Laws of Nature

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.

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.

Then I, justified, will behold Your face;
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.

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.

Profanity and Humor

I was not raised in a particularly Christian (or other monotheistic belief) home. I wasn't a believer in G-d for the majority of my life. I have been known to curse like a sailor on occasion. I also enjoy bawdy humor - depending. In other words, something that is sexual for the sake of being sexual, I am very unlikely to like that. But there is a lot of humor that could charitably be called rude humor that I nevertheless find hilarious. I have a sort of peculiar taste in that sort of thing, not everything that comedians dish out these days I find funny. Probably most of it I do not find funny.

There is also a special case for profanity that I will bring up shortly.

When I measure that against the archetype of the pious individual, well typically and historically and culturally that kind of person would not approve at all. The pious person who curses like a sailor is not an idea that sits well. For the Christians, we have James who was surely the very procrustean bed of all dour pious serious people, speaking very pointedly about the topic. Here's what we think of: these people do not curse. In a sense I envy that.

But I am not a Christian, and as is my wont I went directly to the Tanakh where I found... virtually nothing about it. There is the commandment about taking the Lord's name in vain, which I think has nothing to do with what you say when you stub your toe in the night and everything to do with what you say when you are overtly trying to represent G-d's will to other people. When a preacher tries to say that G-d wants you to give him money for a new Lexus, he is breaking the commandment. When I stub my toe in the night, I am not.

Now obviously that might be taken as unintentional cursing. What about intentional cursing? Well, G-d is depicted in the Tanakh as a passionate G-d, and in that respect I could be called a true child of His. I am passionate. We live in a world of environmental collapse, of the glorification of sexual immorality, of decadence, of abortion. Actual communism becoming popular in America. Words sometimes fail to convey the degree of dismay that I might feel, looking at the fuckery that surrounds me.

Notice what I did right there? I could have said evil, or ignorance, or sin, and those words would have just slid right down your ears with nary a bump. The words ignorance and evil are not truly offensive anymore. I drop the F-bomb though, and your ears prick up at least a little bit. But what I am talking about is wickedness, is ignorance. THAT is the fuckery I am actually talking about.

If the greatest witness against using curse words is James in the New Testament (which again isn't scripture for me, but is for a lot of people,) then the best witness for them is in there too. I am not talking about Jesus, who could curse up a blue streak. Arguably Jesus did far worse than just utter an expletive now and again. For people who believe Jesus is part of the godhead or something, when he tells you "go to hell," he means you are literally going to hell. ;) Like when he cursed the fig tree, the tree died. He cursed that tree to death.

If people croaked every time I said a curse word, I can promise you I would choose my words much more carefully. ;)

No, the witness I want to call is John the Baptist. John the Baptist kicked asses with his words. He extracted the sin from your body with his verbal boot being planted in your anus. Metaphorically speaking. ;) Now unfortunately we don't know a huge amount of detail about John's life, but as he is commonly portrayed it is impossible to imagine John meeting his executioners meekly. He damned them at the top of his voice, just as he did all along. He cussed them up a blue streak.

Now, it is not that every time I use a cuss word, I am doing it in righteous indignation. When you cuss as often as me, it can't be that. And it is not that I think that cursing is becoming or attractive because it is not.

However, there are cases where cursing is not only acceptable but virtually mandatory. If you are talking about people murdering their own sons and daughters in abortuaries, if you are not cursing, you are not mad enough. You are not as offended as you should be.

If you are talking about Stateolatry and communism IN AMERICA and you are not cursing, you are not offended enough. 

If you are talking about the normalization of sexual immorality, and the sexualization and leftist indoctrination of children by such things as Drag Queen Story Hour, and you are not cursing, you are nothing but cowed weak sauce. You are compromising with them merely by your lack of outrage about something that should be outrageous.

"I like my babies quartered and braised in barbecue sauce, how about you?"

"Well I really believe, it is my personal opinion, that killing and eating babies is wrong."

"Shut up bigot!"

NO.

You speak about such things in the tone of voice that is just barely lower than the tone of voice you would have if you had a pitchfork in your right hand, a torch in your left, and a barrel of boiling tar at your side. Let us remember that people like King Josiah and Elijah did not reason with such people. They killed them and scattered their bones on their pagan altars.

