Saturday, February 19, 2005

God: God as Foolable

Fundamental pk Symbols: God
Specifically: God as Foolable

However short the list of fundamental pk symbols, god must be on it.

It's a dangerous symbol: both perishable and flammable. Perhaps more than any other symbol, it's the one guaranteed to paralyze semiotic and semantic distinctions: the speaker says "map"; the hearer thinks "territory."

I'll try to illustrate that latter point by substituting a synonym: truth. Truth is a word: the meaning of the word is not a word. Some of us have a knee-jerk reflex to reify that particular symbol – "god": and also to capitalize it.

pk tries to be careful to distinguish, phonemically as it were, between lower case god and upper case God. in pk parlance, upper case God is the god who agrees to be fooled by the particular culture of the symbol user.

Genesis tells of God making the world: finally, Adam; then Eve. The narrative immediately skips to Eve's disobedience: and to Adam's backing her up. Are we going to be loyal to the Creator? Or to this woman: the place our penis fits? To the woman! Of course.
It's so funny. lower case god has nothing to do with obedience; for upper case God, it's his whole shtick. And in the story of upper case God (that is, in our story), disobedience is the very first thing we emphasize. (This is a pattern that appears again and again in our culture. To use a English major's example, the most famous early line of iambic pentameter in English begins not with an iamb but a trochee.) (Violate the cadence before you've established it.) (This basic information, this initial difference, will thereafter be invisible to the culture.)

There! You see? It's impossible to deal with so basic a symbol without spinning off away from it: like trying to swat a fly with your palm, or trying to pick a micron of fluff out of water with your fingers.

god may be a whole but we can only talk of god in facets: one, or perhaps two, at a time.

And the facet I wish to spin on a bit today relates to uppercase God and to what happened next in Genesis. God makes the world, God makes man, then woman. God gives the man rules. The woman disobeys them. And man backs the woman. Pussy is more important than rules, than truth, than God. Pussy is at least man's preference.

And then: God walks in the cool of the evening. And Adam and Eve hide from God.

Does the God who just created the world really not see them? or is he just pretending?

That's a trivial question – for man – because it's not about pussy. Nevertheless it's the theme I want to follow here. Skip a bit: Cain, Abel (I'm come back to them next) ... Noah, Abraham ... The Covenant! Isaac ... Old men, funny marriages, and the passing of the Covenant. Primogeniture. Esau the eldest ... but mommy favors Jacob. Mommy and Jacob fool Isaac ...

And God (seems to) agree(s) to the fooling!

The rule giver can't find Adam when he's hiding. And the rule giver assists the fudging of the rules so that usurpers can commandeer the Covenant. No wonder God is the god of civilization!

One additional perspective on that spin: It's the characteristic of any theist culture to see that handling by Nazis contaminates evidence, but that handling by our cops is necessary.

At God's Judgment, the ascendant Church will determine who goes to heaven. God's angels will be indistinguishable from the human priests: or from the FBI. Which is why at god's judgment, all evidence contaminated by God will have to be thrown out.

Oh, goody. You mean if we contaminate all the evidence, then we can never be convicted? No. I mean the evidence will have to be decontaminated. Or: merely shown to be contaminated.

Scientists use dyes, injected or ingested, to reveal this or that virus, this or that cell type, to their instruments. Maybe God is a dye used by god. And maybe hell is the disinfecting process. Maybe real life will begin after eternity!

In fact maybe heaven is a place to put evidence so contaminated it can't be disinfected!

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