A
a.saccus
Guest
NOT ALL LOYALTIES ARE CREATED EQUAL
The furor over Mearsheimer and Walt’s March 2006 paper on American foreign policy influences, and the seemingly endless, scurrilous personal attacks on President Jimmy Carter for writing Palestine:Peace Not Apartheid, are themselves irrefutable evidence for the existence of a group of people whose loyalties are divided between the United States and Israel. Had no such lobby existed, you would have heard naught but the soft, croaked murmurs of the denizens of lily pond lane, as Mssrs. M., W. and C. came and went their way; instead, the very air cries out in protest, ripped beyond the decibel limit and beyond the limits of decency by harsh, hysterical cries of “Jew Hater" and “anti-Semite" leveled reflexively at anyone with the temerity to speak the simple truth about a foreign policy that is leading not only the USA but the entire world to the brink of destruction. From the throats of the multitudes of the murdered in Palestine and Iraq, waiting upon the banks of the River Styx for the ferry, the silent accusations — each one paid for with the price of a precious human life — hasten towards us with all the concussive shock of a moral sonic boom. Any good karma America has acquired has just about been consumed by the past half-dozen years; and should America go to war with Iran, the container will be bone dry -- and soon filled with dry American bones.
Having just written about Abraham and Isaac in “Paramoralisms Where You Least Expect Them", I find that my mind is drawn back again to Abraham, even when writing about loyalty. And then I see why: the paramoralistic patriarchal part in this passion play has not yet been played out to the full.
* * * * * *
A parent’s relationship to a child, although usually called “love", is also a prime example of “loyalty". Implicit in the act of conception is a promise of fidelity, of unqualified responsibility for the well-being of the new life being brought into existence. That unconditional devotion is given for the duration of the time that the child cannot physically care for itself, and is among the most basic loyalties known to man. The more embracing the loyalty provided by the parents is, the more amenable the conditions are for the fulfillment of the child’s potential. And on the other hand, when this loyalty of parent to new life is absent, the child may be abused, starved and even die, in what is probably the most inexcusable and unacceptable form of betrayal imaginable.
This steadfast relationship -- this loyalty -- of parent to child is the biological foundation of human society. Attack that, and you are well on the way to destroying the human race, or crippling them so that they may serve one’s purposes. This is only one of “bonuses" of the paramoralistic action of the Abraham and Isaac story.
Take one more example -- another paramoralistic insistence -- of how we cannot let any loyalty be stronger than our loyalty to God:
Judges Chapter 11
30 And Jephthah vowed a vow unto the LORD, and said: 'If Thou wilt indeed deliver the children of Ammon into my hand,
31 then it shall be, that whatsoever cometh forth of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return in peace from the children of Ammon, it shall be the LORD'S, and I will offer it up for a burnt-offering.'
34 And Jephthah came to Mizpah unto his house, and, behold, his daughter came out to meet him with timbrels and with dances; and she was his only child; beside her he had neither son nor daughter.
35 And it came to pass, when he saw her, that he rent his clothes, and said: 'Alas, my daughter! thou hast brought me very low, and thou art become my troubler; for I have opened my mouth unto the LORD, and I cannot go back.'
36 And she said unto him: 'My father, thou hast opened thy mouth unto the LORD; do unto me according to that which hath proceeded out of thy mouth; forasmuch as the LORD hath taken vengeance for thee of thine enemies, even of the children of Ammon.'
39 And it came to pass at the end of two months, that she returned unto her father, who did with her according to his vow which he had vowed; and she had not known man. And it was a custom in Israel,
40 that the daughters of Israel went yearly to lament the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite four days in a year.
This utterly abhorrent piece of paramoralism -- where Jephthah’s daughter goes willingly and smilingly to her death because her father has half promised-half dared God to give him a victory, and that victory won, Jephthah, or rather his daughter, gets to pay up with her life -- is a particularly clear example of totally inhuman, anti-life psychopathic thinking which has been embedded in the Bible.
* * * * *
The paramoralistic intent of the story of Abraham and Isaac and the story of Jephthah’s daughter seems to be to teach us that not all loyalties are created equal. The loyalty of man to God is supposed to be above the loyalty of a person to family and friends. How has this psychopathic reversal come about? Why was this course of action taken?
