lummi island wine tasting July 4-5 ’25
Sorry, wine shop closed for 4th of July weekend …. But...
Friday Bread pickup as usual 4-5:30 pm
will feature wine tasting!
Economics of the Heart: Politics of Religion <–> Religion of Politics
It is no coincidence that the Maggit coup now well underway in our country has been unfolding since 1980. Leonard Leo’s diabolical plot has long been to transform America into a racist, misogynist Hell to benefit only a tiny handful of white, male, fundamentalist Christian billionaires while creating misery for everyone else. This is the kind of stuff Dante could have made up, yet here it is.
The ongoing hostile takeover of the United States is following the detailed blueprint of the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” with the aim of replacing our Constitutional democracy with a tyrannical oligarchy of the few, by the few, and for the few; a police state unbounded by law; a coast-to-coast, privately owned Feudal State where all wealth and all rights are allocated by a strange coalition of ‘Oligarchs for Jesus.’
This all-devouring coalition of has its roots in humanity’s five thousand-year history of “Religions of the Book.” The intertwining of religion and politics has been a path to power for countless ambitious people of both genders, for as far back as we have historical records.
Millennia of human existence have left artifacts, stories, tools, and ruins, along with ancient skeletons and cultural totems sometimes buried with them. Then, as now, every family, tribe, and society made meanings from their experiences which shaped their beliefs and rituals.
While various forms of record-keeping have existed for some 30,000 years, symbolic language as we know it today began independently “around 3,200 BC in Mesopotamia and Egypt, around 1,200 BC in China, and around 400 BC in Mesoamerica.” (link)
Significantly, as suggested in detail in the very interesting 1998 book “The Alphabet Versus the Goddess,” for thousands of years pre-literate cultures likely processed information with significantly more right-brain-dominated processes than the left-brain dominated “alphabet” cultures which have succeeded them.
Those preliterate cultures may have made sense of the world more from intuitive, right-brain, holistic direct experiences than later cultures of the written word. By comparison, translating written symbols into meaning requires a more “linear, sequential, reductionist, and abstract kind of thinking, largely relegating right-brain perception to the somewhat eyebrow-raising realm of “intuition.” The suggestion is that literacy itself may have altered –possibly narrowed– dimensions of human perspective and behavior which may have been lost.
Since the dawn of writing, “Religions of the Book” have been a central feature of human culture for very large populations of human beings across the world. In various ways each asserts that only its particular “Book” was passed down directly to their Prophet, from their supernatural God, who is the only “True God.”
Non-believers were often regarded as heathen enemies, and thousands of years of cruel and horrifying oppression, wars, torture, executions, and genocide have been justified and carried out by Holy men in symbolic robes, whose authority to interpret the Divine Word of God gave them enormous power.
Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, for example, each have their Book, in which the Law of their God is spelled out in great detail to distinguish virtuous human behavior from sinful, and worthiness from unworthiness. The aspirational interpretation is to create and maintain acceptable bounds of behavior, as with, for example, the Ten Commandments of Judaism. The political aspiration is to leverage its Divine Authority to rule the masses and punish every dissenter.
Here we are today embroiled in a sweeping attempt to establish that same “divinely inspired” philosophical argument as justification for turning our country and our way of life upside down.
Immigrants and dissidents are being snatched away and “disappeared” by groups of young, masked, armed men with neither warrants nor due process. Federal records are being used to target and punish hundreds of thousands of Americans for fictional offenses. These are the tools of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and Putin.
There is nothing to admire or respect in this eruption of institutionalized cruelty,
so while we join together in resistance we take comfort where we can, and remain committed to maintaining the humanistic values of a just society:
May all beings be free from suffering,
enjoy the ease of well-being,
be free from fear and violence, and
be stewards of all living things,
with kindness, compassion, love,
patience, clarity, and wisdom.
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