God Is Not Your Opium

The theology of apathetic consumption

God Does Not Exist for You

God is not your opium.

His name is not stuffed into a pipe, nor rolled into a joint, nor injected in a vein. God does not exist to ease your pain. God does not exist to love you; he does not exist to hug you; he does not exist so you can find your own value. God does not exist for you; God exists, with or without you.

You, who are born from dirt and return to dirt; you, who are born in need and end in need; you, who are born from death and return to death – God does not exist to comfort you. There should be no greater pain than to say His name; no greater ripping of the chest than to chisel his name into your breast. If you don’t feel the stripping and ripping agony that’s gripping deep into your lungs and squeezing until every ounce of breath is leaving your chest and you’re left with nothing but the desperation of gasping and heaving in hope of some reprieve and rest – have you even believed in God?

God is not the balm but the test; God is not the calm but the tempest.

His is the hand that grasps the heart and constricts it, presses it and afflicts it, juices it like a grape until every drop of blood is let and every ounce of flesh is spent. His is the roar that brings bumps to the skin; His is the terror that makes you abandon kind and kin.

God is not your opiate. You are the moth, and He is the flame.

The Capitalist’s God

Praise be to Adam Smith, who invented first the continuous myth of the invisible hand that keeps man adrift in the folly of his own consumption – chains him to his own assumption that nothing is except that it’s for subsumption into the kingdom of his growing greed.

First, he sets his sights onto the earth, turning all its soil and all its dirt into a treasure that’s only worth the price it fetches in the market. Then, he turns to sell himself, to buy himself for himself, shape himself so he himself desires himself to take back home to himself. Then, when all the earth is subjugated, and all its fossils excavated, and all his self aggregated, accumulated, calculated – he turns his sights on all that’s left to package and sell.

He sets his eyes on God Himself.

The capitalist loves the idol he’s made from his own hands and called it God.

This idol does not command man to stand against his own wants and demands – to break himself with his own hand. He doesn’t call against oppression, subjugation and repression, for all those who live beneath the depression of weight pushed against them in suppression. This idol doesn’t ask you to prove your faith. He only wants you to love yourself.

The god that only comforts is the capitalist’s god – the god that calls for continuous consumption, gives only injunction for pleasure over pain – he is the god that must be slain.

We say we worship God, but worship an idol named God. To become free, first smash the idol of god to find your way back to God.

Lā Before Illā

First comes pain, then comes pleasure; first is work, then is leisure. First negate the capitalist’s god; then you’ll find the one, true God.

You’ll find him when you say no: no to pleasure sold to you; no to compliance bought from you; no to the product that’s made from you then given to you back to you. No is where the path will start; no will cause your seas to part.

No begins from within the self – to negate the self by yourself. No is axe to take by hand and smash yourself where you stand. You sell yourself to yourself when you say yes to yourself; your highest self is only found when you say no to yourself.

When you have broken every idol with the word of no – only then can you find the truth that’s hidden in “except.”

The Forming of the Blade

Iron ore asleep deep within the mountain side! “No” is the axe that strikes deep into the cave, rips you from your sleep and whisks you away to where the furnace awaits. “No” is only the first of pain – the easiest of what awaits.

Iron is impure at first. The filth that mixes with its metal keeps its from realizing its shape and strength. To purify iron, you must burn it – melt it and smelt it until it runs like a molten river of ferocious liquid. Then, it is poured into a mold, forced to cool by plunging it into the awaiting cold of water. Once the blade adapts, it must be beaten into shape, plunged again and again into the fire to soften it, sunk again and again into the water to harden it, beaten again and again to create its edge.

Finally, it is polished and sharpened and set aside to be carried by a knight riding into battle. The path that began with “no” ended with the blade placed in the hand of God.

When God Becomes Rest

You only find rest in God when you begin to live for God. Until your heart beats for God, it will never find relief in God. The chest that loves the squeeze of God feels it as embrace of God.

Until you break the idol of yourself and the god that is worshipped to keep the self consuming, the idol that brings you relief is the devil dressed as God. Once you break your self, and break the idol of the capitalist’s false god, only then do you find relief in the name of the one, true God.

Repeating the name of the false god creates apathy and consumption, production for the sake of accumulation of pleasures and desires. The name of the one, true God is simultaneously fire and frost – it is the flame in which Abraham sits, neither burning nor cold. It is passion to be the unsheathed blade in the Divine hand by which He carves the world; it is the cool breeze that brings relief on the hottest of summer days.

You were not meant to be iron ore asleep in the mountain cold. You were meant to be the blade of God.

At times the blade that's being formed
Will mourn the life it lived before
When, nestled deep in mountain home,
It slept in ease as iron ore