Posted on 3-4-2003

God Is Not For Sale Or Conquest
By Alan Marston

The human condition - having to cope with self-consciousness - is a product of separation and the consequent emotional pains of aloneness, relativity, fluidity, ungroundedness, that's why we all feel a craving for atonement, at one-ment, which is re-unification with an absolute grounded beingness. However every human’s being is driven into motion by the struggle between ever more separation and division (rational knowledge, eg. democracy) and a counteracting ever greater need for atonement (revelation, religious knowledge, eg. God).

The human’s being is split down the middle between rational (imminent) and religious (transcendent) consciousness. Agnostic, Marxists and other materialists, realists, scientists, post-moderns, de-constructuralists,… can proclaim the death of gods and religion and to the extent they mean it they proclaim their own extreme psychic imbalance followed by a narrow and shortened life. On the other hand the `believer’ who completely identifies with a transcendent being, a god, achieves atonement and a measure of psychic stability which however serves them and all around them very badly in an increasingly rational social universe, driven by and only responding to power.

Philosophical rambling? Yes, but. Yes, because the word philosophy is a short way of describing the psyche’s attempts at coping with self-consciousness. But, because a philosophical ramble is the only path we humans have to wander through the maze of thought’s founding assumptions, which latter, if never thrown into the spotlight of reflective questioning will never be `seen’ as wrong assumptions, leading thought and action to tragedy.

Modern thought and action is characterised by too much tragedy, manifested most obviously but not restricted to armed conflict and predatory commerce. I believe force cannot end tragedy, philosophical changes in consciousness can. A need for philosophical reflection is the silver lining to war's clouds.

The balance to tragedy, peace, rests on acceptance that the rational side of life (commerce, science, material production) must be separated from the religious side of life, because the religious path available to every human is a uniquely personal revelation which can sustain itself only with the freedom of the individual to their own and other’s thoughts. Whereas the social side of life with its material needs and practises requires broad agreement, and that path is paved as well as we know how by democracy, when the rational is branded and sold as all-encompassing absolute, ie. as a religion, freedom is banished from thought and being and along with it sanity.

Belief cannot be acquired by democracy, autocracy, plutocracy or any ocracy (force). Real belief is inherently free. Right now commerce and politics has, by advertising and control of nearly all communication media, tried and largely succeeded in usurping the role of democracy AND religion, America is God. Great tragedy will continue to unfold until democracy is given back to everybody and religion is freed from any body.

America is not a religion, money is not God nor presidents popes. No thing is God, no one is God. God is revealed only in individual belief which can grow exclusively in a climate of freedom, in the ground of peace.

Watch PlaNet TV for latest programme, `The Last Crusade'.