Category Archives: conservatism

O’bama faking terrorist threat!!!!

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“Yeah, O’Bama and his cohorts are making up this terrorist threat for 9/11 just to divert attention from a failing economy!”

No, once again, I don’t really believe that.  I made it up!   But if I happen to hate him and/or “liberals”, I am inclined to interpret news in a fashion to confirm my bias and therefore arouse passions in similarly uncritical thinkers to hate him/them like I do.  It is similar to the prophets of doom and catastrophe-monger-ers–they are full of existential insecurity and dread (i.e. the poison of self-loathing) and thus compulsively announce, “The sky is falling!  The sky is falling!”  The simpleton “birthers” and “O’bama is a Muslim” crowd are guilty of the same lack of critical thinking.

Now, conservatives are going to interpret O’Bama and liberalism from their perspective.  And they should!  We need different perspectives, certainly the conservative one.  But it is important that conservatives, or liberals, or libertarians pause briefly before they make pronouncements and consider, “Now, am I just grinding my axe again?”  Now most of us will, after that pause, go right ahead and grind our axe.  I know I will!  But it is important to pause, and in that pause, from time to time we might learn that there is another way of looking at things.  And, it is important to look at things differently on occasion.

And this touches on a core issue in our culture right now—what is real and what is unreal.  I am of the conviction (i.e. “bias”) that “real” is a very nebulous term.  We are now at a point in our species development where we need to embrace the nebulous nature of reality and be willing to re-define a lot of the “categories” that we fall into and into which we project our world.  But this kind of “sophistry” is anathema to the hyper-conservatives who are not willing, or able, to compromise with what they know to be “real.”  An old fundamentalist bromide sums up this attitude, “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it.”

 

 

All Republicans are racist!!!!!!!

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The Republican party is united against President O’Bama and O’Bama is a black man.  Ip so facto, all Republicans are racist.

Well, actually I don’t think this is so.  BUT, why not say that it is so, and say so with vehemence and self-assuredness, and do so on the “lame-street media”, and therefore make it so. For, most people do not watch or read the news with any discrimination and believe whatever is presented to them as fact.  This is particularly so with the right-wing of the conservative movement.  They live on a steady diet of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh (and his ilk), and conservative religion.  And they are now dug in at the heels.  And, they hate O’Bama and I do suspect that with the fringe element there is a racist dimension to their acrimony.

It is fascinating to watch what Limbaugh, Fox News, and Company have done with the “O’Bama is a Muslim” and “O’Bama in not an American” stuff.  There are millions of people who believe that non-sense and do so because that is what has been presented to them and because it feeds the poison that festers in their heart.   Sure, liberals are not objective either.  But they are much more likely to have a healthy self-doubt and be aware that they are not objective.  Such a perspective makes some allowance that other view points have some degree of validity.

The core issue here is, “What is real and what is unreal?”  Hermeneutical willingness is the issue.  Each of us interprets his/her world and does so on a daily, minute-by-minute basis.  The more conservative one is the less likely is it that he/she will grasp the flimsiness of his/her perspective and be willing to consider other interpretations of reality.  That is the reason I subscribe to my particular bias–liberal Democrat!  So don’t dare confront me with anything which might challenge this assumption!  And let me gravitate to a social context that has the same bias and then all will be well with the world.

(On the last note, I hope you are not ironically-challenged!)

 

Purity and Danger

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Mary Douglas, a noted anthropologist, wrote a very provocative book in 1966 entitled, Purity and Danger.  In this book she explains the origin of a need for purity in primitive tribes and the perceived “danger” of impurity.  (And though I hear described this as a “perceived” danger, that is not to dismiss the very real danger of impurity run amok.  Boundaries are necessary.)

I was raised in a sectarian, fundamentalist church which also emphasized purity and did so to excess.  It emphasized rules and regulations to a fault, believing that the essential dimension of Christian piety was combating the forces of darkness, inside and outside.  And to those who failed to live up to those standards there was always a hefty dollop of shame and guilt that was heaped upon them.  In retrospect, I now see that shame and guilt was the essence of their belief system.

