Doctor Daniel Paul Schreber complains of the compulsive thinking that he is forced to endure, a process of “having to think continually,” in opposition to “man’s natural right of mental relaxation, of temporary rest from mental activity through thinking nothing.” Never a moment in which not to think and feel. Machines within me, engines in hyperdrive, factories in constant overproduction. Bataille argues that nature and capitalism alike are driven not by scarcity, but by excess, a superabundance that we are unable to discharge: “The sun dispenses energy–wealth–without any return. The sun gives without ever receiving.” My own body is suffused with such surplus. But it is impossible to emulate the sun, impossible for me ever to spend or squander enough. No wonder I find it difficult to get enough sleep. Schreber, suffering under the weight of this irreversible generosity, unable to suspend his exquisite soul-voluptuousness and pay off his debt, screams that the sun is a whore, and identifies it with God.

What is God if not a notion of a continuously self-giving God who never requires a return. In some Christian circles, there is this idea that we get everything and God keeps giving. But does not God get tired and exhausted, frustrated and depleted by this excess? The question of excess [as in God gives without receiving] is a God who is repeatedly driven by his/her neurosis to make creation happy. God in his dedication to the cosmos has created many things in excess. The weather being one of them, the excess of knowledge about the universe [as in we cannot know all of the universe]. Reality is driven by this elusive excess. It is God attempting to please man in the hope that creation would find happiness in what is being created. This happiness is then that which drives God to create the world in excess. God is attempting to fill a void. The anxiety of God is that God is driven by such an aggressive excess because he/she does not recognize his/her own individual value of self thereby negating himself through Jesus. In a very simple sense. Jesus is the social superego of God. He keeps God in check, hence why he claims: I and God are one. We read it as a subjective relationship, however, it is that they are equals who sublimate each other.

And what of us? What of our need to fulfill God’s addiction to us? Going to Church. Reading the Bible. Feeding the Poor. Fighting against the Bourgeois. Incessant Conversions. Guilt-laden requests of penance. Loving our neighbour. Loving our enemy. Writing Books. Drinking the Body and Blood. Fighting against Satan. Having ecstatic moments of awe. Tasting and Seeing that the Lord is Good. And that’s all in one day. This is what drives us. This is what drives God. It is a reflexive addiction.

Another social example would be the nature of capitalism, which hides itself in our over-commitment to it. It feeds on our exhaustion. It feeds on our inability to resist its addictive ploys and anti-revolutionary cries: “Produce! Produce! Produce!”. It being a machine can only do one thing, create more machines. More producers. And here is the perversity of it all, its all spiritualized. There is something holy in keeping the machine alive. In fighting for our individuality and false sense of fulfillment and happiness. We reify the object of our desire to the point that gods emerge out of God. We create more idols out of idolatry. We fight for the products that produce us. It is not that we go to church to make ourselves better christians, it is that the machine of the institution makes better copies of itself and we over-spiritualize the reification of such a process by deeming it Christian.

Our understandings of God are mere reflections of that which we think we have a choice to define us, and yet, those choices define for us what we should/should not believe. If God is about freedom [which Jesus seems to think S/He is] then freedom is what should drive us into more freedom, not into things, objects or addictions that drive us deeper into some cosmic slavery with God. We need less of God’s generosity and more of God’s identity, on her/his/its own terms.

In a very practical sense, think of a relationship in an employment setting. One cannot be an employee without an employer. There are certain tasks set out for the employee to do, and they tend to be assessed based on their ability to perform said tasks [usually within a given time-frame]. So what we have here is something we all have become used to and are not aware, two things: Ideology & Identity. Most think they can separate themselves from their work, the bad thing is this, they can’t. Once you accept a contract [commandments?] you then now are responsible to fulfill that identity, whether you agree with it or not. {Hence, why God loses his patience, and at times, vice versa]. But in a relationship such as this, we can only refer to the relationship as a sexual one. I dont mean sexual in the traditional sense, but rather, one of extreme erotic over-compensation where one takes on the role of dominant partner [i.e., the employer], and the other as the submissive partner [i.e., the employee]. It is one defined by its dysfunction, excess and perversion of power. Which seem to me to be things that a large part of liberation theology, process theology and the like disavow and turn away from. Is not the parable of the Lost Son about G-d losing himself without us and finding himself, and dont we share in this story?

God must remove himself from the stories made about him. We must remove ourselves from the stories we think about ourselves. It is not an end to The Story, but rather, a decentering of that which we have come to deify. It is not a perpetual end to all identity, but rather an emptying of self. We have centered ourselves around exhaustive procedures that we think will either fulfill us or fulfill God, and unfortunately, it seems both of us [us and G-d] have come to believe the lies. So, how do prostitutes move out of such a profession? They leave their current context. We must do the same to come to experience the freedom spoken about by Jesus of Nazareth.