Look at the Doom 2016 intro to get an idea of what that attitude is.

RIP AND TEAR, UNTIL IT IS DONE.


That's the attitude. The Tanakh does not recommend dialogue with evil. It recommends destroying it. It says to contain the cancer, destroy it, expunge it utterly with violence from the midst of the people.

However, we do live in a different world now. We live in a civil secular society. The state of ignorance we are dealing with is such, that there is honestly no point to that any more. The cancer has become the body, we are now the invading cells that live barely at the tolerance of the cancerous whole. But we should speak at least as if we know how wrong this is!

That doesn't excuse probably most of the cursing I do. Like I say, I'm a passionate guy. But sometimes cursing is not just acceptable but virtually obligatory.

Sacred vs Desecrated

A lot of Christian churches (and probably synagogues too, and other places) have been infected with a sort of cartesian dualism. Souls matter, Matter doesn't matter. We care about people. The stuff they use, not so much.

Indeed this is not notably different from the philosophy of postmodernism, in which they might if you twist their arm say that people matter, but they have no basis for saying that. More likely, they will say their own people matter, to them. Not a lot else does.

Part of this is part and parcel with having a heavily mercantile nation. Everything is a commodity for sale. People too, ultimately. You can at least say that in this commercial paradigm, things do have value: cash value. When you buy a roll of paper towels, gratitude is irrelevant. You paid for it, although you did not give that tree life nor create it's marvelous design.

A world in which "stuff," the created world, does not matter is eventually a world in which nothing matters. It is a desecrated world.

All of this is a roundabout way of starting to talk about what kind of worldview a person of G-d should have. The worldview of a child of G-d should be that EVERYTHING matters. Everything is a gift from G-d to you. Use that gift WISELY, use it carefully.

Lets do a thought experiment. Read this paragraph and then close your eyes and imagine it. You are being led to your execution. Your arms are tied up, there are shackles on your legs, there is no possibility of escape. But your execution is to happen in a very large if slightly wild and disused garden. So as you are being led slowly (there are shackles on your feet) through this garden, you see everything in it. Flowers and birds, and bumblebees stumbling from flower to flower like drunken pandas. You see a fountain in the garden, with fresh clean water bubbling over it. You see the stones in the pathway, each a slightly different hue. You see the black rich soil. You see the blue sky overhead with just a few wisps of cloud. You see a robin feeding its young. As you walk towards the guillotine, you see the faces of the few people who will be attending your death, and suddenly the expressions of their faces speak volumes about their inner state. Anger. Mournfulness. Dull dutifulness of a soldier who has seen death and no longer cares. Haughty judgement. Pity. Grief.

Now close your eyes and imagine it.

Are not all the little things of this world precious to you, now that you will be leaving the world? What would you not give to go back to that fountain and sit by it awhile, and watch the birds? You would give anything to go back there, but all the money in the world will not return you to that place of life. Even the expressions of the people, even the people who are about to preside over your death, you see them in a new light. If only you had seen all this before, but now your life is to be over.

"In time of trouble, why should I fear
the encompassing evil of those who

would supplant me -

men who trust in their riches

who glory in their great wealth?
Ah, it cannot redeem a man
or pay his ransom to G-d,
the price of life is too high;
and so one ceases to be, forever.

Shall he live eternally and never

see the grave?
For one sees that the wise die,

that the foolish and ignorant both perish,

leaving their wealth to others.

The grave is their eternal home,
the dwelling place of all generations

of those once famous on earth.
Man does not abide in honor,

he is like the beasts that perish.

Such is the fate of those who are
self-confident, the end of those
pleased with their own talk.

Sheeplike they head for Sheol,

with Death as their shepherd
The upright shall rule over them at

daybreak, and their form shall

waste away in Sheol till its

nobility be gone.

But G-d will redeem my life from the clutches

of Sheol, for He will take me."

~Psalm 49:6-16

The attitude of a child of G-d should be that EVERYTHING is a gift from G-d. EVERYTHING. Indeed you could not draw your next breath unless He willed it. Thus, everything in this world is precious. There is nothing trivial. Thus, you should use every gift of G-d with care, AS precious. Use it wisely and be thankful for it.

