By Paul G Dellit
To avoid confusion or misunderstandings, “God”, in this article, refers to all manifestations of the deity in monotheistic religions. We will allow Christian religions, such as Catholicism to be included even though their god is referred to as “The Holy Trinity”. As we know, their “Trinity” is a legal fiction created for income-splitting tax purposes, much as the Catholic Church exists on Sundays when the plate is passed around at Mass, but ceases to exist when the victims of their paedophilia commence litigation. Apparently they have found a way around the master/servant relationship priests have with the organisation that anointed them and funds them.
The Church of England is also included even though at least one of their Archbishops of Canterbury was too polite to be too dogmatic about the traditional claim that Jesus Christ was, in fact, God (perhaps for fear of antagonising the agnostics and alienating the atheists). The question as to whether this would leave the Church of England with a Holy Duopoly is still up in the air, though the smart money has it that the stationery costs would be more than the change is worth, and anyway, who would send their kids to Duopoly Grammar.
The other attributes of our “God” is that he is omniscient (knows everything about everything, past, present, and to come) and omnipotent (made everything from the smallest particle and wave of energy, can change the course of history, a la raising the dead Lazarus, and override the laws of nature, a la walking on water, large scale catering by creating loaves and fishes out of thin air and turning water into wine. Yep, this guy can do anything he wants to.
And I’m sorry to break it to you, little ladies, but he is a ‘he’, a very patriarchal ‘he’ who inspired all the other guys who wrote the gospels (and Tony Abbott) to tell you so. They might have contradicted each other on a lot of points and never wrote a single line of “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen”, but they were solid on the assertion that the little woman was meant to be the perfect ‘her in doors’ devoted to life-long domestic duties – to be an underpaid nurse or teacher before she was married, an unpaid wife and mother, and finally, when she was widowed and discovered that her husband had drunk his life assurance and spent his super on a number of Eves who didn’t exactly give their apples away for free, an underpaid tea lady.
The other term we must be clear on is “LNP”. In this article it is used in the parabolic sense of standing for all right wing political movements which espouse the rights of the individual and beggar my neighbour. In other words, “LNP” comprehends any organisation which subscribes to the Thatcher dictum that society doesn’t exist and that people live together in dog-eat-dog competition with one another. Scott Morrison, for example, is an archetypal adherent of LNPism. He may have been born with the usual impulses towards empathy and genuine concern for others, but beneath that shell of smug, devil-may-care self-satisfaction, LNPism has eaten away every last vestige of a social conscience and replaced it with a sociopathic desire to achieve power at any cost.
So, how can we surmise, with any confidence, that God votes for the LNP? Well, even if we allow that Jesus is a fully paid up member of the Trinity and spent the adult part of his thirty three years on earth saying a number of things that smack of socialism (but, sorry girls, not even closet feminism), he must be considered the ‘ex parrot’ of human manifestations of God-on-Earth. He has pissed off to the easy life beyond the sky. God is no longer with us. He is back in his natural environment. He is doing what God does in Heaven. And if you know as little as I do about the religions of The Book, which cover all the bases as far as monotheism goes, you will at least know something about what God has been up to in Heaven. For example, we know that God likes war. He created Lucifer as a really beautiful angel with a big ego. God is omniscient, so he knew that this was going to lead to war and that he will win the war with Lucifer and will kick him out of Heaven and send him to Hell (also created by God). We must conclude that God set the whole thing up for a bit of fun, and that fun, for him, includes war when you know you are going to win. Now, doesn’t this have some parallels with earthly appetites for war. They are waged by those who believe they will win, acquire great power and wealth, have their egos boosted enormously, and all at the expense of people other than themselves. I think you will agree that, in terms of our LNP definition, that’s one tick for an LNP candidate.
Now let’s look at the question of suffering on earth. Our omniscient, omnipotent God created Adam and Eve. It is true that Bible revisionist, faced with the time-frames established for evolution, have had to abandon the 6,000-years-ago date for the beginnings of life on earth and in the light of evidence of all the predecessor species to us, now consider that the Adam and Eve story to be apocryphal. Nevertheless, they still maintain the existence of Original Sin, i.e. once we didn’t have it but now we do. The Bible still maintains that God was our ultimate creator and that we were in a perfect state of being when he created us, but that an Original Sin was committed by our first distant relatives. It was their fault that we live in the kind of world we live in. But it must also be true that God knew from the beginning that he had created those distant relatives of ours with the predisposition to commit the Original Sin and that they would commit it, with the result that all the people, and other species, which have existed from the date of the Original Sin, none of whom/which had anything to do with committing the Original Sin, have been made to suffer. No one escapes this world without suffering. Billions of creatures have suffered much more than any pleasure they have had.
So, what kind of individual has the character trait that seeks personal gratification at the expense of everyone but themselves. I think we have another tick for an LNP candidate.
We could go on, ad nauseam, citing examples of patriarchal, ego-maniacal, solipsistic, sociopathic, and even psychopathic behaviours on the part of God which neatly overlap with the values of the LNP. We need look no further than the treatment by Messrs. Morrison and Dutton of the children, women and men they have held and continue to hold in torturous, soul-destroying detention to find an instance of complete overlap. God has made these men in his own image.
If you were to ask me to pick one avatar that I would have complete sympathy with, I would choose Guanyin, a bodhisattva which is something akin to a saint in Christianity. Guanyin is the embodiment of compassion and through all of the many versions of her mythical existence the theme of all things anathema to the values perpetrated by the LNP are to be found. Worth a read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanyin.
