|
Edited on Wed Dec-15-04 11:10 PM by arendt
The New Indulgences from the New Whore of Babylon
by arendt
...."As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs."
........- Johann Tetzel, indulgence seller
...."The penalty (of sin), therefore, continues so long as hatred of self continues;
....for this is the true inward repentance, and continues until our entrance into the
....kingdom of heaven."
........- 95 Theses of Martin Luther
It is surreal to watch a gullible American public squander their nation's collective intellectual,
economic, and environmental capital to a five hundred year old con game: the selling of
indulgences. It is surreal because the process of debunking that con-game, namely the Protestant
Reformation, was not only a major event in Western religious and political history, but also led, not
so indirectly, to the founding of the United States as a secular democracy.
In the early 1500s, the Roman Catholic Church was in very ill repute. It had a reputation
for simony, nepotism, and greed, not to mention the ever-present homosexuality and
pederasty. The Black Death had been taken as a sign of God's disfavor with the Church;
and this disfavor was not improved by the spectacle of the Papacy held captive by the
French King at Avignon - a period called the "Babylonian Captivity". About the only thing
keeping it afloat was the ignorance and superstition of the uneducated, poor populace.
It might have seemed that the economic and cultural advances of the Rennaisance would restore
the Church's prestige. Unfortunately for the Latin Church, these advances mostly caused trouble.
Culturally, the Rennaisance led to a lot of well-read clerics and lay people, like Erasmus, Luther,
and Calvin. More ominously, it gave rise to critical scholarship.
Economically, the relatively more successful Northern European peoples came to resent the
constant taxation of their wealth to benefit the secular church in Italy. In the formerly well-known
narrative, the Pope sent Johann Tetzel to peddle indulgences to save one's soul in return for cold
cash for the treasury of the Borgia popes. Martin Luther denounced the whole idea of indulgences,
and along with it frontally attacked the spiritual monopoly the Church had constructed on access to
God. The rest, as they say, is history.
But, it seems that a large minority of Americans are about to remember this history in the manner
that Santayana postulated - by repeating it. Fundamentalism in America has reached medieval
levels of gullibility and lynch-mob xenophobia. In Europe, the Church-sanctioned scapegoats
for the very real problems of the age were Jews, witches, and heretics. Today, it is Moslems,
feminists, and liberals that we threaten with physical violence, imprisonment, and loss of civil rights.
Same play, different cast.
In both eras, the gullibility has taken the form of buying a guaranteed place in the afterlife.
The early Protestants saw this act of the Latin Church as nothing but state interference in spiritual
matters coupled with a privileged position for money in the afterlife. It led them to name the
Church "The Whore of Babylon".
In American Fundamentalist churches today, preachers openly tell their congregation to vote
for Republican reactionaries so as to obtain their spiritual reward. What is never examined
clearly is the Republican economic program that they have to buy to get the reward.
That program is nothing less than to rob America blind to build their own temple to global corporatism.
They have literally shipped our industrial plant to Asia. They have looted our Treasury with reckless deficits
that our grandchildren will struggle to pay, assuming our grandchildren still have air to breathe and
water to drink. They are busy de-funding our educational system and stacking our scientific bodies with
religious crackpots and corporate hacks. That is, they are killing the goose that lays the golden eggs -
the intellectual resources that solved problems and made the average American's lifestyle the envy of the
world. But, the corporatists can now find cheaper navvys in Asia. Finally, they feel free to plunder our
environment for even the slightest chance of return. All of that is the payout side of this New Indulgence
from our new corporate Whore of Babylon.
That is the deal so readily grabbed by the poor, dumb suckers out there in Kansas. They think they
have a guaranteed ticket to heaven. They say it is not important that they have given away every
last valuable thing our country owns to buy that ticket. And, if it were only their property that they
had given away, I would be handing out Darwin Awards with glee.
But it is your property and my property that they are enabling to be looted by runaway corporations,
crooked politicians, and glassy-eyed, sex-obsessed religious zealots. When your money built your
schools and your roads, it became a lot less fungible. If the GOP sell it off, you will get pennies on the
dollar for your property; and the corporations will charge you for your own goods for the rest of your
life. And that is the nub of it. If the world doesn't end, you and I are going to be a whole lot worse off.
Or, if these lunatics manage to blow up the world or pollute it to death, and it turns out there is no such
thing as an afterlife, then we are maximally worse off - we are all dead. This is the unconsidered side
of Pascal's wager. And, while that wager may make sense to some religious individuals, it makes no
sense to a society at large.
Today's fundamentalists have no excuse for being duped by trading in souls. They claim to be Protestant
Christians. Then again, they claim to be conjuring the End of Days, forcing God to do their bidding by
bringing on a new Armageddon in the Middle East. Real Christians would call that blasphemy
and sorcery. Just for spite, these heretics have added the fatwa that the faster we despoil the environment,
the sooner the Rapture will come. Real Christians would ask what happened to rewarding the Good Steward
who multiplied his master's talents.
Its about time for someone up north to get out the hammer and find a church door. We need to bring our
government and our economy back from its Babylonian captivity.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
