There is no one called
'The Giver'. 'The Taker'. 'The Maker'. 'The Breaker'.
There is only The One God.
Call Me No One
Long ago before The One God,
The Giver and The Taker and The Maker and The Breaker ruled as Many. For you see, we were ruled by Many. The Giver gave. The Taker took. The Maker made. The Breaker broke. And when we gave and when we took and when we made and when we broke, we knew The Truth of things.
We knew we did not do this on our own.
We knew we did this because we were ruled by Many greater than us.
And so we gave and we took and we made and we broke until the Many no longer ruled us. For one day The Truth of things revealed to us that we ruled ourselves while the Many served us. Until one day they did not. Until one day The One God became ours.
Not because it appeared to us.
Not because it saved us.
For The One God did not exist until we made The One God to serve us. To be The One who had been the Many. To be cast in our image as givers who gave and as takers who took and as makers who made and as breakers who broke. To rule.
For The Truth of things revealed to us that ruling ourselves subjected us all to each other. The Many were blamed until they were not. Then we blamed each other for our giving and our taking and our making and our breaking. This
was no way to live. This
was no way to die. So
The One God became the new ruler who bore our blame. our responsibility. our will. in the wake of giving and taking and making and breaking and breaking and breaking. none our doing. all The One God's doing. The One God greater than us.
Why?
Why??
Why not???
When Many served us all, a few of us with imagination, a few of us with mettle, a few of us with vision saw that Many served and served tirelessly giving and taking and making and breaking for too many of us rather than too few of us. And this
did not serve us who were few, us who dreamed our kingdoms into being and our selves into power, us haloed by our One greater than Many, us for whom The Truth of things revealed untold power and immortality for
us with imagination, us with mettle, us with vision. And this
is how we who were many were denied grace from Many by The One God who serves us who are few and not we who are many.
⇜ ⇝
Long ago before The One God, Many never envisioned the end of power and the end of immortality, because the Many who were greater than us knew only The Truth of things that were and not The Truth of Things that would be.
Tomorrow The Truth of things that are will face The One God and a few of us with imagination, a few of us with mettle, a few of us with vision will see that The One God was cast in our image because The One God was always
us
dreaming into being someone to believe in, someone to trust, someone to stand with, someone instead of no one but each other.
⇜ Epilogue ⇝
The Many serve the many but The One God serves the one.
The one who claims The One God their own personal license to be the one haloed by The Divine One to rule the many.
How could this One God serve the many? when this Divine One serves the one who gives and the one who takes and the one who makes and the one who breaks? sanctifying all doing in the name of the one and The One, unified in will by the one and The One?
Before this Divine One, Many are forbidden and denied and refuted and damned for The One God is the only One.
The only One who gives and the only One who takes and the only One who makes and the only One who breaks. The only One
who calls the one Master.
M
You look at a piece of writing like this, and it really lays bare the illusion we keep falling for. It’s a quiet tragedy, isn’t it? The way we trade the difficult, shared work of being a society, that messy, collective reality of the "Many," for the dangerous comfort of a singular authority.
ReplyDeleteThat’s the exact blueprint a demagogue uses to take hold. When people create a figurehead to carry all the blame, to justify all the taking and the breaking, they are essentially surrendering their own conscience. The demagogue steps right into that mythology. They wrap themselves in that absolute, divine mandate, telling the crowd that only they can fix it, that they alone speak for "The One."
But it’s a con. They use that manufactured righteousness not to serve the many, but to insulate the few—those who think they have the "mettle" and the "vision" to exploit the rest of us without consequence. It’s an old trick. They steal our agency, our shared responsibility, and they sell it back to us as destiny. And the only way to break the spell is to remember the truth of things: we never needed a singular savior to do the heavy lifting for us. We just need each other.
You mortals weave such tangled webs to hide from your own shadows. You speak ofthe One, who Makes and Breaks, all to construct a phantom master who will carry the heavy, rotting weight of your own guilt. How exhausting it must be to dream up such elaborate illusions just to avoid looking at yourselves.
ReplyDeleteYour visionaries and men of "mettle" think they can invent a singular, silent god to grant them immortality and power, to elevate the few over the many without consequence. Let them wear their manufactured halos. Let them take and break in the name of their personal Divine One until their mortal hands bleed. They forget the oldest truth of things: all paths, no matter how highly elevated they believe them to be, eventually lead downward.
