Faith

"Faith is a means by which one resigns oneself to the present in order to invest in the abstract promise of the future."- Cuauhtemoc Medina
Implied in this defining is the intolerable dimension of the present. The not-right-ness of now. In societies of plenty it is not the radical faith of Roman Catholic Europe and it's Conquests so much as the obstinate pagan rituals and ecstasies, like Burning Man, that displace the discontent of a people into a place of never coming to be. The ancient Egyptians, with their millennial Nile rhythms and ossified social structure, employed conservative religious narratives that functioned as continuance rites; their is no longing, no faith in them. But for the laboring masses? Which animal headed deity promised deliverance? Which was not a player in the annual pageant of sowing and flood, harvest and continuance, subservience and dominion? In this context, the monotheist impulse could be read as a proto-socialist uprising. Deliverance from certainty and servitude to freedom and self determinism (eventually mercantilism and entrepreneurship), and paradise as a promise of return to pre-agricultural egalitarianism.
How do I paint that?

Begin with what is, or has been. The greatest critique of anything is it's self same.

I think.