III  Mysteries of the Sungod 

            Imagine yourself High Priest of an island kingdom once upon a time, before the advent of modern religious practices.  And that you and your people worshipped, as all of your ancestors had before you, the sun as God.  Makes considerable sense.  After all, as the bringer of light and warmth and life and even, as your legends have it, lightening and fire; what would be left without it but stormy darkness, bottomless cold and end of life.   In praise of its existence your people call it the Golden Orbed Eye of Eternity and engage in many different rituals and taboos to placate its moody plagues and windy rages.

            What if one day at the tail end of a storm of unprecedented magnitude and duration a boat load of travelers from far on the other side of the world were washed up wet and hungry on your shores?  Although not especially used to strangers dropping in -you being naturally hospitable and they more pitiable than threatening - you provide them food and shelter.  At first you are quite pleased with the bearing of these modest, intriguing and exotic strangers.  You are especially impressed that they seem to share the same reverence for the Sungod as you and often intone odd chants and perform wonderfully colorful and peculiar rites to mark the daystar’s passage across the blue sky.  Who would have guessed then, given these pacific beginnings, that soon this nice similarity would breed contempt and familiarity would turn slowly to distrust, then dislike and finally terror?

            The first clue you have to the dark nature of these deceptively innocent and simple people is when it is observed that before they sacrifice them to the Sungod they pluck their chickens.   On your island even a child knows how much the sun is upset at the sight of a naked chicken.  It’s well known as the most insulting thing anyone could ever do.  After this faux pas, though most of your people still try to be kind, some of the more scared and intolerant among you, imagining the many dire afflictions that may befall your people if such heresies are even vicariously countenanced, begin to cool toward your guests.  Still others start feverishly sacrificing their own fully feathered fowl to cancel out the nude hens these barbaric foreigners are roasting.  By these faithless measures your people hope to appease your angry, temperamental and apparently nearsighted sun from wreaking vengeance upon you all indiscriminately.

            Next, as if this were already not bad enough, as you learn to communicate better with these strangers you find that when they pray they don’t refer to the Sungod as the Golden Orbed Eye of Eternity as you do but something like – though granted this may have gotten garbled in translation – The Great Yellow Turtle Deity of Light and Dark and Up and Down!  My God, don’t they know that turtles are for soup not for worshipping!  You begin to ask yourself, what kind of heathen wacko sinners are these we have allowed into our midst?

            The final and most inscrutable heresy, however, arises when you as the High Priest, in conversations with their chief shaman, start to compare astronomical calculations.  Having not much else to do at night in that age before television glazed over eyes, this is an art at which both cultures are quite adept.  But as you come to the realization that the night sky they habitually see is not just different from yours by a few degrees as you expect but actually seems to be an image strangely opposed to your own, your disquiet starts to build.  And when at last you deduce that in their homeland these aliens must be worshiping their Sungod at precisely the opposite times of day and year that you do, you are genuinely horrified.  How can this be unless they are from a parallel universe and not worshipping the same Sungod as you at all but some sort of devil demon alien, bent down under and backwards, Satan sun.  At that moment you have no doubt that these people have been sent by the black hole Lucifer of Night as minions of chaos to deceive you and your people into the hopeless agony of apostasy.  

            Obviously, if only in your ignorance you had been able to conceive of a rounded, dynamic and magnanimous universe where the earth spins as it revolves around the sun rather than a flat, stationary, two-dimensional, homo-centric one in which the sun merely monotonously rises and sets overhead and revolves around us, these differences between you would have made perfect sense and ceased to exist as real differences at all.  But because limitations of mind lead to prejudice in action, you couldn’t and so at that point you really have no choice left but to have your new friends over for dinner.  Literally.

            The moral of this is that generally the religious differences which divide mankind have their roots in our own ignorance, not in any fallibility intrinsic to universal design. 

Mysteries of the Sungod - part II

But further then what if the decision to execute these heretics has not been unanimous?  What happens then?  What if at the tribal council where their fates are sealed one person dares stand up and protest?  And what if this person is considered to be one of your people’s bravest and wisest citizens?  He has come to know these people better than anyone and insists that these strangers are not barbarians at all but good people, proud and industrious.  “There is far more in humanity that unites us with them than separates us,” he argues forcefully.

“Now I can’t explain the discrepancies put forward by our honored High Priest as to why their faith differs in some details from our own.  But in what world is mere discrepancy and difference a sin?  Isn’t variety the very essence of creativity, harmony and progress?  Now I’m the first to acknowledge that there is far more about the world we don’t know than we do.  I’m no philosopher, I’m a man of activity like you but I, for one, can’t believe that there are two skies and two suns, one for us and one for others. Nor can I believe that one of these is a black, anti-sun that somehow operates in negation of the one we see above us every day.  I can’t believe this any more than I can believe in a cruel and arbitrary creator who would dole out his graces and wisdom selectively according to vagaries of language, geography, chance, culture and personal preferences. 

 “So I believe that this dark sun we hear postulated is just a reflection back in our eyes of the clouds of bigotry our minds generate within our hearts to block out the light that shines from on high equally upon us all.  For I believe that our Sungod, to be our Sungod, by our own definition of god, must be always equitable and accessible to all in life, just as I know the sun shines equally on all of us on earth for whatever endeavor we choose to use its light.  Otherwise, are not all our beliefs just anarchy and random folly?   For if our Sungod is not objective, universal and fair how can we know what is right to do or how to be objective and fair with one another?   Isn’t singularity and consistency of justice the essence of all faiths? 

