It is amazing how arrogant and selfish we may become in the name of divinity while we pretend to be ever so humble. "One who despises himself is the nearest to a proud man," quoth Spinoza, who was wont to praise his god to the high heavens in geometrical fashion.

We may conceal our arrogance to appease the higher or more general powers, but we cannot help being selfish and arrogant in order to manipulate nature to persist as long as we can. And to that end many turn to the projected image of the almighty and immortal superman; but the clothes or names we fashion for him do not make the man superior.

No name can recreate the Creation or convey the Conveyance, yet the inadequate names concocted for the Name are many. Efforts to name the unknown potentate of the highest order, signifying the power unlimited by our naming power, or the infinitely variable X, if you please, are futile indeed, hence our magic is inutile; no matter how much we pray for unlimited success, we have to think about and do something definite, and in that our powers are limited. We certainly do have due cause for humility in our incompetence.

Wanting more ever power than we have, we have unwittingly hidden our native pride and mutual ignorance behind various names for the power we want and lack. Fearing our deficiency, we love the cause of our weakness; we love the potency before which we belittle our selves in hopes of a reprieve from our life sentences.

I speak not only of the ever-popular name, God, but of all the idolized general terms or universals, the “divine” names upon which we pin our fondest hopes for exercising power over the particulars of our circumstances. ‘God’ is, by the way, a pagan name, although some Jews believe it is legitimate by spelling it G-d lest the Lord be offended by the blasphemous presumption that the Supreme Being can be identified therefore categorized and controlled by the magic power of naming – the ultimate blasphemy is using the Lord’s word against the Lord. Any name except the secret name of the ineffable god is just a mask; dare not behold the true face of the Lord.

There is nothing like a name to handle things as we may define them. A name is not the thing named, but the name provides us with power over the thing. Some names seem far more suitable and effective than others, but all are arbitrary in the final analysis. “Nobles’ originally meant “known ones”; they were “the Names” who had power over people of lesser status. They were called lords. Some were even called gods. Everyone would be a Big Name; or, better yet, an omniscient eye at the apex of the pyramid, the "I" in the center of the universe, an all-knowing god named after the projected God. Naming something gives one power over things, but dare not name the Name, to know the one-god or the One, for knowledge of the infinite kills the definite.

Religion and politics constitute the worship and distribution of absolute power under various names; the apparent separation of Church and State is a convenient illusion, for Power is revered and wanted and distributed in all formal institutions transcendental and mundane, howsoever they be named. The individual would persist forever without impediment if only he could; ironically, his existence is defined by his resistance to the very omnipotence he would have – if it were the indefinite hence sexless One, it would be incomparable Being or Nothing

There is always a higher power and a better place given the relativity of individual existences – the sin of original sin is being born divided from the One, i.e. as an individual. Every individual who would persist indivisible is an infidel. In the final analysis, the substantial difference between an atheist and a theist, for example, is merely formal, just as is the difference between one 'A' and the other 'A' in the statement of identity, A=A. We are all cattle; our identity is the herd. That is not to say people will not fight to the death of their respective identities over some merely formal difference, over the same damned thing differently named if not over a piece of land, the color of skin, a kind of hair, the shape of nose, a favorite totem animal; war mixes tribes and races, and miscegenation makes it difficult to discern enemies, wherefore different uniforms and flags and names are needed for hate-others-based love for sake of group-identity!

Survival for human beings is a moral i.e. a mental enterprise. Rudimentary judgments on sensations are perceptions. Nothing can be known without perceiving something or making a difference, and those differences are conveniently named. The human mind is made to perceive differences and similarities in nature, to create categories so that decisions can be made and the individual may struggle for survival, making it difficult for men and women to set aside their differences even within the similarities of their own groups. General presumption must be made to begin with in order to proceed with life’s trials and experiments. ‘Ma’ is “she who measures out” or gives birth to; Ma measures out ‘Manu’, the man thinks, who measures out thoughts. Once his feet are planted on Earth and he stands erect to walk forward with head in the heavens, homo sapiens needs certain metaphysical ground to confidently or faithfully stand upon for mental progress and salvation of the species - that both mind and body be saved. The Word saves. Man is a rational animal. Every thinking man and woman needs an abstract article of faith, a plot of groundless ground to metaphorically stand upon. It may eventually be discovered that people who fight over rubble on some particular plot of real ground have rocks in their heads; but who are those who fight over names but worse fools?

