"Can't a man die in peace without some high almighty deciding it's not his time?"
No - You Get to Live.
" So I thought I would start the lecture tonight by reading a little bit of it. It’s from a chapter on the issue of sacrifice as such.
This is Abraham and Isaac.
This is a very strange, little Old Testament story.
This is one of the stories that’s contained in the Old Testament that makes modern people think that maybe we should just not have that much to do with the Old Testament, per say, at all, especially with regards—and maybe we shouldn’t have anything to do with The God of the Old Testament, either.
I mean, as far as Abraham is concerned, God tells him to sacrifice his own son.
Now it turns out that God was just kidding, so to speak.
I’m obviously being flippant, but it does raise the question, what do you make of the divine being who would require such a thing?
Or, conversely, what do you make of Abraham, who would have such delusions?
Either way, it’s a little hard on the modern believability, and on the moral integrity of the Old Testament.
These are very, very strange stories, and they are not what they seem to be—or they are, and they’re more.
"When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.
And Cain said unto the Lord,
'My punishment is greater than I can bear."
One of the things that’s interesting about this is—
I think the punishment that God lays on Cain…
It’s like the inevitable consequences of Cain’s action.
It’s like, well, he killed his brother.
There’s no going back from that.
Good luck forgiving yourself for that,
especially if he was your ideal.
Because you haven’t just Killed Your Brother
—and, of course, tortured your parents and the rest of your family—
You’ve Deprived the Community of Someone Who’s Upstanding,
and
You Did it for The Worst Possible Motivations.
There’s no up from there.
That’s as close to Hell as you can manage on Earth, I would say.
"And Cain said unto the Lord, my punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid…”
That, too.
There’s also no turning back to God, let’s say, after an error like that.
You’ve done everything you possibly could to spite God
—assuming he exists—
and the probability that you’re going to be able to mend that relationship in your now-broken state, when you couldn’t mend it to begin with, before you did something so terrible, starts to move towards zero.
"And it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me. And the Lord said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him."
That’s an interesting thing.
I wondered about that for a long time.
You might think,
'Why would God take Cain under his wing, so to speak, given what’s already happened?'
I think it has something to do with the emergence of the idea that it was necessary to prevent tit-for-tat revenge slayings.
It’s something like that.
There’s hints of that later in the text.
It’s like, well, 'I killed your brother, and then you killed two of my brothers, and then I kill your whole family, and then you kill my whole town, and then I kill your whole country,
And then we blow up The World. '
That’s probably not a very intelligent solution to the initial problem, even though the initial problem, which might be a murder, is not an easy thing to solve.
But I think it’s something like that.
That’s William Blake.
Adam and Eve have discovered their Dead Son.
Cain has become cognizant, I would say, of
What He Did
and of
What He Is.
It’s another entrance into a form of self-consciousness.
The Self-Consciousness that Adam and Eve developed was painful enough.
They become aware of their own Vulnerability, Nakedness,
and, perhaps, even their Capacity for Evil.
But Cain becomes aware of his
Voluntary engagement with Evil Itself,
and sees that as a crucial, human capability.
That’s something modern people…
It’s no wonder we don’t take it seriously.
Among intellectual circles, for decades, the Idea of Evil has been…
It’s like, what are you?
Medieval, or something?
The whole Idea of Evil is a non-starter as an intellectual starting place, and as a topic.
That’s something that I’ve just been unable to understand.
I cannot understand how you could possibly have more than a cursory knowledge of the history of the 20th century—much less a deep knowledge of the history of the 20th century—and walk away with any other conclusion than,
"Well, Good might not exist, but Evil…"
The evidence for that is so overwhelming that only Willful Blindness could possibly explain denying its existence.
That was actually a useful discovery for me.
I also concluded that, if it was True that Evil existed, then it was True, by inference, that its opposite existed.
The Opposite of Evil.
Let’s say the Evil of The Concentration Camp.
We could get more specific about it.
There’s this one thing that used to happen in Auschwitz, where they would take people off the incoming trains—those who lived, and that weren’t stacked around the outside of the train cars and frozen to death because it was too cold.
Those who only had to be stuck in the middle, so it was warm enough.
Maybe the old people died because they suffocated, but at least some of them were alive when they arrived at Auschwitz.
They took those poor people out, and one of the tricks that the guards used to play on them was to have the newly arrived prisoners hoist like hundred pound sacks of wet salt and carry them from one side of the compound—and these compounds were big.
This was a city.
It wasn’t like a gymnasium; it was like a city.
Tens of thousands of people were there.
They would have them carry the sack of wet salt from one side of the compound to the other, and then back.
That was to make a mockery out of the notion that Work Would Set You Free.
It’s like, no, no.
You work here, but there’s nothing productive about it.
The Whole Point is exactly
The Opposite of Sacrifice, in some sense.
We’re going to make you Act-Out working, but all it will do is speed your demise.
And maybe we can decorate it up a little bit, because not only will it speed up your demise, it will do it in a very painful way, while simultaneously increasing the probability that other people’s demises will be painful and sped up.
