I can imagine the dude buying Triumph sneaking over and leaving your web site with the game in a brown paper bag, just like buying a Penthouse or Hustler magazine back in the day, all self-conscious and hoping that no one notices the LaFond product inside! God bless him.
When you have the time and inclination, post something about your statement from
James LaFond: "I subscribe to the ancient belief in a metaphysical underpinning of reality, of swarming and feasting entities of evil, and aloof and damning forces for good [not our good but divine good], both of whom, God and Evil, Light and Dark, literally drink our tiny, suffering souls like a blue whale straining krill from the Ocean. And, like smaller fish in the metaphysic sea, many—most indeed—humans thirst for the suffering, submission or approval of others.
What got me the most about that was not the "feasting entities of evil", I sure enough believe that, but your "damning forces for good" (i.e. divine good). I believe you are wrong, or I hope that you are wrong but find it very interesting.
-S
Thank, S.
Any Divinity with a large-case D of a mind which stoops to meddle in human affairs has suggested the ancient Hellenic or Aztec human sentiments which saw gods as forces of great evil who must be appeased less they do terrible things—in other words, the God of the Old Testament, an angry pillar of power. Imagine if you will an ant hill overseen by a scientist? If that scientist kills certain ants because they do not obey his will than woe to ant-kind. That scientist might decide to flood the tank and drown the ants.
A God that is merely providing soil and observing the ants, in hopes of one day discovering a method of communicating with the ants for their enrichment, this is the God who is presented to us while he is out of power—sidelined as he is by the worship of things—but our world was conquered by worshippers of the wrathful God of a singular, specific, chosen good not a God of good for all.
Increase Mather and other early modern clergy prayed for God to smite the heathen with disease, and these pious souls reveled in an ecstasy of worship when the tiny tribes of cheated, bullied and disarmed defending heathens were “smitten” by the “avenging angel of the Lord” to make way for his teeming chosen people, who were invaders, in some cases welcome guests turned oppressors.
How could we say that God smiting the Wompanoag and other tribes with plague was good for those people, even if it was for the Greater Christian Good?
Even modern atheist libertarians believe the plague that so sickened the 9,000 natives defending against 120,000 invaders that they were no longer able to pursue their victories against the Christians was for “the greater good.” These people do not believe in the God of Abraham at all, but do believe in The God of Things. So in the libertarian view the slaughter by disease of the Wompanoag People by the God of Hosts served the greater good of the worship of perpetual hockey-stick-graph economics which is their ravenous God.
My point is, that God has always chosen sides, has always done or facilitated the doing of the most hideous and destructive things to those who do not submit to Him through those who have appointed themselves his emissaries. He is a jealous God by his own admission. The Old Testament, the New Testament and the Koran revel in slavery and slaughter constantly. For a litany of New Testament justifications for slavery see Cotton Mather’s A Good Master well Served. As someone who sees the slaughter of people because of the content of their minds as evil, who sees the slavery or violent death of all non-believers as evil, I can come to no other conclusion than the fact that divine good brings earthly evil. It is one thing to slaughter those who attack you or steal from your or threaten you, but to pursue the death and damnation of any and all who do not agree with you equals your good translated into their evil.
Increase Mather further points out that Satan and his Heathen Indians attacked and slew the English for the sins of the English as God’s punishment upon them—casting Satan as God’s active servant—and that after the English had suffered enough that his Avenging Angel spread disease among the heathen, the word heathen simply a word for free-minded people of the heather or hills applied to aboriginal people who had originally helped the Christians get settled on the coast.
Reading the Old Testament reveals an angry God, a crusher of any human soul not dedicated to him as a slave, so, if we are to be honest about our sacred texts we should take them at their word and not pretend that a shepherd can be good for his flock. A shepherd is worse for sheep than are wolves. I have seen wild sheep in the west, masters of rock climbing far beyond anything my apish self can achieve. Wolves, Coyotes and mountain lions have tested, tempered and forged these creatures into a state of magnificence—and I would like to think, according to God’s will—where the shepherd, has, over the ages, created a creature which he himself hates. The men I know who worked with sheep despised them, as did numerous sheep dogs who would thrill kill the sheep they were set to guard.
Of all the faiths of the seeded earth, of the slavery of Man to God, I think the Aztecs had the most realistic view of Man from the perspective of Divinity that of evil unto men for the good of heaven. Suffering on earth for bliss in heaven everlasting is a nearly universal facet of civilized religions, not simply a Christian construct, but a perspective found reflected in all slave societies.
Homer perhaps had the view I regard as the most optimistic in terms of God’s view of Man, that being jealousy.
In the belief that God is our shepherd, I have chosen damnation over domestication.
Under the God of Things
"How could we say that God smiting the Wompanoag and other tribes with plague was good for those people, even if it was for the Greater Christian Good?"
There is no such thing as "the Greater Good" - this is a pragmatic, utilitarian idea, not a Christian one. There is good and evil and there are ethics. Increase Mather lived in a much-more "enchanted" time where Puritans tended to pray imprecations far more often than was warranted by Scripture. Given the difficulties in Europe and the struggles in North America, things took on a "Life or death" quality for the Puritans far too often. You'd do the same thing in their shoes.
"Reading the Old Testament reveals an angry God, a crusher of any human soul not dedicated to him as a slave, so, if we are to be honest about our sacred texts we should take them at their word and not pretend that a shepherd can be good for his flock"
Well, you owe your Creator - maker of all things visible and invisible - worship. Jesus affirms this when the lawyer asked him, "Teacher, what is the greatest commandment," to which Jesus replied, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul mind and strength." The New Testament God is therefore as jealous as the Old. He can be jealous justly because He is owed.
You've written this like a true rebel against God and you will not succeed in your rebellion. Repent and save yourself from this crooked generation and you will be raised again like Jesus at the Last Day.