Christianity mostly has devolved into the cult of "Nice G-d."
G-d is not nice, sometimes not at all nice. What G-d is, is good, and that can be a very different thing.
There's a heck of a lot of the Torah that deals with, how do you keep from getting sick, and mostly, how do you keep society as a whole from getting sick. Sick medically, but also sick socially.
The slogan of Star Trek's Vulcans is, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Nowhere in the Torah are human beings allowed to make that measurement of need. The basis of individual moral action in the Torah is not Utilitarianism but principle. Adherence to the Law. The Laws of G-d however, which are actually based on proper natural laws, DO make that measurement. They express a point of view that the needs of the whole community are more important than the needs and certainly the wants of the individual. They express a focus on the well-being of the people as a whole, which if it is not attended to will inevitably have an adverse impact on the well-being of the individuals in it.
Take the commandment against homosexuality, for instance. If someone else is a homosexual, that, in the words of Jefferson, neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. So it is unlike many other laws in that no immediate injury to person or property is involved. Why is it a commandment nevertheless? Because homosexuality attacks and erodes the family structure that is the fundamental building block of society. Same with adultery. Same with cross-dressing. The structure of male fathers and female mothers exists for a reason, a reason tested by millennia. So for the "hygiene," the health of the whole society, these things are forbidden in the Torah even if they do not DIRECTLY harm others. It's like allowing a woodpecker to bore into your foundation posts. You don't mess with your foundations, no matter what your particular desire is. Your house will fall down if you do.
Stoning people is not nice. Not at all. Not in the slightest bit nice. Yet it was the punishment listed for adultery, for homosexuality, and even for breaking the Sabbath (though I somehow doubt that this was often enforced, given how much Sabbath-breaking the prophets described.) Why? Because the needs of the many, the health of the whole society, demanded it. Demanded the sacrifice of the desires and if need be, the life of the individual. Because you open the floodgates to pleasing individual desire at the expense of the health of the community, then soon you are sacrificing babies to Molech (or having abortions) and having cross-dressing priests and having fathers abandoning their children, and on and on.
Quarantine is called for in many situations in the Torah. You separate the individual for the health of the whole. It is not pleasant for the individual, but is better for the whole. Many foods are forbidden: these foods can be found to have adverse health effects and that was very much more so in 2000 b.c. Nowadays you get trichinosis or shellfish poisoning, you go to a hospital and probably live, though this would be an unnecessary drain on medical resources. THEN, you would likely have died. You had pigs running around eating human corpses, and shellfish in the hot waters of the Red Sea were a case of food poisoning looking for a place to happen. As far as meats go, only animals that eat grass were allowed to be eaten, and only some of those. All plants were okay to eat though. This is because other kinds of animals can accumulate toxins or act as magnets for diseases. You don't eat predators because being high on the food chain, they accumulate more toxins in their bodies. You don't eat animals with long lifespans for the same reason. These laws were meant for the health of the individual, but also the whole society.
THESE LAWS ARE BASED IN NATURE AND THE NATURE OF HUMAN BEINGS. They are not in the least arbitrary. I know the prophets often talked of such and such a society angering G-d and G-d wiping them out because of it, but honestly it was just the application of G-d's Law that wiped them out. They wiped themselves out by not following G-d's law, just the same as jumping off a building will lead to your death because of the law of gravity. You hurt yourself AND your society by breaking these laws. You might get away with breaking them for awhile, but sooner or later nature snaps back, to your ruin and the ruin of many.
Now the Law as written does have a shortcoming, and that is that it was written 3000 years ago. If G-d had said, "Thou shalt not engage in any unnecessary international travel," no one would have understood what the point was. It would be like someone saying now, "you should not fly to Jupiter." The world has changed drastically, though not human nature. Back in 2000 b.c. there were no cities as we would now understand them: the vast majority of cities at that time were what we would call villages or small towns. They were very few and far between. The overwhelming majority of people lived very rural lives. The total population of the world was a couple hundred million at best, and wouldn't reach 1 billion until 1804. Most people died within a few miles of where they were born. The Torah was written for a rural pastoral people.
