out of the church and away from the faith.

I suppose I was one of them. But the distance between me and American Christianity is now so great that it is hard to remember, or even imagine, that I once considered myself one of them. There are no gods. Humanity's only hope is to listen to truth reviled in the teaching of the best of its teachers. Among those being some of the words shared by the character of Jesus. Our mythology holds truth and light, offering guidance passed down through the generations. Religion, however, has always been completely compromised. The demand that one worship and accept as an unquestionable authority both a “god” and those who claim to represent same, has as its foundation the lust for power. That lust is the basis for all evil, and the very act of worship, of bowing a knee without even the idea of questioning the rightness of that being worshiped, twists and poisons the heart.

The lust for power is resurgent in the world and thus, so is religion. Yet love is the very opposite of wielding power. When the backlash, the true revolution, the real revival of the human spirit comes - if it comes - it will show itself as the rejection of the power of one person over another. It will include, and maybe start with, the rejection, of religion.

If it doesn't come human kind will have a short, ugly, and forever forgotten history in the cosmos.

What we like

With the Republican sweep of the mid-term elections it was inevitable that calls for impeaching the President would follow. Republicans will not impeach Obama for any legitimate reason, but that does not mean he should not be removed from office. Unfortunately, the reason he should go is equally applicable to everyone who would be doing the impeaching; the massive, criminal defrauding of the American taxpayer during the economic failure engineered by Wall Street, and the subsequent Government endorsement and cover-up of those crimes. If Nixon was rightly driven from office for covering up the criminal activity around the Watergate break-in (and he was) then Obama – and Bush before him – are equally liable for the criminal activity of Wall Street.

That criminal activity is well documented but is as much “out in the open” as it is ever going to get. Reports of the crimes are covered just enough to support the illusion that "someone is doing something about it". The Republican propaganda machine will not use the issue to go after Obama as their need is to protect the interests of the corporations and banks. But they can claim that Obama is a bad guy and thus paint the Democrats as bad guys as well. The Democratic propaganda machine will not use the issue to go after corporations and banks because they need to protect Obama. But they can claim that Wall Street and the corporations are the bad guys, and thus paint the Republicans as bad guys also. Which, as far as the American people are concerned, is about perfect. We do not want much more than some vague allusions to what is really making our political / economic system do what it does, but we do want a reason to pick a side. Which makes a demented kind of sense.

No one wants this can of worms (snakes really) opened and pored through mass media into the public's lap. If that happens the entire greed driven, crony capitalism that is the foundation of American society is likely to crash. Americans like greed driven, crony capitalism. It feeds our lust for “things” and massages the illusion we can all get rich with some work and some luck. It makes us feel special, so special in fact, that we have incorporated capitalism into our religion. God, we claim, is a free market kind of guy who has rewarded the rich for their enterprising ways and punished the poor for being “takers”. We are, at the same time, both victims of a corrupted system, and its biggest supporters. Cherry picking the propaganda to support our own version of greed and thievery, we pick a party and vote to keep the system exactly the way that is is.

What I see now is an America that is something akin to a pure criminal enterprise, one in which we are all complicit.  America's collective ego will simply not allow us to face the depth of corruption that has overwhelmed our society and the part we play in it. The Supreme Court's “Citizens United” ruling, Obama and Holder's refusal to prosecute anyone on Wall Street for crimes clearly committed, and the America public's refusal to engage corruption as a primary issue in any election, would have us all indited at the hands of any just court in the universe.  We are all supporting criminal activity, but none want to admit that we are the bad guys as well.

Eventually such a system has to collapse. There really is no honor among thieves. Betrayals, double dealings, secret pacts, hidden and not-so-hidden violence, fear, intimidation, and threats, are the hallmarks of our political / economic system and, often, of our personal dealings with each other. No nation jails as large a segment of its population as does America. No society happily endures our level of gun violence. No nation comes near to matching our personal consumption of resources and energy.

The truth is nearly impossible to winnow out of the chaff but that is actually fine with most of us. We are really not interested in exposing the system for what it is. It is our system. We like it. We vote for it. We claim it is the best system the world has ever seen and, given half an excuse, will impose it on any other nation by brute force. It has our enduring and unassailable support. And we will go down with it.

Voting one's way into hell ...

When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me,I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.

Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?

The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.

They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.

It may seem odd that an atheist would even know that this was in the Christian Bible, but I used to be a believer. Though I don't remember a lot about those days, I do remember that this story, and the Sermon on the Mound, formed two of the pivotal bits of my religious identity. Oddly enough this same story highlights one of the main themes in Christianity that eventually led to me walking away, that of a hell. In this case the people who get sentenced to that hell might well be described as people who where simply going about their lives pretty much minding their own business. At worst they were a bit calloused about the injustice around them, but no where is it suggested they stole food or drink or clothes, that they drove the immigrant back across the boarders, or sentenced the innocent to jail. Though they may not have been very active in making the world a better place (and this assumes they were not good parents, able teachers, skilled craftsmen, or honest business owners), they did nothing to make it any worse. Yet they still “will go away to eternal punishment”.

