The Human God
The God of its own worship.
The human being is a beast of nature that is capable of so much and yet limits itself within the confines of its own immaterial though rigid inventions. As a beast it transcends all others, its ability to comprehend and utilise its technologies if observed from the human past or by animals with lesser comprehension, a form of magic wielded by a deity. Found within this beast lies a belief that all is possible, that its abilities are infinite. It is inside of this cocoon of arrogant assurance that the human being has undergone a metamorphism into a Human God.
Though it does not create like nature, humanity does seek to control it. With knowledge and ability, it has learned how to breed and mutate through mistake and intention plant and animal for its own utility. It crafts its images into the landscape and from it, with effort it can pull from the Earth swathes of substance and with knowledge and skill can make machines that allow humanity to send envoys into space and for a time onto the nearby moon. The Human God does not limit this ability to discovery beyond its own planet, more ingenuity and effort is spent in blasting to pieces life, Earth and animal with sanctioned might. The fates of the stars beyond are uncertain so long as the Human God yearns to touch them with its own brilliance.
With sadism and fascination humanity destroys the other animals, with natural instincts it kills for pleasure and sustenance. In this regard it is no different to any other beast. Yet, through arbitrary compassion it may save distinct animals because of a natural appeal or because for a moment the bestial desires to destroy are staved off. The other animals may be enjoyed for sport, as trapped beasts running laps so that the Human God may celebrate in chance or they may be forced to fight one another in an orgiastic lust for pain and death. It Is not with primal necessity that the civilised Human God devours but with an entitled cultural obesity. Millions upon millions of beasts are slaughtered so that they may be dressed up, drizzled with flavour and placed upon tables where less than half are gorged upon. The rest wasted, thrown aside for the Human God food is not about utility and sustenance but entertainment and experience, the beasts sacrificed are meaningless props for the culinary wastefulness of a deity.
The Human God can also seek validation from the other animals, it is not enough to farm them so that they may be slaughtered wholesale. Using sinew, muscle, bone and innards to the very pelt and hooves with learned ingenuity. As a God it craves an obedience and affection from the other animals, forcing a dependence into them. This obedience and affection must be sought despite action and its many inconsistent, though usually merciless histories. The other beasts should love the hand that both beats, murders, though also feeds and tends to it. Simplicity in the mind of a God, complicated to the lesser beasts.
Some beasts may be burdened to serve as crude devices of labour or transport, while others are slaves so that human beings may no longer feel lonely, or feel loved. They are warm, soft and fuzzy or even cold-blooded reptiles that have been trapped, bred and imprisoned so that a human may lift them up at will, decide when to feed them and then shelter them all the while imagining that it is about the animal and not the Human God that controls everything in the animals life. The ownership is the closest form of worship that humanity can instil, short of demanding it from their fellow humans. The God will capture film and images of this imprisoned beast, sharing it among its fellow Humans so that they may praise and adore the Human God with affection. An altruistic adulation blasted back and forth above the down gazing eyes of the technologically blind beast.
The Human God frequently imposes a human quality onto its beasts, a fondness and a make believe fantasy that it is as equal as the God itself. With adoring names, inclusion into the Human Gods rituals, celebration of its sacred days and even in one sided conversations. When the beast stumbles or errs, the equality returns to a one sided beat, the Gods wrath is felt. The loyalty is not earned but demanded, the Human Gods memory is short, the beasts’ tender life and mind though limited does not unremember.
Beyond the need to control the domesticated and human made animals of nature, the Human God wants to feel special in the wild, beyond the parts of the Earth that it has civilised and built upon in its own image. When interacting with feral beasts less accustomed to the human, the God expects a fondness. They want the wild animal’s attention, desire a moment where the beast of nature suddenly picks the human being as a special individual as though this natural curiosity or wariness is a blessing or a praise granted to a deity of civil uniqueness. The Human God yearns a friendly interaction, when it is not hunting it for pointless murder where no appetite is satisfied other than arbitrary death. When the beasts run in fear the Human God seldom understands the fleeing, when the beasts curiously intermingle the Human God is satisfied that it is appreciated for all that it is not.
Though curdling inside are long dormant natural elements, the Human God builds temples of steel, concrete and glass celebrating its own glory. From within they may hide from the cold and heat of nature and when either is too extreme they assume that they can both internally change the temperature or that eventually with as similar ease despite so many variables can affect the Earths weather for the better or worse. Though for many of the civilised gods, they live beyond the touches of nature. They demand it obey them, the pretend to understand it and they encroach on it with a Gods ease. When they do harm the wider weather with choking smoke, radioactive clouds and burning napalm the Human God debates itself claiming that it can reverse its own impact, as it goes on repeating its miserable violence.
With both the majesty of technology the Human God possesses its mighty institutions, civil creations that constrict the creative instincts and drives of human individuals while ensuring many others that their greatness will know no bounds. These institutions while puffing out many toxic miseries into the Earth and its atmosphere also claim to be the harbinger of the planets salvation. While civilised gods fight among themselves destroying their sacred temples, conquering their imagined lands and obliterating generations of lives they praise their might and nobility in doing so. And still the Human God looks into the stars, promising “one day” while its own Earth drearily succumbs to its touch and its touch alone.