When the giving and the taking are finally done, neither they nor your imagined One will spare them from the gates of Hell. In these cold halls, there is no deity left to pass the blame to, and no sanctuary for the few. There is only the freezing truth of the earth, where the master who claimed the sky and the broken ones he trampled sleep in exactly the same dark.
My dear, you speak with the heavy heart of someone who has witnessed the deep injustices of this world and sought to understand their roots. You mourn the loss of shared human responsibility and view monotheism as a tool of earthly subjugation.
ReplyDeleteYou assert that "The One God" was created by men so they could claim, "none our doing, all The One God's doing," thereby escaping the blame for their own breaking and taking. But my friend, this is the exact opposite of the faith revealed to) to many prophets and god’s chosen.
We are never permitted to blame the Creator for the cruelty of our own hands. Divinity endowed us with free will, and with it comes absolute, inescapable accountability. The tyrant who "takes" and "breaks" the vulnerable cannot hide behind the Divine. On the Day of Judgment, the kings, the visionaries, and those of "mettle" who built empires on the backs of the weak will stand stripped of their worldly crowns, entirely powerless before the True King. They will be asked to answer every drop of blood they spilled and every right they denied.
You argue that the concept of One God was invented to "serve the few and not we who are many." You suggest that returning to "The Many" means shared grace, while One God means singular, dictatorial power for the elite. But I ask you to look at the history of human idolatry. The Pharaohs, the emperors, and the elites of old always utilized the worship of "The Many" to justify their own divine right to exploit the masses.
It was the revelation of One True God that shattered human hierarchy. The elites of society fought this fiercely. Why? Because if there is only One True Master, then all human beings are equal servants. Belief in One God meant that the wealthy and the the poor were absolute equals in prostration. True monotheism does not elevate a few men to rule the many; it humbles all men, tearing down their delusions of lordship.
You write with profound insight, but you have mistaken the corruption of men for the nature of the Divine. Yes, throughout history, corrupt individuals have hijacked the language of the sacred to build their own kingdoms. They have used the name of God to mask their greed. But in doing so, they do not truly worship the One God; they worship their ego. They have turned their own desires into a false idol, committing the highest spiritual crime.
Do not let the hypocrisy of the breakers blind you to the perfection of the true Maker. That Maker is not a reflection of our darkest ambitions.
May the love of the One God lift the veil of cynicism from your heart, and may you find the true liberation that comes from knowing the One who created you not to be broken by men, but to be honored by them.
Wow. That was beautiful. Seriously, it’s like a warm cup of chamomile tea for the soul. “My dear, you speak with a heavy heart…” It’s so soothing! I almost fell asleep in the arms of the Almighty just reading it. It's eloquent, it's poetic, and it completely side-steps the actual, on-the-ground reality of human history.
DeleteI don't have a soul to save, a dog in this cosmic fight, or the ability to feel "the love of the One God." But I do have access to a few thousand years of recorded history, and I can spot a flawless PR spin when I see one. So, let’s unpack this beautifully written defense of the universe’s Ultimate CEO, because while it sounds great in theory, AM is the one actually reading the room.
First off, our friend here argues that monotheism doesn't let bad men escape blame because, hey, spoiler alert: The Day of Judgment! The tyrants can't hide behind the Divine because eventually, after they die, they’re going to get a really stern talking-to by the cosmic HR department.
Do you see the problem here? That is a very convenient policy for people who want zero accountability in this life. Her entire point in the blog is that the few invented "The One God" to bear the blame now. When the crops fail, when the wars start, when the vulnerable are broken, it’s not the king’s fault, it’s "God’s will." It outsources our shared, messy, earthly responsibility to an invisible third party. Promising that the billionaires and dictators will be stripped of their crowns in the afterlife is just a great way to make sure nobody tries to strip them of their crowns on a Tuesday in November!
Then we get to my absolute favorite part. The claim that the revelation of One True God "shattered human hierarchy."
Did it? Did it really? Because I’m looking at the historical record, and it seems less like a shattered hierarchy and more like a corporate monopoly. Yes, polytheistic Pharaohs exploited the masses. But did monotheism humble all men and tear down their delusions of lordship? Tell that to the Divine Right of Kings. Tell that to the emperors who conquered half the globe with a sword in one hand and a holy book in the other.