What I have to say in this and the next few paragraphs is pure speculation on my part -- there simply are no records of what really happened at that time; but where there is an effect, there must have been a cause. And Genesis 22 and Judges 11 are most definitely defects. But decide for yourself if this -- or something very much like this -- must not have happened for Genesis 22 or Judges 11 to have been written in the first place and then become embedded inside a “sacred scripture".
Loyalty is a concept naturally extensible, first to the relationship with other family members, then to other tribe members, and then even to larger groups like kingdoms or nations.
The strength of the relationship, the degree or amount of loyalty, is understandably stronger the more closely related people are. You only have one birth father and one birth mother, and even if they are replaced by divorce or death, one’s loyalty to them remains unchanged throughout life. You don’t change your parents.
When one reaches the king / national level, the loyalty relationship still exists but it is not as strong as it was at the personal level. It is here that the possibility of dual loyalty arises, because, while you cannot change your birth parents, you can change your tribe or your country. Dual loyalties are discussed in my next post.
At some point, most people realized the arbitrary nature of the loyalty to the larger social groups led by kings. That loyalty was unlike the loyalty to your father or even your loyalty to your second cousin. It all depended on nothing much more than where-were-you-when-the-lights-went-out, i.e., when some king’s army went stomping through your neighborhood. There was nothing about loyalty to King Zig to distinguish it from loyalty to King Zag, except the size, skill, and organization of their respective armies -- facts which it was prudent for everybody to know so that they could choose which side to be loyal to, i.e., which side had the army most likely to win the next battle.
Now, if you were in the king business, this blasé-blasé attitude toward kings was definitely not good for your business -- the business of telling other people what their business was. You wanted “your people" to respond with alacrity when you issued a command, whether or not your army was as good as your neighbor king’s was or not. What fun was it to be king if nobody obeys you? And if you were a psychopath and a king -- which is a not unlikely combination -- what did you do about this annoying fact that people were more loyal to their families then they were to you?
Find some other relationship that required even more loyalty than that of a parent to a child.
Find some other relationship that is more able to chain the loyalty of “your people" to you than to their family members.
And if you can’t find such a relationship -- because it doesn’t exist anywhere on earth
-- then you just make it up!
Enter, stage right, Genesis 22 flanked by Judges 11, and all their ilk.
In Genesis 22 and Judges 11, we see examples of paramoralisms created as part of a program to establish a psychopathic version of loyalty -- the relationship of man to an anthropomorphic God -- one that was supposed to be more binding even than the strongest of natural bonds, the relationship of parent to child-- all just to prop up the flagging loyalty between subject and psychopathic king. These two stories, and many others, were not, of course, the whole story. This program was worked out over centuries, inserted piece by piece into the current version of “sacred scripture", until the finished product was revealed by Ezra in Babylon.
What these and all the other paramoralistic stories teach is that there is a hierarchy of loyalties:
And this would be the case -- provided that all the assumptions underlying the story -- that paramoralistic story -- turn out to be reasonable and true.
Here are the assumptions which I see as being required before I would feel obliged agree to the conclusion: “Don’t disagree with God. Do what you’re told."
2. Assumption: That God has gone to all the trouble of writing out — in stone, no less — the orders he wants you to obey, more impressively known as “The Commandments", even though God could, being omnipotent, just as easily insert a thought into your mind or get you to do what he wants by some other Godly means.
3. Assumption: That we possess undeniable proof that these Commandments come from directly from God; we don’t have to take somebody’s word for this, no matter how important that somebody is; there’s irrefutable evidence which anybody can refer to anytime, anywhere.
4. Assumption: That God has nothing better to do in the universe than hang around planet earth and enforce each and every one of his Commandments consistently, without fail, and with alacrity for every single person on the planet.
If all these three assumptions are true, then, of course, we would be wise to obey the commandments of God, and like the songwriter, to ask “Where you want this killing done?"
Please note that my argument deliberately omits saying anything whatever about numbers 0 and 1., i.e., the assumptions that
0.Assumption God exists. There is nothing about the Divinity, the First Principles of the Universe, that require It to take any form. My argument is not an argument for atheism, for I believe, but cannot prove, that there is an Overall Guiding Entity. I'm just a little chary about giving It a body and claiming that I know what It is thinking, or if It even does what I could recognize as thinking...Are you beginning to see the problems inherent in any God that possesses a form?