As they look beyond themselves as the god of all their deeds, they outsource both success and failure to imaginary creations. A Mightier God above all else, karmatic forces, Satanic touches are perhaps the most extreme but subtler scapemyths are readily available so that the mighty mythic institutions of the civilised Human God may go on ensuring itself of its many virtues. The gods that it places above itself, its imagined gods are all made to exhibit its own imagery and traits. The mythic gods that it sometimes worships and prays to is far more human than it is anything else and yet the Human God cannot see its own mirror, mistaking it for a window into a non- beyond. An afterlife is conjured up to satisfy the Human Gods fear of its own mortality, to replenish its inability to accomplish all in a limited amount of time. The invention of beyond promises eternity to an already impressive deity.
Nature has its own beauty and its own laws, as much as the Human God pretends to enjoy natures beauty it defies and destroys it. Unlike the natural laws of the Earth and beyond the Human God creates its own, they are imperfect, inconsistent and tragic. Its holy institutions enshrined upon the non-physical alter often called civil society empowers through the majesty of imagination, force and belief a select few who may rule and command over millions. Despite the misery and torment suffered it is often with the birth right of Kings, the violence of Dictators and in the election of a ruler and rulers that the Human God finds its most sacred delight. With the virtue of sovereignty and a sanctified hall of iconic heroes and martyrs the Human God has invented nation states. Plots of land carved in invisible ink seen only by their own deified vision, not by the other creatures of nature. Despite the mostly unseen markings of the Earth so much blood and tears soak the ground stewing the corpses of their glory.
With ritualistic dominion in some of these holy nations the many decide who may rule in either name or with some real ability to control, despite the Human Gods knowledge of its own past it seems unwilling or unable to learn from it. Instead it omits much and admits little, inventing myths upon myths, like layers of decaying flesh festering among the many hungry worms and bugs that often profit from death. So, to do those inventors and upholders of these myths enjoy with a parasite hunger the dead flesh of the past. The Human God loves what it does not know about its own history, it yearns to repeat on and on its most vicious moments in time satisfying only the deception it constantly yearns to believe in. No amount of death and suffering can stop it in this pursuit.
The Human God gorges itself not on the exotic fruits of nature but all the saccharine creations it can barely stomach it invents exemptions for the obesity of its sloth. Beyond the physical are its many indulgencies where it finds wealth in fiat debt, splendidly borrowing from nothing and conceiving a value from such. It is most gorged upon its ability to solve problems, its many solutions however impulsive or ill-conceived are often embraced en masse and in the end the outcomes are dire. The problem enhances or dissolves for a time only to arise in another form for a later time. It was the deed and energy invested that is most celebrated, that is what is more important than the consequence, the ritual of doing something rather than allowing time to heal.
Every fault and flaw that it seeks to remedy is of its own creation, the many courses that it seeks to pursue as a collective are ultimately the assurance of its own demise and yet with no ability or true otherworldly talents it is unable to steer itself clear of the future calamities. Instead it only knows one thing, to assure itself that it can fix and make all better, by bolstering its own importance. The Human God is a terrible central planner yet it adores central planning. The individual can barely plan its own day but its own belief in its institutions and ruler’s talents at planning ensures a trusted joy for the Human God. Failure can be fixed, but it cannot fix its many own failings. For the Human God and its institutions the future is always an oft paradise, when the generations reach it, the past has already robbed it of its delight.
The other beasts of nature have yet to evolve, other primates tether on the stone age and yet for all their vulgarity and inability to express intellect their destruction is limited to intimate instances of life and death, survival. The Human God would survive, it has survived under so many dire circumstances and for all its knowledge and combined histories it has no wisdom. It shares no universal or barely individual realisation that its collective self-belief, its many institutions and mechanisations are its and the planets cauldron of doom. With every human enlightment it seems to find another dark age. The Human God is more the Janus in some of its ancient myths, where it is both creator and destroyer, mending that which it continues to break. Much is unamendable, most of life is far too frail to return to the living. Reality frightens the Human God, it is why it is obsessed with its many fictions.
The Human God loves war, when it is not making it against itself it finds abstracts by which to fight. The Human God loves to fight the realities of its own creation, war on poverty that which can only exist thanks to the many institutions, interventions and regulatory alchemy of human ability. War against drugs, the celebration of some as a pariah status is enforced on others as the Human God penalises in the name of its desires for prohibition. In practice the Human God makes war against the jungles, desert, atmosphere, oceans, animals, insects, bacteria, everything and as it does so in practice it claims to want to save it. While toxic tears melt from above, metals bleeds into the sea, buzzing critters fall to fumes and flowers wilt beneath chemical dust the Human God watches, studies and boasts that it is here to protect all, from itself.
The tap of evolution is running, its gushing water erodes the land and its steam eats the atmosphere, the Human God would be unable to turn it off, even if it was willing. Instead it finds more taps and lets the blasting waters combine, satisfying itself with its own inventiveness. The consequence only to flow into another stream, to form running rivers of painful misery. Eventually the world will be the boiling ocean of chaos that the Human God fears most, yet so easily and readily bathes within.
Perhaps this is the human condition. To be the parasite on a greater host, feeding from it and growing at the expense of all else only to kill that which it needs and inevitably itself. The virtues of dynamic thought, philosophy, individualism and adaption have little or no place inside the institutions that comfort the Human God. They are almost atheistic to the very religion of its own worship. An open mindedness as glorious as it is celebrated in empty mantra, has no place inside of the human institutions, though all have benefited from those individuals who have it. The Human God as a collective being craves a certain rigidity, sanctified doctrines and dogmas to reassure itself of its mighty frailty. Because of this the Human God shall go on worshipping its many golden calves, the idols of its past and present, despite the other invented gods of theology. Humanity is great, it alone has determined it so
Kym Robinson, October 2017