Sat, Dec 22, 2018, 2:55 PM (11 days ago)

Lynn, James:

While I have both of you on the line, I'd like to make a request. For one of your future podcasts, would it be possible to make the human mortality one of the themes?

I think it'd be interesting to many to hear some of the following:

- The historical views on mortality within the context of both heroism, as well as everyman's life (Ancient Greece, Rome, Norsemen's Ragnarok and on)

- Dignity in the old age: some cultures revere their elders, some brush them aside in contempt. For those of us living in the latter, how do we preserve at least a shred of it in our advanced years?

- The crackpot's own view on mortality, and the way to exit, in the face of the current "longer is better" - even though the usable time is greatly reduced for those of us with failing health.

Oh, and speaking of crackpots, how about this quote for the podcast byline:

"When you're one step ahead of the crowd, you're a genius. When you are two steps ahead, you are a crackpot".

- Rabbi Shlomo Riskin

Thank you, and take care.

-Vlad Tepid

Vlad, I'm glad to hear that after 500 off years that goblets of wine and blood no longer appeal.

Aspects of man's earliest postmortem doctrine remain in various world religions. Primal people did not, as far as can be divined, see themselves as outside of nature as an avatar of super-nature, as do the faithful of the world's largest and most militant religions, one waxing one waning. Primitive man believed in interactive multiple dimensions and some came to see their departed ancestors in the trees, winds and stars that bounded their world. Without the ability to build lasting monuments, set up trust founds, found socialist ideologies and otherwise stand like Christ, Lenin or Bezos straddling tomorrow as a giant, the primitive person with extraordinary agency was expected to help the living from his place in the afterlife.

This animism gives rise to the worship of ancestors as animal husbandry develops and powerful nomad tribes capable of imposing some measure of will upon the natural order—by at least migrating to favorable grounds as leaders rather than followers of the animals they depend upon. The standard ancient faiths of heavenly pantheons then came into being. In time a spiritual classism developed in which animistic beliefs persisted among the conquered folk of the countryside, overshadowed by the "Olympian" gods of the now settled nomads.

The third type of faith seems to have formed alongside the second, with the sacrificial cults of the seeded earth in fertile river valleys where priesthoods ruled tiling grain-eaters worshipping various versions of the goddess and her sacrificed and resurrecting son—and even kidnapped daughters. The fertility cults are accompanied by a woeful view of the afterlife as souls being housed in an internal city of dust, an under world. Such societies are incapable of imposing their will on the animistic folk inhabiting the majority of the virgin earth and are easily conquered by nomads.

When evolved ancestor-worshipping nomads, who have retained an idea of an alternately smiling and wrathful sky god [which seems to be a conflation of the animistic elevation of the ancestor to an over-watching spirit and nomad weather-reading and ancestral attribution] conquer the squalid valley folk, the dim afterlife of the cities of dust evolves into a place of torment were fertility goods have been banished by sky-gods while their sisters are raped and married, reflecting very much what is occurring among men. Likewise, the nomadic interlopers, with a slave society to feed them and their horses, can begin imposing their wills on the remaining natural people, with a three-tiered:

palatial [Zeus]

civic [Athena]

countryside [Artemis]

Scheme of mortal considerations of extra-mortal forces prevailing in the ancient world.

The fourth evolution occurs in two branches, with philosophy occupying the seeking aspect and mysteries occupying the experiential aspect in a resurrection of the animistic vision quest. The purpose of philosophy was to understand man's place in the cosmos. The purpose of the mysteries was to practice the soul for the after death encounter with the unknowable. The mystery religions practiced rituals intended to increase the odds of the soul's successful negotiation to the afterlife in the recognition that know human could know what would occur until he died and past beyond life.

The fifth tier of mortal cognition of the postmortem condition is to be found in the revealed faiths of the Middle East, which borrow heavily from the earlier forms and at the same time claim complete invalidation of the earlier forms, even though such aspects as the underworld of the damned [Hades-Hel-Hell], of super-natural conception and ascension [Euthymus to Jesus], of the vision quest [Moses on the Mountain, Mohamed in the Cave] all draw on earlier forms in very explicit ways. The appeal of revealed religions, which were all championed for millennia by the most powerful political-military actors, was that revealed faiths set forth a sure knowledge of the soul's fate after death and links this fate to acts in life, putting salvation literally in the hands of every man if only he believes.