While only G-d is holy, everything is sacred in the sense that it is a gift from G-d and only G-d could give it. To desecrate what G-d has given is the ultimate ingratitude.

The attitude of the modern world is, we take stuff from the natural world and turn it into products and then sell them. Whether in a truer perception of need anyone really NEEDS what we make is irrelevant, and if we make too much of that product then the only issue is that we have excess inventory. Which is perceived as bad business, but not as a sin. But it IS a sin.

Too many people have no comprehension of the difference between need and want. To destroy the gift that G-d has given you, the natural world, for desire and not true need is a sin. This unfortunately is what the modern world is built on, desire, overconsumption. It is therefore desirable if possible to absent yourself from that world.

Only destroy for true need. Be thankful for what G-d has given you, because no one else can create a world. Be thankful for your life, because no one else can give it to you, and no one else can ever give it back once lost. No amount of money will give you life, and no amount of money can create a world and a universe.

Give thanks to G-d, and use wisely His Creation.

The Center of the World

The place in a synagogue building, the ark, which holds the Torah scrolls, at least in most cases, points towards Jerusalem. Or in other words, if you are facing the ark you are facing towards Jerusalem. This is based on passages in 2nd Chronicles, and as far as I am aware, nowhere else. The Muslims are even more location-based, praying towards Mecca 5 times a day. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that this idea is based on subservience to a temporal power, not G-d. Even if the temporal power is a temporal religious power.

Since it is the Tanakh that concerns me, lets look at the passages in 2 Chronicles 6. This is Solomon's dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem. And he prefaces it with basically skepticism that a house for G-d on Earth is a concept that even makes sense.

But will God really dwell on earth with humans?
The heavens, even the highest heavens, cannot

contain you. How much less this temple I have built!

~2 Chronicles 6:18

The idea of a house for G-d that is more than a meeting place for his worshipers is fundamentally a conception that is alien to the G-d of the Torah. The 2nd Commandment makes plain that no image or anything else built by Man is to represent G-d. Yes, there was the tabernacle and the Temple, but this was because the religion of the Torah (which was directed towards a primitive and pastoral people) involved animal sacrifice, and you need a specific place for that. You may notice, there is no longer a tabernacle or a temple and no longer animal sacrifices in Judaism. There were things in the Torah that were for that people and that time, and other things that were for all people for all time.

Also, when Solomon speaks of "praying towards" the Temple, it is not clear if he means the one praying is physically pointed at the Temple, or whether he is directing his prayers towards that place. In other words, since the entire address is a kind of prose poem, we don't really know if he meant literally or metaphorically. The address was not an instruction to pray towards the Temple. The only issue is whether Solomon thought that instruction already existed somehow, but how could that be if he only just finished building the Temple? Did people pray towards the tabernacle beforehand? But the tabernacle was for the first generations of the Exodus a mobile sacrificial site. So obviously the place where it was located wasn't itself important.

Also, we have to appreciate that the Tanakh does contain the words of godless or pagan people. The context makes that clear. If the Tanakh says that Ahab was a wicked king who disobeyed G-d, and then it says that Ahab said or did X, obviously we should not be looking to Ahab for instruction. His words and actions are included to tell the narrative, not to tell US what to do.

What about Solomon? Well it is reasonable to say that Solomon worshiped the Lord or at least went through the motions, but it is also clear that he worshiped other gods too in clear violation of the Torah. His wives were foreign pagans in violation of the Torah. He was functionally a polytheist. Or, like many rulers, he just aped devotion to the gods of whoever he wanted to win to his side. So Hiram of Tyre was his buddy, so Solomon worshiped Tyre's gods along with the G-d of Abraham.

Sooo... should we be looking to Solomon for religious instruction? I would think not. So whatever Solomon says as religious instruction, unless it is already in the Torah, is safe to disregard.

The idea that one place or a few places are the "centers of the world" is a fundamentally pagan conception. The idea that one place or several places are "holier" than others, is pagan. We can get a good idea of that by looking at how Catholics regard their holy sites, since Catholicism co-opted paganism heavily. G-d does not have or need a house. Worshipers might like to have a house to worship in, to keep the rain off their heads, but to the extent that they start to regard it as more than a structure they have delved into paganism.