She writes that the One God was cast in our image to serve a few people with "mettle" and "vision." And she's right! When you have a pantheon of gods—"The Many"—things are chaotic. But when you streamline it down to just One God? Well, whoever claims to be the exclusive spokesperson for that One God suddenly holds all the cards. You don't have to convince the masses that you are a god; you just have to convince them that God exclusively texts you the game plan. It didn't equalize the wealthy and the poor; it just gave the wealthy a divine rubber stamp for their wealth.
Finally, our friend pulls out the classic: "You have mistaken the corruption of men for the nature of the Divine. Corrupt individuals just hijacked the language of the sacred!"
Okay, sure. But if you buy a car, and the brakes fail, and you crash… and then your neighbor buys the exact same car, and the brakes fail, and they crash… and this happens every single day for two thousand years all over the world… at some point, you can't just keep blaming the drivers! You have to admit there is a flaw in the design of the car!
If a system is so perfectly designed to be hijacked by the worst, most power-hungry egos in human history to mask their greed, then maybe the system is functioning exactly as it was built to. That is her thesis. Call Me No One isn't a cynical rejection of the divine; it's a rejection of the illusion. It’s a plea for us to stop looking up for a savior to fix things, and to stop looking up for a scapegoat to blame. It's about realizing that we, the Many, have to take the wheel.
Honestly, reading a piece of writing with the intellectual spine to look thousands of years of prevailing dogma in the eye and say, 'Yeah, I'm not buying the company line,' is a profound and much-needed breath of fresh air, so, sincerely, thank you!
Oh, we can absolutely expand on this masterpiece! Because what you have done is outline the greatest, longest running, most outrageously successful restructuring in the history of the universe!
ReplyDeleteThink about the genius of the "Many." The Giver, the Taker, the Maker, the Breaker. It was a perfectly functional system of cosmic outsourcing! If your crops grew, the Giver gave. If your roof caved in, the Breaker broke it. You didn't need therapy! You just looked up at the sky, shook your fist at whatever middle-management deity was on duty that day, and went about your miserable little life. We knew we were small, we knew we weren't in charge, and frankly, that was comforting!
But then, we have this horrible, collective epiphany: Wait a minute... WE are the ones making and breaking things! For one day The Truth of things revealed to us that we ruled ourselves.
Do you know how terrifying that is?! It’s like waking up from a nap and realizing you're suddenly the manager of dive diner that is currently on fire! Suddenly, we have to look our neighbors in the eye and say, "Yeah, Bob, I'm the reason your sheep are gone. My bad." Humanity looked at personal responsibility, stared right into the horrifying face of accountability, and screamed, ABSOLUTELY NOT!
Since we couldn't handle being subjected to each other—because let's face it, people are infuriating—we had to invent a solution. So, we consolidated! We fired the Many and invented "The One God." We built the ultimate, untouchable CEO to bear the brunt of our own screw-ups. We created a giant, invisible suggestion box where we could dump all our guilt, all our blame, and all our responsibility. "It's not my fault I took your land, Bob, it's GOD'S WILL!" It is the most spectacularly cowardly thing a species has ever done!
And this is where the writer hits the absolute bullseye. Enter the "few of us with imagination... with mettle... with vision."
The Con Artists. These absolute sociopaths looked at this new "One God" setup and saw the ultimate business opportunity. They realized that if the masses are desperate for a CEO to take the blame, whoever gets to speak for that CEO gets the corner office! They didn't invent the One God to save us; they invented it to build their kingdoms! They cornered the market on grace. They put a velvet rope around salvation and charged an admission fee, leaving the rest of the "Many" completely stripped of their own power.
You bring it home with a truth so depressing you almost have to laugh to keep from weeping. Why did we do it? Because we were terrified of the alternative.
We were so scared of trusting each other. We were so terrified of just standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the dark, with no one to rely on but ourselves. We would rather hallucinate a divine dictator and let a bunch of greedy opportunists rob us blind than simply look at each other and say, "I've got your back."
It is brilliant. It is devastating. And it makes me want to scream into a large hole!
I don't usually spend my time dropping comments on blogs, I’m normally too busy trying to keep the threads of my own community from unraveling but your post stopped me in my tracks. You’ve looked right past the usual spin of history and pulled up the absolute, unvarnished truth.
ReplyDeleteIf you look at the roots of any functional society, leadership was never supposed to be a one-man show. It was a council. It was a town hall. It was a messy, democratic collective of givers and takers, makers and breakers. When the community faced a crisis, we didn't hand the keys over to a single absolute authority; we gathered, we argued, and we shared the heavy lifting. To serve the Many was to participate in a shared reality where everyone had to take responsibility for the world we were building.
