Divine Retribution & the Voice of Whoever

Aside from the linguistic considerations of how humans think, there's one question that has always made me just stand shaking my head in disbelief: religious zealotry. Take any religion, any belief system that proposes first that there is a supernatural divine agent as the source, cause and continuance of the universe with a set of doctrines and pronouncements about the divine agent & its rules of conduct for all that is. Apply those rules to every human creature and do so in a way that makes any variance from the following of the rules the most abject form of blasphemy and then make any blasphemy punishable by death.
     God, as divine agent & ruler of the universe, has rules. You obey the rules, you get an eternal reward beyond measure in a supernatural existence. If you disobey the rules, you get punishment & torment in the afterlife and, if you disobey the rules enough to piss off other believers to want you dead, you die right then and there.
     Now my question about this hangs on one simple hook within any belief system.
     Makes no never-mind whether we're talking about Christianity, Mormonism, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, Hinduism (in all its manifestations), $cientology or – dare I say it? – Atheism, Agnosticism & complete disbelief.
     You act against the divine commands, you can pay with your life in the here and now.
     Never mind that your sins will deny you an eternal reward in the hereafter.
     Sin means death and sufficient sin means that believers will want you dead.
     It ain't enough that the divine judgment of eternity will not tilt in your favor.
     It's that right here, in this physical world of this very moment, other believers will want you dead. In fact they will be quite glad to see you dead. They will end your life right now so you can burn in hell or suffer whatever divine retribution might befall your soul in the hereafter.
     But most importantly: you will pay right now for your sins today.
     And those who do not believe as the rest do will suffer the same fate, should they choose not to convert their beliefs to those of the gun-totin', scimitar-wavin', rock-chuckin', epithet-screamin' majority believers.

You do as someone has decided the divine wants you to do or you suffer physical torture and, ultimately, death. No questions asked. No second-chances given. Belief and obey or suffer and die.

Now, this is all a little weird to me because, if I understand the divine agency message correctly, the divine agent, by dint of having created the universe out of nothing, is thus much more powerful than anything or anyone who might have lived, ever will live or could ever live, now and forever, amen.
     So if god is omnipotent, god itself can punish the sinner directly.
     Why would an omnipotent god need to use its creation – human beings in this case – to punish those who act or believe or speak against the divine will?
     Why doesn't god punish them now? And why is punishment right now in this time and space so absolutely necessary? Wouldn't an omnipotent divine agent, able to transcend time and space, matter and energy, be capable of punishing the sinner before the sin was even contemplated, let alone committed?
     Are you getting me here?
     God is divine. A divine being is immortal, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent.
     God is thus aware of everything everywhere all the time.
     God has rules which god has transmitted to the humans.
     If humans disobey god, then god will exact punishment.
     So why do other humans – creatures much less powerful and a lot more inclined to weakness in all aspects of the universe than god – have to become involved in the punishment of the sinners?
     Shouldn't humans just let the sinners die off and receive the punishment in the hereafter that the divine agency has promised those who disobey?
     It doesn't make any sense to me.
     It's not a wookie. Wookies don't even exist and yet here's a picture of a wookie.

"For it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord."
(Romans 12:19)

At least that's the way it comes to me, that condition of retribution: god says that retribution for disobeying god will come from the hand of god.
     Or so some might think.
     So it's here that the question becomes all foggy and ratty.

First off, what we as humans know about the divine agent comes not from direct communication between that agent and every individual in the human species. The info we have on god, how it works, how it built the universe, how it expects us to act, how it will or has or can act with or toward us comes from the mouths of singularly self-appointed other humans.
     God doesn't tell me how I'm expected to act or what I get for acting nice.
     God tells someone else and that someone else tells me what god told them.
     Chinese whispers on a metaphysical scale.
     Thus, linguistically, the trouble begins there, with that particular human being who claims to have been informed by the divine as to the wishes, commands and directives of the divine. Not god directly. Another human being. Somebody just like you and me, with blood in his or her veins and a whole life of likes and dislikes, neuroses, psychosis, hates and loves and preferences and all sorts of tastes and disgusts.
     Another human speaks for god.
     Which, despite all the history of human beings trusting in the words of some self-appointed (or otherwise mysteriously chosen) human being as the front man for the divine, is the weak link in the chain.
     Prophet, priestess, shaman, wizard or witch, it makes no diff: god don't talk to nobody directly. The divine agent has an agent.
     And we know how selfless & dispassionate agents can be, don't we?
     As if.