The meeting place of heaven and earth is not a place, it is in the heart of anyone who prays to the Only True G-d in absolute sincerity. The Shekhinah, the glory of G-d or the immanence of G-d on Earth that was believed to rest on the Ark of the Covenant in the tabernacle, is upon the heart of every true believer who prays in earnestness.

This can happen anywhere, pointed in any direction. Any belief otherwise is bowing to temporal human earthly power, not G-d.

Sayyid Qutb

To be genuinely religious is to  be  an extremist, in the eyes of the World. I am a religious extremist: I happen to be a largely peaceful one.

This is sort of a counterpoint to my previous post, and in it I will be talking about something that I don't usually talk about: the viewpoints of an Islamic scholar. An Islamic scholar who, intentionally or unintentionally, inspired a generation of Islamic militants and terrorists.

Now, I don't think that Muhammad was a prophet. I follow the Torah and the Tanakh. But you can listen to all sorts of people and take what is good from it, and I happen to think some of what Qtub said was actually good. So, lets take it as given that I think Qutb was genuinely an insightful guy, if misguided in certain respects.

What I am going to talk about is the mistake he made, and consequently the mistake that those who followed his teachings and engaged in violence and terrorism made.

(Well some of those were probably just plain bad people and didn't need a reason but lets assume for the sake of argument that guys like Ayman al-Zawahiri and bin Laden were just trying to follow Qtub's lead. Qtub was dead, executed, before they became particularly active, so he wasn't around to lead or teach them.)

What was the mistake I am referring to?

Qtub and at least initially guys like al-Zawahiri were operating on two fundamentally contradictory assumptions. One, that countries that describe themselves as Muslim are not actually Muslim and that "Real Islam" is, if not extinct, severely moribund. This is because of Jahiliyyah, ignorance, a world system of spiritual darkness. And second, that these fundamentally secular "muslim" people in fundamentally secular countries following man-made laws would, upon being reintroduced to "Real Islam," rise up against their secular leaders and institute rule by G-d's law alone.

Now this contradictory assumption is based on the fact that Muhammad did in fact rapidly conquer the original world of Jahiliyyah, the pagan, Jewish and Christian world in which his movement was founded. So they might say the light of the Quran wowed the people and gave Muhammad & Co. a degree of success and conquest that would seem improbable. The force of the Quran alone, so this thinking goes, conquered that part of the world. Thus, it could do it again.

However, the people that Muhammad converted, did not believe they were already Muslims. This if you will is an additional level of Jahiliyyah that Qtub did not account for. Therefore his followers' attempts to overthrow secular rule and institute Shariah law alone, instead of spontaneously arousing a movement from the populace, failed miserably.

An example of this is the attack on foreign tourists at an archeological site. Now, people say that at least some people in Muslim countries were dancing in the streets when 911 happened. IF that is true, it is because America was viewed as a geopolitical enemy. Not a religious one. America supports Israel: most Muslims do not like Israel because of their treatment of the Palestinians. When terrorists attacked European tourists at an ancient Egyptian archaeological site, the Egyptian people on the whole were furious. Why?

For a very secular, Jahiliyyah reason: tourists brought money. Many livelihoods were dependent on tourists. The Egyptian government and people as one condemned the attack and condemned others that followed just as vociferously. It was these attacks that turned the Egyptian people AWAY from Islamic fundamentalism, not TOWARD a Shariah state. Their plan to inspire an uprising utterly failed. Indeed, before the US government turned them into a sort of hero for some, Al Qaeda was really sort of a sad discredited organization on the downturn.

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What lessons can we draw from this? No sane person thinks that killing random European tourists was morally acceptable, and it certainly wasn't useful. If Qtub's idea was radical devotion to Shariah, al Zawahiri's slaughter of innocents isn't in accordance with it. Qtub himself may or may not have been involved in trying to assassinate Egypt's secular leader (that's why he was executed,) but that's a military target. Not a civilian one. Of course Qtub was accused of plotting even more dire things than that, but for those things we will never know where Nasser's propaganda ends and Qtub's own thought and actions begin. He was accused of plotting to flood the entire lower Nile valley, killing untold people. Did he actually plan that? We'll never know for sure. My guess is that he did not.

