Gods Of Gun

I know I said I was too busy to write, but I have to jot this down.

The USS Gabrielle Giffords is set to enter service with the US Navy in 2017. There are some types that are complaining about the name of the vessel, saying that it promotes gun control.

There is a certain amount of irony in saying a battleship promotes some sort of weaponry control, but that is not my interest. What is interesting is the fact that the critics think that the magical name of a US Congressperson who had been shot in the face was an attack on one of their dogmas!

Some people believe in the Second Amendment as a right, but some believe in the Second Amendment as a dogma. In this sense, there is no difference between religion and politics, for each is a worldview that is intolerant of dissent.

Both religion and politics are often worldviews which are inflexible and intolerant of other worldviews.

Why?

When people talk religion and politics, the areas of the brain involved with the self and self-esteem and are at work. The majority of statements about politics and about religion are mainly statements about the speaker's sense and value of self within the speaker's worldview.
That is, for the most part, religious and political statements are not about facts, but are about one's beliefs and the importance of those beliefs in one's view of the world.


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The Power Of Santa!

The feeling of the season of Christmas emerges from the array of actions we all engage in during that time. Santa Claus and Grandfather Frost (Ded Moroz) and all the other symbols of the season emerge into complex creations of humanity.

I think the Christmas season is a good study of Powers in the world, the Tuatha.
I think it is a good study how what we call fiction becomes what we call fact. Of course, then we turn around and deny the complex emotions which stir us all, especially children, because we love what we think are "facts" more than we ever could love "love".

I am not going to say anymore about it now. I shall let you think about it: the Christmas and New Year season, the Twelve Days, as a coherence, a story which we create and then interact with, giving birth to even more story, emotion, and activity.

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What Good Is The UN? And The Title Of This Blog

My wife says the question the use of the UN was posed on the television yesterday morning by some or all sitting around an oval table on The Morning Joe on MSNBC.

The hash and re-hash of it was what good is the UN?.. yadda-yadda-yadda. Kids are being killed in Aleppo, yadda-yadda-yadda. The UN doesn't even lift a finger, yadda-yadda-yadda.

I responded that the UN can do nothing that the permanent members of the Security Council do not want to happen. The US and Russia are not in agreement about Syria, so do not expect the UN to do anything. If you wish to assign blame, the clear targets are the US and Russia.

Further, if you remember Iraq, the US entirely ignored the UN.
The USA went to war, ignoring any protest from the member states of the UN, and arrogantly dismissing the findings of the UN weapons inspectors.
Hans Blix and the UN weapons inspectors found no evidence of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs). This finding was totally ignored by the Bush Administration, which relied upon fake news and false intelligence and outright lies.

Iraq.
Mistakes were made. Kids were killed. Lots of bad things happened. Were they asking then why the UN did not DO anything?

The bill for Iraq is coming due.
I remember my astonishment that some dark Power was able to get the entire population of the USA to march lockstep to that dubious battle. That is when I began to understand the Powers of the world, what I now call the Tuatha - the powers which not divine, unseen, unsubstantiated by modern rationality, yet which RULE the hearts of mankind... no matter what the UN may say, no matter what our consciences may say.... no matter what God may say.
The dark force controlled us.
Some people call it mob mentality and so did I for the longest time, until I saw that our surrender to the Mob was a vast and intense sacrifice and scarification of our indivduality which went far beyond following the crowd.

 Hans Blix, Head of the UN Iraq Weapons Inspection Team

I remember wrestling over the question of WMDs after the UN weapons team had turned in its report and the US was having nothing of it. I was truly upset by what was going on. I finally decided to pray on the matter.
I fell asleep soon in front of my computer. I recall that I awoke looking at an Excel spreadsheet of something.
At that point I knew that there were absolutely no weapons of mass destruction present in Iraq.

I did not like this one bit. There was a bit too much of Prayer and the Divine about it. I do not like putting God "to the test", as it were, for if there were to be found even some smallish WMDs, sort of like "appetizers for Armageddon" or some tantalizing "amuse-gueules"   (mon frère dit "amuse-bouche"... but I prefer more ancient and less polished expression)   for the Eve of Destruction, then my sudden insight and intuition - message from above, as it were - would be nothing but my own mental palaver.

And my intense feelings of the divine - like so many prophets who have foretold the end of the world, for example, and had the whole thing NOT blow up in their embarrassed faces  - would be the musings of an emotional dunce.

