Evil & its Good God, Versus Wisdom, Crown of Creation

More theology? Enough with that!!!… Except that Judeo-Christian values are all around, ever since our cultural ancestors, the Greeks, not to say the Egyptians, and Phoenicians, came in contact with the Jews around 33 centuries ago (that probably started with the enormous turmoil known by Pharaoh Ramses III as the “Peoples of the Sea” invasion; all old states succumbed to it… but for Egypt, which survived in extremis).

Thereafter, a hierarchy of values was proposed, which became part of the philosophical problems which brought down the Roman Republic, and, centuries later, the Roman empire itself (it’s pudically refered as the seduction of Rome by “Oriental values”…). In Judeo-Christianism, the top notions, the top values, are omnipotence and goodness. Even after the Judeo-Christian was lethally wounded by the Enlightenment and toasted to a crisp at Auschwitz, the hierarchy of values it carries is still around, orienting the psyche of most people. And those values imparted by Judeo-Christianism, omnipotence and 100% goodness, are, contrary to repute, deeply inhuman.

There is a well-known trilemma, between “God”, omnipotence, and evil. The Cathars founded their religion on it. The fundamental idea of God, one and indivisible, is that He is omnipotent, like the savage of old, over his wife and children! Omnipotence is the definition of “God”: no omnipotence, no “God”.

However, if God is willing to prevent evil, but can’t do it, He is not omnipotent. Thus not God. Yet, if God is unwilling to prevent evil, “God” is evil, or, at least, no good. If God is both incapable of preventing evil, and unwilling to prevent evil, He is both incapable and evil, so why to call Him “God”, and debase oneself, kneeling to Him and his incapable, evil nature?

Of the Cathars, only castles are left. The obsession of Christians with “omnipotence” and “goodness” (of said omnipotence) brought this result. The Christians exterminated to the last, with an enthusiasm Hitler would try to direct toward the Jews, eight centuries later. Vatican, greed, and Paris (“French”) king Philip Augustus dispatched Catholic armies who killed most Cathars, at least 700,000, in France alone, and destroyed all their works (further eradication was pursued in Italy and the Balkans, killing hundreds of thousands more, if not millions). The Pope had decreed that Cathar properties and lands were there for the taking.

Confronted to the previous trilemma, the ancient Greco-Romans, Phoenicians, Hindus, Celts and Germans, who had plenty of half potent, half evil gods, would have scoffed: why should gods have to be good and omnipotent? Isn’t it enough to be gods? Can’t gods be free to do as they please, and be incapable and evil, as they pleased? As a Chinese emperor famously noticed, not taking action is itself an action.

The Judeo-Christians have a problem, though, because their “God” is omnipotent, omniscient, and supposedly “good”. The Islamists have less of a problem than their Judeo-Christian predecessors: God, in their Islamist version, although “merciful”, is horrendously cruel and torturous, to the point of sounding completely unhinged. However, Allah has lots of problems (as related by the Qur’an) with human contradictors, thus suggesting he is not omnipotent. To avoid this, the Qur’an claims that Allah laid traps to all these people He wants to “throw into the fire”. So people are not bad because Allah is weak, but bad because Allah is crafty, and misled them.

The Cathars read the Bible: clearly the Old Testament is a piece of evil trash (with God ordering holocausts, right and left, torturing David’s son, to death, over a week, just because David had refused to enact a gratuitous holocaust, etc. Thus the Cathars deduced that the Old Testament showed the Devil created the world (the Vatican was not amused, and fought the Cathars with Inquisition as early as 1022 CE; finally launching a crusade against them, in 1209 CE, two centuries later).

Christo-Islamism is the ideology of tyranny, made by dictators, for dictators. Thus it represents as ultimate goods the values which should be perceived as the characteristics of absolute dictatorship: omnipotence, and goodness as defined by said omnipotence

Why this obsession with power and goodness? Christo-Islamism was engineered mostly by Roman emperor Constantine and caravan raider Muhammad, both of whom were, if not the fiercest, bloodiest dictators ever, certainly the intellectual progenitors of many of the worst dictators. (Constantine assassinated wife, son and nephew.) So Christo-Islamism is the ideology of tyranny, made by dictators, for dictators. Thus it represents as ultimate goods the two values which should be perceived as the characteristics of absolute dictatorship: omnipotence, and goodness as defined by said omnipotence.   

Yet, pretend goodness and omnipotence are not the top values of the crown of creation, Homo Sapiens. Wisdom is more like it. Wisdom is the top value.

Wisdom is not indifferent to good and evil. Wisdom gives primacy to goodness over evil (as babies can’t do without goodness and altruism directed at them, thus wisdom couldn’t even exist without goodness!)

However wisdom. Once it exists, is first about growing ever more intelligence. Intelligence etymologically, that is, in the logic of its true sense, means: reading between the lines.

It doesn’t mean being good, 24/7. Fundamentally, goodness is needed, for babies, children and for fostering enough altruism for whatever society needs to function. Beyond that, in the realm of good and evil, anything goes.

In particular, hatred and fascism, both related to war making and keeping human numbers low enough to prevent mass extinction(s), have their uses.

We are not omnipotent, but ever more potent, because we can read ever more between the lines. That’s all the divine We The People need.

Omnipotent dictators playing pretend goodness are incompatible with advancing wisdom. How will we get rid of them? With good old, evolutionary honed anger, and combat. All these qualities Judeo-Christianism insist we shouldn’t have (they are reserved to the divinity). All these qualities the founders of Israel rejected… rightly so (the philosopher Isaiah Berlin complained that “they listened to Hitler, not us”).

A bit of hatred for evil makes a most worthy ethics good. This is the human way to go. Anything else invites collaboration with the enemy, the most despicable, and vicious ways (for a contemporary example, consider the situation in Burma, where an entire Muslim population is kicked out by otherwise resplendent, self-absorbed Buddhists…)

Patrice Aymé

Tags: Cathars, Evil, god, Good