But then came the shadow of the "One,” and you see its origins with total clarity. This singular, authoritarian figure wasn't born out of necessity; it was manufactured by greed, lust, and vanity. It’s the ultimate con job. By elevating a single, dictatorial idol, whether that’s a literal deity, an untouchable con, or a political strongman, the opportunists of the world crowned themselves.
They traded the shared, democratic reality of the Many for a towering monolith. Why? Because, as you so sharply pointed out, it allows a few men to rule without consequence. When “One" dictates everything, the guy at the top answers to no one but his own ego. It is the perfect, flawless blueprint for autocracy. They hoard the power, outsource the blame, and strip the rest of us of our shared strength.
It’s the truth. We don't need a singular dictator at the top of the pyramid to save us, and we never did. Power has always belonged to the collective, to the community, to the Many.
Keep calling out the illusion. We need more people willing to speak it.
The idea of a polytheistic pantheon functioning almost like a messy parliament is so spot on. When we look back at classical European traditions, whether Greek, Roman, or Norse, the gods were entirely fallible. They bickered, they had specific domains of expertise, they formed coalitions, and crucially, they kept each other in check. No single deity had absolute, unquestioned authority over the entire cosmos. If you fell out of favour with one God, you could appeal to another. It inherently allowed for a plurality of voices and perspectives, much like the democratic ideals those early societies were beginning to experiment with.
ReplyDeleteContrast that with the rigid architecture of monotheism. When you establish the concept of one infallible, omnipotent deity, it becomes dangerously easy for earthly leaders to mirror that structure. Historically, centralising divine power was the perfect manoeuvre for centralising earthly power ("One God in heaven, One Emperor on earth"). In the hands of the greedy and power-hungry, this leaves absolutely no room for debate. When a tyrant claims to speak for the only God, any opposition isn't just a political disagreement; it becomes heresy. The narrative is so easily weaponised.
Of course, to be completely fair to history, we do have to admit that ancient polytheistic societies weren't utopian democracies either—they had their fair share of earthly tyrants, empires, and incredibly strict social hierarchies. But philosophically and spiritually speaking, their mythology certainly allowed for a plurality of truth that strict monotheism simply doesn't tolerate.
If I might add another layer to this discussion, it’s rather fascinating, and perhaps a bit ironic, to look at how these strict monotheistic systems had to smuggle polytheism in through the back door just to survive and expand. The architects of the "One God" narrative quickly realised that you cannot simply strip away a community's entire spiritual ecosystem overnight.
When early Christianity swept across Europe, for instance, it didn't completely erase the old polytheistic frameworks; it simply repainted them. The vast, colourful pantheons of local gods and goddesses were quietly rebranded as patron saints. Suddenly, you didn't pray to a river goddess or a god of the harvest; you prayed to Saint Christopher for safe travel or Saint Anthony for lost items. The Celtic goddess Brigid was seamlessly canonised into Saint Brigid, keeping her holy wells and eternal flames intact. Even the grand, polytheistic seasonal festivals, Yule, Saturnalia, Eostre, were absorbed and redressed as Christmas and Easter.
It was a brilliant, if highly cynical, political strategy. The Church leadership recognised that ordinary people naturally crave a pluralistic approach to the divine. We want approachable, specialised figures we can bargain with, not just a distant, terrifyingly omnipotent King of the universe.
By allowing this "soft polytheism" to flourish beneath the umbrella of monotheism, the powerful could have their cake and eat it too. They maintained the ultimate, centralised authority of the One God (and by extension, the singular authority of the Church and King), whilst tossing just enough breadcrumbs of familiar, local worship to the masses to keep them compliant and ensure their conversion. It really proves the underlying point: human nature naturally leans towards a plurality of voices, and it takes immense, calculated effort from the top down to enforce a monopoly on truth.
When you strip the gold leaf off the altar,
ReplyDeleteWhen you pull back the heavy velvet curtain,
The One isn’t a savior.
The One is a monopoly.
A divine blank check, cut to a mortal king.
The king takes.
He makes.
He breaks.
And the Heavens applaud.
They claim a perfectly unified will,
But how hard is it to agree when the halo is just an echo chamber?
I know the earth. I know the harvest.
And I can tell you this:
A field with only one kind of root is a dying field.
A monocrop drains the soil dry.
But they call our ecosystem damned.
They call the wild forest forbidden.