Of course, when it was proven true, it was a bit scary, too.

Anyway, that's why this blog has the title it does. I was so moved by the events of 2001 up to Iraq - and beyond - that I felt the earth was like the waters and I felt divinity mutely moving upon the face of the earth.
I thought it best to share with my daughter.

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Powers In The World: Tuatha

 Hagia Pharmaka  -  Holy Drugs

I wrote a post about Powers in the world in which I sort of compared Drugs to ancient dark deities. I think that everyone of the 8 people who read it thought it was a metaphor, as if I were saying that drugs are like dark gods.

http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-powers-of-world-hagia-pharmaka.html

No-o-o...
It was not really a metaphor.
What I meant was that the same psychology and physical processes that led humanity at other times and at other places to conceive of a pantheon of gods were actively at work in the present day cobbling together a pastiche of gods and goddish things that go bump in the night.
Really.
I mean it literally.

I was going to use the name Lwa to refer to them, but the Haitian people already have a very good usage and claim on it, and I did not think it right to steal even that divine nomenclature from them.
So I decided to use the ancient Irish Tuatha, literally "gods", and which is pronounced pretty much like "Tu-e'-he" or "Tyu-e'-he".

 Riders of the Sidhe by John Duncan.  A depiction of the 

Tuatha De Danaan  the Divine Beings of the Goddess Danu

Wikipedia

This whole business of the Tuatha (Tu-e-he) within our modern world which prides itself on knowing the distinction between fact and fiction as well as that between Church and State came to me in a bloody hurry one morning - sort of boisterously and staggeringly like a noisy reveler coming home in the early morn - when I was reading the news at 5:00 AM during one of those unpleasant periods when there was a mass shooting every day.

The news article said that the US House of Representatives began their day with a moment of silence as an observance for those slain the day before.
There were a lot of these moments of silence. If they had an individual moment for each shooting victim they US House may not get any work done.

It was very unclear who were the objects of the moment's prayer: did they pray for the dead? did they pray to the gods of death who welcomed the dead into their domain?
It was suddenly very unclear, for these are the legislators who are building the Weapon Society and extending it through such stratagems as "Stand Your Ground" laws - a law of which type led to Treyvon Martin's death in Florida.

I thought they just might be praying to the god of death... even though I'm sure most of them were totally unaware that their prayers were to accompany the sacrificial victims to the underworld. 

Mayan Lords of Xibalba Underworld

In the center is the Death god. On the left is the Weapons god, making implements of violence upon his forge. On the right is the god of Force and Compulsion.

We who thought to have drained the divinity from the world are now feeling it come back in new forms to destroy!

Lastly, these Tuatha correspond to the Saints and the intercession of the Saints in the Roman Catholic Church's view. The Tuatha are not merely anthropomorphized entities; they are also acts and process. For example, in Islam the Sunni lords of Saudi Arabia denounced any observance of the Prophet's Birthday, whereas the Shi'a - and many Sunni Muslims - will offer respect. But the purists of Arabia believe all respect is due to God alone.
Following this creed, they have destroyed the ancient cemetery of Baqi'a years ago, wherein the first Muslims were buried.

In monotheistic cultures - such as Islam and this Judaeo-Christian one - there in one God.
This Holy emerges from personal human history.

Then there is often an intermediary layers of Saints, Powers, intercessions, images, goals of holy pilgrimage, etc. which form the Tuatha. In this layer of Tuatha lie the superstitions, the egoistic prayers, the Pascal wagers, the failed and re-failed prophecies of end of the world, etc.
These phenomena emerge as the individual opens themself to the world and the world opens itself to the individual.

Then there is the world itself at the bottom layer, and forms the environment for intelligent life.


I believe that the modern Western world tried to throw the Tuatha out the front door, only to discover they have re-entered through the window. Any thinking person knows that there are powers in the relationship between intelligence and the world.

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The Powers Of The World: Hagia Pharmaka!

 Hagia Pharmaka  -  Holy Drugs

There are powers in the world.
Mysteries that emerge from our living in the world.

This is not a new discovery. Quite the opposite. Since antiquity we have had gods and demons and forces and fates, fairies and sprites, that may push or pull us, bless us or bane us.
Not new at all.

What is modern is that we have drained the spirits from the world. We have made all things material objects, facts, and processes, and thrown the baraka into the dustbin.

Only...

Only, they do come back!