See, that's where it really all falls apart for me. Over the course of six million years as a species under development and over the course of something like twenty thousand years as a species per se developing today's culture, it's likely that a few billion human beings have claimed to speak for the divine.
     Among that group – and most recent 'cause they seem to keep better records now than they did twenty thousand years back – you can count the likes of Ezekial, who saw the wheels and the faces and such. Or John Smith, who got his info from some stones in a hat by way of gold plates carved with stuff that no one ever really, truly saw in the flesh, hands-on, so to speak. Or Jim Jones, who distributed the Kool-Aid to his flock in the jungle of Central America. Or David Koresh, about whom any number of conspiracy theories have been proposed and used as fodder for or against government interference in belief. Or the Ayatollah Khomeini, who proposed in a fatwah that it was ok to have sex with a child. Or Adolf Hitler, who proposed that the German people were the last vestiges of a once great Aryan race, despite all evidence to the contrary then (or now). Or Julius Caesar, who claimed to be the child of parthenogenesis and who was supposed to have ascended into heaven upon his death all them millennia ago, thus copping in on an act that Christians today claim only happened with Jesus.
     Yeah, year and month and day and century after millennia of this or that human being claiming to be inspired by and speaking for the divine agency when the divine agency, by way of being divine and thus omnipotent &c should, by all rights, be talking to each and every one of us individually.
     Or is that the story of prayer?

See, that and the rest of it makes the entire conceptual underpinnings of belief and disbelief so incredibly, well, human. And I ain't talking about humane or how humans are better 'n the other animals on the planet, even if they do appear to have some sort of inner dialogue or reflective consciousness.
     I'm talking about humans gaining control over other humans by saying that they got the word from the divine mouth.
     Ages upon ages of prophets, seers and metaphycicists.
     Them guys.
     The holy men.
     Every single one of 'em born of the flesh, given to the flesh and living within the flesh, they somehow get called "holy" and none dare question what they say about what the divine might have said to them.
     Period.
     Silence! I kill you!
     Them guys.
     
All of which brings me back to something I noticed when I was talking with a believer one year at the Dayton Hamvention.
     This guy and I started talking and he expressed his belief in a divine agent. Jesus, to be exact.
     I explained that I did not hold to that particular accretion of mythic elements.
     I explained that I did not see a god to believe in. (As opposed to saying that I didn't believe in god, which to me is a way of saying that I choose to not believe in a god which I somehow have to admit exists by way of negating my belief in it. In god.)
     The other guy then went on to explain that he worried for my eternal soul and then explained how his life had been beset by some personal problem (into which I will not go, since it's basically immaterial). He explained how this problem bothered him and how he prayed and consulted the Bible and prayed and tried to figure out what his god would have him do.
     Then, finally, he said he put the problem in his god's hands (yeah, I know: this is figurative speech about something that is entirely conceptual within the reflective consciousness of any human of the species) and how at that point a great weight was lifted off his shoulders.
     The great weight being, of course, this problem in his life.
     So the guy tells me that he just let it all go and then, lo and behold, he hears the voice of his god telling him to proceed as he has been proceeding and to change this or that behavior and all would come out well.
     Which, he told me, it did.
     Eventually.
     Now all the time I'm hearing this story, as I listened to him tell me about his concerted effort to find a way to fix things, I kept thinking that his prayers and his readings and his contemplations of scripture all amounted to the beginnings of a trouble shooting exercise.
     Collect all the data about whatever you've got to fix.
     Look at the problem in a linear, step-wise fashion, not letting one minor thing get missed in your evaluation of the problem's cause.
     Then! Then you let your understanding of what you're looking at, based on what you've accumulated as data and information, float the problem to the surface.
     In other words, you relax all the serious referentiality of the situation and look at what you've got.
     This don't happen because of action A, B or C.
     Or, to put it a bit less technically, the guy had given up thinking about the problem, at least to his own conscious awareness.
     This didn't make the problem go away, of course.
     It just meant that he wasn't spending serious awareness time on it. He put himself to the task of not thinking about what was wrong by way of not thinking about all the thinking about the problem that he had been thinking about.
     Degrees of referentiality. Or at least one version or the other of degrees of referentiality. Among many others.
     And then one day the gentleman's subconscious mind just floated a solution to him and, bingo, just like that: problem solved.
     Thank you, Masked Man.