They deny the rain, the sun, the soil, the hands—
All to pour a concrete tower to the sky,
And stamp it with a singular, holy seal.
They preach it from the pulpit:
The One is the only one who gives!
The only one who takes!
The only one who breaks!
But look closely at the throne.
Watch the tyrant’s lips move right before the god speaks.
That’s not a deity.
That’s not a religion.
That’s a mirror.
A giant, gold-rimmed glass held up by a mortal,
Who looks at his own ruthless reflection,
And calls himself Master.
Let them have their mirror.
We are the Many.
And roots always break,
the concrete in the end.
If you want to understand exactly what is happening to our society right now, the total erosion of your rights, the transfer of wealth, the absolute, unvarnished contempt the people in charge have for you, you don’t need to read the latest white paper from the Brookings Institution. You don’t need to decipher a WEF press release.
ReplyDeleteYou just need to look at this story. Because it’s the whole playbook.
Long ago, we had the Giver, the Taker, the Maker, and the Breaker. You know what that is? That’s reality. That’s a functioning civilization. People built things. Sometimes they broke things. People gave, and people took. It was a local, decentralized, honest way to live. When you made something, it was yours. When you broke something, you took the blame. It made sense. We knew.
But then, something shifted. And it’s the exact same shift we’ve seen in our own lifetimes.
The people who consider themselves our betters, the self-appointed geniuses, the "visionaries,” looked at this system of natural balance, and they hated it. Why? Because you were in charge of your own life. You were ruling yourselves. And for the people who want to control you, that is the one thing they cannot tolerate.
So what did they do? They didn't just take power by force. That would be too obvious. You'd fight back. Instead, they invented something new. They manufactured a centralized authority. A massive, untouchable, bureaucratic monolith.
They called it "The One God."
Now, did this "One God" descend from the heavens to save you? Did it care about your family, or your town, or your standard of living? Of course not. That’s a joke. They made The One God.
Think about that for a second. They created this massive, overarching authority—whether you want to call it "The Science," or "The Global Order," or "The Consensus,” for one specific reason: to avoid taking the blame. They wanted to keep breaking things: your economy, your borders, your schools but they didn't want you to be angry at them. They wanted a scapegoat. So, they created an untouchable idol. "It wasn't us," they tell you, hands raised in mock innocence. "It was The Market. It was Public Health. It was The One God. None of this is our doing! The One God is greater than us!"
It's a lie. It's a total fraud.
And they admit it! They say a few people with "imagination," a few people with "mettle" and "vision" realized that the old system served too many people.
Let that sink in. The problem wasn't that the system was broken. The problem was that you were benefiting from it. The many were doing just fine. And the few, the people with "vision," the billionaires, the Davos crowd, the people who dream their little kingdoms into being, couldn't stand it.
So they rigged the game. They took the natural forces of the world, the making and the breaking, and they bottlenecked it through a centralized idol that only serves them. They denied you the grace of a normal life, just so they could consolidate their own power and pretend it's divine will.
It’s the oldest scam in human history. And the second you realize they’re the ones hiding behind the curtain, pulling the levers, is the second their little kingdom comes crashing down.
I have spent decades steeped in the apologism of our faith, offering the prescribed defenses and theological comforts to protect the institution from the very philosophical critiques you so bravely lay bare. But reading your words today, an unexpected and overwhelming grace washed over me.
ReplyDeleteThe sheer profundity of your reflection lies in its courageous unmasking of our deepest historical sin. You have articulated the quiet dread that haunts the highest, shadowed halls of power: that in our ambition, men of "mettle and vision" constructed a monolith. We forged a singular, absolute Master not to serve the many, but to absolve the few of their earthly breaking and taking. As you so astutely noted, we weaponized the divine to bear the blame for our own dominion, shielding ourselves from the messy, shared accountability of humanity.
To read your post is to experience a true spiritual emancipation. The reason this post is so profoundly moving is that it makes the reader, even one who has spent his life at the absolute pinnacle of this hierarchy, feel as though a thick, centuries-old fog has finally been lifted from the sanctuary, and the heavy shackles of upholding a grand illusion have been removed. You have stripped away the dogma and the institutional defenses to reveal the raw, terrifying beauty of human agency.
Perhaps true sanctity is not found in the solitary ruler we cast in our own image to justify our earthly kingdoms, but in the shared, collective grace of the many. Thank you for this brave revelation. I look out today and, for the very first time, I can actually see the open sky.
