SIGNS FROM ANCIENT/MODERN DAYS

Today, passing by a church on Minnehaha Street in Vancouver which likes to load down its curbside reader board with pithy (well, maybe pissy) conundrums for the passing parade, I read the sign, WHEN YOU'RE DOWN TO NOTHING, GOD'S UP TO SOMETHING. Actually, from personal experience and a lifetime of reading and study, and as revealed in that old movie with Joanne Woodward, "Rachel, Rachel", I think the sign, if it were honest, should read, WHEN YOU'RE DOWN TO NOTHING, WE'RE OUT TO GET YOU, for that's when the Christian brotherhood comes for you—when you're weak and vulnerable.

Of course, the upshot of pouncing on the vulnerable and lost is Christian or Moslem or Jewish houses of worship full of the mentally ill or, at best, the neurotic many who are trying to get well but not always achieving that goal. Which further means, it's in those sanctuaries where you'll find weak-minded authoritarian figures who like to dominate others (as part of that, they are manipulators, prevaricators, passive-aggressives, child molesters and rapists too) all mixed in with the weak and vulnerable who are open to that sort of molestation of body and psyche, quite often children and women. Witness that Texas mess! Would anyone but a wimpy sort of male want a women chosen from that brainwashed bunch? Of course, to be honest, sex is an interesting sort of animal, and women (men too) can be a lot more interesting in bed when that evolutionary adaptation sets the synapses to firing than you or I may imagine them to be. Sex has a lot to do with imagination and less to do with pure chemistry.

DID YOU HEAR THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS AND HUMANISM?

In reading The Jesus Papers, by Michael Baigent, I came across an interesting quote by the disciple Thomas as revealed in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Thomas said (no, that's not me, but it could be) "When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living Father."

When I was more of a believer than I am now, I used to understand that Jesus was calling me brother and telling me that we shared the same father and, therefore, I was as much a god as Jesus was. How the Catholic Church corrupted the historical Jesus into a triune clusterfuck, I'll never know.

Self knowledge. Ah, yes! Later in the morning after reading that passage, as I was strolling through the Vancouver Mall for exercise and window shopping, I pictured a teeshirt conundrum that read: HUMANISM—THE ETHICAL LIFE.

Then I imagined the dedicated dogmatist challenging me, saying, "Yeah, but who anchors your ethics? What unimpeachable source underlies your philosophical musings?"

My only answer could be "Me and what can still be called my human nature. And yours too!"

I went on rambling in my head while my body rambled too, meandering between the aisles of the goods and services in Sears, Macy's, Penny's, etcetera. Each of us carries the basis of moral behavior in our own bodies, I thought. We all know what it is to "feel" we've been treated unjustly. It hurts. By extension we can surmise that each of us, sharing the same biological feeling structure or moral mechanism in our own bodies, can recognize and share this feeling mechanism. In fact, humans are so certain of this moral mechanism in the human animal that we recognize those who don't have this universal mechanism are a real danger to us. We call them sociopaths and the criminally insane. From that simple fact of shared biology (some have called it the golden rule)(some have announced it in the saying "all men are created equal"), we can build a humanwide ethical structure when, and if, we mature as a species a little more than we are now matured.

The flaw in religious people is that they want to cheat on this biological mechanism. Instead of referring to their own feelings as a source of ethics, they try to buttress their personal feelings by calling in a higher authority. They want to trick us into giving their feelings a little more concern than we give our own feelings. Specially guilty of this hedging of bets are the preachers and other church leaders like mullahs and rabbis who use their power positions to wheedle money and even more power out of the weaker and less skeptical among us. Specially nasty and irrational of these religious folk, leaders and followers alike, is the belief, which the gullible among them accept unquestioningly, that this higher authority who justifies their human feelings about life can also reward and punish humans with eternal punishments and rewards. Now there's a real stretch of the imagination and also of the unbounded ego of religious people and their leaders in their attempt to get the rest of us to give more importance to their "ethical feeling mechanism" than we give to our own ethical mechanisms.

LONGING FOR ZION

I guess Texas's little pony show down there troubles me enough that I wake up thinking about it. "Troubles" may not be the word I'm looking for. "Intrigues" might be the more apt verb, for that little group of people poses many interesting challenges. Is polygamy necessarily bad for the human animal? Are their women and children actually being dummed down so that they can be controlled? And if the women and children are happy and not being harmed, should any of us care what their men do with them, how they train them and to what Biblical standard they indoctrinate them—as long as they agree to it?

Do they pay their taxes and are they available for military service should a draft come up? That may be all the larger state can expect of them.

I try to think myself into their compound, walk around in it, savor its sights and smells, but such an adventure is hard to imagine. I know their compound looks neat and clean as a whistle. I know one thing for sure—my free nature would rebel against that sort of control over my life. I was a total failure in the military mold. I can imagine the chains of gossip by which they control one another. I can imagine women teaching one another not to be jealous.

I can imagine what it must be like not to be allowed any really independent thinking from the group norm and being ostracized (banished) when one strays too far from the herd mentality. Banished—can you imagine the terror such a punishment would cause in a person who has been cut off from the main body of American culture and then forced to go survive in it? How would the banished one cope, find work, make friends? Being raised, cut off like that, would make it extremely difficult to function in the American body politic.

Of course, straying from the herd in the larger society also causes similar sorts of repercussions. Look at the "gossip" about and condemnation of gay folk and cross-dressers, for examples, in church groups. Look how we try to suppress them and regulate them and hem their behavior in.

And, come to think of it, look at all fundamentalists in their churches, striving with might and main, through non-association and through home schooling, to stay free of contamination by the freedom gene and thirst for new experience that thrives in those of us who have them. It's not an easy thing to be free. Most of the human herd desires to run around in carefully regulated groups because, when the human brain first achieved consciousness, that's the sort of social arrangement it found itself in and the atheist gene complex is fairly new, I suppose, and may not turn out to be the most successful adaptation. And even atheists group together for common protection and warmth of association. None of us are free from the need of companionship.

So there you go. I've just rambled a bit in an unorganized manner, here in the wee hours, because my mind was going a mile a minute, lying there in the dark. Getting up and attending to my consciousness's needs usually gets me back to sleep in short enough time. And I've got to be up at five this morn in order to go catch my plane for Ohio!

I guess the most salient point that emerges when I confront group (herd) mentality like that which controls fundamentalist behavior is how so very close they still are to the people that first made cave drawings. They haven't evolved quite like those of us who understand and accept freedom. The interesting paradox is that our founders' ideas about human freedom protect the very freedom that people longing to return to the herd (and renounce that freedom) are protected by.

So be it—if they are afraid to be as free as those of us in the larger herd choose to be free, let them huddle together in their groups where the male feels free to roam the herd for his sexual release. But, then, when I say that, I'm struck by the fact that the most precious thing our founding fathers gave us was a society in which a freedom to choose is given wide latitude and that women and children, raised in the constraints of Zion, do not quite get the freedom to choose that the rest of us do. Perhaps freedom is the only real reason any of us have to oppose Zions like theirs and fundamentalist churches in general—they don't raise up citizens who truly understand the wide range of behavior they have the freedom to choose among. And people who do not honor freedom above all other values are a threat to the "freedom to choose" itself because they don't want those among them, their women and children, to enjoy that freedom in the same measure they do. Their male freedom of choice is achieved by limiting the freedom of choice of the easily corrupted, because powerless, women and children in their midst. And that is a very scary prospect.