Imagine, if you will, seeking comfort as you age in the prospect of a happy ending, then going to a priest of Dionysius who tells you something like "We want to lighten your heart on the heavenly scale so that the crocodile of judgment does not eat you when the Boatman paddles you across the River Death—but on the other hand you don't want to be two lighthearted when Achilles demands you explain why you should gain passage to the blissful aisles while he yet suffers..."

Imagine this fellow then walks out into the street and a Christian tells him, "Look, Brother, just give everything you own to the church and stop having sex, drinking and going to the games and you will enjoy an eternity of life with your savior. On the other hand, keep on keeping on and go to Hell."

Well, that's a no brainer, revealed religions won out on the principal of keeping eternity simple for stupid people and easy for bad people.

I'm weak on Ragnarok.

The basic hero is simply a champion or protector as suggested by the Greek word root. He is a global phenomenon.

The Arуan hero is most keenly exemplified by the Greek heroes. For the ancient Greeks the hero was a threat to the deities and could actually, like Herakles, displace deities, exposing the pantheon as an elementally attributed family of ancestral deities. The hero warred against men and gods [some of whom might champion him out of spite to other gods] like a comet crossing the solar system, disruptive and memorable not often effecting the heavenly order.

The heroes of this tradition include:

-Gilgamesh

-Enkidu

-Herakles

-Jason

-Achilles

-Odysseus

-Theogenes

-Euthymus

-Beowulf

The Roman hero served the gods and the government which represented the gods and became the template for the Christian hero exemplified by the knight of the High Middle Ages, the crusaders and the conquistadors.

The heroes of this tradition include:

-Horatius

-Rolland

-Arthur

-Joan or Arc

...generally a weakening tradition where heroism is assigned to an avatar of state like Joan.

Today, in the Post-Christian West, the postmodern notion of immortality is vested in the Civic Organism, the One Homogenous Human Race. One can only have dignity in this matrix if you vest your mortality and immortality in the Civic Race: you stay alive as longa s possible breathing as a node of the Greater God which is the Greater Good and in no way challenge orthodoxy in some selfish bid for individual immortality.

I believe in the Old Testament, though I am neither a chosen person or a Christian. Jesus Christ will not intercede on my heathen behalf, but I whole-heartedly believe I the reality of his heavenly father:

-petty

-wrathful

-jealous

-meddling

-instilling fear

-demanding that we kill

-demanding emasculation

-demanding of sacrifice and penance

Read the Old Testament and every time you close the page think of a current corollary and you will see that our world has begotten a jealous and wrathful god on earth in that very image. This earthly version of the Old Testament God has been consciously assembled as a machine for human invalidation, emasculation and exploitation since 1585 when it was seen as a New Isrаel, a place to create a holy nation on the backs of an unchosen people, people designated as human waste and literally used to fertilize the soil with their bodies. This New Isrаel has evolved to the point where it no feeds directly on souls and is being coopted by corporations whose thirst for immortality is truly otherworldly. I'm using my remaining years as my health plummets to thrust tiny daggers into the heart of this soul eating God of Things and leave some musings for those who might emerge like I did from its muck in the future.

This world covets my body and hates my mind. So I busy myself rejecting its temporal dignity in exchange for my immortal soul, which I suspect, is our sorrowful place, our suffering, the tangible currency of whatever super natural actors or knowers beyond our ken. I see my own tiny dignity as working towards a final transformation out of the hell I was born to and possibly back into it. Due to the long years I spent laboring in frozen food walk-ins and in dairy cases—one drying the lungs the other carrying mold—I have chronic respiratory issues, mainly brown goo clogging my lungs whenever I stop taking expectorants in wet conditions. When I'm done wheezing my way through the next dozen or two books, one day I'll just lay down and stop taking the chalky pills. I won't have the SYSTEM keeping me alive with its machines, as their dignity replaces mine.

I have some dim hope of reforming as some force against the evil thing which gut I was spawned in, but no hope, rather a resignation that my time is about up where periods of significance are concerned. They tried to mind fuck me into defining my dreams according to their power and ease, but my dreams remain my dreams, just dreams, not their power points and weigh stations of submission.

To leave behind those I acre about will be hard. But to leave behind the False World I hate, this Civilization that assigns itself as our fate, that will come with ease.