Recent scholarship indicates that 666 being the sign of the beast is a mistranslation of the original text. Apparently the number is not 666 but SOME OTHER NUMBER. Ergo: all the crap about the beast insofar it is connected with this number goes out the window. I always thought Reagan was the antichrist. His three names (in terms of letter numbers) are 666. I suppose I'll just have to look for some other reason to make this case. Even so, given recent dangerous idiocy from the religious right, I thought I’d better let loose (not to say cobble together) a little diatribe concerning why they do what they do. And expose its essential un-spiritual nature. But first a poem:
Nature is
and our nature is.
The opening of a woman
leads to Xibalba;
the doors of the church
must open to her.
(*Xibalba is the Maya underworld)
As you read keep an image in the mind’s eye of the early conquest on the U.S. Eastern seaboard. Consider how the European immigrants were struck with fear at the wild America they beheld. The forests (already cut in their homelands) especially were of concern to the prelates who called out for a leveling of the woods--which shelter the sins of women who wander with their gender's lust among them in the arms of Satan, ruler of uncontrolled nature.
So why does the religious right fear nature?
At core, the unwillingness to accept that human beings are part of the co-evolutionary processes stems from a desire for easy and pat answers (an escape through collaboration with the abusive powers that created them. Strangely paradoxical, they hold that humans are above life itself, God's chosen, and can therefore do what they like as long as they are possessed of the secret code of their personal god. The rights religious mono-mania makes them easy marks for the corporate and capitalist elites that have broken them (and almost all of us) into atomized particles and them reassembled as a mob; check out any Palin rally for an absurd glimpse of what I'm talking about, a real Nazi bookburner.
They are the embodiment of a pathology that makes poor whites the shock troops for the criminal bosses that robbed them. They are the wounded addicts whose cathected fear is placated only by identifying with the perpetrators that hurt them.
What they fear is nature, something they are, yikes, part of. But they hold, that nature is a mirage projected by a female devil. Therefore to spoil it means nothing. Nature, the woman, the other race, religion, whathaveyou are all the same. What matters is their pathological reproduction of the disease.
Such delusions are not spiritual at all. In fact, they embody the corporatism and alienated performance they pretend to abhor.
Everywhere you see their abuse against creation itself.
Unfortunately, what they do to nature they do the future children of earth (human and otherwise), the REAL unborn--robbing them of the pleasure of listening and relating to the full utterance of the languages and music of the planet. Making of God a stammerer--robbed of his poetry.
What they do to nature; they do to these children--what they do nature; they do to the body of X.