Though I am not a believer in gods, this bible story (without the hell part) still captures a good bit of my political identity. One crucial item that the Christians seem to miss is that the story revolves around the judgment of nations, not individuals. This may be a criticism of how an individual reacted to one particular beggar, but it equally as much about how societies are structured. The nations that left the hungry and the homeless to fend for themselves, did not welcome the stranger, and who (note this one carefully) did nothing to look after the sick and the prisoner, were condemned.

It is hard to imagine that the United States could find itself at the Son of Man's right hand. (The Son of Man? That title hints, again, at just how far the American Christians have strayed.) Here it would be easy to go into a long diatribe about American and it poor, its prisons, its attitude toward immigrants, and its health care system. From there it would be easy to segue into the love of greed and violence, the priorities of the National Budget, and being the weapons manufacturer to the world.

But my curiosity here, this close to an election, with the Republicans and the T-Party wrapping themselves with the mantel of Religion and claiming a hold on the moral high ground, is more esoteric. They will win (if they win) because Christians voted for them. But if this story is to be believed, they are voting themselves directly into hell.

This is not to suggest the Democrats would do much better.  But it can't be denied that the Republican right's politics would clearly seem to those of the goats, not the sheep.  To me anyway, it appears that anyone, let alone one claiming to be a Christian, would be hard pressed to explain a vote for Republican party priorities.  When shredding social safety nets, building fences and bringing guns to the boarder, deliberately denying health care to millions of citizens, and demanding that non-violent "offenders" be jailed - and often locked into solitary confinement for years, form the basics of the Party platform, claiming  ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’  will sound pretty lame.

Some think the country is at a crossroads and that the debate actually matters.  I don't think that is the case.  Long ago, if not at its very inception, the US turned to being a nation for the elite few living off the labor of the many.  In a way it doesn't matter how the Christian votes, any more than it matters how anyone votes.  But at least, should this bible story turn out to be true, the Christian could claim,

"But Lord, I didn't vote for those who wanted to leave you hungry, homeless, naked, sick and in jail."

Who knows, it might help.

Scale

A blog friend, Robert, and I have had a spirited political exchange on Deb's and my sailing blog. It has been fun, though there is a basic misunderstanding typical of conservative thought. For him there is only one possible social scale with conservative ideology at the “right” end, liberal ideology at the “wrong” end. Everyone and every policy falls somewhere on that scale. Since I do not share his conservative ideals I must therefore be a liberal.

That scale is an illusion, it has no units that measure how I see the world. But the truth is I cannot offer Robert, or anyone else (including myself), a label that fits how I do look at the world. “Off the Reservation” is all I have managed, and it is not very enlightening. I am a human being who suspects that humanity is a failing evolutionary experiment on what to do with consciousness and intelligence. We are smart enough to do ourselves in and not wise enough to avoid it. I can be described as an atheist. Yet I see self awareness as a fundamental facet of the universe, akin to a dimension or force, in a cosmos that is more like a thought than a machine. We are a mote of an idea in a fully integrated and border-less reality, and maybe not a very good idea. It may be that biology, tool making, tribalism, and intelligence are simply a bad mix that can never mature into much of anything, but it was worth a try.

At best we are a collection of dimly intelligent children who learned how to write just 10,000 years ago. We have barely begun to grasp our place in the universe, if we have even gotten that far. Our politics, religions, economics and wars are largely driven by animal instincts we do not understand and mostly deny. Our religions have their foundations in our caveman beginnings.

Adulthood is hundreds, perhaps thousands, of generations away. One might suspect, on the evidence, that we lack the capacity to ever live that long. Our travels through this life will always be those of children who do not really understand much of anything. If we could just grasp that, maybe we would actually start to grow up a little. Sadly, that understanding is one that still lies beyond our limited reach.

I am not a believer; neither am I completely comfortable with the label “atheist”. Both terms have their foundations in a view of the cosmos so primitive as to be essentially nonsense. “God” is a term that has no meaning. How can one “not believe”? It is like trying to grasp a vacuum, there is nothing there. In addition most of religion is based on the utterly false claim that we were created as adults, but are fallen. It tells us that we are damaged, not children, and need salvation, not maturity. It teaches that someone will come and save us, not that we need to grow up. Our society is steeped in the false assumption that we already know everything we need to know to be adults; that humans are as intelligent as intelligence gets. Religion prevents us from understanding the one thing we need to understand if there is to be much hope for a future that includes humanity.

