Blog 9 Midsummer New Year of Johns Eve 2012



A Basket of Stones.



A too literate interpretation to the question that I left off with in my previous blog (8): “Why, more kindly, not have just one of us [fish] give our life on Johns Eve?’” may shock not only fishermen, but many other people too.

This is one of the paradoxes of our time: You may talk with your doctor about your terminal illness, but you may not talk with him or her about death. At least most doctors will try to answer such a query with an answer which they consider to be a positive one.

No matter how we look at it, the subject of ‘death’ cannot escape an automatic assumption that the subject matter not only concerns ‘death’, but is also a question about suicide. While the subject of ‘death’ is a difficult one, it becomes more difficult when coupled with ‘suicide’, a word that has become a synonym of euthanasia. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtZekdMZwBE .

‘Suicide’ necessarily triggers associations with one’s Will. Is the ‘Will’ of me, a human being, or is it the ‘Will’ of God? Moreover, if a ‘suicide’ involves the Will of the perpetrator (who else is thereto blame?), why would one wish to ‘will’ one’s life an end?

The answer is given in an unconvincing manner in the following link by a ‘therapist’. Granted that a therapist is not a doctor, but given that most individuals are presumed by governments to be in one way or another ‘institutionalized’ individuals (citizen or non-citizens of some nation)—and a ‘therapist’ is certainly an institutionalized figure—a suicide is unavoidably presumed to be a cog in the wheel of the ‘institution’.  http://psychcentral.com/ask-the-therapist/2007/11/28/is-suicide-the-answer/ its modern synonym being ‘nation’.

Such a presumption is an old one (going back to Latin Rome), though the Godless or ‘God-absent’ nature of the nation was asserted only after  Enlightenment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment . For those born in the Age of Enlightenment, the creation of Adam and Eve as told in the Bible was a fairy-tale. However, by escaping the fairy-tale, Adam and Eve and all other humans became members of an institution. While the most immediate institution is a nation (sometimes also known as “my country”), all countries today belong to a league known as the United Nations (UN). So, again, like it or not, all human beings on Earth are institutionalized beings. When one thinks of it, a city (an institution) is not all that different from a prison.

The United Nations does not recognize God, but is headed by an individual known as Secretary-General, who as head of the Secretariat http://www.un.org/en/mainbodies/secretariat/ is deemed to be the de facto leader of the UN. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary-General_of_the_United_Nations . Unlike the discredited God of the pre-Enlightenment Age, the Secretary General of the UN (in spite of his credentials), does not have anywhere near the charisma that God once had.

This is just as well, because none of the members of the Security Council  of the UN (the real decision makers) wish him to have charisma. They rather keep such charisma as can be had for themselves.

One of the most charismatic God-absent nations of all post-Enlightenment nations is the United States of America. The President of U.S.A., from the very beginning recognized as the Supreme Commander of American military forces, has recently—by virtue of the Homeland Security Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeland_Security_Act —become the Supreme Commander of all Americans.

While believed to be a mortal, the President of the U.S., has nevertheless presumed for himself the charismatic role once held by God. The presumption is self-assumed (given the help of legal advisors and concurrence of the Congress) and overrides the authority of not only Americans, but any individual anywhere in the world http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tsP2hkp24s . In other worlds, the ‘citizen of the world’ has been institutionalized as subject to the U.S. President’s will.

Not unlike once deinstitutionalized Christians (the Cathars, Bogomils, Lollards, Children of Johns, etc) everyone who disputes the power of the U.S. President, becomes not only a ‘heretic’ as in the Middle Ages, but a ‘terrorist’.

If in another time and age, the only way to escape the wrath of God was to commit a preemptive act, i.e., suicide, before God had a chance to act for himself, it is not much different today. In other words, if one gets wind of being on the ‘hit list’ of the White House, one may justify to suicide, both, as a pre-emptive act and as an act of protest.