Rather than beat 'em, I join 'em, as who needs all that beating anyway. I'm talking about the cadre that delivers sermons, as from a pulpit, which might as well be a lectern.
When it comes to dogma, anyone is capable of barking out some truth, unreflectively and by the book. But what's the point of suppressing free speech? Let the spewers spew, while reserving your right to change channels.
In other words, rather than fulminate regarding how others seize the privilege (of sermonizing) I'll dutifully get in line to deliver my Lightning Talk when the occasion is appropriate.
My boilerplate sermon (oft preached) centers around God having real problems with his Creation, to where He has to take strict measures even before Genesis is over.
He bans Adam & Eve from Eden, or rather they're self disqualifying in some way. Then he floods the place, saving precious little DNA: just that of Noah and his family, along with the non-humans that they rescued.
So Noah's offspring were very deficient in the biodiversity department and highly susceptible to groupthink. They succumbed to the flat Earth vision of an infinite plane (plain) and God Above, looking "down". To reach God, then, they reasoned, build a tall tall tower.
Their hunger to connect with the deity was commendable, even endearing, but once again the humans were on the wrong track. Blasting off into outer space atop a Saturn V or whatever, would need to come later, much later. By then, the chief lesson would have been learned.
God had promised no more major cataclysms, though in later Plague Days some may have wondered if He'd changed his mind.
The intervention he'd need for this mono-culture was pretty brilliant: just don't let them all get on the same page. End the ability of humans to establish a single, totalitarian consensus reality (some singular Reich) once and for all. Thwart imperialism. Keep it chaotic, though not entirely without rhyme or reason.
Again, the lessons to be learned are geometric in nature: the planet is not an infinite plane, but a ball, and God needs humans to realize this fact.
Some say our eating the apple was coming to know of the world's roundness and that wasn't really a sin. Rather, a self-serving intelligence community, a priest caste, wanted to keep such knowledge secret and conspired to make a religion out of keeping us ignorant.
Without buying into this particular heresy, we're still able to appreciate the intentional nature of our Diaspora.
As a chosen people (humanity, on this particular Eden planet) we were to understand our relationships to one another in terms of networks, not top-down pyramids. Cybernetics and Deep Ecology would eventually seep into our thinking, countering the conditioned reflexes of those "infinite plane" landlubbers.
The Diaspora in the wake of the Tower of Babel incident meant removing our fixation on some singular Z axis, a common pecking order.
Civilization would be multi-polar, henceforth.
Hallelujah and Amen.
When it comes to dogma, anyone is capable of barking out some truth, unreflectively and by the book. But what's the point of suppressing free speech? Let the spewers spew, while reserving your right to change channels.
In other words, rather than fulminate regarding how others seize the privilege (of sermonizing) I'll dutifully get in line to deliver my Lightning Talk when the occasion is appropriate.
My boilerplate sermon (oft preached) centers around God having real problems with his Creation, to where He has to take strict measures even before Genesis is over.
He bans Adam & Eve from Eden, or rather they're self disqualifying in some way. Then he floods the place, saving precious little DNA: just that of Noah and his family, along with the non-humans that they rescued.
So Noah's offspring were very deficient in the biodiversity department and highly susceptible to groupthink. They succumbed to the flat Earth vision of an infinite plane (plain) and God Above, looking "down". To reach God, then, they reasoned, build a tall tall tower.
Their hunger to connect with the deity was commendable, even endearing, but once again the humans were on the wrong track. Blasting off into outer space atop a Saturn V or whatever, would need to come later, much later. By then, the chief lesson would have been learned.
God had promised no more major cataclysms, though in later Plague Days some may have wondered if He'd changed his mind.
The intervention he'd need for this mono-culture was pretty brilliant: just don't let them all get on the same page. End the ability of humans to establish a single, totalitarian consensus reality (some singular Reich) once and for all. Thwart imperialism. Keep it chaotic, though not entirely without rhyme or reason.
Again, the lessons to be learned are geometric in nature: the planet is not an infinite plane, but a ball, and God needs humans to realize this fact.
Some say our eating the apple was coming to know of the world's roundness and that wasn't really a sin. Rather, a self-serving intelligence community, a priest caste, wanted to keep such knowledge secret and conspired to make a religion out of keeping us ignorant.
Without buying into this particular heresy, we're still able to appreciate the intentional nature of our Diaspora.
As a chosen people (humanity, on this particular Eden planet) we were to understand our relationships to one another in terms of networks, not top-down pyramids. Cybernetics and Deep Ecology would eventually seep into our thinking, countering the conditioned reflexes of those "infinite plane" landlubbers.
The Diaspora in the wake of the Tower of Babel incident meant removing our fixation on some singular Z axis, a common pecking order.
Civilization would be multi-polar, henceforth.
Hallelujah and Amen.