However, understanding the Law then for those people, you can understand what a hypothetical new Moses would relay to us concerning G-d's laws for us today. For one, he would say that cities are breeding grounds for poor physical and societal hygiene. Every form of disease and uncleanness, whether medical social or cultural, breeds better in cities. Certainly regular diseases do: the current coronavirus pandemic is an inevitable consequence of an urban and globally interconnected world where ordinary people travel to other continents. Sooner or later, it was inevitable. And if we keep being globalist, keep being urban, keep being interconnected and with porous borders, it will at some point be worse than this.
And this is pretty bad by itself, the city that I for the moment live in is under a shelter-in-place order. What would a coronavirus-equivalent event happening EVERY YEAR do to our civilization? The global economy would grind to a halt, people would starve. Or else we would just say, "so people will die en masse: the economy must go on." In which case our cities would start looking like the cities of 18th Century Europe when people were dropping of the cholera like flies. That trade-off is coming, sooner or later.
And people will ask, "why does G-d allow this, this isn't nice!" No it isn't nice, but G-d didn't do it. You did it. Follow His Laws which are laws of the natural order of things; or suffer. That's about the size of it.
Monday, March 23, 2020
Monday, March 16, 2020
Weakness, Strength and Time
I will admit to something that many critics say about adherents to religions: I am motivated to believe in G-d because I am weak. Or rather, because I KNOW I am weak. They do not know they are weak, or at least they live like they don't know it. They do not fully embrace the true reality of that.
Man is the measure of all things?
How can anyone not comprehend the full futility of such a thought? And yet this is how people live. Waiting for that inevitable moment, perhaps their last moment, when they understand.
When they understand that they FUCKED UP.
That they were fiddling, not while Rome burned, but while they themselves burned. While Time burned. And now they have run out of time to unfuck it.
You are utterly weak and silly, and you don't know where in the realms of all possible realities you are. Not really. You think you are in control, but you're not.
Knowledge of weakness is actually a strength. One of the best kinds to have.
***
Two powerful dynamics fight within me, but they are not truly fighting. They are building on each other. It only appears to be a battle. One is founded on knowledge of weakness, the other is founded on knowledge of strength.
Knowledge of weakness leads me more and more to depend on the One who is strong, who is guidance. I am not by myself true or pure or perfect or strong, but the One IS.
Faith, not the mere belief in some set of propositions but the complete belief that I am in G-d's hand at all times, this comes from knowledge of weakness. My weakness. My faith is not in a set of position statements. It is faith in the One. Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad. My experience has taught me the abundant benefits of this faith.
If knowledge of weakness is easy to understand, what is knowledge of strength?
To say "strength" is perhaps not the best word. What I am reaching for is absolute severity towards everything in religion that is of human origin. When King Josiah tore down the idols, as it says in the Book of Kings, this was not a statement of his personal strength. This was him embracing absolute severity towards human religion posing as divine. Of course that was easy to identify in the form of polytheisms of various kinds, idols. Of course people rarely have a problem tearing down other people's idols. The strength I am referring to is the strength to challenge your own idols, test them in the fire. Faith is not strong when you just accept what you are told, but when you don't, and you believe in G-d anyway even if you do not believe the human religion you have been given.
What I am trying to get at is, when people first come to faith they often just accept whatever position statements their particular flavor of religion has. They nestle down in the reassurance of that faith, and in that community of faith. I did the same thing in the beginning. When I was a Christian, I felt that the idea that a man was G-d didn't make complete sense, and wasn't even consistent with the Torah, but I set that aside. This was the form of belief that existed in my community. I could not set it aside forever though, thankfully.
People come to faith, whether Christianity Judaism or Islam, and they settle. They come to reconcile their weakness, to find a refuge from their weakness, and far be it from me to say that they don't actually find it. May G-d be merciful to us all.
