millennium ramble

And then I saw a city made without walls coming down from heaven. Its roads were obsidian and its sidewalks were a special polymer that gave when you walked but retained shape and durability. And the Traffic lights of the city were all in sync and none stayed on too long or too short. And pedestrians filled the sidewalks and there was plentiful street parking. And drivers drove cars made of high strength metal and with care to each other and to pedestrians and cyclists. And the streets were filled with cyclists and rickshaws and carts of myriad shapes and divers sizes. And there were parks where people strolled safely and played and walked pets. And the air was clear as crystal and as pleasant to breathe as spring breeze. And there was no night there, the streets being lit with a bio-luminescent form of plant life. And people were reading books and speaking with each other as if the other were important simply for being a human being. And there was no church or temple or mosque or reading room or kingdom hall anywhere in the city. And the people were happy. There were unhappy people, to be sure. The people who were outside the city were unhappy: these were people who insisted that culture and happiness could not exist without the absolutes provided by religion; that without a singular moral authority issuing from irrevocable heights and mediated through a tradition and by the authorized spokespeople of that tradition, where people ordered their lives around ritual and taboo, accepting draconian punishment for abstract transgressions of divine law, that chaos and lawlessness would reign, an epoch of anarchy and misery would ensue, death, plague and poverty would be the lot of humanity. But it didn't turn out that way at all: though the people outside the city insisted that it would - although the people in the city were quite happy and had persisted in their happiness for many years. Happiness however was not restricted to the playing out of absolutes - no matter how old or absolute; nor was happiness found in correctly crafting syllogisms that demonstrated God's existence or humanity's depravity or whatever the syllogism crafter wanted to prove: appeals to authority and appeals to logic simply increased the frustration of those leveling the appeals: the people in the city remained immune to ideology. They knew that humanity trumped ideology, no matter what the intentions of that ideology: that for instance, going to war for "liberation of a people" was trumped by seeing the people targeted for war as individuals: they new that it's not terrorists or infidels that are killed but mothers and fathers and children, friends, lovers, people who have dreams and take joy in simple things like any one else. Therefore they did not kill nor desire the death of anyone.
Whenever an ideology was promulgated that promised "better living through chemistry" or "nation building" or "social engineering" the people in the city were not taken in: they recognized rhetorical attempts at dehumanizing others as inhumane. The apocalypse is this: that we, like those in the city, recognize when great evils come dressed in the veneer of good - that this good is often stated in terms of an ideology that demonizes another group of people (immigrants, homeless, hippies, commies, et al) for the power and greed of a few. This is why Jesus teaches us to pray for enemies and give to people who cannot repay, that we see them as people like ourselves and not as annoyances or obstacles (an objectified other); he tells us to do this because that is how God, his father and ours, is. When Jesus says, "be perfect as your father in heaven is perfect", he is not enjoining us to be moral goody-goodies but to participate in God's project of creation, a project that heals and restores creation, especially the image of God - and we all (capitalists, terrorists, poor, homeless, foreign, crazy and sane) are that image.