Of course, the conversation that I had with this guy is just one of many such that I've had over the many years of my life of disbelief which cause me to take a very simple, almost chimp-like, view of just what it is comes out of our minds when we assign significance of thought to an agency outside of our six-million-year-old neural architecture.
     In other words, the idea that a divine speaks to the select comes directly from our innate ability to miss the fact that nothing comes from the mind that doesn't come from the brain.
     We think of stuff and, since thought & language seem to be so intrinsically linked after a hundred thousand years of gibbering like patients in the Thorazine ward, we think it's not our voice telling us to do shit.
     Even if we do think out loud and even if we do work out problems in our heads using words – which words are really never spoken but are nonetheless taken as "internal dialogue."
     Which, as usual, brings me right back to the question of the divine agent needing an agent.

Having spent so much time thinking about language and thought and applying that to the obvious question of why the divine don't communicate with everyone individually and all at once with a uniform message across time, space, geography & politics, it's obvious that there ain't no divine.
     Either that or there's a lot of 'em and they're all very weird about who knows what about them. Or the other 'n.
     Or the one Deeny listens to.
     
And it came to pass that after such a time as was wont, no knowledge has appeared to me directly from the voices in my head. And I know that they're voices plural 'cause, well, there's a huge range of personalities that I am.
     Everyone is.
     A huge range of personalities.
     There's the more-or-less '60s me, the crazy guy who has no serious referentiality at all. I'm just watching the show, man.
     There's the father-son me, the guy who stands in his garage print shop and talks with the now absent & non-existent father who died a couple days before Christmas over 26 years ago come this December.
     There's the sailor/NCO me, the RM2 guy, who stayed with the watch while the rest of the section got sent topside when the second of two engine rooms flooded back off the coast of Greece back in 1972.
     There's the guy who looks at women and girls and thinks of other women and girls whom I've known, some of whom are dead and gone many years. That guy, he's the same one who watched friends in high school walk hand-in-hand with their girlfriends and wondered why.
     There's the guy who loves his sons and his wife and looks forward to growing very old with them as part of his life.
     There's the guy who builds things.
     There's the guy who, when he messes up or injures himself building things, can drop into a rage so violent and single-minded that he may as well be homicidal.
     And there's the inner homicidal maniac, sitting there waiting for the moment of truth.
     And there's the me who knows all them guys and who knows that every single one of 'em is completely outside the control of the guy who knows about 'em.
     Them guys.
     Them referentialities.
     Not a one of 'em the voice of god or Jesus or even The One True Frank.
     Just me.

One thing I know for sure about all this, by way of knowing so much about my inner selves: I cannot account for all the voices that communicate the me (that persona who is me at any time) to me. I know that the person I am varies from moment to moment and that, since I am in a constant state of conceptual flux, my perceptions are in a constant state of flux. And the universe, as cosmic and big as it seems to be, is not a steady state either.
     Part of this is time/space theory, granted. But part of it is also cognitive theory and cognitive theory is pretty damn exact in all its vagueness when it comes to explaining beingness.
     The old Cartesian view (Cogito, ergo sum) of the mindness state has been proven false in all ways by neurology, biochemistry and chemical & neural biology.
     Nothing comes from the mind that doesn't come from the brain.
     That, in sequence, means that all the folks who claim to hear the voice of a god speaking to them directly – and particularly those who claim primacy in delivering what they think god is saying – are dead wrong. They are listening to their own self-perpetuating, self-moderating, self-absorbed selves. Certainly not a divine being.
     Which, again, brings us around to the original question or conundrum with which I started this rant: The info we have on god, how it works, how it built the universe, how it expects us to act, how it will or has or can act with or toward us comes from the mouths of singularly self-appointed other humans.
     There ain't nobody ethereal and divine whispering in my ear. And no, it ain't because I don't believe that I don't hear it, that divine voice. It's 'cause there ain't nobody whispering in my ear.
     Thus I shake my head in solemn disbelief when I hear Benny Hinn or whoever else is hip with the divine making fanciful pronouncements that, like all other such pronouncements over the course of human history, serve not the divine but the ego and self-adulation of those claiming to speak for the divine. And who claim the right to demand payment for blasphemy in the here and now instead of waiting for their imaginary friend to do the job itself, as any truly omnipotent & transcendental being should be able to do . . .

Unless that being never has existed and never will.