Not A Card I Play, Usually . . .

. . but I don't think people get me.

I had an exchange I had with a priest I find far more intelligent than myself:

The difficulties you see are simply symptoms. The whole structure is corrupt, though founded on sound general principals. Life is valueless, humans are valueless. This is the truth of the world, no matter how much rhetorical decoration we put on it. This will be true as long as there is something we can call an "economy."The reason for this is that, far from getting value for your money, in reality, a money economy assigns value to the person - you sell your life at so much an hour; your place in our "egalitarian" society is decided by the amount of money you can scrounge; you must be able to afford certain possessions to be part of a larger community. Human life, in fact, has no value until assigned by its profitability.This is the basis of the other struggles. Take away want and competition, you will have peace.

She responded:

Mark, that is the darkest perspective of human nature I think I've ever read. You have out-Calvined Calvin.

Now, aside from the deep insult implicit in being compared with Calvin by a liberal priest, there was an absolute dismissal of any engagement with reality on my part - it's a theoretical "perspective of human nature." Where was I speaking rhetorically? Where was I in the realm of speculation (other than, perhaps, my final statement)? Indeed, I wasn't speaking of human nature, but human construct that has fettered human nature.

The kicker, though, is that we later get:

As a Libertarian, my politics are grounded on the 8 articles and 27 ammendments of our constitution. In your observation, you missed the fact that two of our three branches of government are treating our national charter as if it were a roll of Charmin.

Just a thought, but one worthy for consideration; the rights that are being fought for will evaporate in the face of emergent sharia if its allowed to take hold on these shores.

Look hard into enclaves like Somalia, Iran, Eritrea, Yemen and the like where Sharia is codified as the land, and consider their take on Women's Rights, gential mutiliation, and GLBT rights.

David, I fear your perspective doesn't allow you to grasp the magnitude of this project existing within the vicinity of what Americans call "ground zero". THis would be analogous to having a center built in Cuidad de Mexico, dedicated to the exploits of Winfield Scott, Zachary Taylor and President Polk; men who through their actions and policies, wrought death and destruction in your nation.

With no irony, people engage this.

The libertarian poster is the poster child, the final, perfect product of the exact society I've just spoken of - fearful, selfish, violent, given to a zero-sum view of the world, xenophobic, manipulative - yet, underneath is the human nature:

Please understand that while I stand in opposition to the teaching and tenets of Islam, I don't begrudge them one square foot in building a house of worship. - he writes later.

Yet, the reality we've built makes it impossible for him to extend that generosity inherent, that community, or, indeed, for the Muslims to commune with the Christians, etc.

Perhaps, I'm simply an anarchist. I don't know. I believe there is order, but the order we've built is dystopic, toxic, the world IS suffering, that's its nature because we've built this shell of misery, impressed with our God-given minds.

THIS is the world! It's not depression, not despair, it. is. reality. We're not living in the world God created, but the false one we created, and where His creation comes through, it is in misery, conflict with our false one.

God, I wish I had the brains to explain better. I wish I could put my vision into your heads directly. It sounds like mere destruction - take down the money system, eliminate national governments, eradicate personal property, end the institution of "church" - but it's just . . . dismantling of a cage! What we didn't mean to create is what God keeps coming, again and again, to tell us to overthrow and we tame the message every single time. Jesus didn't mean money is bad, he meant it's bad if we don't do this, this, this. Wrong. Jesus didn't really mean He came to bring fire to the earth, he just meant that He was here to fix the system. Wrong.

And this is in every religion - the revolution is killed from inside. We cooperate. We get comfortable. We get nice, which is the horrible, demonic twisting of compassionate. It's summed up in the ever-popular Christian saying, "We're supposed to comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable," always said from a position of comfort and smugness, never afflicting ourselves.

Life is suffering. Not a Buddhist truth, but Truth. Because we made this life, we can end the suffering, and we don't want to. We know there'll be death and loss, so we use that as an excuse, ignoring the death and loss that feeds the world. Even if we burned it all down and nothing grew from the ashes, what was lost? Yet, we are so in love with the hollow shell we've made, given it so much of our own life, we can't bear the thought of losing it.

You want to know what evil is? Serial killers, wars, terrorists, rapists - those are all distractions, the body of the True Creation making antibodies against true evil; true evil is mundane; it's what you and I do every day while we're living a "decent life."

Source: http://eamaa.blogspot.com/2010/08/not-card-i-play-usually.html