Category Archives: fundamentalism

My Anti-Catholic Indoctrination

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I was raised in a very conservative, Southern, poverty-stricken, family and grew up in the fifties and the sixties. There is so much to say about that culture and one of these days I hope to try to say it. But at this moment I merely want to concentrate on one bit of lunacy that I was subjected to—anti-Catholic rhetoric. Of course this was nothing new; this had historical roots from early in American history and in continues even today in pockets of conservative America.

I’ve long since out-grown that provincial ignorance and view the Catholic faith with great respect. In fact, I am now an Episcopalian, which is sometimes known as “Catholic lite.” And I stumble upon treasure troves of Catholic wisdom here in the blog-o-sphere, one of which is “Blue Eyed Ennis” (http://blueeyedennis-siempre.blogspot.com/) She offers a wealth of spiritual resources from the Catholic faith (and other faiths) many of which I would not be familiar with otherwise.

As I revel in the wisdom I find there, I am so grateful that I was able to escape the imprisonment of my impoverished, hyper-conservative childhood. And I speculate about why it was necessary for the Catholics to be singled out for such opprobrium. I know that one part of the picture is simple projection. In any group of people, just as with individuals, it is necessary to project on others unsavory dimensions of their own psyche. It is necessary to demonize someone. And Catholics were merely one of the available resources that my community had to offer. It is as if, and I emphasize “as if”, my sub-culture convened and said, “Now, we have lots of ugliness inside and we can’t handle it so we must blame it on someone.” And after some discussion, Catholics were selected as one of several nominees and this was simple because of the historical roots of this sentiment. So, therefore I was so troubled and even angry that Catholics were not Christian, that they worshipped the Pope…and even Mary!…and that if John Kennedy was elected President the Pope would be taking over control of our country!

 

Confirmation Bias and Emily Dickinson

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A friend recently introduced me to the concept of “confirmation bias” which refers to the human tendency to accept into his/her reality only that which is consistent with a pre-existent bias. In other words, we see things as we want to see them. We see only the “small bright circle of our consciousness beyond which lies the darkness.” (Conrad Aiken). Decades ago I read someone’s observation, “Our thinking is the belated rationalization of conclusions to which we have already been led by our desires.”

Now, of course, being a mere mortal I would like to say that this no longer applies to me, that I have gone a step further and see things clearly, that I see things objectively. But I’ve afraid that I can no longer “lay that flattering unction to my soul” (Hamlet, to his mother). This is a human problem and we cannot escape it. We only see things through a prism, we do not see things objectively.

But, if we understand this notion, it can humble us a bit and we can be a bit less arrogant about our certainties, we can be a bit more accepting of people who are different than us. We might even be a bit more accepting of people who respond to this notion with a blank, bewildered stare!

Emily Dickinson wrote a poem about this tendency to construct our reality and then shut out everything else:

The soul selects her own society,
Then shuts the door;
On her divine majority
Obtrude no more.
Unmoved, she notes the chariot’s pausing
At her low gate;
Unmoved, an emperor is kneeling
Upon her mat.
I’ve known her from an ample nation
Choose one;
Then close the valves of her attention
Like stone.

We do tend to “close the valves of (our) attention like stone” and shut out any further feedback from the world. “My mind is made up. Don’t confuse me with facts.”  This is called insanity.

 

Auden on the Incarnation

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The Incarnation is the story of the Word being made flesh, the “enfleshment” of the Holy to provide us a model for our life. This incarnation has many dimensions. I like to think of it as the process of “coming down” from our head into our heart, dwelling in our flesh, the mind-body duality finding some degree of resolution. In some sense “coming down from on high” is coming down from our head into our guts, the Word being woven into the fabric of our day to day life. The Gospel becomes experience, no longer consisting of mere dogma that we have imbibed from our Christian culture. Read the following excerpt from W. H. Auden about this process, especially that powerful notion of “flesh and mind being delivered from mistrust.”

If…like your father before you, come
Where thought accuses and feeling mocks,
Believe your pain: praise the scorching rocks
For their desiccation of your lust,
Thank the bitter treatment of the tide
For its dissolution of your pride,
That the whirlwind may arrange your will
And the deluge release it to find
The spring in the desert, the fruitful
Island in the sea, where flesh and mind
Are delivered from mistrust.
(W. H. Auden “The Sea and the Mirror)

Carolyn Briggs: Salvation Lost and Found

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I would like to recommend a very important book for spiritually-minded people, Higher Ground: A Memoir of Salvation Lost and Found by Carolyn Briggs. This is Brigg’s story of being raised in a very hyper-fundamentalist religion and her struggle to escape its oppressive grip on her life. It has now been made into a movie, Higher Ground, which which made Roger Ebert’s April Eberfest and was feted by the Sundance Move Festival in 2011.

