Old Scratch's Tea Party
by Joe Palmer
[ opinion - march 11 ]
The principle that all superstitions are equally valid must be true if all men have the right to choose their governors. - Kilgore Trout
A straight trough of motivation extends from the Puritan Divine Jonathan Edward's sermon, 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God' (1741), to the gullible and grasping Tea Partiers, who desperately want to be assured that something, anything, must be true and everlasting in spite of their undeserved but eternal damnation.
Most of the hosts and guests of the Tea Party went to school in the United States, where education follows the German model, with compulsory comprehensive (all subjects) schools, Kindergarten through grade twelve, offering psychotherapy instead of learning as their aim (for example, football takes precedence over literacy, thanks to John Dewey, "the philosopher of freedom," the father of pragmatic and progressive education) because Americans are actively engaged in assimilating several cultures, European, African, American Indian, and so on, in order to produce a common heritage and a way of life they can call their very own. Schools governed by locally elected boards are mirror images of their communities. Teachers must not say anything that offends anyone, or teach anything contrary to anyone's beliefs. When the school boards do not serve special interests, privately funded schools such as segregated Christian academies, Roman Catholic, preparatory, and charter schools fill the need. The entire community must approve the contents of the prescribed textbooks.
Americans believe that the purpose of schooling is to form a more perfect union of individuals who must be shaped to fit into the jigsaw puzzle that every community presents, so every child is taught to pray:
God bless Mommy.
God bless Daddy.
God bless our sociogram.
Their goal in life is to get rich, to belong to the moneyed few, to the elite oligarchy that controls the corporations, which in turn inform the government. They will do anything they can to prevent others from getting ahead of them, a situation resembling life in an old pre-pharmaceutical insane asylum, as portrayed in Sam Fuller's 1963 film Shock Corridor.
Thus it is that President GW Bush, who speaks like a garage mechanic, is a product of the prestigious Phillips Academy at Andover, and of Yale University, at whose Commencement he spoke:
...Most important, congratulations to the class of 2001.
To those of you who received honors, awards and distinctions, I say well done. And to the C [mediocre] students, I say you, too, can be president of the United States.
A Yale degree is worth a lot, as I often remind Dick Cheney who studied here, but left a little early. [Laughter] [Jonathan Edwards went to Yale too.]
So now we know, if you graduate from Yale, you become president. If you drop out, you get to be vice president. [More Laughter]
The United States has few humanistic qualities and fewer social programs because equality of opportunity to get rich is the primary value embraced by the people. Their certain unalienable rights include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They are free to pursue a life of wealth, and so they do. Laissez-faire is the rule. One never interferes with the other players at a gambling casino. So we see that Socialism, applied humanism, does not stand a chance of succeeding in the United States because the people value money and property highly. Not that they don't love mankind, but they love God and money more.
However, it is apparent to them that God doesn't love mankind very much. For proof, like the Americans who are compelled to read it in grade eleven when they are medicated with American Literature, one of the common opiates that pickle American minds, just read and believe Jonathan Edwards' sermon.
Here are some words from the finale of Edwards' sermon:
The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath toward you burns like fire... 'Tis ascribed to nothing else that you did not go to hell the last night, that you was suffered to awake again in this world after you closed your eyes to sleep - and there is no other reason to be given why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that GOD'S HAND HAS HELD YOU UP.
Americans think they have no personal chance to escape Hellfire (unless an individual improbably has the grace of God that lets him off Satan's hook, which is the preacher's escape clause that explains good luck). They know that perdition is coming to sinners - sodomites, adulterers, thieves, and murderers, and to all those who do not keep the Ten Impossible Commandments.
Damnation explains a "peculiar institution," the death penalty, and why Americans do not find its execution inhumane and bizarre, but rather they accept killing as the proper course.
Furthermore, the Great Beast is coming to devour those who deny the literal truth of the Holy Bible and its corollary, divine intelligent design. It's in The Book, and worship of the Holy Bible is taught along with Predestination.
Early New England was a hiding place for Puritans hoping to live sinless and godly lives unsullied by worldly ways while getting rich by exploiting the resources of the New World, a recipe for trouble. Their descendants' fear of dying and going to Hell remains their unspoken motive for joining innumerable new and old cults and sects that spring up beyond the Evangelical, liberal Protestant, and Catholic heritage - weeds in the tended lawns of society that grow into sects and eventually religions, such as Scientology, Rapturology, Latter Day Saints, House of David, Heaven's Gate, Solar Temple, Rosicrucians, Theosophy, Eckankar, Christian Science, Adventists, Moorish Science, Moonies, Hare Krishna, Wicca, Jehovah's Wittnesses, Fundamentalists, all Doomsday fringe sects and Oriental crackpot fanatics.