We have yet to invent a political or economic system that works. I am not a conservative or a liberal. I am not a socialist or capitalist or communist. I don't “believe” in democracy, theocracy, or the divine right of Kings. They are all the babbling of children whose vocabulary is limited to a few hundred words, pictures whose coloring is far, far from being inside the lines. Scribbles mostly, incoherent and chaotic. With politics we have yet to outgrow the “bully” stage. Nation / States are make believe boarders. This swing set is where the cool kids hang out. That carousal is for the nerds. Our economics consists of “THAT is MINE”.

We still love war and force and threats. We like to hurt things. We like to break things; not to understand them better, but just to break them, like a two year old knocking down his brothers block tower.

I have to live in this world, navigating the preschool playground that is humanity, all the while knowing I am just one of the children. A person who lived 20,000 years ago couldn't reach much beyond his or her primitive society. He or she was limited by the social boundaries of knowledge and technology. I can't reach much beyond mine. We are all as integrated into human kind's current disposition as we are in the dimensions of space and time. That current disposition is one based mostly on fantasy, hubris, ego, and delusion. (Remember that that earlier person was physically identical to us and fully human in every possible way, just as smart, just as capable.)

I try to live my life with the curiosity and joy of a child while remembering that we do not even know what it is we do not know. I try to judge things by how they work for all of us on the playground. Who gets hurt, who gets helped, who does the hurting, who does the helping. Who is hording all the marbles. Who are the bullies and just how dangerous are they likely to be. Who cheats. Who plays fair. But I can't help but hope that in a truly adult world such concerns would be laid aside, making room for a better way to live.

I act all grown up when I talk about it, use the biggest words we have, pontificate a bit. All kids like to sound like adults, and we all do it. But the fact is we do not even know, for sure, just what “adulthood” means. I thought I did when I was 20. I thought I did when I was 30. At 59 I am not so sure. Humans have barely 5,000 generations of evolution behind us, just 300 since we started to write, 13 since Galileo first spotted the moons of Jupiter, 5 since Darwin published his book, not yet 3 since Hubble discovered the universe is expanding. Dark energy was discovered and the Internet invented in this generation. (The cosmos by the way, if measured by human standards, is 490,000,000 generations old. But then, we are not exactly sure just how to measure time. All we have is our reference frame. For a photon of the original “Big Bang” - what we call cosmic background radiation – no time has passed at all.)

I'll argue politics, religion, economics, and philosophy. Not very well sometimes, but I will give it a shot. I may even enjoy it. But I can never forget that the debaters are children playing hopscotch in the sand, that most of what is being debated is based on utter, unrelenting, nonsense.  We are talking but, on any real scale of measure, we can't possibly know much of what we are talking about.

 The only saving grace is the hope that we are doing the best we can. But I'm not sure that we are.

Robin Williams

Robin Williams died today of an apparent suicide. It may seem strange that I noticed or cared, given my contempt for America's celebrity culture is deep and long standing. But I enjoyed his manic humor and was touched by his work in “Good Will Hunting”, “Dead Poets Society”, and “Patch Adams”. He was, to me, a celebrity because he was an artist and thus in his own unique way a speaker of truth.

Truth is a rare commodity in our world. Politics is devoid of truth, as is religion. Business cares only for profit and will sacrifice truth, without thought, if a single penny can be added to the bottom line. So the loss of anyone who speaks to the truth of the human condition is a loss to be noted and felt.

There is another sad truth to his passing. With all the resources available to him, a loving family, money, access to the best health care available, and a community of people who respected his work, he was still unable to win a battle with depression. Just being a human was too heavy a burden for him to carry and his illness made death preferable to life. That is a sad and sobering thought.

I don't suffer from depression, which might seem odd given my generally poor view of human kind. One would think that being a member of a species as demented and self destructive as is ours would be enough to depress anyone. This is particularly true given the head long rush to insanity that drives every day's headlines. But, somehow, I bumble along finding tiny bits of joy midst the chaos.  We humans are likely a failed attempt in the evolution of a conscious universe. But a failed experiment is not a bad experiment so long as something is learned.  Even as we fail there and things to discover, children and grand children to love, and adventures to seek and enjoy.

Humans have proved that tribalism and hate will undo any society, regardless of its promise of intelligence and curiosity. It appears that true intelligence requires the skills of a tool maker for, without tools, learning and curiosity are truncated.  Without tools there is no ability to spread intelligence across the cosmos. But the tools of war based on tribalism and hate will negate an otherwise promising history.

Anyway, Robin Williams died today. The world is a slightly sadder place.