The Rhetoric of Idolatry and Self-Electionism

Self-consciousness and self-reflection are powerful virtues enabling self-advancement, but they also enable self-deception and advance bad judgment in habits of ego-culture. The proclivity of self-deception is a well-engrained, inherited tendency. Self-electionism is a bully instinct infecting individual and group consciousness. It resorts to war and uses violence to accomplish its arrogant and misinformed purposes. In the evolution of consciousness, the dogma of one time is the fiction of another.

Words matter. The rhetoric of idolatry and self-electionism is hurtful; it blights sensitivity and social insight, and wrecks nature. The implication of idolatry and self-electionism in cultural behavior roots in deep-past evolution and is alive and well. Idolatry and self-electionism are about arrogance and control, about patriarchy’s culture of dominion and about intolerance for diversity.

Self-justification based on ignorance and arrogance is wasting humankind and Earth-life. Because humankind assumes self-superiority over other life it justifies the exploitation of other life, even the extinction of species. Religions and cultures conveniently ignore their complicity in wasting web-life; they advance a myopic “pro-life” ethic that concentrates singularly on human life, not holistically as part of Earth ecology but as a ruling value sufficient to itself. What does “pro-life” really mean? Surely it can’t mean the proliferation of humankind even to the suffocation of life-essential ecologies.

The Garden of Eden Story has God imposing two mandates. The first is to “increase and multiply;” and the second is a requirement to abstain from eating fruit from the “Tree in the middle of the Garden.” Knowledge of good and evil is a discernment of consciousness and conscience. The fruit of the “middletree” is vitality itself—a consciousness shared by all life, and which conscience discerns as necessary and right. Conscience tells that human ecology totally depends on global ecology. Wasting global ecology/ vitality, the “original” means for all life, is original sin as true in the present as in the past.

The likelihood of permanently trashing ecological life is a prospect all too possible under the license of unrestrained exploitation. Self-interest passion to control Earth resources gets increasingly intense as population pressures increase and natural resources fail. In the circumstance of increased population and decreased resources, violence intensifies, aggravates further violence, and hastens greater waste of nature.

The arrogance of self-electionism is idolatrous for it presumes authority that belongs to God alone. Self-electionism of males over females, justified in institutional religions, is a presumption of overreach and societal disordering, implicating the rape of women, land and nature. Walter Brueggemann assesses the human predicament rightly when he observes that the exploitation of women and nature roots in the same religious/ cultural mindset, and that the wasting of one cannot be restrained except the other is.

http://ncronline.org/news/justice/biblical-narrative-economic-policy

It’s for women to step forward and challenge male inauthenticity/ exploitation. Males still get sex wrong, get religion wrong, and they aren’t likely to get either right unless and until a stand is taken against cultural ignorance/ arrogance—in a “pro-life” way. Nature’s restoration isn’t a habit of males; quite to the contrary, male ego-culture exploits nature, motherhood and the communal persona.

Women of the world! Your mothering intuition is the hope of the present and the future. Male self-arrogation lacks mothering intuitions. On their own, males do not have the insight to back away from cultured violence and exploitation. The revelation of deity, of Trinity, is an insight of communal solidarity, of family and global societies, a sense of harmony beyond the rationality of patriarchal theology/ politics. God is honored in God-like behavior, in lived respect for God’s plan, nature’s pattern—intentional symbiosis.