Tag Archives: Conservatism

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.

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.)

More re “Our Thoughts Become Us”

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I would like to share further re my variant of Mike Dooley’s wisdom, “Thoughts are things.  Choose the good ones.”  We are teeming with thoughts and these thoughts make up our reality.  According to cognitive behavioral therapy, they shape our behavior even though reciprocally our behavior shapes out thoughts.  It behooves us to pay attention to our thoughts from time to time, perhaps to practice the “mindfulness” taught by the Buddhists, and not allow maladaptive thoughts to hold sway over our lives.

For example, if one realizes that hatred often predominates in his/he heart, he/she needs to be given pause.  In our current political climate, hatred appears to predominate more so than I ever remember.  And I do not mean mere disapproval or dislike of the other party or candidate; that is to be understood.  But pure, unmitigated hatred often appears to be the ruling force in this political campaign and often it is the media which is fomenting this poison.

Let’s take O’Bama.  Now he is a liberal Democrat and I can certainly understand conservatives firmly opposing him and even doing so with great passion.  But when those who find themselves actually hating him  they really need to get honest with themselves and realize they are full of hatred which has nothing to do with O’Bama.

But intense emotion, especially hatred, is a powerful political tool.  People are much more likely to vote on the basis of emotion than reason though they are always going to announce with great conviction the “reasonable” nature of their convictions.

Jonathan Haidt on Morality & Politics

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Jonathan Haidt is a psychologist who studies morality and emotion and how they vary from culture to culture.  He has an excellent TED talk which I will post below and several other on-line interviews, including one by Stephen Colbert.

Haidt’s studies attempt to address the issue of the human tendency to isolate into groups which become very smug and very dismissive of others.  I am particularly pleased to see him apply his theory to our particular political culture at present moment. He reports that, “Morality, by its very nature, makes it had to study morality.  It binds people together into teams that seek victory, not truth.  It closes hearts and minds to opponents even as it makes cooperation and decency possible within groups…To live virtuously as individuals and as societies, we must understand how our minds are built.  We must find ways to overcome our natural self-righteousness.  We must respect and even learn from those whose morality differs from our own.”

Now in his TED talk in particular, it is quite apparent that he is a liberal.  But he reports that as a result of his research he was given pause and had to note at one point that the conservative view point has a whole lot to offer. What his research teaches is that we must be given pause, take a look at the other view point, and stop demonizing each other.

This election is not about winning!  If we are so immature that we merely mindlessly want our pony to win the race, then we really need to do some growing up.

http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.html

The Dialectics of Identity

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In yesterday’s blog I discoursed re Lewis Thomas’ Lives of a Cell and the symbiotic relationship between the setting of boundaries and willingness to “relax” them for the sake of the collective. Someone once described this process as the competing drives for homeostasis and change and is relevant to the individual and the collective. If the drive for “homoeostasis” is unbalanced, the individual will be trapped in a static, autistic world. If the other need becomes predominant, the individual will be trapped in an incorporative mode of being in which “strange” is so needed that it overwhelms the ego. This individual will be trapped in perpetual “hunger.” This can even describe the addiction process.

On the collective level, I like to illustrate with politics and there is no better illustration than our current political and social polarization. To function healthily, a culture must have “conservative” forces present as well as “liberal” forces. There must be a tendency to “conserve” tradition but that tendency must be balanced by a willingness to engage with “strange” or “difference.” There must be a setting of boundaries but this boundary-setting must be balanced by a willingness to “relax” boundaries here and there. On one extreme there is stagnation and ultimate death. On the other extreme there is “change” run amok and ultimately death.

Re this dialectic of the collective noted above, there is an interesting article in today’s Washington Post newspaper. The article describes the conservative response of one Oklahoma community toward changes that seem to be threatening them. The article reported the citizenry’s anxiety, fear, and anger toward an over-reaching government, creeping socialism, and liberal values from that bastion of liberalism “up north in Norman.” But this was not a hatchet job on conservative values. It merely conveys to the reader the genuine sadness that some communities feel when their world view is perceived to be threatened. And on the same idea, you might find PBS’s American Experience from this past week as it portrays the Amish response to encroaching civilization.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/to-residents-of-another-washington-their-cherished-values-are-under-assault/2012/03/01/gIQAsbhXlR_print.html

Conservative-Liberal impasse

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The meaning of “conservative”, at least in the political sense, means “to conserve.” The conservative presence is any culture wants to protect the status quo, including religion, politics, social mores, and economics. This is a valid historical phenomenon and needs respect. In its extreme, this “conservative” presence wants not only to maintain the status quo, but wants to do so with a vehemence. It fact, it often would like to return to an earlier, halcyon day when, in our case, “truth, justice, and the American way” prevailed.