Having settled, what they don't do is, they don't go pick up a torch and set fire to their own idols. They don't burn away the human trappings of their own faith. To do so is viewed as the opposite of faith, but it actually requires MORE faith. Much more faith.
This I say: G-d alone, and all the rest to the fire. I only want what is absolutely and completely from G-d.
This is knowledge of strength. The knowledge that you CAN do it without human institutions and crutches, and that indeed you MUST. If you claim to love G-d as much as Deuteronomy says you should, with your whole heart and soul and mind and strength, then you must be willing to walk away from human religion. Your faith must not be in human religion nor human community, but in G-d alone.
This I have learned by faith: that I am led on a narrow road which leaves more and more of this world behind me. Like the symbol of blind justice, I must too be blind to the world and to human sensibilities. He is utterly unlike us, and we too must become unlike us. Human crutches, idols and incense and candles, these appeal to our human nature. God with a human face, this appeals to our nature. Idolatry appeals to human nature. That is a nature we must transcend.
Think on the passage from the Torah that says that even if your own wife or child, your brother or sister, starts following other gods, you yourself must be the first to report them and you yourself must be the one to cast the first stone at their stoning. Ponder that a second, the audacity of that. When Aaron's sons offer unclean incense to G-d and they are consumed by fire from G-d, G-d pointedly tells Aaron you must not cry. You must not cry for them, ever. THAT is transcending human nature. Where you no longer see people, you no longer see your own personal love, where all you see is G-d. You are blind to all but G-d. The audacity of that. The purity of it.
THAT is strength. To almost everyone, that would also be absolutely inhuman. But subtract the sting of violent death from it, and understand its meaning. I have not traveled very far in this strength, but I know it's direction.
Did you think that you would remain the same, with your little human life? That G-d would not transform you? He means to, to transform you into something no human eye could see nor mind comprehend. Who can measure the Children of G-d?
But you have to go all in. I feel I need to, anyway.
I am also brought to mind that G-d said He was going to kill Ezekiel's wife, and that Ezekiel is forbidden to mourn it. And that this was a symbol of the destruction that was going to come upon all Israel.
For which a lot of normal people, their response to that would be to say that G-d is a huge meanie and that is a reason for disbelieving in a deity that would do and say such things.
Relative to Ezekiel (and Aaron) being forbidden to mourn, Ezekiel and Aaron and a few others were in a position that few human beings have ever been in. They were the interface, the ambassadors, between G-d and humanity. They are agents of G-d. They are in a position where their devotion to G-d must be absolute, where they must see the actions of G-d, even seemingly terrible actions, as absolutely the only course things can take. They are set apart, and that setting-apart has a price. You think being a prophet is all gravy?
Suppose you were the executioner for a great empire. And the next person up on the chopping block is the person you love the most. And it is commanded that you do your duty. You've got conflicting motivations, don't you? The last thing you want to do, is your duty. You would rather fall on your own headsman's axe than do it. And as a human being subservient to a human emperor, you might in fact choose to die rather than obey.
Well G-d is not a human emperor. G-d is G-d. If He commands something, it is because it MUST happen.
G-d says in Deuteronomy that we must love Him with all our heart, soul and strength. Meaning, we love Him way more than any person or thing in existence, or even our own life. Why would G-d command that? Is He just selfish?
No. It may be hard for people to understand what I am saying, but to love a lesser or derivative level of reality more than the source is fundamental ignorance. Is fundamental darkness. G-d created Ezekiel's wife, created everything about her. Any thing lovable about her, was from Him. How should he love her more than Him, especially with him being a prophet and all, and responsible for the teaching of Israel?
Also bear in mind that destruction that comes from G-d is essentially medical in intent. Now lets take Sodom and Gomorrah as examples: how is the destruction of everyone in those cities, as in the case of many cities in Canaan which were utterly destroyed by the Israelites, how is that medical in intent?
