Rushkoff on Old Testament death cults and hacking reality.

As always, Rushkoff brings some fascinating interpretation.

Broken Frontier | The Portal for Quality Comics Coverage!:

"...what we're fighting for in the Bible and today is life itself. That's what Torah is really about: life vs. non-life. Pharaoh is head of a death cult, and the escaped slaves are attempting to create a life cult. An open source 'religion,' if you will, where humans write the laws by which they live. And they keep changing the laws to make them more ethical, more life-affirming, as time goes by.

Today, the most life-threatening gods take the form of currency. Money is not real; it's really not. It's created by a central bank, and based in nothing at all but a number. There's no "value" like gold or silver attached to it. Yet thousands are dying for money right now. Iraq isn't about oil—it's about a currency system that depends on artificial scarcity. That's why we can't use a replenishable energy source. We don't know how to make a "market" for it. And this very dependence on scarcity is Joseph's invention in the Bible. It's what gets the Hebrews enslaved.

That's why I thought the Bible could be such a powerful document for our time. But most everyone who says they read it actually don't. They just listen to preachers. So the Bible remains relatively undiscovered in this country, where it could be really useful.



...I think the ultimate hack of reality is to realize it hasn’t been "intended" to be anything. There's no creator. Just creation myths. If you want the world to be created differently, then go write a new myth. If you want the world to work differently, then change the laws, or whatever is in the way. Nothing is sacred. Only the stuff that people are afraid of need the protection of sanctity.

Reality hacking can be as simple as changing a one-way highway into a two-way street, so that less kids get run over and more stores can be developed on either side. Create a neighborhood out of a former highway. That's good enough for me.

Or create your own local currency. Get people to use it instead of dollars in your community, and watch Wal-Mart go out of business. Easy as that, if you realize it's possible. But most of us don't, and so we suffer and maybe pray a little for things to be changed for us."