Sunday, November 17, 2013

Part 2 Fear 16 to 18: The Meme




16
J.K. Rowling has captured a preponderance of the world’s attention in a veiled assault on theism, with the guileful insertion of wizards in Harry Potter.  Rowling juxtaposes hidden wizard-world imaginary inside reality.  Some theists spouted off at the wrong target in the series of novels at ridiculous insinuations of Satanism, witches, werewolves, vampires and other folklore as the threat to their flavor of theism. 

Rowling stole a page from the theist playbook by inserting Christmas, absent any utterance of the birth of Jesus, consistently in the winter time of multiple novels.  Monotheists added Christmas trees to mask solstice festivals.  Now Rowling uses the word Christmas, the very same trees, and presents in a universe where the word Jesus or religion is never muttered.  This lets down the guard of the establishment so that parents across the globe will see the memes carried in the stories as non-threatening like fables of The Ant and the Grasshopper or The Emperor with No Close.  Rowling also hides the theism inside the wizards theme, which looks like Western-European lessons from WWII.

Rowling’s use of Christmas is reminiscent of Father Christmas’ presence in C.S. Lewis’ Narnia universe.  Lewis, who clearly inferred the Christ metaphor with the Easter resurrection of Aslan, used Santa like the Church does as an emissary.  Rowling’s gifts that magically appear coming from parents and not from Santa, despite it being Christmas, are striking in a child’s universe to present reality rather than the typical Christmas lie to a young audience.  The juxtaposition is subtle, and brilliant.

What are some of the themes of Harry Potter?  The main character is a classic Christ metaphor, as in most Disney and European fairy tales before him.  Harry’s parents are murdered and he is orphaned.  Jesus is absent his true father/self in heaven.  Harry sacrifices himself for the good of the coalition and is resurrected.  In between he goes through trials and has a mark on his forehead akin to the crown of thorns.  He is famous across the wizard world (heaven), yet unknown in his own.  He is ridiculed in the press and goes on trial for helping people.  (Pontius Pilate/Passover.)

Harry Potter faces an advisory Voldemort which the other characters dare not say his name out of fear.  Harry says Voldemort’s name abruptly and consistently, as if unaware of the second commandment.  He finds the fear of annunciation ridiculous.  The others cringe in fear of the second commandment.  Harry teaches people that fear of the word only spreads fear of the thing itself and empowers it. 

Voldemort is the darkest of dark wizards who used the cruciatus curse to torture his victims, the imperious curse for mind control and the avada kedavra curse to murder.  The three forbidden unforgivable curses are like mortal sins and a form of the Ten Commandments in reverse as a mirror image.  They are the hypocritical actions of the god-figure Voldemort represents. 

A snake is always by Voldemort’s side.  He is part-snake to preserve a garden of Eden Satanic linkage.  This in many ways conveys that god and Satan are two parts of the same whole.  Rowling pokes holes in the same underlying untruth. 

Voldemort’s followers believe in pure-wizard blood a la Hitler and various racist and religious cults.  To become human again Voldemort’s follower takes a blood sacrifice forcefully from Harry Potter and willingly from the follower.  Harry is held by a statue in a graveyard as if up on a crucifix as his blood is taken for this ritual. 

This is a parallel to religious, conflict, combat, and war from everything from martyrdom to military service.  This shows the role of the good-soldier and the heathen advisory to be interchangeable to some degree once one usurps dogma and patriotism.  In a Christian vein this teaches humans to be Christ-like and sacrifice for the authority of the Meme.

Voldemort has his form of Christ-like resurrection and a link to transubstantiation with the blood.  The character is almost impervious to death like Jesus.  His essence was trapped in objects like the Holy Spirit, which kept him from experiencing a true-death.  This mirrors concepts like sacred grounds, holy water, churches, amulets, Mecca, etc. where god is considered more present than a phone booth.

