The Virgin birth. The Chosen people. The Resurrection of the dead. The Free Market. Which of those is unsupported by material evidence but exists by virtue of practice based on fervent, coerced, or simply uncritical belief and is thus subject to failure at any moment when the belief is shaken to its roots by experienced reality? All of them.
Of course farmers and flea markets are real, as are the corporate malls where millions enter with credit desire and leave in debt frustration. But the global financial market whose minority controllers run the planet is a vast electronic church sustained by a congregation of mentally and physically brutalized parishioners. A political clergy of rabbis, priests and ministers operate its banking cathedrals as an international casino whose minority profits accrue on the loss of billions of people forced to gamble their existence on its success, and their failure.
The ruling minority relies on its giant computers, mathematicians and symbol manipulators to transform global wealth into weapons of war for humanity’s forced use on itself, and luxury goods for lives of wretched excess for them and their servants. All this is supported by the majority whose struggles for survival increase in debt, pain, and endless war.
Financial dictatorship is maintained by military power capable of slaughtering thousands of people instantly and destroying governments through domination of minds as well as bodies. It is more profitable to manipulate worshippers through the consciousness control of political media rather than by brute force. Propaganda is especially useful at programming patriotism during wars, and civic duty during elections. Voting rituals have servant clergy driven into the collective mind as representing an abstraction called “the people” rather than the financial elites who run the temples, banks and the election business.
Philosophers who once claimed that god was dead encountered little resistance since no material evidence could oppose an immaterial charge. But the time for secular and spiritual communities to unite and proclaim that the financial market-god is dead may be at hand, before fanatic faith in this deity of the dollar obliterates us all.
What many religious people site as indications of the downfall of humanity sometimes offer a clearer view of reality than that of secular types skeptical of mythological belief, while they help perpetuate the most fantastic fable:
A political economic dementia that claims minority rule of the planet by a tiny caste of master-race-self-chosen people is creating the best life imaginable for their subject billions, while evidence increases that the material world can no longer support this fanaticism without ultimate destruction of much that passes for civilized reality.
Social critics who hold the spiritual in disdain can make seemingly more credible scientific arguments to indicate that radical change is needed in the political economic foundation of society in order for the race to succeed. Whether one side or the other is right is a dualistic argument and part of the problem. Both are correct to argue that we can’t go on as we have or we will face possible failure for humanity itself and not just the usual segments always sacrificed to the unjust dogma that benefits some at the cost of all.
While severe problems increase, protectors of the status quo take a more crazed and sadistic tone, screeching about peace and democracy while they murder the first and make the second impossible. Public programs are savaged by policies which lavish money on those who have great wealth, steal money from those who create all wealth, and deny money to those who have no wealth. The increased suffering inflicted on western populations manipulated into accepting the irrational idea that minority created financial collapse is the fault of majority need for human service is countered by more savage brutality inflicted on foreigners, especially in the Middle East.
The plan to break up Arab nations that do not obey the West, criticize Israel or relate to Iran as an ally, has taken a more brutal turn. Viciously punishing any disobedience to the dogma of the great white church of the West, first Libya and now Syria—with Iran still pending—have been subjected to open warfare and the more covert murder of embargoes and infiltration by illegitimate outsiders who pervert insider’s legitimate struggles for change.
Libya has been shattered and the same fate is sought for Syria, but the shaman shysters of global finance capital have learned no lessons from their near destruction of Iraq. That nation is now an ally of Iran, strengthening the supposed center of an “axis of evil.” The real evil, known to be so by the overwhelming majority of global people, is the dualist deity of Israel and the USA. An entity calling itself the international community is actually a relative handful of toadies and one massive military power, insisting that the world is its possession to be regulated by a perversion of language, thought and practice that it calls democracy.
All of this is motivated for the gathering of profits by minorities at the expense of majorities, and the loss sustained by the earth and its people has become so staggering that life itself may be scarred for generations if we do not pierce the darkness of compulsory ignorance and create a more enlightened future of hope. That means tearing out the roots of superstition imposed by a few in order to enable the growth of wisdom for the many.
We are all forced into worshipping this false god, no matter what label we attach to ourselves, our nations or our faiths. Continued belief in and support of the religious madness called global finance capitalism will be the undoing of the ultimate identity group: deists, atheists, agnostics and the rest of humanity. In short, all of us.
Frank Scott writes political commentary and satire which appears in print in The Independent Monitor and online at the Legalienate. Email: fpscott@gmail.com.