“No, I’m sorry my good people, I believe there is only one sun in heaven and when we look up it is the same blindingly unerring truth which shines down upon us all no matter from what vantage point we perceive it or how we may choose to express our reverence toward it.  And I believe that the only true heresy on earth is the idolatry of hate and the blasphemies of ignorance which cause us to erect more than one truth to divide and govern all mankind when it serves our slavish prejudices to do so.”

At this point in the peroration you as High Priest, who have been seen growing increasingly restless and agitated at the seditious indiscretion inherent in this logic, might rise and rudely try to interrupt this blasphemer, but by raising his quiet voice higher the man manages to still your protest. 

“No friends, isn’t this really just a crude and doomed attempt by the small minds living among us to project their own limited imaginations on an omniscient, benevolent universe and abase it to their own narrow purposes of hate and war and chaos and in so doing pretend to a capacity of perspicacity, certainty and judgment that no one on earth can possibly possess?  And if they succeed here today won’t they invariably be emboldened to misuse these alleged insights merely as a tool to gain material and political advantage over and oppress all who dare oppose them?  I believe the very fact that some would have the arrogance to want to wield these powers over us is itself reason enough to believe that they can’t be trusted with them.

“So finally, I believe that for us to do what the High Priest proposes to do here today to these innocent people is as immoral and insulting to the absolute sun as it is demeaning and dangerous to all intelligent members of our tribe.  Can anyone of you seriously believe that intentional mass murder is a less grievous insult to god than the plucking of a few chickens?  It is a phenomenal conceit to think this way and a crime of unforgivable hubris to act it out as you intend.”  With that noble call for tolerance the island’s greatest hero sat down.

Of course, eloquence aside, rules are rules and even though it’s difficult for you personally, as this man actually happens to be your younger brother, you see no choice but to consign him to the same stew pot as all his new found friends.  Obviously he has become delirious with pride and fatally tainted with the same heresy as the foreigners to speak so pertinaciously in their defense.  And though some whisper behind your back that you have long since come to nurse a secret jealous grudge against your little brother, given his great popularity and success which far surpasses your own, obviously it is only the best interests of your people that compels you to act as you do and to impugn to you any other motivation is (or will soon be) a crime.

There is a secret maxim among old cannibals that goes something like: cannibals beware, because once you start to cannibalize others and once you run out of others to cannibalize you may soon have no one else left to cannibalize but each other.  Therefore mightn’t it quickly come to pass that you need to put many more regulations in place to control your increasingly restive people, who in opposing your new regulations and proving they’ve been infected with the heresy too, immediately find themselves running afoul of all your new regulations?  And to carry out these punishments you’ll then need to write even more rules, establish more constabulary control and correspondingly – because someone had to do it – have to add the title of King to your previous position of High Priest, even though these positions had always been scrupulously kept separate before. 

And even though this may have taken place many years before, as you uneasily preside over your much reduced and bitterly divided Rule of rules, you may still for many years thereafter find yourself having to convince yourself and others that all your actions were moral and their outcomes good.  Let’s look at the record.

First you unrepentantly congratulate yourself on the utter lack of self-doubt (as if that were an infallible precursor of being correct) you had shown as the self-proclaimed savior of your people.  If pressed you still insist that those rather tasty foreigners had either been sent by God or been sent by Satan (as you grew older you found it harder to distinguish between the two) to tempt your people.  In this respect, for you, the crisis of the foreigners’ arrival had really turned out just to be divine justice working through you to enable you to purge and cleanse your people of all their previously unappreciated faults. 

Then hadn’t it taken a genius of your august magnitude and incorruptible mightiness to see that your peoples’ freedoms could be best protected by limiting the number of people who could be trusted to share in them?  And hadn’t only you been wise enough to grasp that your island’s most sacred democratic traditions could better be revered and preserved in the memory than in the practice?  And hadn’t this enabled you to introduce many long overdo and admirable decision making efficiencies into the management of your regime by merely leaving you to make them all?  And wasn’t it you who did more than any other to ensure your purge’s survivors’ increased economic prosperity by limiting their numbers too?   Not only did the sound population reduction policies you instituted guarantee that a more passive and homogeneous society would result but that a plentiful, steady and cheap supply of meat and protein could be assured for your island’s communal larder.  Clearly this was a win-win for (nearly) everyone.

And wasn’t it you who acted swiftly to ensure by rigorous rite and ritual that your island paradise’s traditional reputation for generosity, tolerance, honesty and high moral values would be scrupulously maintained when others through careless generosity and maddening tolerance would have seen them endangered.  And who knew but maybe those halcyon times of peace, mutual respect and democracy could be returned to someday, perhaps in the afterlife.  But for your life’s duration the potential for attack on orthodoxy and the potential for your own overthrow (between which obviously no clear distinction could any longer be drawn) was just too great a risk to chance. 

            So despite all the undeniable good your actions wrought, as you recline in your superficially opulent magnitude, arrayed in your frayed kingly habiliments, wafted by palm fronds waved by a few fat and fawning mistresses and an aging, subservient retainer or two, mightn’t a certain endless hollow doubt of emptiness still creep across your mind ever and anon.  Especially when you reflect that to secure these reforms you had to savagely destroy not only everything and everyone you had ever loved but everyone who had ever loved you, and in the process gut the very way of life the reforms were designed to protect. 

Then you might do well to pause to wonder if after all you hadn’t mistaken artifice for substance and a banality of ego centric delusion for reality and hate for love and greed for happiness and cruelty for compassion etc., and vitiated all the latter for love of the former.  Because now all you are left with is an empty sack of a life in a vacuous world from which all the joy and glorious contents have been drained away and left to rot on the ground as cruel memorial of your having lived at all.

            Morals 2 and 3 – People quick to see evil in others are usually full of it themselves and those who adopt holier-than-thou attitudes never are.