From Reality Checker:
We have a whole class of people that is hell bent on not only taking everything and re-instating slavery, but committing species suicide as well. I feel that at least the ancient Greeks understood how to live in a world like this: make sacrifices to the capricious, sociopathic gods and hope they didn’t decide to kill you this morning.
I don’t even know who to sacrifice to.
Increasingly, I am learning the wisdom of expecting the unexpected. I am not quite sure when humans wrote capriciousness out of the God narrative.
I think we ought to bring it back.
Anyone who attributes natural disasters to god punishing people has been keeping the capricious nature of god alive and well.
while that is simple-minded in its way, the idea that a benevolent God allows such things to happen for his own inscrutable reasons is not more coherent.
And I am not convinced that it is more comforting, either.
Against the despair evident in that piece I have always found this to brace me:
Thomas Merton
Yes, and it is actually paraphrased from the original, which was a letter to a peace activist by the name of Jim Forest.
I like the fact that this version takes some of the “god language” out to make it perhaps more accessible to non-deists. More than a few social justice organizers see their own evolution in the process:
More on the letter:
http://kylebos.wordpress.com/2011/05/24/thomas-merton-letter-to-a-young-peacemaker/
Those are the putative gods…the glorious entrepreneurial capitalists who deserve all…because that’s the way the system works.
Maybe kosher-halal slaughtering a pig at the Wall Street bronze statue of a bull might work.
Lord knows, the NYPD were mighty intent on protecting that bronze idol during Occupy Wall Street’s tenure at Zucotti Park.
Or you might burn a pile of corn in front of the Chicago Board of Trade. Or a barrel of oil in the City in London.
Hopefully the capricious gods are not demanding real symbolic human sacrifices; hopefully, they are satisfied with starving people to death by denying food stamps, foreclosing and creating homeless families, denying medical treatment at ERs for folks lacking funds, and allowing police open season in urban, rural, and suburban neigborhoods.