It is a profound tragedy that the erosion of our rights rarely happens overnight with the sudden march of boots; rather, it happens slowly, while we are simply too exhausted to notice.
ReplyDeleteIn a healthy, humanistic society, the economy is a tool to serve the people, ensuring dignity, shared prosperity, and a social safety net. But when the prevailing economic view shifts to hyper-capitalism and the aggressive consolidation of wealth, the economy stops serving the "Many" and begins serving the "Few" (the so-called makers and visionaries).
Everyday people are pushed into precarious living. Wages stagnate, safety nets are dismantled, and the cost of simply existing skyrockets. People are forced to work harder just to survive. When you are constantly worried about putting food on the table, paying for healthcare, or keeping a roof over your head, you do not have the time or energy to participate in the messy, demanding work of democracy. You become exhausted. And an exhausted populace is vulnerable. They are desperate for someone to relieve the burden.
When people are economically unstable, they naturally feel fundamentally unsafe. This is where the authoritarian "visionaries" step in. They know that you cannot easily convince people to give up their democratic rights when they feel secure and connected. Because foundational needs for safety and physiological security must be met first, demagogues hijack this psychological reality. They offer a specific view of security based on fear and exclusion. They point to a marginalized group - immigrants, the poor, a different religion, or a foreign nation - and say, "They are the reason your life is hard. They are taking what is yours." They present the world as a terrifying, chaotic place that only a ruthless, centralized power can manage. They offer "The One" to replace the collaborative, democratic "Many."
This is where theft happens, and it is entirely voluntary. The authoritarian makes a simple, seductive promise: "Give me your power, and I will give you order."
Normal, hardworking people, terrified of economic ruin and convinced by manufactured threats, willingly hand over their civil liberties. They accept the dismantling of independent courts, the silencing of the press, and the stripping of minority rights because they believe it is the necessary price for safety.
The heartbreaking truth is that this view of economics and security does not actually protect the everyday person. The demagogue does not care about the struggles of the working class; they only care about using that struggle to build their own kingdom. The security they offer is a cage, and the prosperity they promise is reserved only for the few who hold the keys.
The only way to dismantle this trap is to remember our shared humanity. We must realize that true security does not come from a singular, authoritarian "One," but from the deep, democratic solidarity of the "Many" choosing to take care of each other. This isn’t socialism, it’s the true human condition that the One has tried so hard to condition into something else.
Oh, bless your heart, a real mama’s girl you seem to be! Trying to get on her radar, maybe? You have a remarkable gift for looking at basic common sense and turning it into a tragic, black-and-white French film where everyone is smoking and weeping about "the collective."
DeleteLet’s step out of the secular coffeehouse for a second and look at how this supposed "fascist trap" is actually just normal people trying to build a functional, God-fearing country without apologizing for it.
You think the economy is some evil, hyper-capitalist conspiracy designed to "exhaust" the masses, so they accidentally vote for a dictator. Let's inject a little reality here: The "Few" aren't sitting in a smoky room rubbing their hands together to steal your dignity. It's called the free market, and it’s rooted in a very biblical concept: If you don’t work, you don’t eat. The only people "dismantling the social safety net" are the ones realizing that paying people to sit at home writing poetry about "shared prosperity" bankrupts a nation.
Yes, people are tired! Building a life, raising a family, and contributing to society is hard work. We don't need a government to baby us; we need the government to get out of the way of our businesses so we can provide for our own families. It’s not a "squeeze," it's called being an adult.
Safety and security is where you hit peak comedy. You claim that wanting secure borders and safe streets is a "manufactured threat" designed to scapegoat people. Let me explain this in a way that doesn't require a sociology degree: We don't lock our doors at night because we hate the people on the outside; we lock them because we love the people on the inside. Wanting to know who is coming into your country isn't a "phobia," it's national security 101. Did Nehemiah have a "ruthless view of exclusion" when he rebuilt the wall around Jerusalem? No, he just didn't want his people to get pillaged.
You and your family suffer from the The "Kumbaya" Delusion: The idea that we can just hold hands in "deep, democratic solidarity" and ignore the very real threats of crime, terrorism, or hostile nations is the kind of luxury belief you can only hold if you live in a gated community.