Voldemort calls his followers with dark-snake signs appearing in the sky after his resurrection.  The sign is an allusion to the swastika, which is a perverted crucifix, which is also stamped to his follower’s skin.  His death-eaters (apostle-metaphors) profess faith or explanations for non-faith in his return in a recreation of the Doubting-Thomas confrontation with Christ and a conceptual “second-coming” and how the average Christian would react to that question when proposed by Jesus.  Voldemort is quickly found out to be doubted, re-believed in, and ultimately found to be fraudulent as just another human behind all his illusions.  

Voldemort murdered Harry’s parents.  The two become spiritually bound.  Each can at times see the other’s thoughts.  This is like the second commandment, god is always watching.  Harry in the Jesus/human role to the Voldemort-Father does not understand this link fully.  Harry is the only person capable of stopping Voldemort’s conversion of the world into darkness. 

Rowling’s genius is the theist’s audience assumption that Voldemort is more the devil rather than god.  Open-minded children reading the books, who should not be pressed to have a religion until maturity, may see the opposite as the message sinks in over their aging.  Ultimately the trinity of god/human/devil is merged in place of father/son/spirit.  The god/human//devil translates to volition. (I.e. Humans choose good or bad.  We are not absolutes.)

Harry’s dead father resembles a Joseph character.  Harry only has one mother, but he has Voldemort as a second father-figure.  Voldemort has granted Harry powers through attempting to kill him.  Voldemort’s soul is split into multiple horocruxes to give Voldemort a quasi-eternal life, saving him from death as long as the object is not destroyed.  (I.e. God is eternal.)  A horocrux can only be created through an act of murder (a mortal sin).  Voldemort sought seven, the biblical god number.  The horocruxes include: a ring with the resurrection stone in it (a marital symbol holding a Christ symbol), a cup (a Holy Grail symbol), a locket (a religious totem akin to a crucifix), a diadem (a regal wealth symbol), a diary (a bible symbol), his snake (a satanic and sexual symbol), and the last is Harry (a Jesus as humanity symbol). 

Voldemort lives in Harry the way the Father lives in Jesus and is further split like the Holy Spirit between the other symbols of the Church (gold, the chalice, the books, Satan etc.)  Voldemort entered Harry through the murder of his parents and Harry’s attempted murder.  (Herod attempted to murder Jesus soon after his birth.)  Harry was left with a forehead scar akin to the sign of the cross marked on a baby during baptism without the child’s choice.  When destroyed each of the horocruxes emits a dark spirit, the essence of Voldemort.  This is like the grip of the Meme (religion) inside humanity and these symbols of religions’ influence in our societies.  Ultimately we, like Harry, must accept death and choose to live and choose to remove such a taint living inside of us.

Rowling teaches the audience the danger of books in a book. A diary is possessed to instruct Harry’s future bride to commit heinous acts.  Books unveil dark secrets and wizards are taught to be wary.  In volume two, a handsome-faced braggart has beguiled the populace with wild false tales and found to be not only a fraud, but a cruel-hearted coward who eventually loses his mind. (I.e. a false prophet) Characters research in libraries discerning the value of good ideas from poor ideas based on verification and validity of the idea rather than rhetoric. 

In the Tale of the Deathly Hollows folklore twists fable into reality with the story of the elder wand like a nuclear weapon which in the wrong hands could bring about the destruction of the wizard and human worlds.  The reader is taught to examine folklore and fables.  This is a direct assault on documents like the Bible and the Koran, although the author does well to refute such motivations.

17
The reader is taught to question everything, to not simply trust what one reads in books.  The supporting protagonist and primary female character Hermione is a contrarian introvert probably modeled after Rowling herself.  She is ultra-intelligent, advanced and quick to point out the misguided superstitious notions of the Astrology-like predictions of the Divination teacher.  The glass balls and substandard version of hocus pocus are nonsense compared to magic which is a metaphor for science. 

Hermione is constantly reading and appears ahead of her contemporaries based on her willingness to explore thought rather than merely accept the status quo.  The same character tries to initiate a labor strike and uprising of house elves in a parallel to both the nadir of the African American storyline and the indoctrination of menial laborers and the religious.  The elves only want to serve and cannot imagine what they would do with freedom like pew squatting masochists.  Hermione exemplifies the empowerment of females that is so often discouraged in the misogynist themes of the Bible and the Koran.

