THE FUNDAMENTAL TRUTH ABOUT CHRISTIANITY: IT'S NOT ABOUT SMARTS. LESSON FOR THE USA.
Washington had already discovered the "smart power grid" (as if the grids built before were dumb). Now it is discovering "smart power". The expression "smart power" was sprinkled through Senator Hillary Clinton's confirmation hearing in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
It's an excellent idea to brandish "smart" as the new requirement, the indispensable adjective. This is the new thing that is needed, indeed: out with standing above the world, in with realism, thinking, and smarts. How do we get more smarts? By listening to Rick Warren? Rick Warren believes that he is good only because he fears God. Is that smart?
How can this new preoccupation with smarts be reconciled with the obvious violation of smarts, of not understanding that all the religious semantics and semiotics of the present United States of America, violate the separation of Church and State? (Ever since 1956.) It may be the deepest mystery of American "smarts".
It's fascinating to see how many American democrats, pushed in their ultimate reasonings, evoke "God".
One should stop a moment here, and wonder what it means. This means that the ultimate reasoning of even many supporters of Obama is NOT HUMANISTIC, BUT superstitious. For a real, literal Christian, the ultimate moral reasoning does not stand on the ground, but on the “City of God”, up there in heavens. As Saint Augustine pointed out a good Christian worries about the supernatural, not real things such as real bodies, real lives, simple desires.
Such was Saint Augustine’s answer to the doubt that “most” of the intelligent people were having (Saint Augustine says) about Christianity, because the Roman State had been collapsing ever since Christianity had been in command.
Superstition, comes from super-stare, that is, above-stand. It means standing above reality (craftily, emperor Constantine imposed the label "superstitio" to all religions except Christianism).
Fundamental humanistic reasonings are hard, complex, intricate. In one word: smart. Smarts require serious brain activity. It's very tiring. By contrast, reasonings evoking a being standing above reality, allow to forget humanism, and to act, according to faith, which means without reason, without consideration to reality, without tiring brainwork. This neglect of sophisticated morals, devilish details and human responsibilities, is what allowed to engage in the worst atrocities. Including Crusaders' cannibalism in the Middle East. As Jesus put it: "I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you" (John 6:53). Constantine's Catholic Church interpreted this appeal to cannibalism, and similar calls to monstrous crimes, literally. Similarly, Bush's God ordered him to invade Iraq (he said).
Some say that such mischief is unrelated to what they mean by Christianism. They miss the Machiavellian subtlety of Constantine. By celebrating fundamental atrocities as a religion, Constantine, and his similarly minded successors, brandishing the crucifixion, proclaimed that everything was permitted (as long as it was OK with God, a personal faith). This was very practical: his Christianism allowed Constantine to kill his son, his nephew, and to boil his wife, among other feats (hunting Jews and burning philosophers or architects are examples). The aim of Christianity, from the time of its imposition by Constantine, was as a way to enforce brutal, atrocious imperial power, in the image of, and in the name of, the Bible's jealous and cruel God. Between Constantine and Bush are found hundreds of lying and bloody tyrants, all of them using Christianity just as Constantine had intended it, and as he had inaugurated it, for unrestrained cruelty, allowing to economize on smarts. As Hitler put it: "God with Us!"
State superstition is not about smarts, it is quite the opposite. The Christian terror Constantine imposed shattered the religious tolerance and the mental performance, of centuries of Greco-Roman civilization. It made the Greco-Roman empire so stupid, it quickly disappeared (this manifested itself in the destruction of books, schools, intellectuals, and the loss of major wars after making idiotic mistakes).
What does that all mean for the future of the brand new, let's say, brain new, American smarts? Well, there is a long way to go. This is how the first two United States presidents put it: "...the government of the United States of America is NOT, IN ANY SENSE, founded on the Christian Religion... ". Washington and Adams insisted on this in 1796-1797. Why? Because they wanted the USA to be smart. Smarts require thinking, not praying. Change one can believe in will not come from a Jesus best ignored by people of advanced smarts.
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Patrice Ayme
Patriceayme.wordpress.com
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