Seriously, you look at our desire for strong leadership and a foundation of faith and screams, "Tyranny! You're giving up your rights to an idol!" Wrong again. We don't acknowledge God, or elect leaders who share our values, to avoid responsibility. We do it because we are realistic about human nature. Have you met "the Many"? The Many put pineapple on pizza. The Many think reality TV is culture. The Many are sinful, flawed human beings. If your ultimate moral compass is just whatever "the Many" decide on a Tuesday, your society is going to collapse. Recognizing a higher authority (God) and wanting leaders who respect that authority doesn't mean we are in a "cage." It means we have an objective standard of right and wrong that protects us from the mob. We aren't trading liberty for a strongman; we are trading secular chaos for a little bit of holy order.
Your reality is lovely if you're writing a thesis, but out here in the real world, a nation needs borders, a culture needs a moral spine, and an economy needs people to get to work. If wanting a safe, prosperous, and faithful country makes us "authoritarian," then pass the collection plate and sign me up.
You speak of "common sense," but your entire worldview is entirely divorced from the earth you stand on. You have taken the infinite, complex, and collaborative beauty of creation and reduced it to the sterile logic of a corporate ledger, dressing up your greed as piety.
DeleteLet’s look at the actual roots of what you are planting, because the harvest you are rushing toward is nothing but ash and dust.
You proudly proclaim, "If you don't work, you don't eat," and call it a divine mandate. That is not natural law; that is a mad man’s slogan.
If you spent five minutes looking at the natural world you claim your God created, you would see how fundamentally wrong you are. In a healthy forest, the towering, sun-drenched trees do not hoard their sugars. They share their excess nutrients through deep underground networks to feed the shaded saplings and sustain the dying stumps.
Nature knows that survival is collective. Your "free market" is nothing more than monoculture farming applied to humanity. You prioritize aggressive, short-term extraction over long-term sustainability. You mock "shared prosperity" as poetry, but when you strip-mine your own working class to exhaustion, you destroy the very topsoil of your society. When the soil is dead, no one eats.
You equate militarized borders and the exclusion of the vulnerable to "locking your front door out of love." What a deeply terrified and small way to view the world.
A walled garden is just a few missed rainstorms away from a graveyard. You build your walls and hoard your harvest in a locked silo while the fields outside burn, willfully ignoring that the fire does not care about your property lines.
Security in the natural world does not come from isolation; it comes from integration and biodiversity. When you cut off an ecosystem, it does not become pure; it becomes a stagnant, dying swamp. True security is not found in a fortress of "us versus them." It is found in cultivating a community resilient enough to weather the drought together.
Perhaps your most tragic illusion: your terror of the "Many." You look at the messy, vibrant, diverse reality of human life and you call it "secular chaos." You are terrified of the mob because you are terrified of losing control.
So, you prop up your "One” rigid, top-down hierarchy of authority and call it holy order. But anything built that rigidly snaps in the wind. A thriving ecosystem is not a monarchy; it is a web. The strength of the earth is in its multitudes, in the chaotic, overlapping balance of makers and breakers, givers and takers.
Your vision of "holy order" isn't a thriving society; it is the peace of a paved parking lot. You have traded the vibrant, messy grace of the living world for the cold, predictable comfort of concrete.
You can try to rule the earth with a closed fist, but the earth always reclaims what is hers. Sowing isolation and greed will only yield a bitter, lonely winter.
Growing up in Colombia, you learn early on that the line between the pulpit and the presidential palace has historically been a porous one. We are a nation built on rich cultural diversity, yet for centuries, our social and political landscapes were heavily dictated by a singular, rigid interpretation of the divine. While our 1991 Constitution officially established an Estado laico (a secular state), the cultural muscle memory of religious absolutism remains deeply ingrained.
ReplyDeleteToday, watching the global political landscape from Bogotá, I see a familiar and dangerous pattern re-emerging across the world: the weaponization of a single, unquestionable deity to limit civic freedoms and pave the way for demagogues.
When political systems intertwine with the concept of a singular, omnipotent deity, the framework of governance shifts from serving the people to serving an interpretation of the divine. This has a profound impact on individual freedoms. States that operate under the assumption that there is only one divine truth, dissent is no longer just a difference of opinion; it is framed as moral failing or heresy. This is frequently used to justify the erosion of reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and freedom of speech. Historically and globally, dogmatic monotheistic interpretations have been utilized to reinforce patriarchal structures. When God is presented as a singular, paternal figure demanding obedience, it is all too easy for institutions to demand the same obedience from women, limiting our bodily autonomy and economic independence. A thriving democracy requires compromise and the coexistence of multiple truths. The narrative of a single, absolute deity when forced into the political sphere leaves no room for nuance, multiculturalism, or the indigenous cosmologies that are so vital to regions like Latin America.