Okay, lets forget about Islamic militants. Lets take a more sensible example from militant Christians. When Paul Jennings Hill killed an abortion doctor and his bodyguard, was that a morally acceptable action? In my opinion, yes. Laudable even. He killed a person to prevent them from continuing to kill innocent people.

Did it accomplish a damn thing in the big picture? Is America more likely to outlaw abortion now than before he did it?

Absolutely not. So should he have done it? I would argue, no. Which is to say, it was not an effective means to what should be our shared end, eliminating abortion altogether.

According to the Torah, the whole community was supposed to enforce the Law. If someone was convicted of a crime that carried the death penalty, the whole community stoned him. In that context, it was obligatory for a community member to stone that person. It would have been immoral for them not to. Neither was one stone likely to kill someone. The community killed that person. That's the very reason why stoning as versus some other execution method was commanded.

That condition, the whole community enforcing the Law, does not exist in America and especially not as regards abortion. Should an abortion provider be stoned to death? Yes. Is it obligatory for ME by myself to stone them to death, in the absence of such a religious community and their shared obligation to uphold the Law? No.

In the previous post, I said that a "ends justify means" morality is immoral. If you justify an action by its intended end, any action could be considered moral. True moral action is motivated by principle. No end can justify the taking of a life. Some principles can. So for instance, if I am on a liferaft in the middle of the arctic ocean, and we are running out of food or taking on water, pushing my fellow passenger off the boat is still murder. It is not murder if HE was trying to push me or someone else off the boat beforehand.

Just as much however, the lack of viable ends can justify the lack of action, if that action is not obligatory. So in the stoning example above, the community stoning the person is obligatory and you as a community member taking part in that action is obligatory. Where the community does not exist, the action is not obligatory. It may be laudable, as Paul Hill killing that abortion doctor was laudable, but you are not an immoral person if you do not do it. There, ends can take precedence because the action is not morally required.

Suppose shooting kids in schoolyards was the law of the land. You could legally hunt kids in schoolyards. Would it be laudable if I were to shoot the shooter? Absolutely. Am I morally required to shoot the shooter? Absent a direct individually-binding commandment from G-d Himself, no.

Qtub's fundamental mistake was to underestimate Jahiliyyah. It is ironic that the person who made that concept relevant for the modern world (or at least the modern Islamic world) did not truly understand it. While I am not the person to recommend readings from the New Testament, he should have read the last few chapters of the Gospel of John. In it, Jesus says that SATAN is the ruler of this world.

The supposedly Muslim population of Egypt, they weren't slaves to Jahiliyyah against their will. They wanted to be secular in outlook, while hanging on to selected parts of Islam. They wanted Jahiliyya, just as the overwhelming majority of humans on Earth want Jahiliyya.

In a world absolutely dominated by Jahiliyya then, including human law allowing what G-d's law condemns, the most constructive actions are to

1. Wait on G-d's action. Jahiliyya inevitably leads to destruction as it is anti-life in the long run. Destruction can sow the ground for new growth. That destruction is not ours to create, it is the inevitable consequence of fighting G-d's law. We must prepare as if that destruction is imminent, whether it is or not.

2. Build a core community that accepts G-d's law and does not participate in the Jahiliyya-version of religion like modern Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Instead, it would be based on G-d's word in the Tanakh alone. Qtub believed, correctly, that the word of G-d must not be taken merely as a subject of intellectual or cultural curiosity or interest, but like the commands of a commanding officer in war. A community that takes its lead from the Tanakh alone, not from cultural Judaism or cultural Christianity, would be a serious enough endeavor for several lifetimes.

Thus actions like those of Paul Hill, though commendable, are not either required or useful. How much less the actions of those like Eric Rudolph in the Olympic Park bombing which both violated G-d's law in its action (killing innocents) and was at best not useful for moving the country towards those goals he believed in. You don't get to kill innocents to prove the point that killing innocents is immoral. He broke G-d's law. It is ironic then, that while Rudolph is cooling his heels in Supermax, Hill was executed.

"Forget it Jake, it's Jahiliyya." ;)