©2001 Jon Youngblood

Unity Through Understanding

A Guidebook for the Recently Alive

Part One

Chapter Three: Religions Reach for Power

3.6 Religion and The Law

When people first began to work together in bands and tribes thousands of years ago, it became apparent that in addition to the need for the management of chores and duties, there was also a need for spiritual management.  Religion and culture (politics) were to be entwined forever more.

It may be that our misplaced need for religious associations, in an age of declining church attendance and less traditional conceptions of Deity, that has led to the fervent divide between the two leading political parties in the US today.  Religion and Politics has had a tight bond of common goals,  namely that The Rules which define appropriate behavior, is like two sides of a common currency.  One side appealed to the spiritual mind, the other, the rational mind; two methods of maintaining civil order.  The Currency of Faith in right behavior you might say, and the Currency of Law that equally defines conduct and consequences of matters too numerous for the concern of Faith.  The currency of Faith/Law is becoming equally ineffectual, so the numbers show, the majority of the time, to provide the wealth of behavioral compliance that it was once able to provide to the Group. 

For modern man who seems to be facing a drought of religious inspiration within the mainstream faiths, it would be natural for people to look to the remaining side of the religious coin: The Rules side.  Not what we believe is a truth about the world, but rather what we agree it is. 

Rules imply co-operation.  When co-operation is not effective, the society, in order to be wholesome (and not all societies' are concerned with wholesomeness), must resort to coersion, typically pre-emptive in the manner of fear of what will happen if one infracts upon the agreed terms of behavior or social etiquette.

In many "pristine" early cultural structures, it was the man of law and the man of faith that stand together to enforce, in one manner or another, the framework under which we as a species progresses.  They learned early that knowledge is a powerful thing, and should be kept under strict secrecy, so that the people might not have a means (0r the same means) as those who's position it was to maintain order, in what was, after all, by today's standards, quite ineffectual means - thus requiring more and more blood to be shed and all manner of cruelties to be committed against innocents in order to "pound" the minds of the public into seeing things their way and behaving themselves.

Religion, with it's accoutrements of ethics and morality, was able to achieve, to a far greater degree, a more subtle and pervasive weapon in the battle for civil order and obedience.  Religion governed over the mind and the spirit which were above the constraints and limitations of the body during the most agonizing torture and/or slow death, public executions included.  No mere punishment, inflicted on the body, could steal the soul, or spirit.  And this was maddening for many Devine (or non-divine for that matter) Rulers who were seen as the Supreme Authority in matters of law. 

How can a man, divine or divine by bloodline, maintain civil obedience when his punishments become a joke to those people who have found a means to elaborate their Faith so deeply, that nothing that Man can do will ensure spiritual compliance?  Which is the real origins, I believe, of propaganda machinations, cultism, charismatic dependency, and all the other ways that the rulers of the mind and "spirit" have succeeded where the most brutal and sadistic of Governors, Emperors, and Kings have failed  time and time again. 

As we move into the 21st century, will we develop new mythologies to cope with the new "leniencies" in social conformity?  Are we to fend for ourselves and realize on our own what the worth and value of our lives are?  Perhaps there will come a human, of unparralled command of the Teaching Force.  Who's words will inspire an image inside of each of us that will thereforth see the world in a clearer way?  One that will Teach a concept, idea, stance, whatever you want to call it - worldview - that everyone will know in an instant is what we all, each and every one of us, feel at a deeper level, and will no longer see the minor disagreements for the commonality.  I personally believe that there will.  Or simply that more and more souls will come into reality with a higher level of empathy.  It is, after all, what launched us, quite against our wills, into a new level of existence.  Sentience.  Feeling abstract emotions about the world around us that seems manifest in only a few other species.  Our feelings have had their growing pains, and there is no doubt much more mistakes in communication that will be made.

Existence, or Creation, did not get this far to fizzle out from here.  Sure, we may be blasted to kingdom come by a super-volcano, but somewhere else in the vastness of creation, there will be one who does not.  Who leaves the frail and empty nest to wander and explore the rapidly expanding universe.  If the technology for high speed interstellar travel turns out to be a bust, it will be very sad indeed if, like the ancient Minoan culture, we are wiped out in a day and gone.

It would be sad for us, more so for the souls that would never be born, but there can no longer be any doubt whatsoever that there are other earths out there.  In other stages of evolutionary development.  The Universe is friendly to life, and should be, in all probabilities, continuing to be so for a very long time before it begins to become to hostile to life as we now know it. 

Religion brought about social order.  It is really quite surprising to me that we did not live under the "power of the priests" for a much larger percentage of  our developed life as it has.  That the doubting Thomas's were free to doubt as rapidly in our history as it has seems remarkable!  One then only wonder how can we be sure of our newfound independence?  Can we ever be sure that, as the Indian mythologies teach, we are ever free from someone's' manipulations?  Wall Street perhaps?  Enron, no doubt.  Corporate Power.  Some might well argue that the personal freedoms we seem to have gained is nothing more than a mere scrap, a pitiful sample, of the dam-water of social and spiritual evolution that awaits our descendants hundreds, or perhaps thousands of generations in the future.  We can then see ourselves and how we play out the melody of our individual lives - good, bad, ugly, or innocent - is a continuous line in space and time and if  you could reach out far enough into time you could almost touch the fingertips of this future "you".  Perhaps something like a child experiencing the comforting hand of a parent over theirs for the first time and knowing that all was right with the world at that blessed moment.

Law, and the personalities who are drawn to breaking them, are a body with invisible tendons and muscles that connect each and ever one to the other.  So out into space, these invisible sinews and cartilage and fluids, that connect and make whole everything that is.  And in time, everything that was and will be.  Law is an abstraction that is purely artificial, yes.  It is absurdly ineffectual unless the mind follows It's will.  And we are connected to it and to every law giver, enforcer, and, most importantly for the Supreme Being's sake, breaker of.  We are each and every one a part of existence and are directly connected to every barbaric act!  Every rape, every cruelty, every love, every loss, every goodness, and every badness is connected to us, now, at this moment, as certainly as the air is contacting the surface of my lungs and exchanging one element for another.  There is no separation.  The evil ones, are us.  The saints, are us. 

Now we lead to the horribly thorny path of Free Will VS Predetermination.  We know from science that at the most fundamental level, that there is an absolute randomness.  So Predetermination seems impossible from our usual point of view.  Does one choose to be evil?  Does one set out with a mindset, for whatever emotionally twisted reasons, to cause pain, suffering, and even death upon ourselves?  Apparently we do.  All we can do is pray, whatever level of authority you give the act of requesting something from life or a higher power, that we will not be the one who becomes a monster in the eyes of time.  All the worst of criminality, whether sanctioned by a groups Higher Power, God, or Gods, is only a muscle or nerve fiber away.  If you see the world this way, and sometimes a great deal of time and effort is required to experience this in a life changing way, is simply beyond the means of most people.  Not because they do not have the capacity (Do I dare?  Yes, why not.  At the risk of seeming PIC, I would venture to say that there are a vast number of human beings alive in this time, who could truly be considered un-capable, in capacity) but because they do not devot the time to try to see the world differently. 

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