brainfood for boxing day

On a deeper level, the Bible works because it’s very gently trying to break the bad news: that our relationship to God has changed from that of believing children to that of lonely adults. It’s telling the story of how a civilization grows up, and learns (or doesn’t learn) to take of itself with no parent telling it what to do. It’s about how to stop engaging in child sacrifice; how to develop legal and monetary systems that don’t exploit people. And, most of all, it’s about how to stay alive and conscious in a society that’s trying to make you dead and asleep.

It’s really a collection of stories that mean to address the new challenges of the Axial Age — and foretelling some of the dangers of evolving into an agricultural society. The Bible works because it attempts to tackle the underlying dynamic between models of scarcity and models of abundance.

For my purposes, it’s interesting because it has become so much more relevant today — as society is again falling under the spell of a reality template as extreme and limited as the mental slavery of Biblical Egypt.

-- Douglas Rushkoff quoted in Thou Shalt Realize the Bible Kiketh Ass (an interview between him an RU Sirius).

I've been reading Rushkoff since I was 15. Testament is his new comic book* series. Unfortunately, I find his writing & discussion *around* the comic more interesting and effective than the comic itself. The whole article is worth reading.

* I hate the term 'graphic novel'.