1. Assumption: God not only has a form but it's anthropomorphic; i.e., God is made in man’s image. (I know, the Bible has it just the other way around, man being made in God’s image. But we’ve already seen that there are paramoralistic elements incorporated into the text, and -- Surprise!-- this is another one of them. And you’re really not going to stand there in the year 2007 and tell me that God has pimples? alimony problems? two arms and two legs?….)
But I didn’t put a 0. or a 1. Assumption there.
That would have taken us on a slightly different investigation, one which was initiated by the first hominid creatures on this (or any other, for that matter) planet, and one which is -- pending premature termination at this location due to the Total Folly of the impending war with Iran -- still in progress. The initial results of that investigation are, as you may know, not yet conclusive; for while it is always possible, it is nothing more than an unproved assumption that God exists in form at all. As of this moment, however, there are multiple, mutually-exclusive claimants for such an appearance in form; and as those claims are still being investigated and evaluated, and that said investigation will, regrettably, not be concluded before I finish writing this post. So we must be satisfied with a negative results for 2, 3, and 4, which are thus assumptions, not facts.
Thus we are NOT obliged to kill anyone on Highway 61 -- or in Baghdad or in Palestine -- In God’s Name.
(And I didn’t mean to imply that the above-named song writer was part of this paramoralistic program, for the last verse of “Highway 61 Revisited" goes like this:
So, the entire paramoralistic effort embedded in the Bible and other monotheistic scriptures, is not only psychopathic, it has, as of this moment and for all eternity, no basis whatsoever in fact. It's all Make-Believe, of a very sinister variety.
* * * * *
Earlier I gave this hierarchy of loyalties promoted by those paramoralistic stories in the bible and other sacred scriptures:
1. Loyalty to God most important.
2. Loyalty to Abraham, Moses, Joshua, David… next most important.
3. Loyalty to family and friends least important.
But the real hierarchy, which the above one is trying to destroy is:
The furor over Mearsheimer and Walt’s March 2006 paper on American foreign policy influences, and the seemingly endless, scurrilous personal attacks on President Jimmy Carter for writing Palestine:Peace Not Apartheid, are themselves irrefutable evidence for the existence of a group of people whose loyalties are divided between the United States and Israel. Had no such lobby existed, you would have heard naught but the soft, croaked murmurs of the denizens of lily pond lane, as Mssrs. M., W. and C. came and went their way; instead, the very air cries out in protest, ripped beyond the decibel limit and beyond the limits of decency by harsh, hysterical cries of “Jew Hater" and “anti-Semite" leveled reflexively at anyone with the temerity to speak the simple truth about a foreign policy that is leading not only the USA but the entire world to the brink of destruction. From the throats of the multitudes of the murdered in Palestine and Iraq, waiting upon the banks of the River Styx for the ferry, the silent accusations — each one paid for with the price of a precious human life — hasten towards us with all the concussive shock of a moral sonic boom. Any good karma America has acquired has just about been consumed by the past half-dozen years; and should America go to war with Iran, the container will be bone dry -- and soon filled with dry American bones.
* * * * * *
Having just written about Abraham and Isaac in “Paramoralisms Where You Least Expect Them", I find that my mind is drawn back again to Abraham, even when writing about loyalty. And then I see why: the paramoralistic patriarchal part in this passion play has not yet been played out to the full.
* * * * * *
A parent’s relationship to a child, although usually called “love", is also a prime example of “loyalty". Implicit in the act of conception is a promise of fidelity, of unqualified responsibility for the well-being of the new life being brought into existence. That unconditional devotion is given for the duration of the time that the child cannot physically care for itself, and is among the most basic loyalties known to man. The more embracing the loyalty provided by the parents is, the more amenable the conditions are for the fulfillment of the child’s potential. And on the other hand, when this loyalty of parent to new life is absent, the child may be abused, starved and even die, in what is probably the most inexcusable and unacceptable form of betrayal imaginable.
This steadfast relationship -- this loyalty -- of parent to child is the biological foundation of human society. Attack that, and you are well on the way to destroying the human race, or crippling them so that they may serve one’s purposes. This is only one of “bonuses" of the paramoralistic action of the Abraham and Isaac story.
