Hi Ray:
Your interesting post - >>There isn't a single JD, CPA or CLU who earns it. They're all parasites. As are you.<< - got me thinking about what your belief system must look like. Which led me to this:
>>It's shortly after dawn on February 15th on the remote island of Tanna in the South Pacific. The oppressive humidity and heat of the rainy season is already building, the pigs and chickens are slowly stirring, and - as on every February 15th for the last 45 years - one of the world's strangest religious ceremonies is about to take place.
The village of Sulphur Bay is waking up, as it does every morning, directly under an active volcano. The cone of Mount Yasur steeples up above it, thumping periodically as blisters of magma burst inside its crater, and scattering ash onto the dead plains around its base like a carbon snowfall. On the coastal side of the village is a black sand beach running with steaming rivulets of scalding spring water, too hot to touch but ideal for washing clothes and dishes. Between the devil and the deep, the palm and thatch huts are arranged quite untypically for a Melanesian village: not around a central clan hut or banyan tree but framing a large, deserted square like a parade ground. This is because Sulphur Bay is one of a handful of villages in this part of the world where the people neither worship the Christ of the missionaries nor practice the traditional kastom (custom) religion of their ancestors, but who live with a god of their own: a spirit messiah known as John Frum.
John Frum is the son of God, but he's not Jesus. He's a black Melanesian, but sometimes a white man - or, according to others, a black American GI. He's a kastom messiah, come to turn the people of Tanna back to their old ways before the missionaries - but he's also a universal avatar of change, a successor to Buddha or Jesus or Mohammed. Like Jesus, he's poised to return - or, perhaps, he's already here. He's a volcano god, with an army of the dead who live down in the crater, and a spirit who approaches the men of Tanna when they drink their intoxicating kava and bring their spirits into communion with him.
To anthropologists, John Frum was an example of one of the strangest and most exotic phenomena to be observed in traditional cultures: the cargo cult. All across Melanesia, from New Guinea to the Solomon Islands to Tanna's archipelago, the New Hebrides, dozens of unconnected communities, thousands of miles apart and speaking unrelated languages, seemed spontaneously to generate the same set of bizarre beliefs. A new dispensation was on the way, when the white man would vanish from the islands, and his cargo - Western goods - would be diverted by magical means to the local people, who were its rightful owners.
'Cargo cults' got into full swing during the 1950s, though once the phenomenon had been classified by Westerners it seemed that the beginnings of the movement could be traced way back, as far as the 1890s. The classic account was by the Australian anthropologist Peter Lawrence who went out to the Madang district of New Guinea in 1949 to conduct field research into the traditional social relations of people who, despite colonial rule, were still living much as they had in the recent Stone Age. Lawrence gradually discovered that his presence in Madang had become woven into an extraordinary complex of beliefs. Persistent rumours abounded that a cargo ship was about to arrive in the harbour with huge consignments of goods for him, and the local people asked him to help them supervise the clearing of an airstrip. When he asked what the airstrip was for, he was told that cargo planes were about to arrive bringing tinned meat, rice, tools, tobacco and a machine for making electric light. And when he asked who was sending this cargo, they replied 'God in Heaven'.
Lawrence's analysis of what was going on came to constitute a template for what seemed to Westerners an inexplicable and repetitive complex of delusions. First came 'cargo belief': the apocalyptic conviction that the world was about to turn upside down, the islanders finally receiving the material rewards of the white planters and administrators who were currently enjoying the fruits of the black man's labours. Then, even more puzzling, came 'cargo ritual': new religious practices designed to reel in the cargo by magical repetition of the acts which were currently bringing it to the white man. All over, islanders were downing tools, clearing airstrips in the jungle, building imitation radio masts out of bamboo, scouring their bibles for hidden messages, even sitting around politely drinking afternoon tea. If it worked for the white man, so the theory went, it would work for them.
All across the region, colonial governments cracked down hard, rounding up the cargo prophets and imprisoning them. Planters and other Western commercial interests, who coined the term 'cargo cult', saw it all as madness which demonstrated the ignorance and superstition of their workforce. More liberal whites attempted to explain to the locals that cargo wasn't produced by magic, but by hard work and the product of generations of technological progress, and the only way in which Melanesian societies were going to become rich in cargo was by working and earning it. To the locals, the subtext of this explanation was clear: the whites were politely refusing to give up the secret of their cargo." |
