 | 'Avatars of living grace' |
|
There is one perfectly good sense in which humans are puny and insignificant, and that is as a part of the universe, which as we know is like big. We are not required to find a hill-top to stand on to daily tell the universe how small and meaningless we are, what crap we are or others are, how we hope the universe will forgive us for existing, how much we beg it to let us do its will. There is and has been for as long as humans started to think about these things, an area of human thought in which belief and unbelief meet. The orthodox of course both know about it and strive with all their might to enforce division. That is pantheism, the proposition everything is in essence god, you, me, the fly buzzing against the window, the lilies of the field. 'Are ye not better than they?' Different: ye have the capacity called consciousness to know what ye are. To write of goodness, truth, beauty and love, of 'avatars of living grace', is to demonstrate the evil, falsity, ugliness and hate of orthodox religion, which is of course something the free world has long been aware of, but that is apparently unknown to our Beloved Leaders. To deny any requirement for a divine mediator, to indicate the matter is one of human consciousness and we are what we choose to be, we command ourselves, we are not required to beseech or thank a deity, we are not as a deity chooses we be, the buck stops here, is well, yes of course to cause hysteria, but also to move the world on, which of course causes even more hysteria on a number of grounds, among which are that that supposedly is something women do not do and head-on collision with the Hollow Gourd Theory: While other languages struggle towards precision, Newtspeak strives to confound. If there exist excellent, honest, industrious, innovative, then those who fall short of such descriptions are in some way flawed and that is not acceptable, for all are without fault (or at any rate that sub-section of all dear to the Great Lizard). Underlying this is the Hollow Gourd Theory, the Doctrine of the Empty Vessel. Criticism is meaningless because it is pointless: people can do nothing about how they are. They have no control. Obviously you can't expect much of a hollow gourd. Dynamism, innovation, moving and shaking are outside its capacity. Criticism can only traumatize it. Not surprisingly, tadpoles are notable for their passivity, what the unreconstructed call their uselessness, and there are none more hated than those who are not gourd-fearing and so bounce in with evil nonsense such as the suggestion that there is something wrong with you that you have the capacity to put right. Oh, did they lay you on a rack and start to flay you, while applying lighted cigarettes to your genitals? You have to understand they aren't evil per se, it's just their kulcher. This masquerades as loving the sinner and hating the sin. Newtism is so besotted with absolving the sinner, who is himself or herself a victim and so guiltless, that it is indifferent to the sin. Even the most vicious totalitarian states offer some career choice in that it is unlikely people are forced to be torturers. It is an offence against the supposed natural goodness of humanity to suggest some people rather like being torturers, have a natural flair for it. And the culture of the torturer, the culture of the despot who commands him, that is an outgrowth of the primarily agricultural society that surrounds them? Newtism is among other things an attempt to deal with human evil by denying it exists. But don't wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, etc. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will, whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class. Manifesto of the Communist Party; Chapter 2 The most important thing about newtism is the thing most commonly overlooked. It is a religion. Rational processes are suspended for everything is explained in the holy books. Loving the sinner and hating the sin rests on the belief that the sinning doesn’t mean a person is bad, but that he or she has acted badly: he or she is equally capable of acting well. His or her core notions about himself or herself and his or her place in the world may make it inevitable that he or she has acted badly, but those notions are not fixed. The newt’s terror of judging derives from his or her conviction that everything is fixed. When everything is subjective, the lazy may think themselves industrious, the stupid, intelligent, the illiterate, linguistically gifted; nothing exists outside the self and its capacity to distance itself from reality. Elitist is Newtspeak for the temerity to think one has a right to judge. Only newts have that. |