I had the great honor of meeting this lovely woman at my church last weekend where she previewed this movie and then was interviewed by our rector about the movie and some of her experiences. Ms. Briggs emanated a lovely spiritual presence as she described her experiences, admitting that there is a sorrow that follows her to this day due to the loss of the certainty that once was such an essential part of her faith. She now recognizes that doubt is part of faith and shared how that now she has a deep, abiding faith in God even though she no longer has the comfort provided by the close-knit (and close-minded) group that she was part of. But she does have the comfort of like-minded kindred spirits, many of which have followed a similar path in their life.

I would also recommend that you read an article by her in Religion Digest last year about her trip to an atheist convention. Her observations are very amusing as they show just how fanatical and obnoxious some atheists can be, much like the “compulsive Christians” that they decry and redicule. (Google Brigg’s name and “atheist convention” and you will find it on the net.)

Let me clarify something about the notion of rejecting one’s faith, evangelical/fundamentalist or otherwise. This “rejection” does not have to be the end of one’s faith. This “rejection” can be merely letting go of the “letter of the law” and embracing the “spirit of the law.” The Bible and Christian dogma is no longer merely ideology with which one has been indoctrinated. It becomes personal and has meaning that it did not have before.

This experience means that we become willing to realize, and humbly experience, that we only “see through a glass darkly.” We do not know objectively the truth. Therefore we can be a little more tolerant of those who believe differently. We do not have to go on witch-hunts, medieval crusades, or jihads. We merely have to let our faith become articulate in our own day to day personal life and any evangelization that needs to take place will come naturally without our manipulative wiles and machinations.

 

A Paranoid Political Rant with a Serious Point!

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Hurricane Isaac’s approach to Tampa and points west have piqued the deep recesses of my brain, stirring an interpretation angle that I don’t like to acknowledge. I’m gonna have some fun with it here. Let me start with David Letterman’s quip last week: Hurricane Isaac’s attack on Tampa proves to be, beyond doubt, that God is a woman!
Here is paranoid rant # 1 (from about a week ago):
The wrath of God is bearing down on Tampa and the Republican Nominating Convention. Clearly God is answering my prayers…and those of other Truth-believing, Truth-telling Democrats…and is gonna wreak havoc on those God-forsaken Republicans. God will not truck with those that believe differently than I do, He does not tolerate compromise with the Truth, and he is tired of these lousy people who never have read “Being and Nothingness”, “Thus Spake Zarathustra”, the “Kama Sutra,” and “The Huffington Post.” Oh, I should add, “He is tired of those who can’t read in the first place and who, only one generation back, were not walking upright.”
But, alas and alack, the path of Isaac was diverted and New Orleans is facing its fury. So, here is paranoid, insane rant #2:
So, God clearly had a change of heart and decided to spare Tampa and the GOP the brunt of his wrath, meting out to them merely a slap on the wrist. For, you see, god chose to answer another one of my prayers and take care of unfinished business from six years ago. You see, back then he gave New Orleans a scourging because of its sin and iniquity when he sent Katrina. But, he spared Bourbon Street, that bastion of perversity and degradation. Now, he has turned Isaac in the direction of New Orleans and this time he is gonna beat the hell out of Bourbon Street.
Now the scary part of this nonsense is that it does reflect the residue of the way I was taught. Anyone who can even think this way…even sarcastically as I have done here…has at his/her disposal a very skewed view of the world. And yes I was taught such a view and it is still present in some whimsical, capricious fashion though I give it no energy in the least.
Our view of God does not say so much about God as it does about ourselves, ourselves in the very depths of our hearts; not the selves that we present to the world but the ones that lie buried in our unconscious depths. I’m going to illustrate with only one of the right-wing crazies who have crawled out from under the rocks the past four years—Michelle “Deep Penetration” Bachman. In addition her recent paranoid fears about Muslim infiltration of our government, remember how she attributed natural disasters about a year ago to God’s judgment on our country, saying, “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?’”
I quote Jesus here, “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.” And anyone whose heart is full of this paranoid filth does not need to have the prominence in our government that she has. I gravely fear what direction our country will take if it is led by people of that ilk. (AND, by the way, I do NOT think all Republicans are like her.)
Bachman lives in a very rigid cause-effect, right-wrong, black-white world. Reality is much more subtle than that. Now we must have “cause-effect, right-wrong, black-white” world but we do not need to be consumed by it. We need to realize that there is another world “out there” which is paradoxically “in here” and the Presence of that world gives us pause and keeps us from getting too arrogant. That Presence gently reminds us that we always “see through a glass darkly.” Though wrongs in the world, i.e. “evil”, need to be addressed, the primary focus of our energy needs to be the “evil” that lurks within. And, contrary to people like Ms. Bachman, there is a lot of evil in good people. In fact…and this is getting far out I admit…but I posit the notion that the “gooder” you get the more evil you have to deal with!

Opiate of the Masses

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Karl Marx famously noted that “Religion is the opiate of the masses.”  O’Bama had this notion in mind four years ago when he was unwittingly heard referring to some people who “cling to their guns and religion.”

