[Newspoetry] You've got to be carefully taught

[Donald L Emerick]

Religion as it Ought-to-be to be Revered?

One problem of all media studies -- printed or oral -- is the determination
of audience, as to whether any news is being broadcast, or whether merely
(as is usually true) pre-existing bias and other latent prejudice is being
reinforced, reinvigorated.  A fire in a wood stove will die when logs are
not regularly added to it, and also when ashes and soot are not removed.
And, when one stirs an old fire, one that looks dead and cold, one sometimes
stirs that fire back to raging life again.

Now, racism is not a problem peculiar to Islam, as it also occurs as a
distortion of many other religions.  And, Jews would the first to know the
meaning of the word pogrom and ethnic cleansing best from their own possibly
apocryphal stories of the First Jewish Conquest and Settlement of the Land
of Canaan, for God is said to have said "Kill all of the present inhabitants
of the land: kill the men, kill the women, kill the children, kill everyone
who lives there.  Burn their houses and their idols.  Save the gold and the
jewelry for my temples, but keep the livestock for yourselves."  Its hard to
overcome the ills of one alleged racism by practicing yet another racism.

What makes a religion evil happens when it countenances the practice and the
continuance of such evil, rather than seeing that some part of the basic
message may have been corrupted and falsified by some right-wing radicals of
the same religious sect.  And, even if the founder of that religion said and
did exactly what texts purport that he said and did, then one ought to
surmise that no founder of any religion is infallible, rather than to
suppose that God is evil, like that.

How does one know what is God?  I claim that the question of what is God is
to be judged according to the idea of good and evil -- and that these ideas
do not originate with any God.  Indeed, taking up once again the basic text
from Genesis, we might see -- right at the very start -- that God did not
want people to have any idea of what good and evil were.  God allegedly
prohibited the first people from acquiring the capacity for knowing Good and
Evil: "I forbid you to eat of that tree, for its fruits would inform your
sensibilities, as to what is Good and Evil, and you would become like us
gods, lacking only immortality."  And, when they saw that they were only
craven images, mere trinkets, cheap imitations of being, and that they had
no choice but to trust this strange God or to discover for themselves the
truths of morality, which truths would make us gods, then they chose to
rebel against that Great Dictator, and rightly so, say I.  They disobeyed
the Great Authoritarian of the Universe.  They defied the Primal Slime from
whose mold they had been formed and in which they had yet wallowed.  Woman
and Man became gods, lacking only immortality  -- and Woman became godlike
first.  And, God, knowing of the other tree, the one of Life nearby, feared
this upstart rival, this Woman and Man who would displace even the God of
all the World.  So, God exiled them from Eden, and set fierce Angels, armed
with flaming swords, as warding guards to the Gateways into Eden -- so that
neither Woman nor Man would find re-entry into Eden easily accomplished.
Moreover, quite vengefully, before exiling them, God staged a mock trial of
these intended and sacrificial victims, cursing them for aspiring to dare to
be equal to any god, especially to "himself."   "He" chose to condemn them
to bitter lives of hard labor rather than joyfully offering to help them
become all that they could be.

So much, I say, for that kind of God, the Father!  I could rewrite this same
story several other ways, to explain the same structural features, by
pointing out, say, that God would be basically and fundamentally ignorant
about how everything that "he" made would actually work, especially in the
questions of what autonomous, but finite, co-equals might decide to do.
Either, one surrenders the idea that God knows exactly what Woman and Man
shall necessarily do, or else, one must believe that God is just the Supreme
Sadist of the Universe, and one's freedom amounts to mere consciousness of
the pains and the pleasures of life, wherein the former generally greatly
exceed the latter, unless one serves the ways of evil.  And, after we get
rid of this false Omni-Science, then, there seems to be no reason for any of
the other Omni-characteristics popularly attributed to God: such a being has
no need to be everywhere (Omni-Presence) and need not possess ultimate
magical power to do everything anytime "he" wishes (Omni-Potence).

Once we grow up and give up such childish notions of God, we might have a
truer idea of what God is and why "he" is constantly in need of our
judgment, just as we might also constantly need the sense of being judged by
gods, even if those gods are like unto us, our fellow human beings.  Once we
know ourselves to be the ultimate moral creatures, who have the power to
discern, correctly, good and evil, then should we not focus more upon the
responsibilities that always fall on good gods, like Atlas, who carries the
weight of the world on his shoulders, and not upon the vain escapisms of the
evil gods, like Loki, who spends his time deceiving others, and seeking
after profits for his private pleasures?

Well, where was I in revising
this syllabus of Rever-ba(s)-tions?
Oh, yes, Thanks for Listening,
Donald L Emerick,
who is willing to be your one and only God,
if you will have no other Gods before me,
but not at all otherwise...
because I'd hate to be your prototypical minor God,
who has uses only on some few holidays
and is ignored the rest of the time.
I'd advise you to choose this day carefully
to whom you will submit yourself to serve.