Knatz.com had a number of answers, more than one imagining on the subject. Here follows this morning's new draft on the subject:
Catholics succeed in scaring the bejesus out of children with threats of hellfire: hellfire following Judgment. God will judge. God will judge children who don't behave. Notice: churches routinely appeal to the self-regulation of the already-over-regulated: children, women, slaves ...
The Jews failed to scare the massagan out of those they were trying to impress: other people out-competing, out-cheating, out-hustling the Jews in the area of the world over-developed and over-crowded the longest. The Bible imagined the Jews' God judging the "nations": bullying those the Jews envied on behalf of the Jews: Today you steal my lunch money: tomorrow my big brother, my big friend, my big father, God, MY God, the owner of the universe, will make you lick my balls, make you eat my turds ... You watch out, God will give me Your lunch money.
Neither Catholics or Jews listen to me much when I imagine god judging the judges: Hitler and his judges, Stalin and his judges, Nixon-Bush and their judges: the judges who presided while my god-inspired fiction wasn't published, while my god-inspired scholarship was interrupted, while my Jesus-inspired public network was degraded, then plagiarized, while my outrage-inspired satires were censored: barred from the internet stolen from Jesus, Illich, and me. But that's nothing: Protestants absolutely never understood anything I said (that is, they understood it so instantly, saw where it was going, that they interrupted me, thinking that then it couldn't go there, that god couldn't make it go there.
Wait a minute, step back for a second: there's a fundamental, un-resolvable problem here. God, however you spell it, is so ambiguous a term, that the second you say it, you've confused and misled everybody. When I was a kid God was palmed onto us as "the truth." That's the main thing that god still is to me: the essence of things, the truth: not Newton's model of gravity, not Einstein's, not the word gravity, but the thing gravity: gravity in the actual universe; not in our pathology of misunderstandings, interruptions, and lies. But, simultaneously, when I was a kid and didn't know any better, God was a magician, Jesus was a magician: a worker of miracles. Now I repudiate magic and all magicians, there being no true examples that I can discover with anything like objectivity.
But, damn it, it's hard to give up hope of a big brother who'll fight your battles for you, and win: all for you, no payment necessary, cheap thanks more than enough. On the other hand, if you grow up at all, even 1%, then it's impossible to give up the idea of the truth: the idea that if we poison the earth, then keeping false records about the environment, refusing to understand what the scientists have tried to tell us, that therefore the poison won't be poisonous.
No. Bateson said it: God is not mocked: meaning, the poison is still poison, no matter what lies we tell, no matter how false our record keeping: no matter what we censor, who we crucify.
Here though is a problem I've always had, and still have, a little bit, with the idea of justice: divine judgment. If the Pope is supposed to be infallible, it's God the Catholics really imagine as infallible, isn't it? If God judges it so, it will be so ... right? These days I have trouble imagining anything infallible, I don't even want an infallible god. Be that as it may, put that aside for a moment.
The Jews' God had a bunch of commandments about giving God a monopoly on our admiration, but then he added something about not stealing. Now that's a commandment that almost any civilization will endorse, or at least pretend to endorse, there being no civilizations that aren't based on theft in the first place: didn't we subtract farmland from wilderness to have civilization in the first place: isn't theft what civilization is? (But can you imagine a caveman who wouldn't steal? Could you imagine a monkey that wouldn't grab the candy?
Back teaching, my office-mate told a joke that remains a favorite of mine: I quote how I'd already repeated it at Knatz.com:
The old peasant fixes the aristo with his eye.
"Judgment," he says. With venom.
Illich told a story of an old Mexican peasant who say every day in front of his shack. A road was built, right over the spot where he sat. The old man still sat there. One day along comes an American in his car and runs the old guy over. The driver was upset, but blamed the guy sitting in his old spot in front of his old shack. He was "asking for it," sitting in "the road." That's what I want to see: I want to see that driver judged. And with him I want to see the road-builders judged. But not by the God who gives the Canaanites land to the Jews! I want to see the judgment made by the actual god, the actual truth of things, by the actual universe.
Unfortunately, that is the judgment that we see, constantly, every day: the truth. But we don't see the truth, we see only the lies we tell ourselves: The Lakota land is ours, God gave it to us. We were able to take it, so it's ours. And the poison we've poisoned everything with isn't poison: it's our halo, our crown.
I'd written an awful lot about Judgment in my fiction, in my novels, in my diary, and at Knatz.com. The fed censored my writing against artificial vertical human hierarchies. My family let my internet accounts lapse while I was in jail. My host destroyed all my data: five domains, evaporated, 3,000 files, 2,500 of them text files: whole chapters of books, whole books! Books otherwise hard to find! Chapters otherwise unpublished! I'll try to get it back up. Some of the materials on judgment I'll try to add as a special section of my PaulKnatz blog. Meantime this file forecasts some of that old material: here, at IonaArc, my original blog: a tiny supplement to the huge Knatz.com; since, its replacement.
But here's one detail repeated here and now: I suspect that this universe is merely a petri dish in which god lets this and that type of germ fight it out. What god learns from our petri dish and from other petri dishes, goes into other, ever-more-creative universes: any of which may surprise, may go wrong. Life, evolution, is not infallible: and has no point. But neither is it as stupid as we pretend.
The following post, Competent Theology, will develop related branches of this theme.
I really need to gather all my K.-related comments on the concept of Judgment and post them to this blog. Here a new note meantime:
Will Judgment Day commence when God is ready? or will God (and the world) have to wait while Marie Typhoid (and her court) decides what to wear?
By "Marie Typhoid" I mean to suggest Christian overtones, overtones of Marie Antoinette, and Typhoid Mary of US fame.
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