We have modern-day examples of purity run amok.  The best one is the Taliban.  It was interesting, though horrifying, to watch them rise to power as they emphasized purity morally, politically, and socially.  But purity when it is running amok always runs out of grist for its mill when its primary focus is within its own ranks.  At some point the machinery of purity has done all it can do within its own ranks and has to turn its focus outside, seeking to purify the world.  Unfortunately for groups like this, the outside world always has a mind of its own and fights back.

Now there is nothing wrong with purity.  It is an essential dimension of human experience.  But mature purity will recognize that the impurity that it resists cannot be obliterated and that the very effort to obliterate it will result in a catastrophe if balance is not found.  As Jung noted, “What we resists, persists.”  The goal is to acknowledge the presence of impurity in our hearts and actions but to consciously pursue the pure instead.  And I think that the Christian obligation to “confess ours sins, one to another” (James 5:16) is a ritual that facilitates this recognition of impurity and provides an opportunity for catharsis.

story telling

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When I was a child, “story-telling” was just another expression for lying.  If someone said something that we saw as false, we would immediately declare with great passion, “That is not so!   That is a story!”  If someone had a history of telling falsehood, he/she was labeled with heavy opprobrium, “He/she is a story-teller.”  Even a benign “story”…such as a fairy tale…was a “story” because it was clearly made up.  The implicit assumption of that cultural verbal contrivance was that there was an objective reality and anything that differed was “a story.”

But story-telling was being maligned.  Story-telling is a wonderful way of conveying information; one could even say, “truth.”  And, technically the best we can every do is to tell stories and even history itself is a story that has evolved over the millennia.  Let’s take U.S. history, for example.  When I was taught this subject in the mid-sixties I found the subject fascinating and didn’t have to worry about critical reading or anything like that.  The story of U.S. history was merely a factual account of what had happened and I found it very interesting.  It was only in college that I learned to approach history…and the rest of our knowledge-base…with a critical mind.

Another powerful story in my youth was the Christian tradition.  But it was not presented as a “story”; it was presented as a factual account of what had happened two thousand years earlier with the life of Jesus.  I now see that too as a “story” but with that approach I have been able to glean great meaning which would have eluded me otherwise.  I see Jesus as an historical character who was an extraordinary spiritual presence.  The early Christians were captivated by the story of his life and death.  And they had little difficulty in believing that, yes, he had been raised from the dead.  These early believers perpetuated this story and contributed significantly to it.  Christian history has from that point been an unfolding of this original story, an unfolding that continues even today.

Let me close with an observation made by Harry Crews in the story of his own life:  Nothing is allowed to die in a society of a storytelling people.  It is all—the good and the bad—carted up and brought along from one generation to the next.  And everything that is brought along is colored and shaped by those who bring it..

It is important that we formulate and tell our stories.

The wrath of god

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Michelle Bachman noted Sunday re the recent natural disasters, “I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We’ve had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said, ‘Are you going to start listening to me here?'”

So Bachman again trotted out her Old Testament world view but then, conferring with her handlers, realized this was imprudent and tried to explain she was only speaking in jest.  “No, Michelle.  You can’t get out that easy.  Your mind is teeming with that…ahem…stuff.”   Her religious affiliations and her speech has been replete with material which reflects the view of God as some vengeful, punitive tyrant.  And, as is always the case, our perspective on God always reflects our perspective on life itself and reflects our own view point on life.  As the Bible says, “As a man speaketh, so is he.”  And, “out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.”

And, this perspective she offers is the reason she is a marketable political commodity in our current world.  Our country has millions of people who function on the basis of “concrete operational thinking.”  (See Jean Piaget re stages of cognitive development.)

The Power of Now

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I refer often to Eckhart Tolle, especially his best-selling book, The Power of Now.  The central emphasis of this book is that our culture is captivated by our orientation to past and future.  (T.S. Eliot in The Four Quartets notes, “Time past and time future” and then claims that we “cling to that dimension.”)  And Tolle is only one of numerous gifted souls, men and women, who are aware of the shallowness of our particular culture and the unwillingness of organized religion to address the ensuing spiritual malaise.

Tolle emphasizes “the Now”.  Though he recognizes the importance of past and future and the imperative that we pay proper respect to “that dimension”, he encourages us to look below the surface, beyond the pale of the normal hum-drum of day to day life, and recognize the present moment.

