Revelation or revolution. It's a no brainer.

by Richard Mellor

I think this map is on the wall in the US Congress

Afscme Local 444, retired

I have to admit I was somewhat awestruck by the following words at one point in my life.

"And I heard a voice from heaven, as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of a great thunder: and I heard the voice of harpers harping with their harps: And they sung as it were a new song and no man could learn that song but the hundred and forty and four thousand, which were redeemed from the earth."Revelation, 14. 2

If I could only learn that damn song. But things got a little rougher:

"And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels." Revelation, 12. 7

The problem now was that I found myself sort of attracted to serpents and dragons and didn't want to be one of the 144 thousand if it meant the serpents and dragons couldn't come with me. To be honest, I just didn't like Michael if he didn't like animals. And, I wanted to know how the world worked.

I was the only Catholic in my village if I remember and I had a little alter in my room with two little candles and a plastic virgin Mary in the middle. By the age of 10 I had really become interested in biology and how the body worked. I was reprimanded for my experiments in the field and even had to say ten or sometimes 20 hail Mary's as a punishment. "Bless me father I have sinned, I have had immoral thoughts" I had to tell the man with the cloak. I felt like Galileo who was imprisoned for saying the world was round, or the great alchemists and women healers who were burned at the stake as witches for studying science. But I could say the hail Mary's very quickly so it didn't last long. More importantly I didn't give up my passion for biology, I was going to follow in the footsteps of the great alchemists.  So I would turn the plastic statue of the virgin around when I conducted my experiments so she wouldn't be able to snitch on me anymore.  I became quite an expert in my field.

But later on as I was becoming more interested in the world around me, about human society, tribal culture, feudalism, slavery and the system I found myself in that was called capitalism or freedom. I came across these words that seemed to me to make a lot more sense than what I was taught. I still kept an interest in biology but I had found my calling. They made a lot more sense to me than the war between Michael and his angels and the two animal. I mean, did they really do that?

I was told not to read these words as a bad man wrote them, a god hating man named Karl Marx. He wrote, among other things:

"In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness."

 

Another German dude, Fred Engels, an atheist like the previous author, also wrote some words that made me perk up. He wrote:

 "The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in men's better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange” 

I wonder why the first versions that I eventually abandoned as they seemed absurd after I was about 10 years old, are quite prominent in the institutions of capitalism, this free society we live in, and the latter ones have to be sought out, the authors demonized, the philosophy slandered. 

 

The people that propagate the former view of the world have built buildings where they can gather people up and tell them about Michael and dragons and angels and even cherubs. It is an important business with a lot of employees and gold and property.  They have some buildings that can hold as many as 30,000 people but not the 144,000, that special group that their book says will be lifted up from the earth. Many of the US branch of this view of the world has moved to Israel/Palestine because that's where the ship is going to land that will take them out of here.

Oh well, at least I don't have to say 10 hail Mary's anymore.