The Patriarch Devil


It is easy to imagine that when people pray to Father God they are really just praying to their own dad.

Dad! That towering figure of ancient memory (from when we were a toddler), rummaging around in the garage of heaven, coming inside to lay down the law by yelling the loudest: “because I’m the dad!” (what my own dad actually yelled at me once). Ye old father-function, as they say in psychoanalysis: the law and the logos; security and ownership.

A certain kind of person enjoys being owned by dad (because security) as in the Old-Testament sense of human property, still more practiced today than anyone wants to admit. If the notion of penis-envy offends you, consider that it was only fifty years ago that women in the U.S. were given the right to have their own bank account.

So it is not so easy to disentangle the misogyny of a religion that yet vocally encourages the dominion of men over women in holy matrimony (as father god dominates the church) from a secular modernity that re-instates laws on women’s bodies. Can you think of any laws that give government the power to make decisions about the male body?” it was recently asked to no answer. These are certain cruel and salacious laws applied only to women in order to maintain the production of consumers, upon which our economy is based. Is not the natalist—nearly always male—a kind of pro super-consumer, hoping to create a target market by breeding it…? 

Of course the natalist little cares for—or hates—that person who is providing the labor in this production. Economists were aghast to contemplate the feminist plan, Wages Against Housework (1974), that women be given a livable wage for child rearing and domestic labor, claiming that the costs would be at least 9% of global GDP—or $11 Trillion per year…

No surprise then that many of those who worship Father God should be so transfixed by women-hating geriatric real-estate tyrants for they act just like God does in the bible: jealous, vengeful, sexist and bombastic—almost as if God Almighty were, in fact, a literary model of male tyranny? The Lord God of private property: an evil old-man god familiar to William Blake as both Yahweh and Nobodaddy, the “father of jealousy” who loves “hanging and drawing and quartering/ Every bit as well as war and slaughtering."

The Buddhists were likewise well aware of this danger: “if you seek a patriarch, you will be bound by a patriarch-devil.” 

By no means does this suggest that dads are bad, far from it, rather to say that the deification of dad, by which I mean monotheism, expresses and exploits the primal desires to own and to be owned. So the populace votes for the tyrant like the turkey votes for thanksgiving. A vicious circle where father god guarantees the tyrant’s authority who guarantees dad’s authority who once more guarantees god’s authority.  

Freud, who would struggle with his own patriarch-devil—der
Ödipuskomplexsaid early on that “the essentially repressed element is always what is feminine.” Now what could this mean do you think?


detail of Moses, 1515, Michelangelo 


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