It’s a Work of Art.
That’s for sure.
To know about that sort of thing and to not regard it as Evil means…
Well, you can figure out what it means for yourself.
"And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the East of Eden.
And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived…"
A fairly common criticism of these Biblical stories is, well, if Cain and Abel were the only two people from Adam and Eve,
" Where did all these other people come from? "
Doesn’t that make the story simpleminded?
No. That makes the reader simpleminded.
I mean, really?
That’s the best criticism of this you’re going to come up with?
You might say, "ah, you missed The Point. "
That would be the right response: You Missed The Point.
"And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bare Enoch, and he builded the city, and sold—"
It’s Cain that builds the cities and starts the civilization. That’s pretty rough, too. It’s the first fratricidal murderer who builds the cities after the name of his son, Enoch.
"And unto Enoch was born Irad…"
Et cetera, et cetera. I’m going through the generations.
"And Lamech took unto him two wives: the name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other was Zillah."
This is an attempt to flesh out the genealogy and describe to how culture started, in some sense, in these tribal communities.
"And Adah bare Jabal: he was the father of such as dwell in tents, and of such as have cattle. And his brother’s name was Jubal: he was the father of all such as handle the harp and organ. And Zillah, she also bear Tubalcain, an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron."
Tubalcain, traditionally, is the first person who makes weapons of war.
"And Lamech"—back to Lamech, descendent of Cain—"said unto his wives, Adah and Zillah, Heed my voice; ye wives of Lamech, hearken unto my speech: for I have slain a man to my wounding, and a young man to my hurt.
If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold."
Well, what I see in that is this proclivity of this murderous capacity of Cain manifesting itself, as society develops, to a murderous intent that transcends the mere Killing of a Brother.
You Hurt Me;
I Hurt You Back.
No—you hurt me; I kill you and six other people.
The thing that happens after that is, it’s not to make it seven people, but to make it seventy people.
And so there’s this idea that once that first murderous seed is sown, it has this proclivity to manifest itself exponentially.
That’s a warning.
That’s also why, I think, Tubalcain, who’s one of Cain’s descendants, was the first person who made weapons of war.
And that’s pretty much the story of Cain and Abel.
It’s a Hell of a Story, as far as I can tell.
I think it’s worth thinking about pretty much forever.
It has so many facets.
I think the most usefully revealing of those facets is the potential for the story, once understood, to shed light on not your own failure
—not even on your rejection by being, let’s say
—
but on
The Proclivity to Murder The Best,
and for
Revenge Upon That Violation.
What that means—and we know that knowledge of Good and Evil entered The World, so to speak, with Adam and Eve’s transgression—is that now, not only does humanity have to contend with tragedy and suffering, and even the unharvested fruits of proper sacrifice, but with the introduction of Real Malevolence into the world.
There’s The Fall into History, and then there’s the Discovery of Sacrifice as a medication for The Fall.
And then there’s a counterposition, which is the emergence of Malevolence as The Enemy of Proper Sacrifice.
And Cain said unto the Lord,
'My punishment is greater than I can bear."
One of the things that’s interesting about this is—
I think the punishment that God lays on Cain…
It’s like the inevitable consequences of Cain’s action.
It’s like, well, he killed his brother.
There’s no going back from that.
Good luck forgiving yourself for that,
especially if he was your ideal.
Because you haven’t just Killed Your Brother
—and, of course, tortured your parents and the rest of your family—
You’ve Deprived the Community of Someone Who’s Upstanding,
and
You Did it for The Worst Possible Motivations.
There’s no up from there.
That’s as close to Hell as you can manage on Earth, I would say.
"And Cain said unto the Lord, my punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid…”
That, too.
There’s also no turning back to God, let’s say, after an error like that.
You’ve done everything you possibly could to spite God
—assuming he exists—
and the probability that you’re going to be able to mend that relationship in your now-broken state, when you couldn’t mend it to begin with, before you did something so terrible, starts to move towards zero.
"And it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me. And the Lord said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him."
That’s an interesting thing.
I wondered about that for a long time.
You might think,
'Why would God take Cain under his wing, so to speak, given what’s already happened?'
I think it has something to do with the emergence of the idea that it was necessary to prevent tit-for-tat revenge slayings.
It’s something like that.
There’s hints of that later in the text.
It’s like, well, 'I killed your brother, and then you killed two of my brothers, and then I kill your whole family, and then you kill my whole town, and then I kill your whole country,
And then we blow up The World. '
That’s probably not a very intelligent solution to the initial problem, even though the initial problem, which might be a murder, is not an easy thing to solve.
But I think it’s something like that.
That’s William Blake.
Adam and Eve have discovered their Dead Son.
Cain has become cognizant, I would say, of
What He Did
and of
What He Is.
It’s another entrance into a form of self-consciousness.
The Self-Consciousness that Adam and Eve developed was painful enough.
They become aware of their own Vulnerability, Nakedness,
and, perhaps, even their Capacity for Evil.