Allowing Sodom to continue would mean many generations living in abject darkness, cut off from all true goodness. Innocent children would be born and would continue to be born into a nightmare of sin and evil. Indeed in the story of the Flood, the whole world was exactly like that and all future generations of human beings would have been born into darkest darkness had G-d left them alone. This was not His will, His compassion for future generations compelled Him to destroy that one.
A Navi, a prophet, or a high priest like Aaron, cannot put his own emotions above his duty to G-d. As part of that duty to G-d, he may in fact be called upon to announce destruction.
That destruction has an important, a corrective purpose, a medical purpose, and the Navi cannot side emotionally with a mankind that has brought that correction upon itself. His loyalty is to G-d alone. He cannot cry at it, any more than the surgeon can cry when the scalpel cuts.
That is a hard saying. But then again, people in the position that Ezekiel and Aaron were in, are an infinitesimally small minority on Earth. For everyone else, cry away.
Man is the measure of all things?
How can anyone not comprehend the full futility of such a thought? And yet this is how people live. Waiting for that inevitable moment, perhaps their last moment, when they understand.
When they understand that they FUCKED UP.
That they were fiddling, not while Rome burned, but while they themselves burned. While Time burned. And now they have run out of time to unfuck it.
You are utterly weak and silly, and you don't know where in the realms of all possible realities you are. Not really. You think you are in control, but you're not.
Knowledge of weakness is actually a strength. One of the best kinds to have.
***
Two powerful dynamics fight within me, but they are not truly fighting. They are building on each other. It only appears to be a battle. One is founded on knowledge of weakness, the other is founded on knowledge of strength.
Knowledge of weakness leads me more and more to depend on the One who is strong, who is guidance. I am not by myself true or pure or perfect or strong, but the One IS.
Faith, not the mere belief in some set of propositions but the complete belief that I am in G-d's hand at all times, this comes from knowledge of weakness. My weakness. My faith is not in a set of position statements. It is faith in the One. Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad. My experience has taught me the abundant benefits of this faith.
If knowledge of weakness is easy to understand, what is knowledge of strength?
To say "strength" is perhaps not the best word. What I am reaching for is absolute severity towards everything in religion that is of human origin. When King Josiah tore down the idols, as it says in the Book of Kings, this was not a statement of his personal strength. This was him embracing absolute severity towards human religion posing as divine. Of course that was easy to identify in the form of polytheisms of various kinds, idols. Of course people rarely have a problem tearing down other people's idols. The strength I am referring to is the strength to challenge your own idols, test them in the fire. Faith is not strong when you just accept what you are told, but when you don't, and you believe in G-d anyway even if you do not believe the human religion you have been given.
What I am trying to get at is, when people first come to faith they often just accept whatever position statements their particular flavor of religion has. They nestle down in the reassurance of that faith, and in that community of faith. I did the same thing in the beginning. When I was a Christian, I felt that the idea that a man was G-d didn't make complete sense, and wasn't even consistent with the Torah, but I set that aside. This was the form of belief that existed in my community. I could not set it aside forever though, thankfully.
People come to faith, whether Christianity Judaism or Islam, and they settle. They come to reconcile their weakness, to find a refuge from their weakness, and far be it from me to say that they don't actually find it. May G-d be merciful to us all.
Having settled, what they don't do is, they don't go pick up a torch and set fire to their own idols. They don't burn away the human trappings of their own faith. To do so is viewed as the opposite of faith, but it actually requires MORE faith. Much more faith.
This I say: G-d alone, and all the rest to the fire. I only want what is absolutely and completely from G-d.
This is knowledge of strength. The knowledge that you CAN do it without human institutions and crutches, and that indeed you MUST. If you claim to love G-d as much as Deuteronomy says you should, with your whole heart and soul and mind and strength, then you must be willing to walk away from human religion. Your faith must not be in human religion nor human community, but in G-d alone.
This I have learned by faith: that I am led on a narrow road which leaves more and more of this world behind me. Like the symbol of blind justice, I must too be blind to the world and to human sensibilities. He is utterly unlike us, and we too must become unlike us. Human crutches, idols and incense and candles, these appeal to our human nature. God with a human face, this appeals to our nature. Idolatry appeals to human nature. That is a nature we must transcend.
