I got saved when I was eight years old and I knew that the Holy Spirit came down, “like a dove”, and entered my soul and was then guiding me in “all truth and righteousness.”  I had been taught that this was the truth, and the Bible clearly told me that was so, and the Bible was the Word of God.  I knew that no one could quarrel with God.

But now I have grown up, some six decades later.  “When I was a child, I spake as a child,” but now I see just how I had self-deluded.  I do not blame this on the faith tradition I was born into; they were doing their job, offering me the rudiments of a faith, one in which I still find great value. When I began to grow up in later teens and then in my twenties, I could have found the courage to think for myself but I refused to do so, opting to draw the blinders even more tightly around my consciousness.  The notion of my finitude, that my very view of the world was a flimsy, a cauldron of the timidity and insecurity that characterized my life at that time, was a vein of thought I could not handle.  The specious “certainty” offered me a citadel that I was not able to discard at that time.

But now, as I view the tragedy that is gnawing away at the soul of my country, I see so clearly how that certainty is deadly.  It is deadly in that it is so effective at thwarting the vulnerability that is intrinsic to being an “alive” human being.  As long as one can cling to certainty, and whatever contrivances that give him that certainty, he will be “fine” in his deluded sense of reality. And when this certainty is not checked, is allowed to metastasize, something like Trump is likely to happen.  If we are lucky Trumpism will be checked before it reaches its full-flowering with an expression of Isis lunacy.self