A friend of mine reports attending a recent “Tea Party Patriots” meeting in Benicia where booklets were distributed to attendees outlining ways for Christians to get their preachments taught in public schools. I’ll find out more. If true, it strengthens (1) my view that fixed religious belief in notions not verified by science endangers sanity and good, public order, and (2) that, as my friend suggests, a large number of TP Patriots are hard-shell Christians who want their otherworldly and untestable ideas translated into politics. Their only thought that can work well is that it’s good to be nice to people.
Republicans, however, have been throwing verbal excrement at opponents like chimps throw their stuff at onlookers in the zoo. Tilt, spin, spiteful spit and lies have become their stock-in-trade and hallmark as never before. Desperation on the Too-far Right and among starry-eyed religiosi reveals fundamental disrelation to life and reality. They believe, and have been raised to believe, that believing makes it true. “My faith makes the world I want, and the Heaven I hope for, real.” People over at the wrong end of Righteousness have conflated Christianity, Patriotism and Uncontrolled Enterprise with Personal Irresponsibility for truth, justice or meaning except as they own them. Truth is Property, I can do whatever I please with mine!” I can “Reason As I Choose,” because as a saved Christian and a person possessing all “The Right Stuff” I’m the measure of everything and “entitled” to rule you authoritatively straight from scripture or my old grandpa and teach you my ways of seeing and knowing everything.
Their disrelation to life and reality stems from elemental fantasy about who and what they are. Christians base reality on supernature, hence they can discount whatever science seems dismissive of belief or wishfully-defined fact. Similarly, Republicans base their reality on a mentalistic, similarly fantastic illusion of “principled Philosophy.” Both conclude what they assume to start, “The world is, and will be, what I want it to be and say it is, if I say it often enough and loudly enough.” This is near to the fictional world created by George Orwell in his originally futuristic novel, 1984, which, sadly could still come true, given enough victories by the Backwardites.
Those I call Backwardites are not sodomists but people who prefer Dreamland America to American civilization because they understand neither themselves nor civilization. They think they own or are owned by supernatural spirits, or souls. Every language seems to afford a number of serendipitous relations between word-sounds and plain meanings. English has the homophones, “soul” and “sole” which, though they have different etymologies, offer profound insight. Soul is not a metaphysical, material entity (which is self-contradictory.) Far from an etherial will-o’-the-wisp loose on an “astral plane” or saddled on a person’s body, soul is that from which a personate structure extends rather like the vamp, top and tongue of a shoe extend up from its sole. This is far too extreme for conventional minds to consider. It means we have to look inward to neural process for our unseen, physical basis, not up to Cloud Cuckoo Land, outside.
This is real revolution: the god you can’t see because it senses all, while thinking it is you imagining your god (the “sole”) is away somewhere only “He” knows. Wake up.
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