Think on the passage from the Torah that says that even if your own wife or child, your brother or sister, starts following other gods, you yourself must be the first to report them and you yourself must be the one to cast the first stone at their stoning. Ponder that a second, the audacity of that. When Aaron's sons offer unclean incense to G-d and they are consumed by fire from G-d, G-d pointedly tells Aaron you must not cry. You must not cry for them, ever. THAT is transcending human nature. Where you no longer see people, you no longer see your own personal love, where all you see is G-d. You are blind to all but G-d. The audacity of that. The purity of it.
THAT is strength. To almost everyone, that would also be absolutely inhuman. But subtract the sting of violent death from it, and understand its meaning. I have not traveled very far in this strength, but I know it's direction.
Did you think that you would remain the same, with your little human life? That G-d would not transform you? He means to, to transform you into something no human eye could see nor mind comprehend. Who can measure the Children of G-d?
But you have to go all in. I feel I need to, anyway.
Then I, justified, will behold Your face;
awake, I am filled with the vision of You.
~Psalm 17:15
awake, I am filled with the vision of You.
~Psalm 17:15
**************Postscript***************
I am also brought to mind that G-d said He was going to kill Ezekiel's wife, and that Ezekiel is forbidden to mourn it. And that this was a symbol of the destruction that was going to come upon all Israel.
For which a lot of normal people, their response to that would be to say that G-d is a huge meanie and that is a reason for disbelieving in a deity that would do and say such things.
Relative to Ezekiel (and Aaron) being forbidden to mourn, Ezekiel and Aaron and a few others were in a position that few human beings have ever been in. They were the interface, the ambassadors, between G-d and humanity. They are agents of G-d. They are in a position where their devotion to G-d must be absolute, where they must see the actions of G-d, even seemingly terrible actions, as absolutely the only course things can take. They are set apart, and that setting-apart has a price. You think being a prophet is all gravy?
Suppose you were the executioner for a great empire. And the next person up on the chopping block is the person you love the most. And it is commanded that you do your duty. You've got conflicting motivations, don't you? The last thing you want to do, is your duty. You would rather fall on your own headsman's axe than do it. And as a human being subservient to a human emperor, you might in fact choose to die rather than obey.
Well G-d is not a human emperor. G-d is G-d. If He commands something, it is because it MUST happen.
G-d says in Deuteronomy that we must love Him with all our heart, soul and strength. Meaning, we love Him way more than any person or thing in existence, or even our own life. Why would G-d command that? Is He just selfish?
No. It may be hard for people to understand what I am saying, but to love a lesser or derivative level of reality more than the source is fundamental ignorance. Is fundamental darkness. G-d created Ezekiel's wife, created everything about her. Any thing lovable about her, was from Him. How should he love her more than Him, especially with him being a prophet and all, and responsible for the teaching of Israel?
Also bear in mind that destruction that comes from G-d is essentially medical in intent. Now lets take Sodom and Gomorrah as examples: how is the destruction of everyone in those cities, as in the case of many cities in Canaan which were utterly destroyed by the Israelites, how is that medical in intent?
Allowing Sodom to continue would mean many generations living in abject darkness, cut off from all true goodness. Innocent children would be born and would continue to be born into a nightmare of sin and evil. Indeed in the story of the Flood, the whole world was exactly like that and all future generations of human beings would have been born into darkest darkness had G-d left them alone. This was not His will, His compassion for future generations compelled Him to destroy that one.
A Navi, a prophet, or a high priest like Aaron, cannot put his own emotions above his duty to G-d. As part of that duty to G-d, he may in fact be called upon to announce destruction.
That destruction has an important, a corrective purpose, a medical purpose, and the Navi cannot side emotionally with a mankind that has brought that correction upon itself. His loyalty is to G-d alone. He cannot cry at it, any more than the surgeon can cry when the scalpel cuts.
