You, Cows of Bashan!

Apparently, we now live in the shining city on the hill where empathy is weakness and cruelty is both a strategy and entertainment, where the statue of liberty is waving a club as a smirking F-Off to the tired and poor. Astonishingly (as if anything can astonish us anymore) the strong and gleefully cruel ones are also super devout Christians. I don’t understand why other Christian leaders don’t state the obvious: These folks are not Christians. They are a new religion, the deformed child of a polyamorous marriage of social media, capitalism, and the Old Testament (but with all the poetry, wisdom, and social justice stripped out).

I think about the prophet Amos in those same scriptures who called the wealthy “You cows of Bashan!” meaning fat, well-groomed cows. He actually aimed the insult at the wives of rich men, but I think Elon Musk uses enough hair products and plastic surgery to qualify as a cow of Bashan.  In my book of Amos, all the pampered billionaires and the preening faux manly men parading around social media these days are cows of Bashan. Amos said to the cows of his time that soon they will all be taken away with meat hooks because of their lack of empathy and smug superiority. 

When I listen to MAGA-ites speak of God, I think of Carl Jung’s idea that humans need contact with awe-inspiring forces far larger than ourselves, or we get very small minded. we implode in on ourselves, and convince ourselves that we are the gods – that what we hate, God hates. Without true awe, which shatters us in certain ways, we shrink and collapse inward, and we spend our life amusing ourselves to death, as Neil Postman wrote in 1985. The Hebrew prophets and the psychologists are clear: arrogance can become pathological and self-destructive. 

When I hear the Republicans talk about God, I cannot help myself from thinking about the ancient Gnostic belief in the Demiurge: that the material world is not created by the true, supreme God, but by a lesser, imperfect being whose goal was to entrap souls and feed off their suffering and worship. A God who demands to be worshipped or he will kill you, like a leader who demands to be thanked and adored - clearly these are not worthy beings for our adoration. The Gnostics saw the God of the Bible as that Demiurge, not as the Supreme God. They saw Jesus not as a blood sacrifice to wash away sin (something the demiurge would be totally into) but as a blazing light illuminating our roadmap to free ourselves from the small, awe-less, false, hate-filled universe of the Demiurge. Not "Jesus saved me," but Jesus showed me. All of this thinking got the Gnostics banned and killed by the institutional church. Of course. Amos got killed by a politically well-connected prelist's son. 

I think about Illinois Governor JB Pritzker’s speech (from two years ago, but floating around the internet now) where he describes cruelty as a conscious effort to stay un-evolved as a human being, and kindness as the difficult practice of moving our animal fears out of the driver’s seat so that our more evolved kindness can make the decisions for us. I like that so much. That’s as clear of an explanation as any for what’s going on right now. Maybe he will be president in a few years, after we find out what happens when you turn the government over to teenage boys.

Speaking of the boys, I think about how so many bro-dudes in the billionaires’ club seem to be devoted to the “transhuman” movement whose vision is eternal life as a sort of human/cyborg creature. Apparently the wanna-be trans-humans, like Peter Thiel (PayPal founder who is the puppet master of JD Vance) believe that death is an aberration. They see a world where billionaire trans-humans rule over a “Christian” world from their own island. They imagine a king of Olympus, but its really more of a Rolex-wrapped Lord of the Flies, except everyone is chipped and hydraulic in some way. Beyond the irony of their embrace of the “trans” word, I just have a hard time understanding why anyone would want to live eternally at all, much less on the island of lost boys with the bros. 

I think about a Norwegian aphorism: “Death is the mother of beauty.” The bro dudes are seriously malnourished in actual beauty. They think beauty has to do with gold or with penises. But beauty has everything to do with vulnerability. This may explain why they are so afraid of death, because it is our ultimate vulnerability. 

I feel sad for the bro-dudes when I think about what they are missing from this precious opportunity to be a human being, and how their denial of death equates directly with their lack of empathy. They could be using their immense power so beautifully. So beautifully! But, instead, they build rockets (penises again, sigh) and spend their energy finding ways to make the poor suffer more. But when I think about their easy cruelty and their off-the-charts arrogance, I don’t feel sad for them anymore; I just find myself wondering what form the meat hooks will take and when they come. 

I want to be more spiritual about all of this. I want to be in neutrality and compassion. I want to see myself as conscious and compassionate and large-minded and gentle and loving and all Jesussy and Budda-y. I try every day to claw my way up to that 5D throne of light where all old shamans certainly sit. 

But I really enjoyed it when I stumbled on that meat hook image. It felt good, and now I really like Amos. 

I am not sure what my point to this entire piece is, except, I guess, this: If you are grieving and afraid, and mad and astonished, I’m with you, I’m all of those too. Let those energies live in you so they can help focus you. Grieving is important and appropriate right now because grief can ferment blind rage into right action. The time is building for right action. Let's be ready.