The liberal presence wants change in the aforementioned categories. It sees the status quo as problematic and wants to bring about changes, often sweeping changes. If this force is not checked, it too can lead to problems.

When these two forces work in tandem, a society will have a dynamic quality that is necessary. When they are at loggerheads, problems are in the offing. If there can be no compromise, if there can be no respect for each other, then historically catastrophe has often been in that offing.

As Rodney King said, “Why can’t we just all get along.”

Anti-intellectualism and anti-science: Keep ’em on the reservation.

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Karl Gilberson has another post in the Huffington Post in which he, an evangelical himself, addresses the issue of anti-intellectual, anti-science stances taken by the evangelical movement. He attributes this issue to driving away the youth from evangelical churches and cites statistics to prove his point. And his position brings to my mind the work of Richard Hofstadtner on anti-intellectualism in American history (Anti-intellectualism in American Life), a tendency which Hofstadtner links with religious and political conservatism.

Some Christians feel that God wants them to turn their brains off and not think critically. Their stance reveals a perception of God who wants to be merely adored and worshipped, who will, after “the end of the world “comes will get his jollies from having all his believers fawn over him for eternity. And “eternity” in this mind set is a quantitative term, not qualitative. In other words, it will go on and on and on forever! AND, of course, meanwhile those “non-believers” will be roasting in hell for the same “eternity.” Why is it so important for Christians to have and to maintain this perspective? (There are some revisionist interpretations of hell in evangelical circles and they are not appreciated. That is putting it mildly.)

A key issue here is the very nature of identity. People who subscribe to this world view reflect a very rigid view of themselves; for, as we see God so do we see ourselves and the rest of the world. This is just another variation of my oft-used bromide, “What we see is what we are.” This static view of the world was reality at one point in the past and still is in many cultures. And that “static world” created static identities. But reality has evolved so far beyond that limited grasp of the world.

Identity…and the rest of the world we perceive…is ephemeral. When this understanding comes to an individual whose grasp of the world is otherwise, it is admittedly disturbing and potentially catastrophic. That is why conservative believers cling so desperately to their static world-view, their static identity, and amuse themselves with mindless repetition of dogma. I must insist, however, they could “let go” of their dogma and discover that their “dogma” would still be valid, though in a radically different way. The “letter of the law” would then give way to “the spirit of the law”. When identity has been transformed, worship of “god” becomes worship of “God.”

But I must offer a caveat to any True Believer (see Eric Hoffer) who might have stumbled upon my musings— “You had better keep your kids on the reservation! Yes, home-school ‘em and try to keep them out of college. And if you let them go to college, make sure it is some diploma-mill where their belief system will not be challenged.”

Book review re Frank Schaeffer’s “Crazy for God”

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Frank Schaeffer is the son of Francis Schaeffer who was a leading spokesman and intellectual for the Christian Right in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s.  Frank himself was groomed in his childhood as their heir apparent for his father and did indeed step into that role as a young man.  But, safely ensconced in that prominent position, he became disaffected and disillusioned by the bigotry and closed-mindedness that he witnessed and eventually left the fold.  But, if that wasn’t enough, he began to speak and write about what he witnessed during his youth, not just with the Christian Right, but with his family itself.  His book, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All of It Back” is the story of his “conversion” from hyper-fundamentalist Christianity and political conservatism to a pronounced liberal stance in both regards.  If you are an ex-fundamentalist, or if you are a fundamentalist who would deign to look critically at yourself, you really need to read this book.

Politically and familial-ly his book is a story of a standard dysfunctional family, a family trapped inside its own limited world-view and incapable of dealing honestly and openly with the world.  Families of this sort are in service to the myth that they are caught up in and dutifully dedicate themselves to perpetuating that myth even at the expense of its members own soul. Yes, it is sheer lunacy at times.

However, let me note that the “lunacy” presented here cannot compare with the lunacy I noted last week when I discoursed re Muslim culture from the perspective of Ayaan Hirsi Ali.  Any closed-mindedness veers toward lunacy and will end up there unless reality sets in.  But, I much prefer our culture’s conservative lunacy over that of the Muslim world.  There are more limits set here, largely by the power of a liberal and critical press.