That is a hard saying. But then again, people in the position that Ezekiel and Aaron were in, are an infinitesimally small minority on Earth. For everyone else, cry away.
Friday, March 6, 2020
Patterns of Soul
I am not a believer in conspiracy theories. I think that people, especially powerful people, are way too selfish and contentious to ever conspire together on anything like the scale that many conspiracy theories require. Not to mention that I don't think they are bright enough to pull it off without anyone knowing.
I am a believer in unconscious conspiracies. To put it perhaps a little more clearly, tell me a person's worldview and cosmology, their fundamental understanding of things, and their behavior in particular situations can fairly well be predicted. And everyone who shares fundaments of the same worldview will tend to react the same.
The interesting twist is that worldview for probably most people is invisible: to them and to others. Unless you are somehow brought to a radically divergent worldview from the norm, most people unconsciously assume there is one worldview. That they and everyone else see things more or less the same, which is mostly true. You can't even truly see that worldview unless you do not belong to it. To someone outside that worldview, the behavior of those inside it can be predictable, whereas your own behavior is more unpredictable to them.
Lets look at the sudden departure from the Presidential race of Buttigieg, Bloomberg and Klobuchar. This was so completely in unison that my initial thought was, "they all got the memo where they were told that they either quit and endorse Biden or else Hillary was going to give them suicide counseling." ;)
But in fact it is completely understandable. The one unacceptable outcome is not them losing the race or Biden winning it. The unacceptable outcome was their party losing power, losing control, utterly and completely.
An uncontrollable, unknowable factor sitting fat and happy right there at 1600 Pennsylvania. An orange-haired enigma. Sweeping in a Congress full of people willing to do his bidding and afraid not to.
THAT IS THE ULTIMATE LOSS OF CONTROL.
Fear of a total loss of control was more powerful to these three than any other possible fate. Contrast that with Tulsi Gabbard who is still in it despite having no electoral points on the board. Despite the "D" next to her title, she is not a Democrat in the same way that these three are. Gabbard embraces disruption. Buttigieg, Bloomberg and Klobuchar are paranoid about maintaining control over their world, even if it means thwarting their own personal ambitions for a time.
Faith in control, faith in human power, faith in the State, is a big part of the prevailing paradigm. We can see this in China's response to the coronavirus, and also the responses of US Democrats and liberals to it. US liberals are not critical of Trump's response to the coronavirus just because they hate Trump. It is because they believe that it is possible for GOVERNMENT to CONTROL it, and thus it must. In truth government cannot control it, and that is what scares them the most. And there is something about not believing in G-d or an afterlife that adds a certain urgency to this idea of control.
There is an argument to be made that what the Chinese government should have done about the coronavirus is absolutely nothing. The sooner coronavirus gets out there and takes its inevitable toll, the sooner our bodies can develop immunity to it and the less likely that some new worse mutation can erupt that will kill far more people. Viruses are like wildfires, they burn themselves out in time. Once the body is exposed it can develop resistance. So the virus runs out of food.
A virus like this in the modern interconnected world is functionally impossible for human beings to control. That is a word that people of a certain worldview will refuse to hear. Certainly the rulers of China will refuse to hear it. What did they do the minute they realized what they had on their hands? Turn 11 million people into prisoners in their own cities. Can you imagine the response in the US if the entire city of New York were absolutely shut off from the outside world? The entire city quarantined?
And yet based on the worldview, the internal operating system of China's leadership (and not only them,) that was the only thing they COULD do. They had to shut down Wuhan, even if it led to more suffering in the long run than leaving it be. The one unacceptable option, the one great boogey-man of people of a certain worldview, is the idea that we are not in control. That Government is not in control. That there are certain things that are beyond human power.
IF they acknowledge that, that they CANNOT stop the coronavirus and that NO ONE COULD, what else can they not control? Why are they even in charge at all? This would challenge the people's faith in government and the government's faith in itself. So they had to come down on the coronavirus like a ton of bricks, even if it screws us all in the end. The deified State cannot be found to be wrong, or far worse, to be powerless.
