Avatar, Guru, King, Master, Saint, etc.

I watched the election news on CNN last night until they announced that the House went Repub and the Senate stayed Dem, and then I thought the thing was essentially over and I could go to bed. Fairly sleepless night during which I thought of a few things I'll try to set down here. Thoughts in the middle of the night are often clear, but attempts to recapture them next morning are often muddled. We'll see.

I began to think of the great heroes of humanity: Jesus Christ, Buddha, Confucius, Rama, Krishna, Muhammad, and so on. And of how the Hindus, that so tolerant people, accept that there are many avatars, human representatives of God. Christianity says there is but one, the Lord Christ, who is God himself. Muhammad is a messenger merely, but you can see that for Muslims he is on the way to being a virtual divinity, a final authority, while Muslims also accept that Jesus Christ is at least a precedent prophet, and to be so honored.

I sense a kind of flowing together or all these conceptions, so that one can quite easily become another in the mind. I'll settle on a master word here, "avatars." Avatars are much alike. They teach very similar things, and they are generally more honored in the admiration of people than in people's willingness to observe the precepts the avatars taught.

The Vedanta teaches (I think) that a guru is to be obeyed as if he were God; for the devotee, guru is in loco Dei. St. Paul says we are to obey civil authority: Caesar or King. The only higher authority is God himself. Paul ended up in the crossfire of the two: High God and Corrupt King.

Some years ago I read Christopher' Dawson's book, "The Age of the Gods," his reconstruction of the city and farming civilization that arose four to six millennia ago in Mesopotamia. Here at the beginnings of our recorded history Gods and Kings were fluid: each city would have its God and Ruler, and they tended to be seen as one Perhaps, in effect, were one.

Axiom: If you can corrupt a ruler, a government, you can corrupt the religion of its people.

Perhaps I'll continue this another day.