But Cain becomes aware of his
Voluntary engagement with Evil Itself,
and sees that as a crucial, human capability.
That’s something modern people…
It’s no wonder we don’t take it seriously.
Among intellectual circles, for decades, the Idea of Evil has been…
It’s like, what are you?
Medieval, or something?
The whole Idea of Evil is a non-starter as an intellectual starting place, and as a topic.
That’s something that I’ve just been unable to understand.
I cannot understand how you could possibly have more than a cursory knowledge of the history of the 20th century—much less a deep knowledge of the history of the 20th century—and walk away with any other conclusion than,
"Well, Good might not exist, but Evil…"
The evidence for that is so overwhelming that only Willful Blindness could possibly explain denying its existence.
That was actually a useful discovery for me.
I also concluded that, if it was True that Evil existed, then it was True, by inference, that its opposite existed.
The Opposite of Evil.
Let’s say the Evil of The Concentration Camp.
We could get more specific about it.
There’s this one thing that used to happen in Auschwitz, where they would take people off the incoming trains—those who lived, and that weren’t stacked around the outside of the train cars and frozen to death because it was too cold.
Those who only had to be stuck in the middle, so it was warm enough.
Maybe the old people died because they suffocated, but at least some of them were alive when they arrived at Auschwitz.
They took those poor people out, and one of the tricks that the guards used to play on them was to have the newly arrived prisoners hoist like hundred pound sacks of wet salt and carry them from one side of the compound—and these compounds were big.
This was a city.
It wasn’t like a gymnasium; it was like a city.
Tens of thousands of people were there.
They would have them carry the sack of wet salt from one side of the compound to the other, and then back.
That was to make a mockery out of the notion that Work Would Set You Free.
It’s like, no, no.
You work here, but there’s nothing productive about it.
The Whole Point is exactly
The Opposite of Sacrifice, in some sense.
We’re going to make you Act-Out working, but all it will do is speed your demise.
And maybe we can decorate it up a little bit, because not only will it speed up your demise, it will do it in a very painful way, while simultaneously increasing the probability that other people’s demises will be painful and sped up.
It’s a Work of Art.
That’s for sure.
To know about that sort of thing and to not regard it as Evil means…
Well, you can figure out what it means for yourself.
"And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the East of Eden.
And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived…"
A fairly common criticism of these Biblical stories is, well, if Cain and Abel were the only two people from Adam and Eve,
" Where did all these other people come from? "
Doesn’t that make the story simpleminded?
No. That makes the reader simpleminded.
I mean, really?
That’s the best criticism of this you’re going to come up with?
You might say, "ah, you missed The Point. "
That would be the right response: You Missed The Point.
"And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bare Enoch, and he builded the city, and sold—"
It’s Cain that builds the cities and starts the civilization. That’s pretty rough, too. It’s the first fratricidal murderer who builds the cities after the name of his son, Enoch.
"And unto Enoch was born Irad…"
Et cetera, et cetera. I’m going through the generations.
"And Lamech took unto him two wives: the name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other was Zillah."
This is an attempt to flesh out the genealogy and describe to how culture started, in some sense, in these tribal communities.
"And Adah bare Jabal: he was the father of such as dwell in tents, and of such as have cattle. And his brother’s name was Jubal: he was the father of all such as handle the harp and organ. And Zillah, she also bear Tubalcain, an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron."
Tubalcain, traditionally, is the first person who makes weapons of war.
"And Lamech"—back to Lamech, descendent of Cain—"said unto his wives, Adah and Zillah, Heed my voice; ye wives of Lamech, hearken unto my speech: for I have slain a man to my wounding, and a young man to my hurt.
If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold."
Well, what I see in that is this proclivity of this murderous capacity of Cain manifesting itself, as society develops, to a murderous intent that transcends the mere Killing of a Brother.
You Hurt Me;
I Hurt You Back.
No—you hurt me; I kill you and six other people.
The thing that happens after that is, it’s not to make it seven people, but to make it seventy people.
And so there’s this idea that once that first murderous seed is sown, it has this proclivity to manifest itself exponentially.
That’s a warning.
That’s also why, I think, Tubalcain, who’s one of Cain’s descendants, was the first person who made weapons of war.
And that’s pretty much the story of Cain and Abel.
It’s a Hell of a Story, as far as I can tell.
I think it’s worth thinking about pretty much forever.
It has so many facets.
I think the most usefully revealing of those facets is the potential for the story, once understood, to shed light on not your own failure
—not even on your rejection by being, let’s say
—
but on
The Proclivity to Murder The Best,
and for
Revenge Upon That Violation.
What that means—and we know that knowledge of Good and Evil entered The World, so to speak, with Adam and Eve’s transgression—is that now, not only does humanity have to contend with tragedy and suffering, and even the unharvested fruits of proper sacrifice, but with the introduction of Real Malevolence into the world.
There’s The Fall into History, and then there’s the Discovery of Sacrifice as a medication for The Fall.
And then there’s a counterposition, which is the emergence of Malevolence as The Enemy of Proper Sacrifice.
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