looneytunes
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« Reply #272 on: June 03, 2007, 09:00:08 PM » |
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Ultimately, religion is all about CONTROL, the undying human desire to establish order and structure to this constantly changing chaotic world; hence, it wants to monopolize the world views for one monolithic outlook and no other way. It wants to devour all other beliefs than itself, as well, which explains how human beans have fought, long and hard, as we still do, to preserve one version of it against all the others—while loud-mouthing to one another, “Love Thy Neighbor!” In fact, all religions ironically pretend to teach compassion, charity, love, brotherhood, humanitas, communitas, and humilitas, the kind of very fine rhetoric Hemmingway’s protagonist Jake, finally enlightened, laments about the lip service of “fighting the enemy for fatherland” in The Sun Also Rises: patriotism, honor, glory, and hero—empty skulls of words in harsh un-reality that finally awakens us in the tomb.
All religions start as a sect, a Country Club made up of control freaks, long before years and years of snow-balling. Mormonism or Moonism serves as one glaring example: the artificial creation of a sect followed by sanctification via appealing to antiquity (Egyptian hieroglyphics in the former and the time of Adam and Eve in the latter). Remember Christianity too started as a “sect” just like any other sects in human history so much so that one can view it as Paul’s religion, the first organizer that ultimately canonized the snowball. The argument—that the majority of Americans believe in God and therefore they are in the right—shows a gross unfamiliarity with religious history, just as the argument that tradition supports the veracity of its raison’d etre: when it was first institutionalized, it did not have any tradition to even speak of, just as when it first started, its followers were in the minority, the majority being cow-worshippers, among others.
Mormonism has no history to fall back on. Hence, the desire to be connected to Egyptian time for its lacking legitimacy; otherwise go figure how Egyptian hieroglyphics allegedly ended up in American soil. Just as Microsoft Operating System subsumed most other operating systems for convenience, Paul’s religion sucked up all the different gods so that one did no longer have to worship agricultural god, love god, tree god, thunder god, war god, wisdom god, marriage god, city god, spring god, winter god, household god, life-after-death god—a tremendous money-saving measure. It was an economic decision in that one did not have to kill so many lambs for sacrifice for this god and that god when one will do just fine, following the principle of Ocam’s razor. Like MS Operating System, Christianity became universally “compatible” operating system for all people, in general, and those prosecuted or enslaved, in particular, showing how efficiency and economics go hand in hand.
Another primary example of this control was that until rather recently (the time of Henry VIII), the Vatican prohibited the Latin Bible from being translated into English so that only the “learned clergies” can monopolize the sacred foreign text and the interpretations thereof, a clever and convenient controlling mechanism that denied ordinary people from getting to the source or God, individually. The clergies could never be/do wrong, for they carried truth in their pocket, which meant that you are always in the wrong no matter what. The Inquisition, in fact, resulted from different interpretations of the same line in the same book, forcing a brother to kill another in self-justified glory (Forgetful of showing another-cheek-to-your-enemy rhetoric).
Similarly, such attempt to control and monopolize the proof of God’s existence still goes on even today. Listen to tongue-twisting jargons one must muster to know or understand God nowadays—just as if you did not know Latin, you could not understand the real meaning of the Bible: “Thomism,” “epistemology,” “apophatic statement,” “epistemological justification,” “an assumed homo religious,” and “eschatological vision,” a very fine abracadabra only voodoo practioners, wearing a black hood, have understood a while back in human history to control the incomprehensible “other” reality for the ordinary folks. Nothing better obfuscates high-flutin bull s*** than the mud-throwing, using a new “lexicon,” particularly since the control freaks cannot come up with hard and concrete, here and right now, evidence of God’s existence. Well, SHOW him! I am not stopping you or him.
Does one must really know these jargons to know God (assuming he exists)? Is your God a Ph.D. advisor?
If so, God does not care about ordinary people without the Country Club membership then? Rather, the reason that you try to obfuscate the simple issue whether he exits strikes me as just another example of CONTROLING. Not all the wives in the Mormon household can be “saved,” for instance, without being called by name by her husband, too—a prime example of controlling and Chauvinism, just as Catholics would not allow a woman priest—to maintain and control the power and money. Again it is the greed that greases the world to go around, and the only way to do it is via tight control based on “epistemological justification,” a phrase void of any significance, for it presumes the existence of a being as priori when in fact the very existence is the bone of contention. What is the point of dong any research when you know the answers to all?
Always one-step lagging behind in the chase of God’s shadow, ordinary people are thus judiciously kept aloof (crowd control) from the SOURCE and then spoon-fed, morsel by morsel, by “religiously-enlightened intellectuals” about the incomprehensibility of God in the tongue-twisting, meaningless abracadabra only they pretend to comprehend, for they text-message with God daily in such ultra-fine jargons, the lexicon no ordinary soul can ever comprehend. What the heck is “eschatological vision”? When was the last time you used those heavy duty words over a dinner table? “Well, Honey, are you experiencing any eschatological vision lately?” “Well, I must apologize for my apophatic statement I made last night, my dear.” Piled, higher and deeper, indeed. If God were indeed here, would he use such pretentious b. s. to reach his flock?
When the uninitiated don’t seem to follow, these enlightened religionists then say there is a need to invent yet a different “lexicon,” another dead Latin or another voodoo spell, for the current idiom is just inadequate to explain such overwhelming incomprehensibility! Consequently, only those who own a Ph.D. in Theology (what a joke!) can understand and explain God; the rest of the followers, half in voodoo and the other half in science. (Elaboration begot elaboration and elaboration begets more elaboration, and then finally the elaboration itself becomes their evidence, a reason why their dubious argument is always circuitous like a snake biting its own tail)
Religion wants to CONTROL every facet of our and other lives, profiting from the fact that our existence dangles in the world of uncertainties—impermanence, indeed, is the only thing permanent in reality, as Greeks and Buddhists have noted. In fact, religion even attempts to control events after death, providing the self-enlightened intellectual with a Mutual Omaha policy that will comfort him/her while breathing, particularly given the small donation-premium given each week. Admit it. 99% of God is stupid weather or natural disaster, which explains why people flock to church typically in the event of a disaster. Actually it is not even the church that triggers God in them; rather, it is the disaster itself that impacts on their psyche and they are now willing to grab a straw while drowning in his/her own sea of sorrow. Sure, a nasty divorce will do that, too, so will a death in the family, a car wreck, or even tornadoes; we all WANT to believe that the deceased is in a better place. That’s just human nature. (Speaking of which, I have never met a Xtian who will not end up in heaven. I often thought, wait a minute, if you are going to end up there, I surely would not want to see you again. Once was enough!) I have yet to meet a person who became religious after enjoying the sublime of a sunset or enthralling beauty of nature, such as Grand Canyon, a freak natural event that surpasses any religious or noumenal “high” or “enlightenment” or “epiphany”—all without so much high-flutin’ artificial man-made b.s.
Once cloaked inside the blanket of delusion, the blind wants to control others too, insisting others to follow the suit and become like themselves in believing the “incomprehensibility,” this pie in the sky. How is this incomprehensibility any different than those of any other superstitions? Why is your version of incomprehensibility more legitimate or righteous than any other claims made by others, such as Taoists, for instance? “Tao,” they say, is an incomprehensible thing, too; as soon as you name a thing tao, it ain’t tao anymore. Anyone interested in shooting a moving target? It is so and it ain’t so? “God exists but it is impossible to prove so; therefore, believe it.”
Thunder and lightening was “incomprehensible” to the dark souls of the night caught inside the caves, as well, forcing them to invent artificial intelligence, such as Zeus, Thor, Sky God, and Great Spirit. It is a pretty story. Nevertheless, a story is a story is a story. Where are these supreme beings now? Are they still incomprehensible? Go right ahead. Invent and insist on Intelligent Falling Theory, too. I love all these tinsel trappings that will make us forget the red reality, “nature red in tooth and claw,” and I am sure the bubble will last as long as I decide to deceive myself.
“Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
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