It's All Coming Together

From Paul Zweig's The Heresy of Self-Love:

The Pax Romana had made the Empire into what Gibbon described as a vast prison, with no escape for those who resisted its authority. It was a prison as vast as the world; and this is recognized in the religious terminology of the Neoplatonists, the Christians, and especially the Gnostics, for whom "this world" was literally a prison, enclosing each citizen in his own isolated predicament. But if the world was a prison, then the only appeal could be "out of this world," away from its authority and toward some new authority whose main evidence lay not in laws, no matter how brilliantly codified, but in a certain quality of experience. Such was the atmosphere in which Christianity first gained its strength, rejecting the legalistic aspect of Judaism, along with the authority of the Empire, while it appealed, in the writings of St. Paul, to spiritual conviction as individual as that of "grace."

Yet from the very first the Christians moderated this Pauline "individualism," limiting its mystical bias with a shrewd sense of organization and earthly responsibility. Already during the first and second centuries the new Church showed signs of an absolutist tendency. In each city of the Empire, the Christians assembled under the authority of a bishop, whose word was spiritual law. Their religion made them citizens in the City of God, but it also made them members of a strict, increasingly organized community. The Christians owed their success as much to this organizational shrewdness as to the richness of their doctrine. [bold text mine]

Here we have the basis of our current politics of religion and our current conservative ideology, but more importantly we have an explanation for the strength of the combination.

Kochs, Religion, Institutional Corruption--an inverted trinity of material greed.

[As an aside, take a gander at preponderance of programs in HR and Organizational Behavior at those institutions proclaiming an adherence to and promulgation of Christian principles as part of their educational mission.]

By Their Very Fear (Update)

The community is inhuman, and less than human. It becomes at last the most dangerous because bloodless and insentient tyrant. for a long time, even a democracy like the American or the Swiss will answer to the call of a hero, who is somewhat of a true aristocrat: like Lincoln: so strong is the aristocratic instinct in man. But he willingness to give the response to the heroic, the true aristocratic call, gets weaker and weaker in every democracy, as time goes on. All history proves it. Then men turn against the heroic appeal, with a sort of venom. They will only listen to the call of mediocrity wielding the insentient bullying power of mediocrity: which is evil. Hence the success of painfully inferior and even base politicians...

So today. Society consists of a mass of weak individuals trying to protect themselves, out of fear, from every possible imaginary evil, and, of course, by their very fear, bring the evil into being.

This is the Christian community today, in its perpetual mean thou-shalt-not. This is how Christian doctrine has worked out in practice.

There is no doubt that Lawrence is troubling...that his deep insights into the mind of man and the mind of the collective (not woman per se, though woman is lost in the collective) will often spill over into some very distasteful thinking. But baby/bathwater; wheat/chaff.

There is a clear understanding here of the weakness of humans in general. We fear for our very existence (we are small and soft as predators go) and so we have created systems for protection from the natural world and from each other.

Lawrence believes in the strong, brave aristocrat--where strength shepherds the weak--and believes that the religion of the masses, which is Revelation (as he propounds) and not that of Jesus, exists only to destroy all worldly power with the only "good" being the power yielded by the elect in another world (yet to come, but never arriving). Apocalypse is the theology of those who are already "left behind".

And those who feel this deep sense of denigration in their very soul have a singular desire to "equalize" through violence, to be "tough" in their fear.

UPDATE: Digby details some Tea Party plans regarding budgets, teachers, churches and armed employees of the state.

A Farm-Yard Conception

Found this today while looking for something else. Seems to me to be glimpse into our small-minded denizens of this world.

Yesterday I posted on FB a blog article about HR3, a bill that "is actually an attempt to shut down abortion coverage through all private insurance, including employer-provided insurance, which means that it’s beyond even the dreadful Stupak-Pitts amendment/executive order."

That article goes on to detail the clear misogyny and class warfare inherent in the Republican party (White Christian Men and their female servants).

And so this from Shaw is gentle in comparison but speaks of a "true" marriage as defined against a false institution offered by those whose conception of marriage is, as Shaw says, "a farm-yard or slave-quarter conception..."

Monogamy has a sentimental basis which is quite distinct from the political one of equal numbers of the sexes. Equal numbers in the sexes are quite compatible with a change of partners every day or every hour. Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves, and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock. Accordingly, the people whose conception of marriage is a farm-yard or slave-quarter conception are always more or less in a panic lest the slightest relaxation of the marriage laws should utterly demoralize society; whilst those to whom marriage is a matter of more highly evolved sentiments and needs (sometimes said to be distinctively human, though birds and animals in a state of freedom evince them quite as touchingly as we) are much more liberal, knowing as they do that monogamy will take care of itself provided the parties are free enough, and that promiscuity is a product of slavery and not of liberty.

WikiQuotes-Shaw