roachboy

for quite a while, i was taken with liberation theology because it seemed to me closer to the teachings of jesus than anything else i had encountered floating outward from the planet organized xtianity for a very long time. naturally, john paul 2 thought it a pinko threat and authorized its suppression. no doubt the socio-economic elites were happy to see it go: the nerve of people who see in the gospels a message concerning the dignity of the poor, the importance of compassion and self-organization as an extension of it, of autonomy personal, economic, political.

the suppression of liberation theology was one of those moments of theater in which the truth of the matter is revealed: given the choice between operating as a mechanism for the enforcement of social discipline and actually enacting something of the radical aspects of the gospels, catholicism chose the former.

i prefer theology to its absence because if anything about the notion of transcendence is accurate, then it is obvious that what appears in the biblical texts is not transparent----and so any notion that it can be "taken literally" seems to me idiotic. but i've always had a kind of perverse fascination with evangelical shortwave radio stations like hcjb and sometimes like to imagine a group of people in the upper amazon who live according to the norms of evangelical radio broadcasts and so dress and act like donna reed figuring that it is only secondarily the acceptance of the word jesus that gets you somewhere--mostly it's about american cultural imperialism, and the sooner you buckle, the sooner you get where you're going.

the coercive dimension of xtianity seems all about these social control functions. hell is where you go if you dissent and the existing order, because it exists, is rational because there is a god who ordains all and so whaddya complaining about?
a radically uneven distribution of wealth? shut up. read ephesians and meditate of the organic division of labor and shut the fuck up with your complaints about the lack of social justice or anything remotely like it.
you want heaven?
do what i tell you.
and shut up.

jesus was an interesting character and the political implications of the gospels are still pretty radical--but it seems obvious to me that there is a serious divide which separates that message from organized christianity in general. so to my mind at least, the only coherent relation to jesus is to see him as one of a long line of social critics/philosophers who have attempted to fashion a vision of a more equitable world only to find what they said absorbed into the kind of world they wanted to replace. it simply turns out that it has been christianity itself that has played a central role in this absorption process.


from this viewpoint, it makes no difference at all whether folk who subscribe to one or another version of christianity say is or is not christian.
well, from most viewpoints, that makes no difference.
the rules that apply to believers apply only to them. they make no larger game, there is no reason to pretend otherwise. so they talk to and for themselves.

more generally (again) nietzsche was right.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite