The Ten Percent Revolution
THE TEN PERCENT REVOLUTION
BY
DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS
The 'Holy Bible' is a best-selling book today. It was not always so popular but was virtually the private property of a tiny priestly minority. It was written in classical language, and few people were literate. The cost to produce a single copy exceeded the cost of building a substantial house. In some parts of the world, the local spiritual leader had but a single copy in his possession, and we know of cases where people were charged with plagiary for secretly copying the text.
With the advent of the Reformation, the invention of printing presses, the advances in literacy, and translations of scripture into vernacular languages, anyone may easily obtain and read a cheap copy of the Book - propagandists hand out the New Testament free of charge. Although the translations and interpretations of the ancient texts regularly distort the Word, which was and still is not fully understood in its original forms, many readers insist that they understand the Book and therefore do not need a priesthood or any other elite to enlighten them on the true meaning of its contents, thank you very much.
The liberal publication of the written Word in its perverse forms constituted a stunning blow to monarchy and aristocracy in religion and politics for church was married to state. Revolt was in vogue not only among the swinish bourgeois but among disenchanted nobles as well - ordinary folk do not ordinarily like revolutions and tend to be rather conservative. Intelligent monarchs curried favor with the vulgar people to keep the nobility checked. Certain compromising adjustments were made to constitute constitutional monarchy. The divine right of kings was losing its glamor as the word spread that the voice of the people is the voice of god. Certain enthusiasts or "god-possessed" people enthusiastically opposed the Love of Jesus to the Law of Moses. The peasants revolted, wanting a Kingdom of God right here on Earth - Heaven forbade it and 100,000 were murdered in the name of god by the prince's soldiers. Fortunately the lawlessness eventually took milder forms, and the most sinful 'antinomianism' against the sex-obsessed religion was eventually limited to free love. Many protestants tucked god away in a safe place and took up feel-good faith in Anything Goes - as long as it is profitable. The deists kept the moral code and took up the worship of science; they considered the deity as a sort of clockmaker who winds up the universe - the rest is up to us, thank god! Some who were displeased with the pursuit of happiness in property and with the money-god became seekers of divine enlightenment. There were certain finders among them, while the others came to believe the light is in perpetual seeking.
That is not all to the fall of god's secular estate. 'Republican' (democratic) deists took the Old Testament to task for its fundamental contradictions and its outmoded hateful attitude posing as love; that is, hate-based love or love founded on hatred of others, who must be murdered and whose land must be seized by order of the tribal god, or who must be stoned to death for non-violent or minor infractions - and innocent babies must be murdered and generation of kids killed for the sins of their fathers such as idolatry.
Of course the Old Testament was appreciated as a historical work, and its inspiring poetry and prose was admired; but as fundamental law it was, on the whole, said to be no better than a pile of incoherent rubbish; and the judges who abided by it were called foolish and hateful bigots, friends of injustice and diabolical enemies of humankind.
Thus the progress of relatively secret sacred scripture to best-selling book spread religion but did much damage to its god in the process of vulgarization until one day someone looked around and said, "God is dead." At least when scripture was kept in the hands of an educated elite, a relatively reasonable spin could be given to smooth out inherent contradictions. The religious authorities constantly debated the application of points of law. They were not ignorant of the fact that human customs change (even for the better!) over time and that change is part of god's evolving law. In fine, the law must be flexible. What fool would want to reinstitute today, for instance, the rudimentary customs of Neanderthal man? We think he had some religion; it might have included cannibalism and the collection and deposit of cave-bear power-heads in a 'bank' - an early form of capital-ism.
Wherefore the authorities behind scenes argue out the best course of action to fit the present needs. A gradual 'casuistic stretching' or stretching of the law takes place. At first the dissenting opinions were destroyed. The oral explanation of judgements given to the people by the rabbis or teachers seem reasonable enough since they were the synthesis of a reasoned dialectic. In practice the law became milder and seemingly in direct contradiction to specific torah commandments, but there was an explanation for that.... Today we might complain that the judges are "legislating in violation of the separation of powers."
The Catholic church incorporated the hierarchical or patriarchal structure of the Jewish religion along with other systemic aspects. A comparison between the educational methods, including publicity of law, between Church and Temple would be a fascinating study - one issue faced by the Church was how to handle the conversion, often as a result of hostility, of many disparate, illiterate peoples. In any event, we know that when the Catholic cat got out of the bag, when the scripture was published to all, and each person thought that he was competent to interpret it without the advice of counsel, the political power of the Church was nearly destroyed.
Democracy was the watchword as the divine right to rule was dispensed with. But the arbitrary right or divine right to arbitrate was actually retained in a subtle, occult form in the new priesthood, the judiciary. The legal priests are assisted by juries. Juries were first of all instruments of government, but they too emerged as representatives of the people, a people's conventical instructed by the sitting priest - juries have an extraordinary power which they are seldom deliberately made aware of.
Although the law is supposed to be man-made, reasonable and even scientific in our day and age, in contradistinction to the a priori or found law of god's will, we still find judges thumping the Bible before and after they thumb the secular statutes. They say the law is really based on will and not on reason, and when their peers disagree on appeal with their blatantly irrational, arbitrary, and tyrannical judgement, they claim their peers have placed themselves "above God." The over-ruled judge might even be so arrogant as to disobey the ruling of his superiors "in the name of god." That is, he refuses to submit to the first rule of law, the rule of law! And he sets his own opinion up as divine law. He might as well admit that he or his superego is god almighty. We are reminded here of Khomeini's seizure of power; the Shia clerics had maintained a traditional distance from Iran's secular state; Khomeini was merely a "legal advisor" until he issued his ruling or fatwa which literally gave him the self-declared right to decide what was good for the community even if it were actually a terrible evil; technically, he was equal to the Prophet; actually he was superior to the Prophet - he was Allah on Earth.
We might discover this sort of judge to be an elected judge. Ironically, the "democracy" which fought for the people's freedom from a tyranny which was exercised in the name of a god owned and operated by a power elite and justified by rationalizations of mumbo-jumbo, now wants to restore the archaic system. Of course the democrats who fought for democracy were a revolutionary minority who did their level best to protect the minority from majority mobocracy (ochlocracy). So the truth of the matter is this, that the mobs in some states of mind really want to be ruled by a tyrant who cites an unknown god to justify his fundamentalist interpretation of secular law. Since the legislature is elected by the majority too, severe laws are on the books or can be written for him to more easily apply and interpret. And since the top executives are also elected and supported by the majority of the legislature, there is no real separation of the secular branches of government.
Therefore again we see that democracy conceived only as majority rule is no guarantee of liberty. The judiciary is a sort of secular priesthood which is supposed to be independent of the special interests of warring politics and religions. But we see it drifting along with the political majority. If the trend continues to the right, we might see a born-again, right-wing authoritarian government placed into office by a fawning electorate. Attempts would of course be made to stack the courts with Bible-thumping judges. We can only hope that they are highly educated and reasonable. Even then we shall have tyrants on the bench, and in Congress and in the White House as well. We are told not to worry since there will surely be another swing towards individual liberty, a shift away from pseudo-religious fascism to the true-conservatism that protects the liberty of minorities. If not, no doubt another set of traitors will arise to fight for Liberty. If we count all traitors of the Revolution for American Independence including soldiers and sailors, we sum up a small minority of the population - some scholars estimate the number as less than TEN PERCENT of the population.
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