Fear is that little darkroom where negatives are developed. — Michael Pritchard
Strolling through Atlanta’s airport recently, Fear assaulted me. Announcers repeated messages from the Department of Homeland Insecurity. “Guard your bags.” “Report suspicious behavior.” “The Terrorist Threat Level is Orange.”
Such announcements can only be the product of a government that’s living in sin, who does not believe in democracy. So it rules by fear. Long before 9/11, our government had this policy called “Really Bad Things Can Happen.” Keeping the citizenry off-balance (aided by its lapdog, FOXNews), it seeks our compliance. Fear is national policy.
General Douglas MacArthur said, “The powers in charge keep us in a perpetual state of fear; keep us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.”
The Master called Fear has led us into needless wars, multiplied enemies, gotten good religious folk all a-lather to go against their religion and kill, and helps justify a multitude of wasteful spending projects. (I feel safer, don’t you?) We don’t have a government “for” the people, but one “against” them.
***
Scene change. Forget government. Let’s think “religion.”
Fear and religion are a bad chemistry. Arguably humanity’s worst trait, fear is the foundation of so much religiosity. Religions become mad systems of anxious reward and punishment, where creation and Creator are estranged, where – like in our government –the mouthpieces of faith spout inanities to keep us spiritually off-balance.
Code Orange in airports? Where did you think they got the idea? Religion can become one long announcement to watch our spiritual baggage, suspicious faith behavior, to ever-remind us how we’re always living in some hell called Code Red.
• Satan’s out there prowling around. (Be on the watch!)
• Santa (Satan anagrammed!) informs our religions with “You better watch out!” and “Be good,” and then it’s Reward Zone; but it’s coal-fire if you’re bad!
• What you don’t know can hurt you! (Let’s invent mysterious gods and afterlives to keep people tranquilized and questions minimized.)
• Get saved! (Don’t bother finessing that salvation is more about working relationships in this life than being saved from hell-fear in the next.)
In government and religion, Fear keeps us from asking important questions. Quiet people in either domain enable the few in power to sustain and increase their control.
The God of fear is a small reflection of our fearful selves, where God’s chief intention is to reward and punish creation. While “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” the Lord of Fear has no place in a healthy soul.
Without fear, there probably would be no religion (although there would be faith). The fear of death spawns endless varieties of gods, end-time scenarios (none of which have materialized) – and ignorance. How many times have I heard that the mind is a terrible thing in matters of faith? How many times have you heard that we are too puny and God is too big ever to comprehend faith mysteries, so shut up already?
Just believe, belong, behave, or be-damned. These four horsemen of the apocalypse are fear-enabled, and sustain so many cruelties in the name of god.
Bertrand Russell has the last word: “Fear is the basis of the whole thing – fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things.”
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Friday, January 15, 2010
Why Aren't We ALL Agnostics?
The Call to “Holy Agnosticism” is the Call to Faith
I don’t know beans about God. – Annie Dillard
In this space I have proposed that healthy faith include regular purging doses of atheism. We get easily barnacled up by tired beliefs, and these tie us up in knots when we try to keep believing something worn out.
Today I wish to suggest agnosticism for the same reason: the idea that we really don’t know beans about God. Some things we can know, but many more we cannot in the spiritual dimension of things. Two stories about elephants illustrate. I’ll comment after they’re told.
1 Two fleas live on the tail of an elephant. One flea is happy where it is. He has all the food and shelter he wants. He thinks he knows the elephant, though it’s only a small part of the tail. Its imperfect knowledge is nonetheless comforting.
The other flea lived with this first one, until one evening she grows discontent with the usual eating, drinking, and hanging on. She travels a far distance from the first flea. In human measurement, she travels down the tail about a foot. Wow, the environment is different: smells, tail-movement, and other vermin are all different.
She now has a doubled-up knowledge of the elephant. She returns later to report her experience of the elephant to the first. The first one disbelieves her. The second flea keeps insisting that there’s more out there to explore and to know.
2 There were six blind persons who traveled together, and they come upon an elephant for the first time. No one told them what it was, and each got positioned at one body part of the elephant. Each felt, and came away with sure knowledge about what the elephant must be like.
The person at the side of the elephant was sure it was like a wall. “No,” said the person at the tusk. “An elephant is like a spear.”
“You’re both wrong,” exclaimed the trunk-holder. “This elephant is like a snake.” The fourth one, at the elephant’s knee, concluded this animal was more like a tree.