Take one more example -- another paramoralistic insistence -- of how we cannot let any loyalty be stronger than our loyalty to God:
Judges Chapter 11
30 And Jephthah vowed a vow unto the LORD, and said: 'If Thou wilt indeed deliver the children of Ammon into my hand,
31 then it shall be, that whatsoever cometh forth of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return in peace from the children of Ammon, it shall be the LORD'S, and I will offer it up for a burnt-offering.'
34 And Jephthah came to Mizpah unto his house, and, behold, his daughter came out to meet him with timbrels and with dances; and she was his only child; beside her he had neither son nor daughter.
35 And it came to pass, when he saw her, that he rent his clothes, and said: 'Alas, my daughter! thou hast brought me very low, and thou art become my troubler; for I have opened my mouth unto the LORD, and I cannot go back.'
36 And she said unto him: 'My father, thou hast opened thy mouth unto the LORD; do unto me according to that which hath proceeded out of thy mouth; forasmuch as the LORD hath taken vengeance for thee of thine enemies, even of the children of Ammon.'
39 And it came to pass at the end of two months, that she returned unto her father, who did with her according to his vow which he had vowed; and she had not known man. And it was a custom in Israel,
40 that the daughters of Israel went yearly to lament the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite four days in a year.
This utterly abhorrent piece of paramoralism -- where Jephthah’s daughter goes willingly and smilingly to her death because her father has half promised-half dared God to give him a victory, and that victory won, Jephthah, or rather his daughter, gets to pay up with her life -- is a particularly clear example of totally inhuman, anti-life psychopathic thinking which has been embedded in the Bible.
* * * * *
The paramoralistic intent of the story of Abraham and Isaac and the story of Jephthah’s daughter seems to be to teach us that not all loyalties are created equal. The loyalty of man to God is supposed to be above the loyalty of a person to family and friends. How has this psychopathic reversal come about? Why was this course of action taken?
What I have to say in this and the next few paragraphs is pure speculation on my part -- there simply are no records of what really happened at that time; but where there is an effect, there must have been a cause. And Genesis 22 and Judges 11 are most definitely defects. But decide for yourself if this -- or something very much like this -- must not have happened for Genesis 22 or Judges 11 to have been written in the first place and then become embedded inside a “sacred scripture".
Loyalty is a concept naturally extensible, first to the relationship with other family members, then to other tribe members, and then even to larger groups like kingdoms or nations.
The strength of the relationship, the degree or amount of loyalty, is understandably stronger the more closely related people are. You only have one birth father and one birth mother, and even if they are replaced by divorce or death, one’s loyalty to them remains unchanged throughout life. You don’t change your parents.
When one reaches the king / national level, the loyalty relationship still exists but it is not as strong as it was at the personal level. It is here that the possibility of dual loyalty arises, because, while you cannot change your birth parents, you can change your tribe or your country. Dual loyalties are discussed in my next post.
At some point, most people realized the arbitrary nature of the loyalty to the larger social groups led by kings. That loyalty was unlike the loyalty to your father or even your loyalty to your second cousin. It all depended on nothing much more than where-were-you-when-the-lights-went-out, i.e., when some king’s army went stomping through your neighborhood. There was nothing about loyalty to King Zig to distinguish it from loyalty to King Zag, except the size, skill, and organization of their respective armies -- facts which it was prudent for everybody to know so that they could choose which side to be loyal to, i.e., which side had the army most likely to win the next battle.
Now, if you were in the king business, this blasé-blasé attitude toward kings was definitely not good for your business -- the business of telling other people what their business was. You wanted “your people" to respond with alacrity when you issued a command, whether or not your army was as good as your neighbor king’s was or not. What fun was it to be king if nobody obeys you? And if you were a psychopath and a king -- which is a not unlikely combination -- what did you do about this annoying fact that people were more loyal to their families then they were to you?
Find some other relationship that required even more loyalty than that of a parent to a child.
Find some other relationship that is more able to chain the loyalty of “your people" to you than to their family members.
And if you can’t find such a relationship -- because it doesn’t exist anywhere on earth
-- then you just make it up!
Enter, stage right, Genesis 22 flanked by Judges 11, and all their ilk.
