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Edited on Tue Jan-10-06 04:32 PM by arendt
A Modern-day Council of Nicea debates Scalito-ism versus Democracy
by arendt
Those who do not remember history are condemned...
When the Roman Emperor Constantine decided, in 325 CE, that he needed one religion
to quell the disharmony in his empire, he convened the Council of Nicea and knocked the
Christian bishop's heads together until they came up with a uniform creed. Given the
demand from the emperor for a single message, the "orthodox", literalist bishops and their
authoritarian organizational structure easily carried the day.
Overnight, the formerly persecuted Christians became persecuters themselves.
The literalist bishops used the Roman Army to take their revenge on "heterodox"
influences such as Arianism (no trinity), Manicheism (God and Satan are equally powerful),
and Gnostic Christianity (God is personal). The revenge was ruthless and bloody, and continued
for centuries, until all traces of heterodoxy had been destroyed or driven underground.
Until 20th century archaeology turned up rare caches of pre-Nicean documents, the
only knowledge we had of the losers was the vitriol and disinformation spread about
them by the winners.
Soon after Nicea, a fundamentalist mob in Alexandria, Egypt burned the ancient library there - a
library full of all the collected knowledge of the ancient world. Then they murdered Hypatia, a
women philosopher who dared to teach Plato and Aristotle. The might of the empire was turned
lose to track down and burn unauthorized books and the people who refused to recant them.
This behavior continued for a thousand years. Ancient statues and monuments in Egypt
were systematically defaced. Native religions were violently exterminated wherever found,
especially in the Americas. Anyone who caused trouble for the Church, by daring to think, found
itself afoul of the Inquistion. Medieval midwives, who tried to introduce some semblance of hygiene
into giving birth or treating disease, were demonized as witches and burnt as scapegoats for 300
years for the temerity to question the debased and subservient role placed on all women by a homosocial
church power structure.
It took the Black Plague, the Avignon papacy, the Borgia popes, the excesses of the Inquisition,
and the indulgence scandal to build up enough tinder for the spark of Protestantism to catch,
and to burn down the rotting edifice of the Roman Church in Europe; and that burning took nearly
300 years to complete.
The outcome of Nicea set the course of the West for the next 1,200 years - 1,200 years
of ignorance, poverty, superstition, corruption, bloody crusade, and inquisition. Not for
nothing did the British historian Edward Gibbons call the Roman Catholic Church as the last
surviving remnant of the Roman Empire.
...to war, mob violence, and torture
Today, America, has an un-elected emperor whose flouting of the law is maintained by a paper-thin
(and heavily gerrymandered and electronically rigged) majority of Congress, kept content by the
now-exposed Republican "K Street Project" corruption. This emperor has called together a
Council of the Senate to complete his appointment of a team of judicial enforcers. He demands that Sam
Alito be allowed to join an existing cabal of Federalist Society revisionists on the court. That faction will
then rubber stamp all the crimes Bush has committed to date and will commit in the future: illegal wars
based on lies, violation of international treaties we have signed, the dismemberment of the Constitution,
mass torture, illegal suspension of basic legal rights (habeus corpus, privacy of communication), the
looting of the middle class, the creeping establishment of a police state, and the inevitable privatization
of the armed forces.
The confirmation hearing for the authoritarian, imperialist Alito, is as big a turning point for the United
States as Nicea was for the West. If Alito is confirmed, the rabid, literalist forces will control all three
branches of our once democratic government. Only fools believe the cynical, media disinformation
campaign that this hard-right thug is a "centrist" who will not change things much. If that were true,
how could Bush possibly have nominated the man in the current post-Myers fundie backlash?
As with Nicea, change will happen instantaneously. We will go from being a mature, but corrupt, democracy with
a Triumvirate (DLC dems, GOP, and fundamentalists) straight to being a sinking post-Nicean theocratic police state, without
having been an empire in between. All the might of a theocratic government, which no longer has to pretend it will play by the
rules of democracy, will be brought to bear against, first, political dissenters; then, not so much later, against dissenters
from the Dominionist religious agenda: Old Testament dictatorship, slavery, chattel status for women, and the disavowal of
science. Miraculously, with the achievement of secular dictatorship, the Apocalypse will be postponed (sarcasm).
Therefore, in my humble opinion, America is either about to nail some theses to the door of Congress; or it is
about to vote itself into a Dark Age on the eve of the Hubbard's Peak mayhem. The latter is a combination so lethal
that it takes one's breath away.
We need all the true conservatives (that is, Americans loyal to the true meaning of the tolerant and intelligent Constitution)
to awake from their hypnotism before its too late, like Bob Barr did and Paul Craig Roberts did. The GOP has been captured
by Trotskyites; Alito is their cat's paw. Moderate Republicans should vote against this man. The Democratic Party leadership
should at least attempt to get the worthless Red State democrats, for once in their sell-out careers, to vote for the good of
America instead of voting for whatever keeps them in office.
Together, we will stand at Washington; and we will fight for the Constitution - so that we will not have to stand at
Armageddon and fight against the Dark, fundamentalist Lord.
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