Getting back to where I started, unconscious conspiracies. These worldviews, patterns of soul, will compel action with a grip that is both ironclad and invisible. Because of course, within the prevailing paradigm, its reactions are only reactions to reality. They are the rational choice. To behave otherwise would be crazy. The non-rational underpinnings, the faith that justifies the rationale, is invisible. The atheist leaders of China are adherents to a faith, as are the Democratic establishment, as indeed is everyone.
And so it is no surprise that people act in such a way that it looks sometimes like there is a conspiracy when in fact the only conspiracy is their shared worldview. I forget the title and author of the book but there was this book written in the 50's or 60's that predicted many of the events that subsequently happened, and that this was going to all be a part of a "world communist conspiracy." In fact many of the predictions made absolutely came true, but that doesn't mean that there was any communist conspiracy. The Soviet Union is long dead. Rather, the prevalence and popularity of certain fundamental worldviews compel human society in particular directions. This author simply understood unconsciously that a certain worldview would have those consequences. From removing prayer in school to the sexual promiscuity of the late Sixties and after, the normalization of abortion, and ultimately the normalization of homosexuality and many other such things is rationally implied from the worldview.
It was not a conspiracy. It was the logical consequence of worldview, and that worldview is now the dominant one. That worldview also implies the functional deification of the State and the absolute priority of human external control over everything. To this worldview, the idea of a problem beyond human rational control is the great yawning chasm that looms beneath the foundations of their world.
What do I think about the coronavirus? I think we are all in G-d's hands. I am in G-d's hands. I certainly do not want to get the virus, and I do not want to die any more than anyone else does. I take sensible precautions. But my worldview dictates that in the final analysis I don't get to decide. I am not in control beyond a tiny sphere of influence. G-d is in control. And I am more than okay with that.
I die, I live, it is in G-d's hands.
Just as the fact that I am even here now despite nearly dying many times in my life; that I am here now and actually not in bad shape for an old man, was in G-d's hands
Just as whether or not I even take my next breath is in G-d's hands
And when my time comes, it will be time. That's okay. I hope that won't be for a long time yet, but I don't know. He knows.
I am a believer in unconscious conspiracies. To put it perhaps a little more clearly, tell me a person's worldview and cosmology, their fundamental understanding of things, and their behavior in particular situations can fairly well be predicted. And everyone who shares fundaments of the same worldview will tend to react the same.
The interesting twist is that worldview for probably most people is invisible: to them and to others. Unless you are somehow brought to a radically divergent worldview from the norm, most people unconsciously assume there is one worldview. That they and everyone else see things more or less the same, which is mostly true. You can't even truly see that worldview unless you do not belong to it. To someone outside that worldview, the behavior of those inside it can be predictable, whereas your own behavior is more unpredictable to them.
Lets look at the sudden departure from the Presidential race of Buttigieg, Bloomberg and Klobuchar. This was so completely in unison that my initial thought was, "they all got the memo where they were told that they either quit and endorse Biden or else Hillary was going to give them suicide counseling." ;)
But in fact it is completely understandable. The one unacceptable outcome is not them losing the race or Biden winning it. The unacceptable outcome was their party losing power, losing control, utterly and completely.
An uncontrollable, unknowable factor sitting fat and happy right there at 1600 Pennsylvania. An orange-haired enigma. Sweeping in a Congress full of people willing to do his bidding and afraid not to.
THAT IS THE ULTIMATE LOSS OF CONTROL.
Fear of a total loss of control was more powerful to these three than any other possible fate. Contrast that with Tulsi Gabbard who is still in it despite having no electoral points on the board. Despite the "D" next to her title, she is not a Democrat in the same way that these three are. Gabbard embraces disruption. Buttigieg, Bloomberg and Klobuchar are paranoid about maintaining control over their world, even if it means thwarting their own personal ambitions for a time.