The name of that groundless ground giving rise to groundless hatred, the hatred of a member of mankind, might be the Promised Land. Jerusalem or the City of Shalom, might do as the name of the capital city, the City of God wherein we shall find shelter in the palace of the Name of names, the noble King of kings; He shall keep the peace for the wise who fall prostrate and feel His foot on their necks; those who are crushed shall know Him best and repent to gain his merciful love in the paradise from which our progenitors were evicted for being arrogant individuals in their want of wisdom – they and their progeny are bound to be punished forever for disobeying the higher power, no matter how much they invoke it under different names. Love for the Lord of the orchard is based on fear and hate; his name is a term for abuse among Gnostics who love the Stranger, the god Love, and who know that Wisdom is a Her and not a Him.

Gnostics think the loving god, distinct from the hateful lord of the garden, may be known. Agnostics and scientists say not. Scientific thinkers, although they may admit to first or unproved premises for the sake of convenience in proving whatever might follow, may disavow absolute presuppositions because they are not relative propositions which can be answered with a 'yes' or 'no' supported by convincing public evidence. To answer, "What is the cause of the universe?" with, "God is the Cause of the Universe," is no answer at all, but begs the question with "The Cause of the universe is the Cause of the universe." Yet, the scientist, faced with conversion or the sword, if not his ignorance and awe, or confronted with what appears to be intelligent design, might praise God as the causeless Cause of the universe. And he might take humble pride in declaring the scientific method itself, intelligently designed to divine the secrets of the universe in order to control it, to be objective, impartial, impersonal, unemotional, amoral, and value-free. What he praises is really unknown, the unknown god besought but never found, forever nameless because unbounded; say, if you please, Kant’s nothing, the thing in itself, of which we, limited as we are by our inherent categories, remain completely ignorant, sometimes stupefied into thinking we do by nonsensical intuition.

The allegedly non-moral scientific method is invaluable to the progress of the human race and is worth defending by force of arms, perhaps in the name of some ideal or god. But no matter where they stand metaphysically, it is highly improbable that physicists, for example, will go to war over Newton's view that some events have causes, or Kant's opinion that all events have causes, or Einstein's, that no events have causes. Yet, the moment an infidel approaches the sacrificial altar on some sacred abstract plot, heretofore humble preachers devoted to the names of gods or favored concepts, and not to the men and women propping them up are for causes really unbeknown to them incensed to fight over even the most frivolous figments of imagination they happen to name and identify with.

When their gods are challenged by name, laymen loudly defend them in name only with revelations or intuitions instead of plain facts that any sane person could perceive. Indeed, we condemn the sheer stupidity of anyone who does not possess our brassy wisdom replete with the contradictions Luther liked to call “God’s mysteries.” Long before Luther, certain German tribes dispensed with the rhetoric when the legions pulled out: they recovered their traditional idols and dragged them through the villages; there was to be no argument: anyone who did not pay obeisance was summarily executed. We pull out the dead languages from history's graves and throw the empty words and names in each other's faces as proof of our righteousness instead of rightness. Why such powerful gods need our support in the first place is a profound mystery – the explanations might be worth killing for to save us from embarrassment for our foolishness, brutishness, stupidity. We drag out the myths, the legends, the histories, in order to excuse our pathetic conduct. We would expiate the barbarism of our ancestors with barbarism. We would redeem murder with bloodshed. When push comes to shove, instead of humbly pointing our fingers at the names of gods and effacing those names to keep the peace, we point our weapons at each other to prove our points. It soon becomes bloody obvious who the gods really are, and that their main interests are not in heaven above but are right here on Earth.

We might wonder what sort of life we would lead if only everyone knew the awful truth about the ambiguous fictions we fight over, or knew that they are fictions to begin with. We would have to face our arrogant selves instead of the idols of our arrogance; we would have to know ourselves and others better instead of chanting our anarchic and collective excuses.

The particular propositions that we for want of justification faithfully refer to with arbitrary symbols, the divine names of the power we lack and desire, no matter how ill conceived the propositions may be, soon cease to be propositions and take on the nebulous aura of absolute, unmitigated truths somewhere beyond relative good and evil. They seem to possess the perfect clarity of irrefutable truth because our own dignity is at stake. We soon forget the propositions and our ideals, and defend the names to the last breath, convinced of the ignorance or diabolical malevolence of anyone who bothers to disagree.

The divine names do not indicate objective truths or identify real gods at all. Rather they demonstrate our blind faith in our intrinsic pride and prejudicial ignorance. If only that were fully understood, we might turn to more enlightening literature to ennoble our minds, and act accordingly, as rational animals instead of irrational gods, that our own names may designate virtue that we may live in peace. But perhaps not, for virtue was not originally found in temperance, courage, justice, and the like, but was found in manliness, namely the ability to fight bravely for whatever the cause, in those days when might made the cause right. Still we hope for a prosperous peace and call it progress.

Honolulu 1999