Desire is the Desire of the Other – Lacan

Love your neighbour as yourself – Jesus

Imagine a cupcake sitting on a table in front of you. The cream topped pastry tempts and haunts you with its delectable experience. Its voice beckons you: consume me. eat me, whole. in that moment the cupcake became your other. now, the other is that which has the ability [and most of the time does] tells you what you think, how you live, how you interpret reality, relationships and even more importantly – tells you What to desire. essentially what are met with is Lacan’s notion that as humans we don’t naturally know how to desire, but rather are told to desire. for Lacan, speech itself is an after-effect of desire. why do we speak? to be known. to express identity. to express wants and needs. to be acknowledged. when we meet the other, in this case, the cupcake, we want to consume it because it has what we want. the cupcake is somehow inhibiting me from enjoy it, hence why I must consume it. It is the promise of self-satisfaction that draws me to it.

another point about the neighbour (the other) i want to make is that when we spend so much energy on the neighbour we create a drastic objective distinction between me and the other. we make the neigbour objective and ourselves subjective [to them]. In a simple sense, ‘heroizing’ them, and imposing a self-fulfilled prophecy upon them, meaning i expect certain things about them to be true of them, and if for some reason they dont fulfill those roles or expectations then i myself become disillusioned and lose faith/hope in the person or even the process that we hoped would change them.i force my fantasy and interpretation upon them. is this not the vulgarity of the notion of salvation? claiming that people ‘need/must’ utter certain words, get baptised and join a community (ultimately, what we’re saying is that they need to become just like us).

but this is in error for many reasons, one major one being that this behaviour and mode of being towards the other has nothing to do with the other, but rather to do with the fact that we dont love ourselves well. mostly, because we have learned to define ourselves by the same vulgar gesture we have come to define the neighbour as – as a commodity. as an object that only has worth if it is tradeable in an economic system; in theis case, the economic system is now referred to as: relationships. and so what we then do is create a system where people only have value based on how they meet our needs and make us happy and/or make us feel whole. and the main issue with this is that we must learn to love ourselves without objects or identification with anything, rather define ourselves minus ‘things’/likes/objects (i.e., job, marriage, children, and etc.) and learn to love the very essence of who we are….when we are capable of this, we then become capable of loving the other.

the problem with loving our neighbour is that we have imposed our need for the neighbour to be just like us, thereby negating the neighbour because we forget that its familiarity is our own. [because we have imposed our understanding and interpretations upon the other] We don’t know our neighbour and the problem is we Think we do. the only way out of such a deadlock is to love our neighbour as our enemy. our enemy is someone we cant consume and who quite easily frustrates us because they don’t fulfill us or promise satisfaction. and yet we are challenged to love them. and so the way to love our neighbour [this includes people we think we 'know'; family, wives, children, friends, bosses, and etc.] is to love them AS the enemy; as someone who cant be tamed by our desire to consume or to assume.

to truly love your neighbour is an offensive act, because it could cost you your very life, your very identity, to find ourselves in the other is where love and neighbour rest together comfortably. but not the kind of love projected on a movie screen, but the violent kind of love that is more like suicide [is that not the sacrificial nature of unconditional love known in the greek as agape?], imagine a society built on agape, if it were so, as a social mechanism, if i died to myself and you died to yourself and so on, things like poverty wouldnt need to be an issue.

God hates fags, really? I have been told this is true. But what does God have against cigarettes? I mean, OK, maybe the carcinogenic properties probably aren’t that healthy, but who doesn’t have their addictions? Is this enough to merit people standing in the streets, making placards (using a full spectrum of variegated coloring, much like the “rainbow”) and promoting violent behavior against smoking fags? I mean that is simply ludicrous.

Why are so many people justifying their words and actions through a spiritual text and treating the one’s who they are meant to love as enemies? Doesn’t Jesus say somewhere about loving both one’s enemy and neighbor (as to imply, that your enemy IS your neighbour). What of the fag itself? Is this not a symbol of a penis? A sexual object. A phallic entity. A phallic object in psychoanalysis stands in for the lack of something. So why so much focus on this illusory object?

Maybe because what the attackers lack is the ability to embrace difference. In quite a violent reversal, they cannot embrace difference so they embrace the “same” — keep in mind that homosexual, means “of the <u>same</u> sex” — but the same is that of their own species. I intentionally employ the word species because of two reasons: 1) Christians (and others) who attack homosexuals based on some moral high-ground are nothing more than species racists (ultimately claiming they are better than others), and 2) they are ideologically perpetrating a form of “genocide” out of their desire to prohibit a more developed humanity.

I use the word genocide not in the Holocaust sense, but rather in the etymological sense. Genus pertains to a species, a certain type or classification. Which is itself a metaphysical category. What this also then means is that when people attack others (based on some ethical over-proximity to an issue) they put themselves (quite literally) “above” the other they are devaluing and create a subspecies “spiritualized” form of species annihilation. (Lacan refers to this as a “consumption of the other.”)

What they are aligning themselves to then is a modern ideology that doesn’t think for itself, but rather something that chooses to negate itself by negating the “other.” And so, in reality, when the attackers (whether people, conservative bodies, churches, police, the military [as an organizational standpoint; i.e, the "don't ask, don't tell" idea was simply another way to justify brutality] and so on) they are promoting not the end of homosexuality, but the end of humanity.

Their inability to love their neighbor is also the inability to love themselves. The violence of such an attack is ultimately the violence (and end) to self. Homosexuality, if anything frees us to open our historical boundaries and learn to let that which history was (initially) unable to let in and embrace a new kind of hospitality. It begins in the ability to recognize the other, and embrace them as the other, for their otherness. If we do not, the true homogeneity — as in embracing one own’s kind — is the very thing that will end up killing off any hope for a diversified existence.

So, to those who are picketing over fags (UK colloquialism: cigarettes), I say go find some issue you need help on and work on that, because last I remember hearing anything about God, love and fags was when God died for the whole world.

<em>I know I have been a bit ‘tongue and cheek’ here with the word ‘fag,’ which I hate the word used in a sexually pejorative context, but what we need with this issue is a bit of irreverence lest we deify the issue; plus sarcasm was employed by the ancient world as a literary/spoken tool to show the ‘stupidity’ of certain ideologies. I do that here.</em>