all roads lead to politics

I never know where you stand on god. It seems like sometimes you believe in the deist god, sometimes a god that wants us to treat the land well, sort of a happy hunting ground kind of guy but a little vaguer, and you are always quoting the bible as if what it says is important.

If fairness is a human concept, and there is a god, surely god put it there, since he is god after all. And a lot of people believe all goodness comes from god, he is the epitome of goodness. If you are doing good, you are right with god, no?

From what I’ve read of Karen Armstrong, popular writer on religion, originally the various gods were gods of specific tribes and the tribes had to appease these gods or else bad shit happened to them. But other than being appeased the gods didn’t concern themselves with the behaviors of their followers. Be good, be bad, they didn’t care as long as the offering was on the altar. Judaism was the first to include good and evil in its agenda. Not only did you have to have the offering on the altar on time, but you had to treat your brother right. Unless your brother was not Jewish in which case fuck him, as a matter of fact Jehovah himself would help you topple the walls of his village and kill the guy and take everything he had.

Still it was a step forward in the advance of morality. I suppose Christianity, as founded by Paul, broadened the population you had to be nice to beyond Jews. You had to be nice to everybody. But as Christianity got more organized and got to have an army, you only had to be nice to other Christians, unless they weren’t your kind of Christians in which case they were heretics, and you needn’t feel any qualms about getting out the thumb screws.

I’m roughly equating being fair with being good, and it always seemed odd to me that if you just obeyed god you were doing the right thing. If god wanted you to do something why didn’t he just come out and tell you instead of having these other guys tell you? And what if god wanted you to do something unfair, like sacrifice your son? Should you do that? I always thought there was some disconnect between doing what you thought was right and obeying some all powerful creator just because. Is it too much to ask that god be fair?

But there he is willy nilly stuffing them souls like olives one after another and some land in a good place and others in not such a good place, and is that fair? No, but what are you gonna do? Clearly the stronger, better-looking, and smarter you are the farther you are going to go in life, nothing to be done about that. But what about two guys born equally endowed but one into a rich family, and another into a poor family, and the one gets to go to college and the other has to work in the fields? That’s something we can do something about, and we should, and that gets into my whole political agenda. It’s kind of odd, you start out talking about something philosophical, and next thing you know you are talking politics.

I think there is an instinct to fairness in humans. When we see it we are upset, and think something should be done about it. I think that instinct comes from us being such a social animal, and it’s a bad social structure for some to have a lot and some to have a little. See there I am back at my political agenda. Do you think some people are more political than others? Some people never want to talk about politics. What is with them?

Those ideas that pop into your head is no big deal. I was just trying to distinguish them from déjà vu. Déjà vu is like you walk into a bar and some girl winks at you, and you immediately think that this has happened to you before, but you can’t remember how or when. But sometimes you are just riding on a train and the memory of that bar and the wink pops into your head, and again you don’t remember how or when, and maybe it was a dream, or something you saw in a movie, or maybe it was just some kind of brain fart.