WHITECROW BORDERLAND
Creationism Versus Creativity. (
The first five words of the Bible, “In the beginning, God created . . .,” are a seemingly
innocuous way to start an extended discussion of the relationship between
(wo)man and God. That “harmless”
statement; however, is followed by an unrelenting effort on the part of the
people who wrote it to convince everyone who reads it that compliance with its
dictates is not up to any individual’s choice.
There is no freedom here in spite of the fact that Christians everywhere
and everywhen have always insisted on freedom of choice. Sure freedom to disobey God’s commandments
exists but at the cost of eternal damnation for anyone who so chooses. Going beyond the Bible’s initial delusion, which states that the only human life
worthy of existence is lived by people who do not question the validity of the
first five words of the Bible, can be
done only by denying the truth and validity of the Book’s first five words
which are always already perceived as being absolutely true. In other words, if you are not a creationist,
a person who believes unequivocally that God created the universe in six days,
between April 6 and April 11, 5004 BC say (which are just as factual and
non-arbitrary as any other dates suggested for the event), then the rest of the
Bible was written for the sole
purpose of condemning you to everlasting torment in oceans and lakes of burning
fire. That, admittedly, is an
exaggeration. There are many other
things in the Bible. For instance, a significant effort was made
throughout subsequent passages in the text of many books to excuse the practice
of genocide that believers claim as their God-given right to practice against
non-believers. In fact, the first five
words of the Bible create the
philosophical and quasi-moral ground to justify exactly that. Anyone who says that God created anything
automatically and without reservation ascribes to the notion of hierarchical
structure as a ruling principle of universal reality.
This is true because God as Creator is all-powerful,
in a class by Himself, so to speak, that excludes every other thing and
creature on the face of anything that has one.
Since God is all-powerful, everything else must naturally and inevitably
be less than that. Everything He created
is less than God and must be below Him.
On the one side, you have HIGH; while, on the other, you have low. The only thing the existence of God
necessitates unequivocally is the existence of hierarchical structure based on
human generated scales of high and low, good and evil, same and other, this and
that, now and then, here and there, and so on, ad infinitum. The problem,
simply put, is that no such structure, or structures, exists naturally anywhere
on the face of anything that has one.
There is no such thing as hierarchy.
Nothing is higher or lower than anything else. Why creationism matters so much to the people
who embrace the notion is that without it they cannot claim to be in a position
higher than ordinary individuals, in a position, in other words, that gives
them the unique ability to judge what is high and low, good and evil, and so
on, ad infinitum. After seizing the “high” ground, of course,
they are quick to manufacture and fabricate justifications for destroying that
which they find beneath them, and thereby in conflict with the false moral codes
their delusions demand and inflict on the rest of us.
A member of the American Taliban, one who certainly
embraces the idea that God created the world, has recently informed members of
the US Senate who represent states that favored Bush in 2004 that they will
become targets (or as he put it “will be in the ‘bull’s eye’ the next time they
seek re-election”). James Dobson,
founder of Focus on the Family, cannot resist the most extreme expression of
the threat he can use to intimidate people who oppose his narrow view of
reality. His point here concerns anyone,
even including Bush himself, who opposes only the most conservative
appointments to the Federal Judiciary, especially appointments to the Supreme
Court. If appointees do not pass his
requirements for religious fundamentalism, he will target Bush for whatever
smear campaign his money can buy. Any
Senator who opposes the nomination of a religious fanatic to the bench can
expect a re-election campaign like the ones his money-driven ideology supported
against people he considered too liberal in 2004. Tom Daschle was one such victim of Dobson’s
‘bull’s eye’ mentality. The idea that
any single individual, no matter what his political philosophy, has the right
and duty to impose his point-of-view on the rest of the country makes a total
mockery of our democratic institutions.
This is especially true when the campaign designed to eliminate a
congressional representative is not bound by anything like truth-telling in
efforts used to characterize the person Dobson has targeted—any lie,
exaggeration, misrepresentation is permissible if the ultimate objective is
achieved.
This mentality, ever more pervasive in our society,
intends to eliminate choice and diversity in our culture. Its purpose, its hope, is to discredit and
destroy any and every point-of-view that is not identical to the so-called
value system embraced by its practitioners.
Dobson wants every voice in
Two principles matter here when this purely
Eurocentric ideology is contrasted to native American belief systems. Firstly, there is no such thing as a concept
of hierarchy in our traditional thought processes and behavioral patterns. We see nothing in terms of high and low, same
and other, this and that. Concepts based
on binary opposition are meaningless in the way we perceive reality. No one is ever privileged above anyone else
for any reason whatsoever. Such concepts
are literally impossible. The second
principle explains why this is true.
Over the course of living in the natural world for the past 40,000 years
or so, native Americans learned through careful and prolonged observation that
the basic structure of the universe (we limited our observational practice to
what we could actually see—sun, moon, planets, stars) was, is, and always will
be essentially harmonic. Harmony is an
unrelenting “master,” so to speak, that does not allow for the existence of
binary oppositions, dialectical conflicts, or differential contentions anywhere
or anywhen in the vast realm of its reach.
(I have described precisely what I mean here in other sections of this
document; notably: Maya Calendrical Harmonics
and Maya Geometrical Harmonics). The
simple fact that harmony rules the relationships apparent in material reality,
while something “Christians” would point to as justification for condemnation,
make it impossible for native Americans to embrace the notion that a Supreme
Being had any hand whatsoever in making the world what is so decidedly is. The very existence of that Supreme Being
demands an absence of harmony because He must necessarily reduce everything
else in his created world to a position below His supremacy. Put simply: the harmony that exists in every
reach of the universe necessarily denies the existence of something, or
anything, that could have created it—unless that thing is less than supreme—an
idea, or possibility, odious to Christian theology. We have no problem with any of this because
our creator spirits (mother earth; father sky) are superior to nothing at all.
Furthermore, the fact that all reality was created by
a single mother and a single father makes everything in the universe equal to
everything else that can be found there.
Every living thing is either my brother or my sister since all of us
have only one mother and one father. No
hierarchy can exist in such a world.
Oddly, or not, it is the existence of the harmony that created the
ground in the universe for the existence of the spirit world in the first
place. Spirit, as native Americans
understand and practice it, is a natural result of the harmonic principles that
guide and control the complex interactions apparent and observable between and
among all objects of material reality.
Matter gives rise to spirit just as spirit gives rise to matter. They are inseparable. They are interchangeable. They are certainly not the same thing
however. To see the “difference,” simply
look at the reflection of any physical object in a mirror. The material object is just that—its mirror
image, its reflection, is the thing’s spirit.
This is a temporal concept in native American philosophy, one I may
examine in this series of thoughts later.
A concluding (post)script here: since our creator
spirits are not all-powerful, and have never pretended to be, they have always
required help in fashioning the world and maintaining its essential balance,
its harmony. That task was given to
us. We have always understood our place
in the creation of the world as co-creators with mother earth and father sky. We sing it into existence. We have always done that. If we stop—the world will die. We do not intend to stop singing the world
into existence.