Republicans and Democrats are more or less equally divided among educated Catholics, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Evangelicals, and other mainline national churches. It is the outliers, the gullible and grasping, who are up for grabs.
This Tea Party delusion is a grotesque video game played by God, the premise being that America does God's work on earth, and so America is the Hand of God. You see -He's got the whole world in His Hand. The Grand Delusion is that America itself is God shaping the world according to His Will.
President GW Bush pontificated that the purpose of America is to bring liberty to the world by serving as God's stand-in, His handy replacement while He is on His break. And furthermore, "events aren't moved by blind change and chance... but by the hand of a just and faithful God."
We can go along with the idea of a "just God" instead of an unfair, partial God, if we have to choose. However, what's with the idea of a "faithful God," a God who is faithful to whom, to mankind, to the Jews? What are we to believe, after the Holocaust? Are we that bad? Was old Jonathan Edwards right? It seems so.
Deuteronomy speaks of a "faithful and just God," but that is only Yahweh, the dementia of a dynasty of desert dwellers expressed in the Torah, the first books of the Bible, the mono of monotheism. According to Doctor Freud, monotheism is the first symptom of paranoia. Religion is a mental disease. In 2003, on his 90th birthday, Doctor Albert Ellis, the Stoic philosopher and psychotherapist, summed up his thoughts. He announced that in his opinion, "All human beings are out of their fucken minds - every single one of them."
Monotheism is a reason
Why men kill in any season.
Yahweh, God, Allah bless...
Can create a man-made mess.
- Classical Yoga Hindu Academy
A higher God than Old Jehovah is the only logical possibility we have of explaining Original Sin and Satan. Our Aryan heritage teaches that a Little God is only one of the many avatars of Vishnu, so it is easy for us to believe in Jehovah, the Trinity, and any number of gods, if we try.
Giving Mr Bush the benefit of the doubt, let's assume he knows that his god is not Big God, the Boss of all and Master of the universe, who is too busy to pay any attention to Jesus and Satan when they do their things. Mr. Bush's god is Little God, not Little God's boss, Big God, who is the First Mover of everything.
Remember that, as far as we know, Jesus is just one of the kids (who, after all, had to die), and Lucifer, the most beautiful angel, is the major domo, the housekeeper who works for the Little God who rules our world. So Bush's Little God, whatever else He is supposed to do, has to be faithful to Big God who made Him, just as Satan has to give us the fits so we know we are alive. The Little God has to have faith in Big God, on what terms we don't know, just as we have to have faith in the Little God in hopes that he doesn't forget to make our world go around.
Of course He has many helpers, the fallen angels like Lucifer or Satan, Old Scratch, or Beelzebub, and the various demons tailor-made to fit our nightmares, and so on, who never fail to appear to play their parts in the cycles.
Little God's main job seems to be to make us live and see the differences between good and evil, pleasant and painful, ugly and beautiful, and so on, the opposites that provide the tension that makes our reality and gives us desire, strength, and Will. We know that in order to teach us humility the Little God plays terrible jokes on us, allowing Satan and his helpers to maim, torture, and destroy us, and to turn our works into hellfire, like what happened at Hiroshima and Auschwitz II-Birkenau.
That is not good as far as we are concerned, so Big God either does not know what a mess the Little God is allowing Satan to make of things on earth, or He does not care, and if Big God is good and we want to be like Him, we have to trust in the Little God, who is just as likely to throw us in as to spit in the fire.
As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods.
They kill us for their sport.
- Lear
We're in a hell of a fix, when you think about it. Whatever we do not know and approve of is heresy, worthless for knowing and wicked to consider. Some bad people say there ain't no hell while others say the hell there ain't, (the ones in the Blue states who wear clean overalls and aprons to church where it's always Halloween.)
The gullible citizens who make up the Tea Party are haunted by apparitions of the half-formed dreams of the Silent Majority, silent because they do not know what to say, except what they are told to say. The Silent Majority wants to be the Moral Majority, in the right by virtue of their numbers. They know that in numbers there is strength, but they do not care that in numbers there is ignorance, and stupidity. The Tea Party is the Delusional Majority, the common man, a sophomore at Bob Jones University, like me, who detests all vile things from abortion to McRib sandwiches, all red and runny.
Where will justice, mercy, and divine compassion come from if we ignore the very real needs of the Tea Party? Or are such things necessary to well-fed people who know the Hell concealed in an atom of Plutonium? We wonder in what coin we shall have to pay for ignoring them.
