Not to pronounce, but to notate in the tones of pronouncement: we live in a world dominated by dominance. Seeing it as violence is like blaming the hand that slaps your face.
True Christian values were no more or less violent than any other mammalian way of being. It was the connection to something larger and more lasting than earthly triumphalism that was the core teaching. Until it was perverted into a program of domestication.
Again, the message went from love one another to do what you're told.
From a code of preservation of truly human connectedness with the ground and with God, to a code of terror and craven submission. And protection from terror, though seemingly the opposite of violence, is nothing more than a dominance strategy.
That perversion begins with Paul of Tarsus.
The Roman empire's fall wasn't inevitable anymore than its rise was. There are structural banks to the flow of temporal change, and seeming inevitabilities - the shape of the mountain, the composition of the soil - just like a river.
But even the deepest channel can shift; the surface of the earth itself floats, and the planet, too, is subject to the bumps and grinds of stellar unexpectedness.
Our morality's all centered on the temporal, con-sequent events, motives that bring things toward the actual from out of the possible.
-
But see it from an eternal perspective: one thing doesn't lead to another. They just sit there; only they don't. Because time is a subset of the eternal, not in a different room, a different part of the house from it.
The priesthood serves itself at the expense of the congregation.
The progression of wonder is met at the door to heaven, in the sense of the sky, up there, out there, by smug confidence men. Cosmological gibberish designed to confuse the rural hick - first time in the big urb, staring in wonder up at the infinite "buildings", and the astro-con pulls hims aside and runs the scam.
Limits to the universe, oh yeah.
And God only talks to the obedient through those who must be obeyed.
And your individual life is more important than anything you might be a part of, anything that might require the sacrifice of your entire being.
Christianity as it's now configured rewards the self, appeals to the self, uses the hungers of the self to amalgamate its corporate entities.
But the lesson at its source was sacrifice.
That was perverted into, "Well, He did, so we don't have to." He gave it all up so we can accumulate, we can enjoy the rewards, we can transcend the truncated terms of biological living through docility and obedience.
-
Every earthly thing I've seen that looked like it had celestial origin has been crippled with the weight of usurpation, co-opted, encrusted with the profane; the purer the substance the more profane.
Consistently the things and people that have looked the darkest - fierce, uncompromising - have proven to be the truest, and the light most often nothing more than the gleam of hoarded gold.
-
The seriousness of the conflict is more than any modern avenue of expression will support. It isn't your soul that's in the balance, it's all of us, and what's possible - the rise of the temporal toward the eternal.
They bargain it down to the meat you need to exist, the body and its blind demands.
The dynamic is precisely the same as what domestic animals all went through. At first the rebels were culled. And culled again with each generation. The docile were bred to the desirable. And again and again through generations. Until now they can't live without that fence and trough.
Neither can most of us. And that means dependence. And that means dominance. Without the slightest trace of violence. Unless you count the death of possibility as a violent act.
True Christian values were no more or less violent than any other mammalian way of being. It was the connection to something larger and more lasting than earthly triumphalism that was the core teaching. Until it was perverted into a program of domestication.
Again, the message went from love one another to do what you're told.
From a code of preservation of truly human connectedness with the ground and with God, to a code of terror and craven submission. And protection from terror, though seemingly the opposite of violence, is nothing more than a dominance strategy.
That perversion begins with Paul of Tarsus.
The Roman empire's fall wasn't inevitable anymore than its rise was. There are structural banks to the flow of temporal change, and seeming inevitabilities - the shape of the mountain, the composition of the soil - just like a river.
But even the deepest channel can shift; the surface of the earth itself floats, and the planet, too, is subject to the bumps and grinds of stellar unexpectedness.
Our morality's all centered on the temporal, con-sequent events, motives that bring things toward the actual from out of the possible.
-
But see it from an eternal perspective: one thing doesn't lead to another. They just sit there; only they don't. Because time is a subset of the eternal, not in a different room, a different part of the house from it.
The priesthood serves itself at the expense of the congregation.
The progression of wonder is met at the door to heaven, in the sense of the sky, up there, out there, by smug confidence men. Cosmological gibberish designed to confuse the rural hick - first time in the big urb, staring in wonder up at the infinite "buildings", and the astro-con pulls hims aside and runs the scam.
Limits to the universe, oh yeah.
And God only talks to the obedient through those who must be obeyed.
And your individual life is more important than anything you might be a part of, anything that might require the sacrifice of your entire being.
Christianity as it's now configured rewards the self, appeals to the self, uses the hungers of the self to amalgamate its corporate entities.
But the lesson at its source was sacrifice.
That was perverted into, "Well, He did, so we don't have to." He gave it all up so we can accumulate, we can enjoy the rewards, we can transcend the truncated terms of biological living through docility and obedience.
-
Every earthly thing I've seen that looked like it had celestial origin has been crippled with the weight of usurpation, co-opted, encrusted with the profane; the purer the substance the more profane.
Consistently the things and people that have looked the darkest - fierce, uncompromising - have proven to be the truest, and the light most often nothing more than the gleam of hoarded gold.
-
The seriousness of the conflict is more than any modern avenue of expression will support. It isn't your soul that's in the balance, it's all of us, and what's possible - the rise of the temporal toward the eternal.
They bargain it down to the meat you need to exist, the body and its blind demands.
The dynamic is precisely the same as what domestic animals all went through. At first the rebels were culled. And culled again with each generation. The docile were bred to the desirable. And again and again through generations. Until now they can't live without that fence and trough.
Neither can most of us. And that means dependence. And that means dominance. Without the slightest trace of violence. Unless you count the death of possibility as a violent act.
