to Socrates – on monotheism
by richibi
“The Sacrifice of Isaac“ (1598)
________
by very definition, the inevitable
result of monotheism, Socrates,
is war, if there is one authority it
will eventually be opposed by a
contrary, however picayune,
however trivial, opinion, see the
Protestant Reformation, see Islam,
for instance, now
after which there is disintegration
before Christianity, there were gods,
a pantheon of them symbolically
alive among the rivers, the trees,
the mountains, read Ovid for an
exhilarating description, wars were
waged for territory, not conscience
Judaism, the religion of the Jews,
evolved for their own existence a
deity, Yahweh, who was their one
god, disdainful of foreign others,
an uncharacteristic attitude among
other religions then, becoming one
of the very first monotheistic, and
consequently existentially
compromised faiths, if not the
first
the intent was to rally ideological
support among its adherents so
that they could protect the lands
homes, as they would have it, a
sanctification of the territorial
principle
their Bible, the Torah, a vengeful
work, and the basis for the
Christian Old Testament,
demanded of its followers
unblinking and cruel allegiance,
the sacrifice of Isaac, for instance,
a father required to sacrifice his
own son, however might it ‘ve
been at the last minute averted by
the intercession of an angel sent
by that very Lord
Christ came along to turn the other
cheek
which didn’t last long
indeed Montesquieu, an early
philosopher of the French
Enlightenment, tells of the
King’s librarian of Chinese
texts, who had been converted
to Catholicism in China, but
who was nonplussed upon his
arrival in Christian France to find
that the French did not do onto
others as they would have them
do unto themselves, nor did they,
more catastrophically, turn the
other cheek
for that matter see what Christian
Europe did to the Americans
Christ’s own followers, once they’d
achieved political prominence, after,
admittedly, 300 years of persecution
by the prevailing Roman authorities,
set their own deity, God, on high,
indeed beyond the rivers, the
mountains, the trees into the very
ineffable, the inscrutable abstract,
and squelched any opposition for
the next thousand and some years,
the philosophical underpinnings of
which was the work of your
contemporary, Plato, Socrates, his
ideal of the Ideal
Augustine signed those recalibrated
papers with his “City of God“, it took
the Renaissance to make a dent in its
armour, and another several centuries
to declare the Christian God dead,
Time magazine in the ’60s, on the
heels of Nietzsche‘s nihilistic
pronouncement some 70 years earlier,
that God had exited history
what we are left with, Socrates, is every
wo/man for hirself, therefore the Age of
Human Rights, for better or for worse,
otherwise many of us would’ve been
guillotined, burnt at the stake, stoned
to death, by now
what do you think
I’ll bet I can tell, you think that every
wo/man owes allegiance to what s/he
believes in, even to inexorable death,
however impractical, unfortunate, or
fateful, if your exemplary life has
anything to say about it
cheers
Richard
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