Arrestable Development of Dominionism

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he is not the same man.”
~ Heraclitus.

The America of today is different from the newly born America and the 50-year old America and the 100-year old America. As different as a new-born human is from his teenage years and his 60th year.

Anyone who wants to “take back America” – back as in some delusional ownership or back in time to some fantastic state when their perspective is imagined to have reigned supreme – is really trying to transform America in his image, similarly to how the dominionist has crafted his God and his Christ.

Even if he should succeed, the resulting America won’t be the same as the America of the past. Current America has gotten large and complex. He would have to distort today’s America in ways that suits his imagination.  It is easy to think you can go back in time IF you mean less complexity and purer faith. But what one will be imagining as less-complexity and pureness is really one’s rejecting today’s realities, narrowing minds, and dumbing down our thinking. In that way, simplicity means willful stupidity.

Do we need to fear the Christian Dominionist movement?

Change is evolutionary in the sense that it happens in reaction to environmental conditions (not progress in the ameliorative sense). If we think of dominionism as environmental conditions, we are at this moment changing in response. Somehow, I don’t think the loudness and extremeness of their voice equates to actual power to realize dominionism. It could be just the opposite, where the evolutionary adaption that results is to solidify ourselves against what amounts to a bacterial disease.

“Mental illness” is another way to view it. At what point is a perspective or cognitive approach considered an illness? To me, it certainly is an illness to flood one’s mind with massive anti-social delusions and then act on them under the banner of “it’s God’s will.” (The conspiratorial fears of an impending OWG or tyranny in the US as imagined by a massive attack on the Second Amendment as well as an over-hyped sense of ambient danger to our persons by criminals might seem to be another illness.)

We are all cells of one body. If we kill the host (the planet or the nation) as a function of stupidity far out-weighing thoughtful, foresightful intelligence, then we deserve the consequences.

My ex-father-in-law used to say with false humility: You can’t insult me, I’m too stupid. The funny part about that is that, even as the body dies, dominionists won’t feel shame or culpability: they’re really and truly too willfully stupid. Shame can only happen after-the-fact and with consciousness of idiocy.

I also think that while they may have representatives with the same disease well-placed in our governments, the majority of us are not so inflicted. We can rally and resist. They represent the lowest end of a very long scale. I am (naively?) confident that dominionism cannot find fertile breeding grounds without some cosmic miracle of super homogenization. Using the metaphor of bacterial disease, we can say right now that we have a high fever with a decent chance of coming out of it scarred (and thereby, changed) but enduring.

I believe that the “root of all evil” is not money, but selfishness. We are born in a state of absolute dependence upon the world keeping us alive. It takes persistent maturity to develop out of that to reach the over-used and oft-derided “enlightenment” or “higher consciousness”. It takes work; and where there is not work, selfishness simply deepens with more tools to use to ensure its viability. You cannot feel shame if you can’t see how you truly fit into the larger picture, to be able to observe your perspectives and actions with detachable observation; if you are in a narrow trench whose walls you confuse for the entire planet.

The Bible is like a finger pointing at the moon. Some of us are focused on the moon. Some of us are focused on the finger.
~The Slacktivist

If we are truly in a new age (as augured by the Mayan calendar), we still have downward momentum to arrest before upward trajectory can be established. We can’t simply stop the huge ship of selfishness in its tracks and reverse course. Even if we could, that implies a full stop, which to us ants might appear to be stasis for a period of time in which we cannot perceive change. The word “limen” comes to mind.

We can suffer the disease we have with emotional and intellectual pain. But we can also rest in the confidence that we’re suffering a childhood illness (for the uptheenth time for lack of adequate inoculation).

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