The Heartbeat of History

Human history has a heartbeat.   

It has a rhythmic pulse that is both systolic and diastolic, as it contracts when power concentrates in the hands of the few, and expands as that power is eventually disseminated back among the many. 

The contest for the single human soul shared equally by every human being, then, has only ever been waged between these two forces, between those few who seek the power to control the many, and always with claims of necessity, benevolence, and divine right, and the many who have repeatedly challenged those who have always enriched themselves by convincing the many to accept the legitimacy of such claims, in either religious or political terms.

For most of that history, religion has largely been used as a means of concentrating power in the hands of the few to control the many, not only by offering and then legitimizing hierarchically ordered paradigms, but by working everywhere to convince people that those paradigms reflect both a divine universal reality, and the divine will of God himself. And yet both of these paradigms are not only false idols, but are entirely man made. The three major religions today, in other words, which all claim to worship a God, are actually religions that only worship man, and nothing else.  

The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, as Edward Gibbons pointed out, "were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful." And they were equally useful, because they convinced people that their obedience to authority was tantamount to serving the will of God. What is ironic about this, with the story of Jesus and so many other such "man-gods," is that they all, in one way or another, illustrate just how much that paradigm is one of the biggest lies in human history. 

From the concentration of the "gods" of paganism and polytheism into monotheism, and from disparate oral traditions that not only evolved organically with the times as "the living word," but were designed to be applied dynamically in an evolving world, to sacred written texts that could only be interpreted by a professional priestly class that claimed to have divine understanding, the slow process by which humanity has increasingly surrendered its freedom and liberty in exchange for security and narrative, traces its roots back to the Pharaohs of Egypt. 

Like the Hebrews who sought to escape that bondage, however, humanity has willingly sold itself into one form of enslavement or another, whether religious, political, or financial, and always under the belief that we were only ever doing God's will in the process, and achieving an ever greater freedom as a result.  Such are lies, then, that they always promise the very opposite of what they deliver, so they can always blame those who refuse to "believe" the lie, of being responsible for why it has not come true.