The gray-bearded father-figure as head-master of the school, Dumbledore, is quietly gay in a parallel to a priest or clergy figure leading a religious school.  The homosexuality can also be seen as atheism.  The man is kind, but absent.  He leaves clues, but only direct help at the last minute, preferring the younger characters to think, investigate and figure out as much as they can on their own.  One does not become an atheist because one is instructed.  One chooses to become an atheist based on evidence or lack thereof and one’s personal internal digestion of the universe. 

Dumbledore’s distance to allow Harry, Ron Weasley and Hermione to adventure and risk defeat on their own is an example of this comprehension.  Rowling keeps similar distance in that she does not spell out atheist and anti-Meme messages overtly.  Rowling allows those who wish to dive in to find it and others to merely see a world of entertaining wizards.  In the final Kings-Cross scene Harry communicates with Dumbledore like the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  Dumbledore reiterates Harry’s choice and volition to go back or go on leaving the idea of an afterlife as an unknown and open ended.  Voldemort is seen as a week tortured being clinging to mortality and assumption never understanding the power of love.  Harry chose his path.  This is mirrored in the epilogue of Harry and Jenny and Ron and Hermione shown as parents in a future Kings Cross station.

A religious character would be ready with specific-quick answers like Voldemort and the aptly named Dolores Umbrage.  The secret-atheist would not try to force an idea, but lay the bread crumbs.  If people choose to perk their interest in exploring, they can do so.  After that people can decide for themselves what makes the most sense for their life.  The idea of an afterlife is not crucial to the anti-Meme, only the choices we make in the present. 

The Muggle (human) world is discussed with fascinating scientific contraptions humans use because humans do not have magic.  Thus science equates to the wizard’s magic.  Religion in the wizard world is in the dominion of the dark arts speaking of resurrection, horocruxes, and curses.  The message is clear that we are measured by our choices, not by our house of origin.  Wizards of other lands are asked to bond together in Rowling’s books and gender and race flow throughout characters inside the overlay of European-Caucasian pretense. 

The Ministry of Magic serves as a gestapo-type governmental watchtower.  The ministry is aware of the smallest instance of underage magic, which in some ways serves as a parallel to premarital sex.  However it is not clear if the parallel is intentional by Rowling.  The act simulates god’s knowledge of the instance the penis meets vagina.  If the “infraction” occurs before the appropriate age wizards are reprimanded after seventeen such a magical act would be commonplace and permissible.

The wizards live in a world where there is a surrogate caste-system of pure-bloods, half-bloods, squibs, and muggles.  One’s fate is often tied to pre-birth criteria rather than volition.  Rowling counterbalances this status-quo through the power of volition.  This peaks in Harry Potter’s choice between being good or evil.  Harry’s communication with the sorting hat is key to his choice of individual path. 

Magical creatures and beings like vampires, werewolves, and giants are outcasts like surrogate leaper colonies of pagans.  A werewolf-teacher presents lycanthropy as an AIDS parallel.  In the fifth book a centaur teacher (an anti-Meme symbol of a pagan) teaches the students that his priority was “not to teach the students what he knew, but rather to impress upon them that nothing, not even centaurs’ knowledge, was foolproof.”  The centaur comes from a dangerous forest such a native-American Cherokee.  (Centaurs also use bows and arrows.)  The centaur’s humility is anti-Meme.

Justice in trials are often kangaroo courts which send the innocent and the guilty to tortuous prison sentences like one of the main characters Sirius Black, Harry Potter’s godfather.  A paranoid ministry of magic is incapable of facing the reality of the return of Voldemort in book five.  This parallels the rise of Hitler in Europe or the return of fascism and a nation being in denial thereafter. 