In Genesis 22 and Judges 11, we see examples of paramoralisms created as part of a program to establish a psychopathic version of loyalty -- the relationship of man to an anthropomorphic God -- one that was supposed to be more binding even than the strongest of natural bonds, the relationship of parent to child-- all just to prop up the flagging loyalty between subject and psychopathic king. These two stories, and many others, were not, of course, the whole story. This program was worked out over centuries, inserted piece by piece into the current version of “sacred scripture", until the finished product was revealed by Ezra in Babylon.
What these and all the other paramoralistic stories teach is that there is a hierarchy of loyalties:
There’s only one problem -- if you’re in the king business, that is. Let’s examine that by looking at a modern version of one of those stories echoed in a popular song by Robert Zimmerman:
This verse points out that loyalty to son means punishment from God; so loyalty to God takes precedence to loyalty to child -- or else. The message here is: “Don’t disagree with God. Do what you’re told to do."
And this would be the case -- provided that all the assumptions underlying the story -- that paramoralistic story -- turn out to be reasonable and true.
Here are the assumptions which I see as being required before I would feel obliged agree to the conclusion: “Don’t disagree with God. Do what you’re told."
2. Assumption: That God has gone to all the trouble of writing out — in stone, no less — the orders he wants you to obey, more impressively known as “The Commandments", even though God could, being omnipotent, just as easily insert a thought into your mind or get you to do what he wants by some other Godly means.
3. Assumption: That we possess undeniable proof that these Commandments come from directly from God; we don’t have to take somebody’s word for this, no matter how important that somebody is; there’s irrefutable evidence which anybody can refer to anytime, anywhere.
4. Assumption: That God has nothing better to do in the universe than hang around planet earth and enforce each and every one of his Commandments consistently, without fail, and with alacrity for every single person on the planet.
If all these three assumptions are true, then, of course, we would be wise to obey the commandments of God, and like the songwriter, to ask “Where you want this killing done?"
Please note that my argument deliberately omits saying anything whatever about numbers 0 and 1., i.e., the assumptions that
0.Assumption God exists. There is nothing about the Divinity, the First Principles of the Universe, that require It to take any form. My argument is not an argument for atheism, for I believe, but cannot prove, that there is an Overall Guiding Entity. I'm just a little chary about giving It a body and claiming that I know what It is thinking, or if It even does what I could recognize as thinking...Are you beginning to see the problems inherent in any God that possesses a form?
1. Assumption: God not only has a form but it's anthropomorphic; i.e., God is made in man’s image. (I know, the Bible has it just the other way around, man being made in God’s image. But we’ve already seen that there are paramoralistic elements incorporated into the text, and -- Surprise!-- this is another one of them. And you’re really not going to stand there in the year 2007 and tell me that God has pimples? alimony problems? two arms and two legs?….)
But I didn’t put a 0. or a 1. Assumption there.
That would have taken us on a slightly different investigation, one which was initiated by the first hominid creatures on this (or any other, for that matter) planet, and one which is -- pending premature termination at this location due to the Total Folly of the impending war with Iran -- still in progress. The initial results of that investigation are, as you may know, not yet conclusive; for while it is always possible, it is nothing more than an unproved assumption that God exists in form at all. As of this moment, however, there are multiple, mutually-exclusive claimants for such an appearance in form; and as those claims are still being investigated and evaluated, and that said investigation will, regrettably, not be concluded before I finish writing this post. So we must be satisfied with a negative results for 2, 3, and 4, which are thus assumptions, not facts.
Thus we are NOT obliged to kill anyone on Highway 61 -- or in Baghdad or in Palestine -- In God’s Name.
(And I didn’t mean to imply that the above-named song writer was part of this paramoralistic program, for the last verse of “Highway 61 Revisited" goes like this:
and which makes me think he's a little down on war.)Bob Dylan said:
So, the entire paramoralistic effort embedded in the Bible and other monotheistic scriptures, is not only psychopathic, it has, as of this moment and for all eternity, no basis whatsoever in fact. It's all Make-Believe, of a very sinister variety.
* * * * *
Earlier I gave this hierarchy of loyalties promoted by those paramoralistic stories in the bible and other sacred scriptures:
1. Loyalty to God most important.
2. Loyalty to Abraham, Moses, Joshua, David… next most important.
3. Loyalty to family and friends least important.
But the real hierarchy, which the above one is trying to destroy is: