Hypocrisy's Hopeful Oath
by Alfred Lehmberg
I can understand the very real need for "something like" culture... ...something "along the lines" of religion. For Framework hopefully constructive. For Edifice perhaps efficacious. For Consistency possibly satisfying. For Prediction ideally satisfactory... For a Security, reader, preferably built upon that strength not provoking a resultant aggregate weakness in society...
I also understand the need to keep the latter out of the State's business and that there is individual peril to be presumed considering the former as an entity in any way capable of a personal relationship. Beware both!
Each can turn on a dime, be involved in all corruption, and then ape the nastier predilections of their more evil officiates and cadre of carpetbagging codifiers, keeping the nine cents change as it sells the faithful servicing out for its own convenience, security, and comfort. Religion provokes, even rewards, individual expendability. Culture is not your friend.
Historically? There has always been more capacity for evil than the antithesis of same in either... when we regard the lurid long and suffering short of honest history. Self-honesty will be required.
"Lies in the fog," an apt description, doing good and evil. Too often though, as has been recounted ad-infinitim, it is as an opiate's brainless refrain, facile pipe dreams bereft of all worth and consequence... except to the faithless and grasping manipulator of corrupt culture and Religulous religion.
Consider its old codifying and instructional stories, additions, amplifications in literature, and those in oral tradition as constructively fleshed out by John Campbell, but then consider, too, the spins they've endured and by which they've been disgracefully ornamented... or hijacked for alternative utility. What's that?
That's like an old Pagan date, say December 25, repurposed as a birth for more current gods, though not making any sense at all given situational mechanics and reasonable logic. Beside the point, it doesn't have to (not its task), but how is it Christ and Osiris share near-identical personal biographies?
Though, and more spot-on. Is it not plain that these ballyhooed "scriptures" are naught but obviate distortions from much earlier codifying and instructional stories, tales to be now alternatively lit for the use of self-interested convenience and clever if mendacious artifice? Consider now, reader, the story of Cain and Able!
This story celebrates Able! This story excoriates Cain. I grew up on this story well inculcated upon hearing how Able was the default good guy, betrayed by his own, and evil, reader, brother! ...But where was that "evil," really?
Alternative lighting points out, then, that the hates and the dissensions between the two are stoked up and altogether exacerbated by a psychotic God, the Father, in fairness... hard feelings that God's surely sparked up in Cain! Indeed, this is "a sparking" seeming unnecessary and unfair, to continue the fairness. I'm suspecting a nonsense and a wrong that we're taught! Celestial Shenanigans were afoot! Are we having it backward to suit manipulating psychopaths!? If we do, we're mocked anew as saps of those psychopathic manipulators, again!
Sincerely, maybe Able smirked and sneered, and Cain's, perforce, provoked! ...A frame-up, then; who was this Cain... and who else in a history of the disingenuous rates a re-thought write-up!
See, we're always beholden to the recorded words of the "money man." He's not always a good guy, to continue fairness! In fact, this writer's 71 years observes that that guy is SELDOM the good guy. So? We don't know what went on, really. No clue! History is too often an abject mystery! We put our faith in faith and that just begs the contrary faithlessness, eh? Consider current evangelicals penchant for a demonstrably flawed TЯUMPCO and despair.
Maybe Cain had to work, you know...?...do the tedious shit-hauling-dawn-to-dusk stuff. Able, perhaps comparatively, frolicked in the forest and did *fun* things all freakin' day, comparatively. Maybe he wasn't pulling his weight. Able was hunter-gatherer old-school. Cain was herder-horticulturalist new school. It was God making requirement for "New School," at all?
Some might argue that the old must make way for the new... Anyway... one might begin to see abundantly fertile ground for a manufactured dissension provoked betwixt the brothers provoked from on high, eh? A referee would throw a flag, reader, and its penalty then imposed! Who is there to referee God, but us?
Also consider, God engineered the whole thing just to make a point, too. "He" did that a lot. Consider the twitchy conundrums of forbidden fruit posed by "God" to Adam and Eve, Abraham's too willing threat of homicide on Isaac, and the wholly well-chumped lot of a persecuted Lot. That was all about a bet essentially between equals. Like the Koch Brothers betting on the feelings of one of their workers making it all the way in from the parking lot before they find out they were let go in a lay-off. That's OK, too, our erstwhile "leadership" would have us believe.
Here's a wrinkle... did you ever hear that both Cain and Able had twin sisters... (?!) ...and the real reason, it's academically supposed, is that all the sturm and drang of the whole consternation echoing down through time... the strife... the misery... the indecision... was over who was going to be allowed to be boinking whom? Now, there's some of that old-time religion in twitchy action, eh?
Chill. Before you start getting out your piqued boards, rusty hammers and scurvy little nails, otherwise lighting your torches and knocking the cow dung from your green-toothed pitchforks and equally green teeth (...some of you...?), read about Enlil and Enki of Sumerian yore from 8000 years, and beyond, into a turbid past's ineffable hoariness... brother Gods in sensate turmoil over creative differences. Yeah.
Discover that a pompously human-hating Enlil triumphed in that seminal struggle between them and is presently worshiped as God the Father... while Enki, creator and friend of humanity, is reviled as the antithesis Satan, a master of capering imps in cast-down-into hell as Nephilim... ...and then tell me what conclusions you can come to, reader.
Read the stories at the roots of "your" Johnny-come-lately eschatologies, terrific tales, surreal testaments, or anxious fables. Review what came and went before a Jewish, Christian, or Islamic heritage was even thought of! Primary references!
Become aware how your bowdlerized newcomer-upstart neo-spin *Christian* story (to include the Pentateuch or first five books of the Old Testament)... were tales told *first*, you know, in that time preceding all these (comparatively new-age!) religious ideas of Father Judaism, Son Christianity, and Grandson Islam, all late in our religious pantheon! Read how it's all mixed up with visitations of physical beings from other worlds, realities, or dominions—and UFOs... yea and verily. UFOs... UFOs, reader!
Read how things are not quite the way you've been taught they were... ...even from people contrived and manipulated into thinking they "meant well"... feeding you the mal-social pabulum... Feh! Yeah—feel good about your short-sheeting shorter change... ...this endured and ongoing disrespect to pony up that next tithe or tax to support another's lavish, even princely lifestyle... You think these Christo-neofascists now in jealous sway of society remotely respect you, reader? You are, along with myself, just grease for their fatuous and psychotic wheel. A grinding wheel, yea and verily!
...The last priest strangled with the last king's guts. Or we’re to remain, and irretrievably, nuts.
What obnoxiously fetid inculcations have been forced on the truth-seeking individual by errant spiritual fathers, their sociopathic sons, and their pathological grandsons? See, and this is key, the closer you get back to the inceptions of all these old stories? The less they were spun.
...Shunt quickly back to the "spun-up" present...
Here in Alabama, soon after the initial Bush #43 "coup" in 2000 I recall, we received (....every single mailing address statewide!) in the federal mail, a theatre production of the life of Christ... ...on VCR. WTF?
A way conservative estimate at $5.00 a tape (not counting using FEDERAL postal vehicles for NO POSTAGE paid! No postal franking at all!) means that, at minimum, 10 MILLION dollars... ...TEN MILLION DOLLARS... ...was money errantly *invested* in a superficial, nebulous, and instantly expended (...and so instantaneously lost ...)... prevarication of self-gratifying-short-term "feel good"... meaning and accomplishing for the individual, reader... bupkis, zilch, nada, or zip! Nothing for the societally abused folks at which it was aimed. Nothing, indeed, but the arrogant and unconstitutional mixtures of Church and State. My outrage was palpable to an extreme!
...Who was it made the only profit? ...Trees are judged by the fruit produced, friends and neighbors, a "good Christian" shall not hesitate a moment to point that out to you...
For my part, I can only dream of ten million dollars invested at a conservative rate of 5% that would make 500 hundred thousand dollars a year available for an Alabama education system... say ...a system presently bouncing off the freaking bottom of the national education scale!
I’ve lived it, folks... it’s egregious. In Alabama, you see, we substitute only one canned and mythic religious icon for the existential individual's efficacy and quality of life. The effects reaped are truly horrifying, squalid, retarding, and sick... ...certainly for a tree-hugging liberal such as myself.
In the same manner that we court disaster feeding meat protein to a herbivore, we (societally) sell a non-white person on a white person's God. There's a parallel!
I was a career soldier in combat and combat training, reader, expecting more out of the greatest nation on the planet than graft and ignominy. Individual education for the poor black kids of Barbor County (...most!) is atrocious at best. ...Think piles of shabby textbooks published in 1967 smelling of vomit and urine... a true story. Don't ever think that society is not resented by these disenfranchised, even as they are made less able to articulate it by that society.
...Plato wondered that perhaps the unexamined life was not worth living. John Amos Comenius was abundantly clear that untested faith is not only valueless but that it is also harmful. I'd add regressive. Destructive... ...insane!
...And me? I read those guys, while you (...you know who you are!) ... You just scare the hell out'a me.
You don’t read a book that might make you question your dodgy convictions... ... all the while holding jealous sway in a satellite-powered mainstream of conservative media giants, pathological corporate entities, all three houses of corrupted government, and setting the tone for all the remaining powerful institutions of society... ...in institutions not controlled outright...
...STILL ...you still have the blithe temerity, glib smirking "Christian," to whine that you're being "persecuted." Piss on you. No, really! Piss. On. You.
Yeah... sure! Keep grinding your stupid ax, but also expect me to keep challenging you to prove how sharp your bully ax really is, where you expect to employ that dim-bulb blade, and how much intrusive and controlling crap I’m going to take from you as you prosecute your self-involved and unethical back-stepping sociopathy, on me.
You don’t get to dismiss and marginalize me... fundy swine... keep me from employment... persecute and punish me because I won’t validate your dodgy, convenient, untested, and hypocritical faith! No!
You offend me, sir and Madam, because you have arbitrarily disrespected and have continued to punitively disrespect me where I won't validate your psychotic sociopathy. "I would strike the sun if it offended me" righteously. That’s what I learned in school, eh?
And it's what I'd teach! ...But... that was the problem, wasn't it...
Verily! Before the option's denied you! Put down your pitchforks, smother your stinky guttering torches, and open a different book. Give, and get respect... friend and neighbor ...or make an enemy of me and a growing population of disgruntled others who can finally be provoked enough to visit upon you what you are so willing to visit upon others... in the first place!
Finally ...With regard to UFOs, consider. Focusing on them is a little like focusing exclusively on the Pope-mobile so you don't have to think about the leering and child-groping Pope found inside, eh? Don't make that focus. I suspect that it must be the UFOs, then, that are ancillary to what’s inside them...
Restore John Ford. Then we can start to talk. Read on.
