| Soccer and religious wars
Watching the World Cup the fans impressed me as a collection of powder kegs. I could just imagine the middle ages superimposed on these nationalistic sublimations. Adding three fiery bishops (our god will lick your god) and in a matter of days war is declared. The rest we know...
Joseph Campbell suggested that the really interesting issue is your own relationship to this "god." According to him there may be two primary relationship to the concept:
one is master/servant (creator/object) where the boss is always right and I a poor sinner always wrong even if I am right. Justice being an invention of the created, does not apply to the master, to who just about nothing applies. This is not a Greek value system (where gods can be wrong - see Prometheus) but the Mediterranean system (Arab, Xtian, Jew) approach to a male archetype.
The second approach is that I, everyman, am myself divine. You know this to be case when you have no particular urge to search for the whereabouts of this concept. The eyeball sits in the face, contently doing whatever it is doing. It does not occur to it to hypothesize an eyeball of eyeballs watching all other eyeballs. It knows it doesn't work like that.
In the meantime those living in a more or less democratic society to assume the cosmos is a monarchy (like Sumeria where they invented the Jewish book) leads to an mental imbalance of which the current government takes unholy advantage.  |