The fifth blind person, touching ear, felt an elephant is like a huge fan. And the sixth one, hanging onto the tail, felt certain that an elephant is a rope.
***
Which flea, which blind person was (most) correct? None had faulty knowledge. But everyone’s intelligence was incomplete, and thus misunderstood. Each story character was quite sure of the certainty and veracity of their facts.
No one questions their intelligence. We feel pretty darn confident like the first flea that we’ve received adequate/accurate view of God. We may even self-congratulate ourselves on being versed in two religious traditions, like the second flea, and feel that is enough.
Or we may be like the blind who ever-so-quickly under-interpret the elephant: “mine’s the right one, once and for all.”
Everyone’s understanding of the elephant called God is partial at best, and outright wrong at worst. And so we live our lives, vote, fight, discriminate and other everyday things based on this image we carry around within us. These are necessary images, but make no mistake, they’re misunderstandings at the very best.
Every understood deity is partially known, thus an idol. Idols are images based on insufficient evidence and maintained by constant and ever-louder affirmation within a tribe of believers. They are conveniences, for we don’t explore beyond their image.
And if we think the elephant is ‘out there,’ external to us, and not internal, the idolatry worsens. The divine life is our own life. (Repeat until understood.) If that realization brings a “holy agnosticism” vis-à-vis our received idea of God, this blind flea has done his job. Next time you’re at your flea circus (religious house), remember we don’t know beans about God.
I don’t know beans about God. – Annie Dillard
In this space I have proposed that healthy faith include regular purging doses of atheism. We get easily barnacled up by tired beliefs, and these tie us up in knots when we try to keep believing something worn out.
Today I wish to suggest agnosticism for the same reason: the idea that we really don’t know beans about God. Some things we can know, but many more we cannot in the spiritual dimension of things. Two stories about elephants illustrate. I’ll comment after they’re told.
1 Two fleas live on the tail of an elephant. One flea is happy where it is. He has all the food and shelter he wants. He thinks he knows the elephant, though it’s only a small part of the tail. Its imperfect knowledge is nonetheless comforting.
The other flea lived with this first one, until one evening she grows discontent with the usual eating, drinking, and hanging on. She travels a far distance from the first flea. In human measurement, she travels down the tail about a foot. Wow, the environment is different: smells, tail-movement, and other vermin are all different.
She now has a doubled-up knowledge of the elephant. She returns later to report her experience of the elephant to the first. The first one disbelieves her. The second flea keeps insisting that there’s more out there to explore and to know.
2 There were six blind persons who traveled together, and they come upon an elephant for the first time. No one told them what it was, and each got positioned at one body part of the elephant. Each felt, and came away with sure knowledge about what the elephant must be like.
The person at the side of the elephant was sure it was like a wall. “No,” said the person at the tusk. “An elephant is like a spear.”
“You’re both wrong,” exclaimed the trunk-holder. “This elephant is like a snake.” The fourth one, at the elephant’s knee, concluded this animal was more like a tree.
The fifth blind person, touching ear, felt an elephant is like a huge fan. And the sixth one, hanging onto the tail, felt certain that an elephant is a rope.
***
Which flea, which blind person was (most) correct? None had faulty knowledge. But everyone’s intelligence was incomplete, and thus misunderstood. Each story character was quite sure of the certainty and veracity of their facts.
No one questions their intelligence. We feel pretty darn confident like the first flea that we’ve received adequate/accurate view of God. We may even self-congratulate ourselves on being versed in two religious traditions, like the second flea, and feel that is enough.
Or we may be like the blind who ever-so-quickly under-interpret the elephant: “mine’s the right one, once and for all.”
Everyone’s understanding of the elephant called God is partial at best, and outright wrong at worst. And so we live our lives, vote, fight, discriminate and other everyday things based on this image we carry around within us. These are necessary images, but make no mistake, they’re misunderstandings at the very best.
Every understood deity is partially known, thus an idol. Idols are images based on insufficient evidence and maintained by constant and ever-louder affirmation within a tribe of believers. They are conveniences, for we don’t explore beyond their image.
And if we think the elephant is ‘out there,’ external to us, and not internal, the idolatry worsens. The divine life is our own life. (Repeat until understood.) If that realization brings a “holy agnosticism” vis-à-vis our received idea of God, this blind flea has done his job. Next time you’re at your flea circus (religious house), remember we don’t know beans about God.
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