Faith in control, faith in human power, faith in the State, is a big part of the prevailing paradigm. We can see this in China's response to the coronavirus, and also the responses of US Democrats and liberals to it. US liberals are not critical of Trump's response to the coronavirus just because they hate Trump. It is because they believe that it is possible for GOVERNMENT to CONTROL it, and thus it must. In truth government cannot control it, and that is what scares them the most. And there is something about not believing in G-d or an afterlife that adds a certain urgency to this idea of control.
There is an argument to be made that what the Chinese government should have done about the coronavirus is absolutely nothing. The sooner coronavirus gets out there and takes its inevitable toll, the sooner our bodies can develop immunity to it and the less likely that some new worse mutation can erupt that will kill far more people. Viruses are like wildfires, they burn themselves out in time. Once the body is exposed it can develop resistance. So the virus runs out of food.
A virus like this in the modern interconnected world is functionally impossible for human beings to control. That is a word that people of a certain worldview will refuse to hear. Certainly the rulers of China will refuse to hear it. What did they do the minute they realized what they had on their hands? Turn 11 million people into prisoners in their own cities. Can you imagine the response in the US if the entire city of New York were absolutely shut off from the outside world? The entire city quarantined?
And yet based on the worldview, the internal operating system of China's leadership (and not only them,) that was the only thing they COULD do. They had to shut down Wuhan, even if it led to more suffering in the long run than leaving it be. The one unacceptable option, the one great boogey-man of people of a certain worldview, is the idea that we are not in control. That Government is not in control. That there are certain things that are beyond human power.
IF they acknowledge that, that they CANNOT stop the coronavirus and that NO ONE COULD, what else can they not control? Why are they even in charge at all? This would challenge the people's faith in government and the government's faith in itself. So they had to come down on the coronavirus like a ton of bricks, even if it screws us all in the end. The deified State cannot be found to be wrong, or far worse, to be powerless.
Getting back to where I started, unconscious conspiracies. These worldviews, patterns of soul, will compel action with a grip that is both ironclad and invisible. Because of course, within the prevailing paradigm, its reactions are only reactions to reality. They are the rational choice. To behave otherwise would be crazy. The non-rational underpinnings, the faith that justifies the rationale, is invisible. The atheist leaders of China are adherents to a faith, as are the Democratic establishment, as indeed is everyone.
And so it is no surprise that people act in such a way that it looks sometimes like there is a conspiracy when in fact the only conspiracy is their shared worldview. I forget the title and author of the book but there was this book written in the 50's or 60's that predicted many of the events that subsequently happened, and that this was going to all be a part of a "world communist conspiracy." In fact many of the predictions made absolutely came true, but that doesn't mean that there was any communist conspiracy. The Soviet Union is long dead. Rather, the prevalence and popularity of certain fundamental worldviews compel human society in particular directions. This author simply understood unconsciously that a certain worldview would have those consequences. From removing prayer in school to the sexual promiscuity of the late Sixties and after, the normalization of abortion, and ultimately the normalization of homosexuality and many other such things is rationally implied from the worldview.
It was not a conspiracy. It was the logical consequence of worldview, and that worldview is now the dominant one. That worldview also implies the functional deification of the State and the absolute priority of human external control over everything. To this worldview, the idea of a problem beyond human rational control is the great yawning chasm that looms beneath the foundations of their world.
What do I think about the coronavirus? I think we are all in G-d's hands. I am in G-d's hands. I certainly do not want to get the virus, and I do not want to die any more than anyone else does. I take sensible precautions. But my worldview dictates that in the final analysis I don't get to decide. I am not in control beyond a tiny sphere of influence. G-d is in control. And I am more than okay with that.
I die, I live, it is in G-d's hands.
Just as the fact that I am even here now despite nearly dying many times in my life; that I am here now and actually not in bad shape for an old man, was in G-d's hands
Just as whether or not I even take my next breath is in G-d's hands
And when my time comes, it will be time. That's okay. I hope that won't be for a long time yet, but I don't know. He knows.
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