Forgive me, dear readers; more senseless brain spew.
Way back when I first started this blog, I knew it would be raw, but not necessarily fresh. The point is not polished presentation from long consideration; that’s for magazines and books. Blogging is my test bed for expression. And there are no objective standards for talent and wisdom. There is only marketing, though precious little of an open market. What catches the eye of vast numbers for reading is either what they perceive necessary for their future or what they perceive most entertaining. If you don’t think vendors manipulate perceptions, then you don’t understand marketing. To avoid that, I started from the position that my blog was simply my personal journal that others were permitted to read. I proposed blogging for myself even if no one read it but me.
I would pity you for such an empty life, but if you tried to analyze what I’ve posted here over the past 5+ years, you would detect changes in what occupies my thoughts, some significant. Living inside my own head, I would save you the trouble by offering the opinion that I’ve become increasingly otherworldly in focus. Sometimes I’m a little slow and it takes God a long time to get through to me, but I am utterly certain that He is leading me from glory unto glory.
The paradox is that, as one becomes more otherworldly, one becomes more practical. That’s how it’s supposed to work. As more of your attention is focused on things that simply can’t be expressed in any human language, the more you are forced to find expressions that apply those otherworldly visions.
You don’t know Karl Marx — he intentionally lied to many about his real loyalties — but his statement that religion is an opiate to reduce people’s involvement in the real world is part of the truth. What Marx offered as the “real world” was only one more opiate, though. Religion is a human construct in pursuit of moral imperatives, and communism is just one more religion. So is democracy and every economic theory and sports and entertainment, etc. To construct policy and goals for human behavior is inherently a moral statement, an expression that “this matters.” To then go on and construct a system to regulate the behavior in pursuit of what matters is religion in effect. You’ll be herded into one or another or even several because it is part of human essence.
Spirituality is another matter entirely. Marx attempted to deny it existed, as have many others. Denying it as much a religion as embracing it. Way too many have merely claimed spirituality is real, but then corrupted it into something far less. To embrace a level above the mind and outside this universe, a transcendent reality that is beyond human ken, bears with it a raft of logical conclusions. Unlike Marx, I’m not in the business of selling another brand of opiate and I have no interest in herding anyone. I’m quite willing to piss off everyone for the sake of self-honesty. Speaking entirely from my own wild perspective, my spirituality says things like this:
- Christianity as we know it has become the slave of political activism. Forget the words and look at the actual emphases (“this matters”). You’ll see little more than marketing of something entirely secular. Never mind the diversity; it’s just multiple flavors of the same stuff and all of it pretty toxic to your morals, if you take it too seriously.
- Islam is a lifestyle with similar sectarian flavors as Christianity. However, they all tend to be more consistent with the accepted Scriptures than does mainstream Christianity. Islam makes little pretense to otherworldly concerns, having absorbed some of the outlook of Judaism.
- Judaism suffers the same sectarian divisions, but I contend it’s possible to detect an underlying core of basic assumptions about reality. That core is very intentionally hidden from outsiders; what you think you know about Judaism is just PR. At heart it is a religious assertion that Jews are the only “humans,” while the rest of humanity is some filthy perversion of animality worthy of extermination. Short of that they’ll settle for enslavement. We Gentiles aren’t permitted to analyze their documents and statements. Not exactly racist, it tends toward that. It’s not hard to prove Judaism is only the thinnest pretense of ancient Hebrew religion.
- There are genuinely good people in all of the above, and just about any other religion of mankind. What they claim as their religious identity may have little to do with their moral preoccupations; that’s part of being human. Awareness of broad generalities will never translate well into every corner of the human heart.
The primary reason for understanding the generalizing inherent in social sciences is to answer the lies of those who use it for a propaganda tool. Everybody uses it; those who are conscious of it get their message out better. And religion is most distinctly a category of social science analysis because it is essentially an activity aimed at organizing human behavior. All the blather about how the particulars are, or express, commands from God is simply the sales pitch.
Dear readers, I make no pretense of being unbiased. I am very much in the business here of making biases conscious so that you can choose one wisely, since humans are inherently unable to operate without any bias.