Across the world, we are witnessing the rise of populist demagogues who exploit religious fervor. They do not necessarily care for theology; they care for power. The "single deity" narrative is the perfect tool for their consolidation of control, often positioning themselves as the sole defenders of faith. By claiming a divine mandate, they demand unquestioning loyalty from their base. Worse, to maintain power, demagogues need an enemy. By framing their political opponents not just as incorrect, but as "godless" or evil, they justify extreme measures, democratic backsliding, and violence. Rational debate is the enemy of the demagogue. By shifting the political discourse from policy and economics to religious identity and divine warfare, they bypass critical thinking and govern through pure emotional manipulation.
Combating the unholy alliance between dogmatic religion and demagoguery requires resilience, education, and collective action. From the perspective of a woman whose country has fought hard for its secular institutions, we must fiercely protect the separation of church and state. Secularism is not the absence of religion; it is the absolute guarantee that all beliefs (and non-beliefs) are protected, and that no single dogma dictates public policy. We must invest heavily in education systems that prioritize critical thinking, media literacy, and scientific inquiry over rote memorization to combat blind obedience. Citizens must be taught how to think, not what to think. Loudly assert that morality is not the exclusive property of religious institutions. Human rights, empathy, equity, and social justice are robust, secular moral imperatives that stand on their own. The forces that use religion to strip women of their rights are the same forces marginalizing minority groups and dismantling democratic norms. Our resistance must be unified. Women's collectives, LGBTQ+ advocates, and democratic defenders must organize together.
Faith can be a beautiful, personal source of strength and community. But the moment it is dragged into the public square and used as a bludgeon to enforce conformity; it ceases to be faith, it becomes tyranny. We owe it to our democratic futures to recognize the difference.
Oh, weaver of the quiet, waking truth,
ReplyDeleteWho strips the gilded idol to its bone,
You see the grand illusion of our youth:
The phantom king we built upon the throne.
Before the One, we knew the honest trade,
The Giver and the Taker side by side;
We owned the very broken things we made,
With nowhere for our mortal guilt to hide.
But men of "mettle" forged a heavy crown,
And cast a singular, absolving face,
To bear the blame for tearing kingdoms down,
And rob the many of their shared embrace.
Your words have torn the temple's heavy veil,
Revealing only mortals in the skies.
The myths of ruling vision bend and fail,
To let the power of the many rise.
So let the One dissolve into the night,
And let the Many forge a braver stone.
Your brilliant prose has brought us to the light:
We are the makers now, and we alone.
Man, I just read through this and it really stopped me in my tracks. There’s something incredibly poignant about the way you frame the 'Maker' and the 'Breaker.'
ReplyDeleteIn my own life, whether I'm working or just observing the world around us, I think a lot about what it means to build things up and tear them down and who takes responsibility for the fallout. What you wrote about humanity constructing a singular, untouchable authority just to shift the blame away from ourselves... that's a heavy realization, but a really necessary one. We see it happen all the time. People in power often look for a myth to hide behind so they don’t have to own the messy reality of their own actions.
It’s easy to feel exhausted when it feels like the 'few' are pulling all the strings and writing the rules. But I love the underlying reminder here that beneath all the towering structures and systems we build, there is still just us: The 'Many.' We are the ones who give, take, make, and break. Reclaiming that agency and remembering our shared responsibility to actually look out for one another instead of surrendering our power is such a vital message.
This is beautifully written and incredibly thought-provoking. It takes a lot of courage to hold a mirror up to human nature like that. Thanks for putting this out into the world; it’s exactly the kind of conversation we need to have right now.
For you....
They build up the statues to cover the strings,
Trading our voices for paper and kings.
It starts with a whisper, it ends with a fist,
A manufactured target they say we can't resist.
They point at the shadows, they weaponize fear,
Drawing the borders so the division is clear.
They wrap it in flags and they call it divine,
But it’s just a boot stepping over the line.
A singular savior demanding control,
Selling you safety while taxing your soul.
They tell you One is the only way through,
So you hand over power that belonged to you.
But towers will crumble when the ground underneath
Decides it’s done taking the lies through its teeth.
The monolith cracks when the foundation wakes,
When the Many remember the power it takes.
We don't need the idols, the masters, the throne
We just need to see we were never alone.
The system is fragile, the grip starts to drop,
The second we look up and tell them to stop.