STORIES OF SACRIFICE

“As it is in Heaven, so it should be on Earth” is a kind of religious attitude, but more often Heaven is pictured as the way one wants Earth to be but isn’t. So the Christian idea of so much wealth that precious metals pave the streets and the Muslim idea of a horde of willing virgins are drawn from what’s known. We cannot conceive of the supernatural by imagining a bigger and better natural, but we try anyway. Then, circularly, we use the Big Guy in the Sky we made up to justify the Big Guy running the country, or company or family.

This seemed obvious to people living in tribes or in the Roman Empire or even belonging to the Holy Roman Catholic Church. It’s also helpful in places that are based on scarcity or enslavement because the idea is that the good times are coming later in Supernatural land.

The persistence of Christianity has probably been due to one constant aspect of the environment, which is in large measure other people. That is the family, our best way of crossing the generations to keep individuals linked into groups, whether by affinity, attachment or economics. The Big Guys like people to be in groups and siloes and merchandizing preferences for management convenience.

If we look at families in terms of S/M, at first the Big Guy is the father (S) and the mother is the (M) for the sake of her children to whom she was once physically attached. The survival of the species depends upon the success of the children (M) who eventually grow up to be powerful (S) and depose the fathers into senility (M). The symbolism of money — which really stands for ownership and control of things and other people — is a way of moving wealth across the generations.

The strength of the mother (secretly a sub-S) is her control of the culture because this is also a way of moving across the generation gap, this time with ideas, most importantly an understanding of the nature of the world, so that when the kids are Big Guys they will do things a little differently. This is progress and also adaptation to new conditions of civilization or climate. It helps survival. Her power comes through attachment, which some call “love.”

When we discovered DNA in our long fascination with the connected generations, at first everything was thought to be due to the code of the molecules and their dance through sex across the generations. For a while we tried to control it and even now we’re busy trying to knock out genes, add new genes, and even construct a chromosome. Someone claims to have made a synthetic cell. It’s ironic poetry that a bit of DNA with no cell has been stalking us — Covid 19.

But the cultural “DNA” — nothing to do with molecules — is child-raising. The idea of a particular generation’s time and place controls what most people then think should be the treatment of the newly born as they grow through their first years. Mothers raise babies as they were raised, but maybe with a different understanding. New lullabies but lullabies just the same. The babies grow into adults who have new ideas.

My constant reiteration of the idea that a brain is built by the sensory experience of that earliest time comes from recent research. In the past babies have been thought of as predetermined by heredity or as blank slates that can be written on by adults. Now we know that the creation of a new personality happens by molecular recording that creates an understanding of the world, a template for the rest of life.

This is at first not uniquely human but uniquely mammalian and grew out of the plain fact that what is cared for with feeding, cleaning, sheltering and stroking will survive. If there are shortages or imbalances, the result will be a distorted or truncated person. If none of these things are provided, like the examples of babies in minimal care orphanages, then the infant dies of mirasmus.

Sometimes the child survives with a deficit that is convenient, like the conviction that everyone must be obedient or not think for themselves. This works best in a society that is orderly, mostly unchanging, and convenient for those in charge.

But every new generation may be influenced through the care-giver to see the world in a new way. There will be major differences between babies who had a happy start where they learned to trust and grow and those who were living marginally from the beginning, maybe from poverty, war or addicted parents. Those who had a happy toddlerhood later challenged by hardship will never give up trying to get back to that early state, and they may feel betrayed by the failure of the caregiver to continue that world as it once was. Were those Big Guys stupid, weak or malicious? Deciding that will control the rest of life.

And it will shape the idea of the Big Guy in the Sky, because he comes out of life experience with caregivers. He’s basically modeled on parents. Maybe he doesn’t care, maybe he’s nonexistent. The template will determine what most people consider an acceptable life and their understanding of leadership. This is why political big shots are afraid of children, over-control their own, and want the children of dissenters to die, which they can do through starvation, lack of health care, and encouraging the destruction of families through mercantile sex.

Making sex the “Big Buy” [sic] through surgical appearance augmentation, makeup, costume, jewelry, physical development, the promotion of sex “secrets,” and glamorous examples, keeps everyone thinking about self-sales instead of nurturing the next generation. This is disguised by a kind of child worship that reduces them to belongings, poker-chips in the prestige game.

All three related monotheisms are a distortion of Abrahamic stories, not just Christianity. In the end the fate of necessarily changing generations is a reversal of the tale of Father Abraham setting out to kill his son, Isaac, because God promised him a country if he would do it. God changed his mind, so the tribe persists after all.

The next version of the story might be that Isaac does not forget nearly dying on the altar of the status quo. In this alternative version, eventually he kills Abraham, as he kills the old ways and the old status patterns. He begins to sacrifice sheep instead of children and eventually his children choose to break bread instead of eating flesh. The next generation thinks any kind of sacrifice is not necessary. So does that mean their heritage is a mess of pottage? Or is this line of thought worn out?