Drugs - once seen as the opium poppy crowned goddess of Crete...
War and Weapons - once Mars and Ares and Kibuka and Bosou...
Food - once Ceres, once the Corn Deity...
Power and Compulsion - all the forces and fates and things that go bump in the night.

I have taken to referring to these things as Lois - the French word pronounced "Lwa" - which is based on Haitian use of Loa  ("Lwa") for deities. It is mostly just a name I use and I do not necessarily imply anything "law-like". I did not want to use "gods" nor "powers". Any term would have too much baggage. I chose "lois", or "loi" in the singular.
I think I shall spell it Lwa, too, just to make it easier.

So what?
So who really cares what I call things that don't have any traction anymore?

Like Drugs.

Drugs are no law, no power of the world. Drugs is not a god!

Or is it?

Who is winning the war on drugs? Drugs wins.
Who gets the hectatomb of thousands of human sacrifices dead from drugs? Drugs gets them.
Who drives society on to spend billions of dollars fruitlessly? Billions invested with no return? Drugs does.

If Drugs ran for president, I would vote for that real power, that lwa.
We may have made Drugs just a "social problem", but I think that social problem can run the world. In fact, Drugs turned Afghanistan into the Number 1 producer of Opium just after NATO kicked out the Taliban and took over in 2001.
Drugs runs the world sometime.

Drugs is no small change.
Drugs has as much power as Santa Muerte, does it not?  Drugs is very much Lwa.

Hagia Pharmaka - Holy Drugs!

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Powers In The World 2

H. P. Lovecraft's Ancient God Cthulhu Arises from his Lair

Some people have taken me to task for my post on powers, thinking I believed in spirits, ghosts, and demons and angels and ancient gods, somewhat like Cthulhu as pictured above.

Since I have exhaustively said that I do not "believe in" God, I am amazed.

I expect God. If I go around the corner, God is there. It is not a matter of belief. Beliefs can be mistaken. God's presence is not mistaken.
I really dislike what people call "belief systems".

What Carl Jung called Synchronicity, I call Fate or Bona Fortuna. Or I may ignore it.
One thing I do not do is "believe in" it, nor do I disbelieve in it.

To get me to believe or disbelieve, I have to be engaged in whatever it is that is under discussion.

I do not discuss God's existence, so I am not engage in that trivial pursuit.
It is the first axiom of my worlding: my being-in-the-world is subject to being shot through by the occasional divine, leaving my head spinning. It ain't a belief. It is the real deal.

Powers, too, are the real deal. I can believe... or not, as the mood takes me.
One thing I tell you, I pay close attention to Powers.

Water is a Power. Something like -what? - 80% of our bodies is water, is it not? It is a basis of life as we know it.
A Power, in other words.

In Indian Country Today, we read:
Debra White Plume Fights for Sacred Water—With a Film. Want to See It?
Natalie Hand 4/2/15
http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2015/04/02/debra-white-plume-fight-sacred-water-film-want-see-it-159857

For many people on this planet, water is taken for granted. They turn on their faucet and expect clean drinking water every time. But what if you turned on your tap and nothing came out? Or what did come out was discolored or flammable?

Until you’re faced with this reality, you may feel that it’s not your problem. Guess what? It is your problem! And mine, and every Tom, Juan, and Sven’s on this planet.

Debra White Plume (Wioweya Najin Win), Executive Director of Owe Aku, is an Oglala Lakota grandmother and water rights activist who is taking on Cameco, the world’s largest producer of uranium, near her homeland on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, in South Dakota.

White Plume’s call to action has prompted a series of non-violent direct action trainings around North America to prepare people to rise up and stand strong to protect our most precious commodity—sacred water...

So... "sacred". You believe water is sacred?
80% of you screams out that it is so.

Peter Brabek of Nestle Co has been in the news about claiming that water is not a basic human right. That view, he claims, was a distortion.

The matter is summed up in a Huffington article:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-mcgraw/nestle-chairman-peter-brabeck-water_b_3150150.html

... Mr. Brabeck insists that by assigning water a price, we'll become more aware of just how precious it really is. Like him or not, he's right to point out how desperately out of touch we've become.

But I think that this underscores the point at which free markets break down, for we have assigned famously and historically a price in human lives and suffering to Peace and War, and we have found the bulls are for War!

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Powers In The World

Tengo muchos nombres, que sólo le viente y la lluvia pueden pronunciar
I have many names that only the wind and the rain are able to pronounce
El Fauno

It is 5:08 EDT this morning. One minute ago, I heard thunder.