But this is a very subversive notion.  It flies in the face of our most basic assumptions about life and suggests that there is more to life than meets the eye.  This “subversive function” is paid lip-service to in theological and ecclesiastical circles as the “prophetic function” of the gospel.  But most churches and spiritual teachings are unwilling to take on this “subversive function”, preferring to amuse themselves with the gospel-eze version of those “well-worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness.”  (Conrad Aiken)

It is astounding that a book of this sort has been so well-received.  It speaks of the hunger of the modern human heart, a hunger that is rarely addressed with traditional religion.   However, I do believe that this heart-hunger could be addressed with many world religions…and certainly the Christian tradition…but it would require a clergy that was willing to follow Jesus (and other Holy men and women throughout the ages) into a desert experience.

W. H. Auden summarized it so beautifully:

ll those who follow me are led

Onto that glassy mountain where are no

Footholds for logic, to that Bridge of Dread

Where knowledge but increases vertigo:

Those who pursue me take a twisting lane

To find themselves immediately alone

With savage water or unfeeling stone,

In labyrinths where they must entertain

Confusion, cripples, tigers, thunder, pain.

The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

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Chicken Little’s apocolyptic warning never ceases to be relevant.  For, anytime a natural disaster such as earthquakes or tornadoes threaten, the doomsayers crawl out from under their rocks and announce, “The end is nigh!  The end is night!  It is a sign of the end times!  Jesus is coming back soon!”  Glen Beck was one of the best at this, as apocalyptic doom was a stable of his chart-laden dog-and-pony show.

Now sooner or later one of them is going to be right.  For example, a mutant gene could run amok and wipe us all out.  Or some right-wing crazy with a nuclear weapon could annihilate us all.  The heavenly bodies, all so routinely dancing with intricate precision, could suddenly hiccup and this simple little planet could be smashed into the cosmic gruel it used to be.  And, the scientists say that one of these days this universe will stop spinning, will grind to a halt, and sink back into oblivion anyway.  See, we are doomed!  We are all going to die, individually and collectively!  And, when it does happen, someone will be shrieking, “The sky is falling!  The sky is falling!”  At that time I hope they all feel good about themselves and get appropriate tv news and talk-show coverage!

But these apocalyptic nut jobs just need to get a life and stop terrorizing people with their cosmic insecurity.  You see, this is all about death and death is something we have a life time to prepare for.  Someone in mental health has noted, “Those that are afraid of death are afraid of life.”  The issue in death, the “sting of death” spoken of in the Bible, is just our fragile ego sensing its finitude and realizing that it could be snuffed out like a candle at any moment and will, at some point, meet that fate.

And I’m not ready for my own little “flickering candle” to be snuffed out.  I want it to continue to burn brightly for years.  But, I’ve accepted that this is not going to happen and have determined that the best thing to do is to accept this fact, to trust my Source which gave rise to me in the first place, and to busy myself taking care of hearth-and-home and trying to offer something to the world.  It would be self-indulgent and spiritually immature to constantly bemoan my death or the death of the species.

Thousands of years ago Aeschylus noted this insanity, simply noting, “The gods created disaster so that the people will have something to talk about.”

Let the dead bury the dead

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In Matthew 8 Jesus is calling for disciples.  One scribe responds, “Yes, but let me first go bury my father.”  Jesus responds, “Follow me and let the dead bury their own dead.”

Now taken simply, without any use of hermeneutical discipline, this statement can be interpreted to mean that Jesus saw the whole of humanity as “dead” and doomed to eventual eternal damnation.  And this interpretation is very ego rewarding to readers who relish being part of a very select crowd of believers who are going to bask in eternal glory for eternity while the rest of those “damn heathen” roast in hell.  It is so rewarding to know that one has “seen the light”, that one is “saved” and that most of “those wretches out there” don’t see the truth.  But that is not what Jesus was saying.  I believe he was pointing out that most people do live their life in “darkness”, they have never escaped the blinders they were born with, and they go their merry way without addressing the fact that there is another dimension to life.  It does not mean they are inferior to those who have been “enlightened”….or whatever you wish to term it…it just means they are ensconced in commonplace reality and are apt to stay there.

