creativeI've been thinking about societies that have priests as their leaders. This doesn’t seem like a good model. The religious way society can have a "my way or the highway" philosophy, with sometimes the highway being death. The result is a society that stagnates under the influence of it's own dogmatism. Uneducated contemplation of the South American brings me to a place where I consider what happens to a society that has catastrophes, and the "god-connected" leaders don't have an answer. If a god-connected person doesn’t have an answer, who does? Society then collapses in anarchy.I was contemplating this today, realizing that every society has a “God” of some sort. The blanket definition of a society’s God would be that force that defines and drives the society. Invariably, there are priests serving the society’s God. The priests are responsible for furthering the cause of the God, rewarding those who serve the God well, and punishing those who do not. The power of a society’s God is that it has most, if not all, of the answers. Any concepts not originating, or supported, by the society’s God are considered heresy. Those who promote the heretical ideas are subject to discipline, up to, and including, death.
Sounds fantastic eh? Consider the United States. The God of the United States varies, as the country is a representative republic. The vogue God of the past several years is that of Patriotism, Christian Religion, and Business. Those who opposed the priests of these Gods were condemned and considered to be untrustworthy. As I noted in my quotation from the previous blog entry, politics are the resting place for a society’s true, but temporary, priests. These priests will come and go with the shifting tide of political fate. The changes will bring in new Gods’ whims will be imposed on the people.
We are all on a spiritual path, even if that path is of “no religion”. The absence of an over-arching spiritual God places mankind in the God driver seat. In some ways, the atheist or Satanic path places more responsibility on man to be accountable for their actions. Perhaps this is the source of the society's God. Without an absolute agreement on who the Divine Godhead is, the God of mankind's society is present in the divine's place. Even a society that claims to be a theocracy is only a pale shadow of it's divine vision. The influence of society's God rules in place of projected Godhead.
Whatever the path, what are the duties that individual has to the society’s God? Does it matter if the society has a representative framework instead of a despotic? The two seem to blend at times when the society’s God is most revered by the appointed priests. The presence of the society’s God may be strong and weak at times, but it is always present.
Food for thought… ($.02) clink. Your thoughts on this topic???
