This Glorious EXTINCTION
Welcome to Armageddon
I watched the History Channel last evening. There was a show on Armageddon. One preacher claimed the Bible is to be taken literally. How is that even possible?
Did the Bible come with instructions on interpretation? Did its authors not realize words and language change? For instance; that whole Lord thing was inserted by interpreters long ago, due to a feudal paradigm. Now it is literal?
Seems one has to be using literal for some other reason, for why do we need preachers if we could just read the Bible for itself? We could see for ourselves, being that we would not require interpreters to select specific passages and ad their own inflections and conceptual favored ideologies into the old words, which already have had this sort of adjustment. To be taken Literally? I think one must be intentionally deceiving, or incredibly naive about human interpretative skills to claim literal.
What the claim to purity does do, is induce a sense of surety to naive and easily manipulated followers, who do not know how to question false pretext, false dichotomy, false analogy and other disingenuous mechanisms of influencing perception when questioning is absent.
The audience listening to this preacher seemed eerily reminiscent of cult followers. They beamed at the horrors to come, and their special privileged dispensation for being the true believers. For one is certainly a true believer if one is following the unadulterated truth is one not? Well, you will never know if you do not know how to question. Oh, the odd trap of “faith”, but what exactly is the faith actually in? When in a cult, you just “know” what the words mean and how unique to your groups special perception this language is. It is as if you have a conduit right to God. What is more likely is that you are under the “spell” of circular logic thought matrices. The logic is sound when conserved into a ring of belief that often turns in on itself, the hypothesis proving the thesis. I this sort of belief system, the chance to know truth, at least conceptually, is short circuited.
For cults and some churches; we have a bank account of the bad created, then we are given our identity with the good as the way out. This helps generate a cowering and inactivated compliant/submissive following. This kind of preaching is where one plays the good cop and the bad cop, it is quite persuasive to susceptible individual response, which is often accompanied by a sense of belonging purpose, as one surrenders ones own identity to the one authority is proposing as the way out; the way to survive.
This is typical conditioning reaction to tyrannical conditions. In this case, survive a devastation event (or hell) and live happily ever-after in heaven. Scare tactics work. But what kind of follower, what kind of real person is one left with? A sycophant. One does not tend to detect a warm love from these anti-spiritual teachers, we sense dominator retribution. Their spirituality is fear and terror based, designed to scare you into line, but where is such a Pavlovian negative line likely to head one?
What merit is there actually in being a mind controlled slave to fear, with an interpretive conditional love as the love you believe in? Many in cults are very relaxed and confident; confident that they do not have to go through the stress of thinking for oneself, with ambiguity, contradiction, nuance and differentiations of degree to our actual limitations in understanding some (if not all) situations and events. Which is actually a more honest life?
THE REST OF US UNQUESTIONING FOLLOWERS
This same phenomenon exist in the general society. We are given the glorious answers to our existential questions of where we are going and what we are doing. Much of it is all money based, and kind of like that preacher, if we can buy it we do not question it. We have achieved nirvana, or at least material gratification, until the materialist/consumption zeitgeist pushes us into the lack department once again. This is the worlds suicide philosophy joyously being glorified by each of life’s “upgrades”; money to do what you want; Yeah! Go where I like! Have the best of everything! Travel at will! See the world! Help drive it to extinction! OOPS! That one is not supposed to raise its voice there. We do not wish the literal interpretations of our actions! All of our growth is good for everyone, will end up being what is chiseled on humankind’s headstone. Yet more is better is worshiped as a golden calf.
For many of us, life is one big shopping mall. Even many religions pursue “shoppers” to gather to their store of bountiful afterlife somethings. Many decide to live their lives amassing a fortune so they will be “saved” later, since society is expected to not much give a damn about your personal fate. We are living in this literal interpretation of success and achievement. Sure some love and friendship is the icing on the cake, or what we claim is all important, but much of our lives otherwise are spent as slaves to the literal machinery of wealth and lack, with what we are going to do about it holding much of our attention.
As a volunteer for family violence resolution, it is quite common to find; yes we want and expect to be loved, but getting and having to survive is taking a constant toll on self worth and its resulting interpretations of others in relationship to us. Overall, we do not have the tools to understand one another. For those who have violence as a model of behavior established in their family or community of association, one finds the culture thinks one is weak if one “needs” to listen and have full empathy towards another human being. The church of real life may be preaching to us faithfully, but we are not interested in listening to the real world around us.
The interpretive church of materialism and consumptive human need is believed to be our literal faith. We are instructed by this human interpretive church, of our faith and need to have it continuously by implication and assumption. And we never question it, well not until it is nearly too late. it is amazing to see the real rebirth in those of us who realize love is the one and only thing worth serving. They beam in illumination right were they are, with nothing more to get or have. It is an immersion into a cosmic state of being, one where the world around us is in our direct care. If we do not care to know the consequences of our everyday actions, and the actions taken in our name, we will be the final producers of Armageddon.
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