Ronald D. Laing once noted that he believed most people live their lives in a “post hypnotic state of early childhood.”  They go through life on automatic pilot, having imbibed the cultural mandates of the little corner of the world into which they were born, and having dug their heels in with no intention of ever leaving that safe haven.  This is what Jesus meant when he called them “dead.”  But it does not mean they are stupid and certainly it does not mean they are going to roast for eternity in hell.

But some Christians thrive on being “right.”  It is so intoxicating to know that you are “special.”  But, if spiritual discernment were practiced, if “mindfulness” were present, one would see just how egotistical this comforting elixir is.  Believing one to have been “enlightened” or “saved” or whatever, one has actually taken on a bigger blinder than the one he/she was born with.

Now I do believe that “being saved” and “being enlightened” is possible.  But it just does not mean you are special or cool or destined for eternal bliss that others will be deprived of.  For ultimately God’s Grace covers us all.

Please government, please intrude!

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Michael Pearl and his wife Debi were in the news last week for their controversial publications which encourage corporal punishment and do so with an emphasis that the punishment inflicts pain. One couple took their teachings seriously and actually beat one of their children to death for which they are now looking at decades in prison. Their web site is entitled No Greater Joy and if you check it out it is apparent that there is not a whole lot of joy around that domocile.

Pearl and his ilk represent one of the extremes that our culture permits to the great detriment and abuse…and even death…of our children. One essential theme in that mentality is that children belong to them, especially the father as the “head of the home” and that it is his responsibility as head of the home to “train up a child in the way he should go.” And, an important dimension of this is that to “spare the rod is to spoil the child.”

Now it won’t be in my lifetime and probably not for a long time thereafter but we are going to have to realize that children, in an important sense, belong to all of us and that we cannot allow them to be abused or even born into abusive, stupid, hell-holes like that of Pearl and his ilk. Yes, yes, yes, this will involve “government intrusion” but there are circumstances where government does need to intrude. We did it with domestic rape! I remember when the notion of “domestic rape” was just being toyed with and was, in my youth, given pause with the reasoning, “Well, doesn’t a man have the right to have sex with his wife?” Well, now it is a no-brainer to myself and to most people that “No” he doesn’t if she says no. Why was it ever otherwise? Well, the answer is that women were property and being a sex object was a huge part of their role in life. But our government has intruded and in doing so has changed reality on the issue, by and large. And what about race? When I was a child, blacks were inferior and were looked upon with scorn in the deep South where I was raised. The government intruded and changed reality and had they not done so blacks would not have the equality that they have today.

Yes, government intrusion can go too far. But there are instances in which it does not go far enough. And when it comes to child abuse and maltreatment, I really think we should get heavy-handed about it.



 

					

		
		
	


	

				

			
						

				the way things are
			

										

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We wake up each morning to "the way things are."  This is the
ideological/emotional template that we daily impose on the world which I blogged
about in recent weeks.  This template, this "way things are" is a powerful
force and we bring it to bear on our whole world---physical world and social
world---with each breath we take.  We impose it on the world and get by with it
because millions of others subscribe to a similar fantasy. 

And we must have a "way things are" to get by and to live together with some
degree of harmony.  If we had to start afresh each morning that we awaken, we
would not be able to function, individually or collectively.  We need this
"egoic consciousness" (Eckhart Tolle) to keep this dog-and-pony show afloat. 

BUT, we need awareness of its presence and its tyranny. We need the
"mindfulness" taught by the Buddhists.  Or, the "illuminating spirit of God"
taught by the Christians.  For, otherwise we totally disallow and disregard
those who do not fit into this culturally-derived template. 

I grew up in the ‘60’s and I so vividly remember the tyranny of "the way things
are" in a conservative, central Arkansas community.  For example, it was a given
that girls do not become lawyers or doctors.  This was actually noted by the
guidance counselor.  And, she was not a bad person or stupid.  She was merely
purveying "the way things are" in her day and time and locale.  And I vividly
remember the talk of the early part of that decade...and the late fifties...that
"blacks should know their place."  Racism was just part of the social fabric of
that time and place, it was an essential part of the "template" that had become
my reality.  And there was a rigid moral code, part of which was "nice girls
don’t do it. They save themselves for marriage."  And I vividly recall the
tyranny of the collective shame that was cast upon a couple of young
girls who became pregnant.

I wander what part of today’s "way things are" will be subject to scrutiny in coming decades?