The Vatican like the Ministry of Magic in the books cosponsored and failed to deter fascism through commiseration and inaction as an equivalent to Voldemort’s brand of magic.  The Vatican acquiesced to Mussolini in Italy and made a treaty for the education of German children for concessions to Hitler on July 8, 1933.  This linked trend of Catholicism-the Meme-and-fascism also bled in Spain, with General Franco’s La Crujada, Croatia, Hungary, Austria, and Portugal.  Also see the Action Francaise in France and General O’Duffy in Ireland.  These movements appeared to prefer fascism to communism or aligning with the Jewish-taint of Bolshevism.  This continued after WWII with the exportation of Nazi war criminals to South America to dictatorship countries as part of the Meme.  The idea of systematic injustice from a surveillance state government is a blatant assault on the Humans-are-not-Animals meme.  

The glaring anti-Meme message of Harry Potter is that magic exists, but a god is never mentioned.  There is a gap of a wizard derivation of god.  This void is the ultimate rebuttal to the Meme.

18
We hide the idea from ourselves that human differences do not actually exist with the exception of what our memes instruct us to correlate with them.  National borders, names, languages, and religions are all manufactured constructs to organize human society.  Complex aliens on other planets in other galaxies most certainly practice similar codifications under different iterations and create god or gods for similar reasons as humans.  The urge to do so is part of the psychological evolution of complex life.  Understanding god as a concept highlights the absurdity of applying specificity to god as a psychological device.

Ideas like racism, fundamentalism, homophobia, sexism and religion are less likely to continue in a species capable of recognizing why it created the Meme and effectively uses tools of global communication to eradicate the Meme.  A deeper level of empathy, understanding and love is possible.  Our collective doubt of the solidity of such a common-compassion pulls us back to the basic organisms we evolved from. 

These rudimentary beings will always be part of us, but to participate in our next stage of evolution, we must recognize that the paradigm for evolution is far more mental than physical.  For once we dare to enter such mental arenas we free ourselves to include the exponential power of selfless common interest of the species without the crippling interruptions that our current fear stemming from memes like the second commandment spread.

The hurdle is to understand that national identity fueling patriotism and religious persuasion fueling fundamentalism are entirely voluntary illusions meant to bring order from chaos.  No one is watching to ensure that one actually be and perform the pantomime of flag or cross waving or civil rights along with them.  Fear has populated militaries and rabbled war-cries.  Fear of hell lurks behind every Pascal-wager gambled in minds willing to compromise killing, lying, theft, destruction of natural resources, and various other violations of “commandments” in order to keep another group’s religious or patriotic dogma separate from their own.  This separation preserves the Meme’s dogma from question. 

This is the true danger of the second commandment, humans are taught not to question.  Without questioning we truncate our evolution and decay.  We expedite our extinction.  Humanity’s global economic markets, divergent fundamentalisms, widening wealth gap, diminishing sustainability of our planet, and overall level of fear are glaring testaments to this process. 

We should be getting closer by greater communication with the internet.  In many ways we are, as the internet is a major conduit of human uprising.  Unfortunately the same platform is used to spread the messages of not-questioning, of higher fundamentalism, of more zealous religiosity, the expansion of theatrical mega-congregations tithing billions from our tax bases, and non-empirical rhetoric juxtaposed against empirically validated science to create the illusion of equivalence. 

The internet threatens the Meme more than ever.  People are talking across the world at greater unfiltered levels.  The Meme is panicking in unprecedented fundamentalist tantrums.

The inundation of counter-information the Meme produces in response can often drown minds requiring humans to break rank with the second commandment in order to survive.  We must question, read, investigate, and research between Woody Guthrie’s false and true in his Rubaiiyat.  If we fear the very idea of saying a name, we fear the idea of questioning why it is wrong to criticize the name.  Thus we are expected to accept the name absolutely.  We are expected to accept authority absolutely.  We are expected to accept what those in positions of authority instruct us to do, think, and be absolutely. 

If we can overcome this fear then we begin the true responsibility for our choices, actions, and beliefs from an internal culpability that does not answer to fear, but to the love and respect we have for a common life we share in our universe within the auspices of volition.

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