I cannot remember the last time I heard thunder.
Not at all in the winter just past.
I would have remembered thunder in that winter; thunder is a coda that brings the music of one period of time to an end, and then there starts another.
Thus, there was no thunder, for there was no coda to that symphony of suffering, was there? If I was not in pain, my wife was. If not she, then her dying sister or the sister's daughter. Every day was a recapitulation of the preceding day, and to be truthful, did we not weep a capella?
There was no accompaniment.
Until this thunder.

Thunder is not a power upon the earth, but there are such things. The ancient beings, such as Poseidon of the sea, or Yam, the sea god of Ugarit, were they not so? And the gods of the sky and the subnivial underworld, and the mountains and the valleys, the dryads of the trees and their sisters and their brothers, the fauns.

We have been brought up to dismiss such things as demons. If not demons, then myths and mythologies in the least important sense. They are nonsense, and if not nonsense, then they are diabolic.

Yet, they exist still.
We have changed their names to "angels" or "spirits". They are "lwa" or gods of what we consider to be primitive folk religions that still exist beyond the pale of philosophy and science and biblical criticism.
They can also seem ultra-rational. Sometimes the palaver that comes from academe about The Grand Theory Of Everything, or GUT, of physics seemed to be such a creation of a faith that was swept off it feet upon the earth, and there are other obsessions yet haunting science still.

Then there are the demons behind the politics and religions of those who disagree with us.

A Mexican Family Prays at a Shrine of Santa Muerte  (Holy Death) in Mexico City

There are indeed Powers on the Earth. I have seen them at times.

They are not transcendent. God is transcendent. God comes like a sudden blast of a gun across our bow as we sail along our time-line. It gets our attention, but it is gone as soon as we are aware of it.

The Powers do endure.

There are heroes and heroines, demons and angels, powers and tree-spirits, and they all exist within the World-ing we create in our negotiation with Creation.
We read stories in the Bible and often we scratch our heads, wondering how the children of Israel could turn away from such a demonstrably powerful and omni-present deity such as Yahweh, and we ascribe to them not just a stubbornness and stiff-necked-ness of a normal type, but an obduracy bordering on the unimaginable.

Yet even they were not as stiff-necked as Moses said, but they were as immersed into the study of torah of the powers of creation as their later descendants would be into the Torah of God.
They were ever davening in a negotiation with God.
Moses warned them not against defeat by the Canaanites, but of their eventual victory over the Canaanites:

“Don’t say in your heart – ‘because of my righteousness has God brought me to inherit this land and because of the wickedness of these other nations’ – (but) in order to fulfill God’s promise to your ancestors Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – for you are a stiff-necked people,”  Deuteronomy 9:4-6.

for they are focused like religious autistic savants in the parliament with their God, and they will not bow the head once they think they have found the "truthfulness" of their ways.

It takes a long, long struggle to capture the essence of the God who burst upon our lives like a momentary supernova; much easier, is it not, to latch onto those vasty powers who inhabit God's creation, above and below.

However, having said this, we ignore the powers at our own peril.

Iraq;
my mother thinks that the UN weapons inspectors told the world that Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction. She listen to FOX, however, and history has been changed in FOX's Mini-Truth. Yet I well remember how shocked I was at the ease with which we were marched in unison over the cliff of the Iraq War in 2003.
I had a sense of a majority of the public being possessed by madness, a feeling I don't think I ever had before.

The invasion of Saddam Hussein's Iraq began 20 March 2003, and by 12 May 2003 four soldiers from the 320th Military Police Battalion abuse detainees at Camp Bucca, in southern Iraq, kicking and beating them.
Eventually we had Abu Ghraib and the photos of abuse.
Less than 2 months for the devil in the details to jump up.

I particularly found Abu Ghraib interesting because it the photos were filled with nudity and suggestions of sexual dominion.
I remember at the time wondering how long it would take for the culture to begin to "come out" of the S and M closet:
how long before things like Fifty Shades Of Grey would be commonplace?

It did not take very long, did it, suckers?!

Many of us are in the grips of Powers we cannot begin to comprehend with our present intercourse with Creation.

This time, his head was not covered, but the American flag did cover the legality of the events. This was the death of an individual whom the Mass Media called a "very, very, bad man."

I never met him, thank God. But my taxes paid for this.

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