More Dominick

This is a very rough set which means everything you are about to read is stream of conscious rough. I found myself thinking about a 500 plus Healer sitting around watching television and the reactions he might have to our culture as opposed to other cultures and fads etc. he had experienced in his life and how they compared. Comments welcome.

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Dominick sprawled out on his decayed purple couch and turned on the television. The channel 5 morning show was in mid swing and the host was a pleasant looking woman with a warm and fluid voice that reminded Dominick of a Nun he had known in the late nineteenth century. This woman however suffered from vanity, which he noticed was much more than mere affliction in this era, it was a rampant and aggressive plague. Dominick understood wanting to look nice, but he found the pains both sexes went to in order to appear attractive not just to the other sex, but all who lay eyes on them deplorable. Dominick had lived long enough to see that people have suffered from vanity through every era he has lived, but in the past eras it was confined more or less to the upper classes. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the sexes had their painted faces and powdered wigs, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the wigs and paint gave way to corsets, conservative dresses, and blush along with the suits of democratic rule which men wore in their congresses and parliaments. In the twentieth Century was born mass media through movies, television programs and commercials as well as mass produced magazines such as GQ, Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Esquire which brought the obsession with appearance down from the upper classes and into the worlds of the middle and lower classes. Dominick saw the effects of such superficial obsessions and the importance placed upon them in this era’s society. Girls in the various hospitals he has visited over the past fifty years in particular, suffering from such needless diseases such as bulimia and anorexia. Men in the hospital for various injuries to their bodies from the exercises performed incorrectly and religiously in the never ending quest for the body of Zues. Women implanting bags of salt water or silicone into their chests regardless of how unnaturally erect they made their bosom, just as long as those unnaturally erect breasts appear attractive through a shirt. Men who would have the same bags of substances never meant to exist in the human body implanted into them to look muscular because even though these men felt the pressure of needing to be fit and look good, they lacked the will to actively change their lifestyles to achieve these ends. Most of all Dominick was disgusted by the ever growing number of people having their stomachs stapled shut or a rubber band secured around their stomachs because the gluttonous fools cannot control themselves around the ever present temptation of horrible food.
This era and her temptations placed perhaps the strongest test upon Dominick’s faith, the technological advances of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had pushed humanity further away from their Father. More and more scholars wrote of the illogical belief in a God who, if he did exist, turned his back on his children long ago, most cosmologists were quick to promote the theory of the big bang but expressing belief in a God creating the universe was considered crazy. Dominick believed in Darwinism actually, he believed it was the way in which God chose to work on this world, to weed out the unworthy. Scientists called this process natural selection. However the educated elite, for the most part, refused to even consider a universe governed by His hand, to consider his role in all things. Quite the contrary, the idea of an “intelligent design” was quite offensive to most of the educated elite of this era, they used their mathematical formulas invented by man and theories based on those inventions of man in an attempt to deny God. As far as Dominick was concerned, knowing or having an idea of how some of His creations worked did not negate the fact that they were still His creations. Despite these feelings Dominick also felt the pull of doubt, not because of physics or the work of any human scholar, but because of the cruelty and injustice humanity brings to His world. He felt the pull of doubt when he read (and witnessed) the cruelty of humanity toward one another. The hardest on him was by far the cruelty inflicted on His chosen by the Nazi regime, the fact that these cruelties were known to the mortal leaders of the Vatican at the time and their silent consent in trade for their continued existence. Dominick never agreed with the council’s standpoint that God condoned their actions and the survival of the Vatican as well as their continued existence was proof of his approval. As familiar as Dominick is with his bible he could not bring himself to believe that God would or could be so cruel, this had actually always been a point of disagreement for Dominick. Humanity has always mistreated itself, the mass killings of war and the unpunished murders committed by the wealthy when the peasants would not fall in line. Most appalling for Dominick were the murders committed by those supposedly chosen by Him to rule and ‘protect’ His people, all out of fear of losing their earthly power or simply for the perverse pleasure of taking human life. Many of the kings and queen Dominick suffered in his lifetime were anything but Godly. The Nazi holocaust changed something fundamental in his faith he realized, for the first time in his existence Dominick truly struggled with doubt. He has fought it every day since he recognized it was there but it is an everyday struggle for him. What made the holocaust so different and powerful for him was a combination of different factors. At the forefront was that fact that these were supposed to be God’s chosen people, regardless of their acceptance of Christ. They would be made to see Christ was their savior during the tribulation and would thus be saved. Why would God allow them to suffer like this again after they had already suffered slavery, still suffered prejudice, and still remained faithful to him. It seemed to Dominick that if ever there were a more faithful people it was the Israelites. Yet God seemed unaffected by their suffering, Dominick tried to tell himself at first that God had no control over the free will of His children, even those behind such destruction and death, but couldn’t He intervene? Still, to this day the Jews honor and love God with a love, passion, and peaceful devotion that few faiths, even Christianity can claim. No matter what cruel fate God allowed to pass upon them they will never gave up on Him, now that is picture perfect devotion and love. There was also the inaction, in fact the silent condolence of the Nazi holocaust in return for their independence from the fascist war machines was, at least to Dominick, a betrayal of everything Jesus had stood for. The Vatican could claim ignorance all they wished however Dominick knew there were healers in the area who had discovered the camps and reported they’re existence to both the council and (find out popes name during WWII) only to have them told to be quiet about their discovery and put their faith in His will. Were they not a representative of His will? Seven healers could have liberated every camp with minimal loss of life yet this was not done. The importance of the physical church was placed above the lives of His chosen. How could this have possibly been His will? Thus the seeds of doubt were sewn and more and more as the years and centuries dragged on did humanity drift farther and farther away from God, the longer Dominick lived the more distant, faded, and empty did the words of Jesus seem to be to his Children. How faded at times they now seemed to him.