After some internal debate, I have decided to throw
this here instead of my ‘‘Fuck you, god’’ thread,
as this thread is more geared toward our own actions
and words…
Piety: Godly, reverencing and honoring the supreme being
in heart and in the practice of duties he has enjoined:
having due veneration and affection for the character of god,
and habitually obeying his commands:
religious: devoted to the service of god: applied to persons…
Part of this ‘‘habitually obeying his commands’’ lies
in our obeying the ten commandments…and one of those
ten commandments is
‘‘Thou shall not kill’’
and as far as moral edicts goes, it a fairly good one and yet,
it is a commandment that god himself ignores… As I
have noted before, god, as listed in the bible itself,
kills over 2.4 million human beings, Satan, 10 people…
Which leads us to a problem, which idea should we follow?
should we follow the word of god or the actual practices of god?
His words are of peace, his actions are of killing and death…
which god are we to follow? This double standard lies at the
heart of Christianity…
The strength of Christianity in Roman times was that it
laid out a ‘‘way of life’’ that was more consistent than the
Roman ideal…Part of the ‘‘Roman problem’’ lies in this
conflict between the words and the actions of what it means
to be Roman…The Roman double standard grew so big
that it was no longer possible to overcome the gap between
the words of Rome and the actions of Rome… this went
both for the State at large and the individual at large…
it was no longer possible to be a Roman without engaging
in a double standard… and in this came the Christians
with a far narrower concept between words and actions…
Christianity was a ‘‘way of life’’ in a way that was no longer
practiced in the Roman world… Words and actions matched in
the Christian world, in a way that it didn’t in the Roman world…
In just the same way that today, there is a gap between our
words and our actions… This modern-day double standard, in
part, is partly why we have the current malaise of our times…
For the modern-day Christian, what does he follow,
the words of god or the actions of god?
‘‘Thou shall not kill’’ or follow the actual practice
of god and emulate his killing of millions of people…
As a ‘‘way of life’’ which is the goal of philosophy, to
create a ‘‘way of life’’, in which the words and the actions
match, what philosophy should we engage in?
and how do we achieve this union between our words
and our actions?
One of the paths is by following the maxim of Socrates,
‘‘The unexamined life isn’t worth living’’
by examining our lives, we can see how far or how close
we are to having our words match our actions…
in this respect, we can actually become better than god,
by this uniting of words and actions that is not present in
the bible… within the words of god and his double standard
of his actions…
One of the ideas lost in our modern age is this notion of
Piety… but given the vast double standard of god, we can
no longer engage in Piety for god, but we can practice
piety toward each other… a true reverence for life…
not the pretend piety of the Christian, given their
double standard between the words of the bible and their
own actions…
I suspect part of Socrates goal in his focus on the soul of humans,
is this double standard between our words and our actions…
We say one thing and do another… which as I have pointed
out is very Christian… and part of my problem with Christianity
its double standard…
Part of our philosophy as a ‘‘way of life’’ is to limit or even
remove our own double standard… get our words to match
our actions…
and another path toward this ‘‘way of life’’ comes from the
other Socratic motto, ‘‘Know thyself’’ If I pay close enough
attention, I can see within myself, my own double standard…
where my own words fail to match my actions…
I suspect one of the attractions of the MAGA life is this
lack of a double standard… the MAGA world makes it clear,
by words, that it hates others different from themselves,
and practices this hatred, as a ‘‘way of life’’…and a vast
majority of MAGA/conservatives call themselves ‘‘Christian’’
and thus, practicing a double standard… and that does seem
to be ‘‘on point’’ with both Christians and MAGA…
but hate cannot be a value upon which we build a state
or a society upon… it cannot become a ‘‘way of life’’…
as hatred is destructive… it can only destroy, not build…
and the original Christians were able to build because
their religion, their faith was not built on a double standard,
not built on negative values such as hate, anger, lust, greed…
recall the words of the bible, which specifically rejected
those negative values…and what values are employed by
the bible? positive values such as love, peace, hope, justice…
values certainly not practiced by either conservatives or MAGA…
and for the most part, most reading this, the few, the very few,
will not connect their own double standard because they
will not engage in the Socratic ideal of either ‘‘the unexamined life
isn’t worth living’’ or the ‘‘to know thyself’’…
We in our modern age, both individually and collectively,
have engaged in the practice of a double standard…
our words, individually or collectively, do not match
our actions… and in this, we are gods…
Kropotkin