Well, I agree but with qualification.  First, re the gun issue, yes there are some whose identity is too wrapped up in gun ownership and they make things look bad for men who own guns but have a life outside of gun ownership.  The latter aren’t nuts. Likewise with religion, there are those who use religion obsessively to cover up an impoverished identity and often they end up as certifiable nuts.

But the problem here is not guns or religion.  The problem is an impoverished identity which often does cross over into mental illness.

But my main focus here is religion.  There is so much insanity that surfaces in religion and it is so easy to throw the baby out with the bath water.  I do think religious people should give Marx’s observation attention for religion…yes, even yours and mine…does have an opiate dimension.  And that is not the fault, necessarily, of the religion we practice or believe in.  It is the fault of our human nature which tends to take ourselves too seriously and tends to interpret religious teachings in a self-serving manner. And when this tendency runs unchecked, lunacy will likely ensue.  Case in point—Westboro Baptist Church and Islamic Extremists.

Existential Guilt and Forgiveness

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Guilt is a nasty beast and is often very subtle. My upbringing instilled in me the notion of original sin, a notion that I still subscribe to though not as it was taught to me. With this emphasis of sin came overwhelming guilt and the guilt accrued as a litany of things I had done, or thought of doing, or might do which were bad. My life became a careful, compulsive routine of avoiding an ever-increasing list of “bad” things and by not doing them my guilt was assuaged. So, to speak metaphorically…and to borrow a bromide from back then…I did not “smoke, drink, chew, or go with the girls that do.”

But the problem with that guilt-ridden lifestyle is that it does not deal with the real guilt, a guilt that lies in the depths of the heart, a guilt that can best be described as existential, a guilt that is spiritual, not legal. This is not the place to go into great detail on the matter, but this existential guilt has to do with the very onset of “being”, the very emergence of our fragile ego, and its desperate effort to stave off “non-being.” That guilt is a spiritual issue and cannot be dealt with by mere intellect/cognition, cannot be addressed by following any scriptural syllogism.

Many religions become very legalistic and assuage their guilt by formulating lists of things that they don’t do, vices from which they abstain. Among some of them, it amounts to them telling themselves, “I am ok because I don’t lie, steal, cheat, smoke, drink, lust after the opposite sex, and I go to church dutifully, and tithe faithfully.”

Now, adherence to a moral code is noble. And, sociologically it is imperative that we have moral codes. But spirituality at some point in one’s life needs to go beyond simple adherence to a moral code, it needs to go beyond the “letter of the law” and enter into the domain of the spirit. And that involves getting honest, finding the courage to acknowledge that beneath that oppressive moral code…so religiously adhered to…lies a lot of ugliness that needs to find the light of day, ugliness for which we can find forgiveness. But there is no forgiveness when we hide behind that moral code fig leaf.

 

I Hate Intolerant People!

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Yeah!  I hate’em!  And I thank they should be all lined up and shot!

Ok, ok.  I hope you understand irony.  I speak in jest.  But it is important to recognize that even those we deem “intolerant” deserve a certain amount of respect.  But how much is a judgment call.  There is certainly a time when one must speak out against intolerance; but certainly not every time.

Sometimes it takes patience to respect people that are different than us.  It is just so very apparent that they should see things differently  But, of course, there is the catch—who gets to define “should”?

And here I am in the morass of “relativism”, that murky domain which I was taught to eschew as a child.  Oh how wonderfully safe and secure it was!   (Oh, to be honest, it was not a very pretty world!  It was unreality.)

A Thought about Mormonism

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The current issue of The New Yorker has an article on Mormonism entitled “The Birth and Evolution of Mormonism” by Adam Gopnik. This article provides a very good historical summary of Mormonism and its efforts to adapt over the past two centuries to a culture that has always looked askance at it.

It would be easy for a Southern-born Redneck like me to be real critical of Mormonism. But I’m not much more critical this “ism” than I am with all the rest of ‘em. AND, all of us are knee-deep in some “ism” or another, whether we like it or not. I guess I’m a social scientist at heart and enjoy reading someone’s thoughtful account of a religious expression, especially one that is so prominent in our country at present moment.

It is easy to see the lunacy of Mormonism. (I’m tempted here to trot out a few of my favorites, but will leave that selection to your devices!) But it is not so easy to see the lunacy of our own belief system and believe me, it is there.

 

Kudos to Southern Baptists!

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I was so proud to learn that the Southern Baptist Convention elected a black man as its President. Who would have thunk it! AND, just weeks ago they seriously were considering re-naming their denomination due to the baggage that was associated with its name.

I grew up a Baptist in the deep South and was taught that change of this magnitude was just not right, that the “faith once delivered unto the saints” was never to be compromised, that “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it.” Of course, much of this tradition was just that—tradition and had its origin in a cultural setting. “Truth” was not as rigid as we were taught back then and I’m glad the Baptists are now evolving. Yes, I hear talk that some of them are even learning to walk upright!