Tag Archives: fundamentalism

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!

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.)

Elif Shafak and Difference

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Elif Shafak is a Turkish novelist who is brilliant, insightful, and….yes, dare I say it, beautiful!  She has a TED lecture available on the internet which I strongly recommend on the subject of the Politics of Difference.  (See link below)

In this lecture she begins by telling of being raised by an educated and Westernized, single-mother in Istanbul.  She also tells of the influence of her mentally unstable grandmother who was somewhat of a natural-healer in the community.  One of the grandmother’s antics was to remove warts with prayer, incantations, and then drawing a circle around the wart with dark ink.  And Shafak declared that this procedure worked!  She once asked her grandmother about what the secret was and her grandmother told her, “Never underestimate the power of circles.”

Shafak then takes this image of the circle and developed the notion that anytime we draw circles, and do so rigidly, we kill anything within them  She explained how that when groups, for example, draw rigid boundaries around themselves they eventually do themselves great harm.  She argued that when we cocoon, when we ghetto-ize we are isolating ourselves and denying ourselves the necessary feedback from the world outside of ourselves.  Furthermore, she noted the obvious—when we are barricaded within our safe confines, we are prone to demonize all those on the outside, all those that are different, and at times we even seek to eradicate them.

And I close with my daily dose of W. H. Auden who noted, re this isolationism, “We have made for ourselves a life safer than we can bear.”

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

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!

Beware of ideologues!

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It is now about a year ago since Harold Camping had his 15 minutes of fame with his end-of-the-world insanity. Like all of his predecessors, he proved to be wrong and he and his followers were left with egg on their face. Religion Dispatches posted an article recently in which followers of Camping were interviewed about their life in the past year since they got “egged.” A few now totally denounce their former “apocalypse now” style of faith but most of merely reformulated it, offering revised interpretations of the “end of the world.” In other words, they now adopt the pose, “No, it didn’t happen as we anticipated. But, in a way it did happen and here is what I mean….”

In other words, they cling to their lunacy. And that is how we humans tend to behave—we get something in our heads and then hold on to it for dear life. Tearing someone away from a lunatic idea is like trying to take a piece of red meat away from a hungry mongrel. But, I think it goes further than that. We cling to all ideas as if they were ultimate reality and fail to look at what the ideas have reference to; we fail to “wrestle with words and meanings” (T. S. Eliot) as such an enterprise would be too scary. W. H. Auden noted, “And Truth met him and held out Her hand. And he clung in panic to his tall beliefs and shrank away like an ill-treated child.” Decades ago I read someone who noted, “Our thoughts are the belated rationalization of conclusions to which we have already been led by our desires.” In other words, we think and believe only what we want to.

Now let me clarify and be honest. The temptation of being an ideologue is not the exclusive domain of conservative religious zealots. It is a temptation for all of us. Yes, even for the “literarylew” ilk! I have seen egregious examples of this obnoxiousness with liberal, educated, “enlightened” people. It is all the same.

And I close with the oft quoted Buddhist observation about words: the finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.

Purity and Extremism

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I recently posted a review of Reza Aslan’s book Beyond Fundamentalism and explained how he takes to task all versions of extremism, though his focus was on Islamic fundamentalism.

He addressed the purity emphasis of the Jihadist movement, noting that the Jihadists “consider themselves to be the only true Muslims. All other Muslims are imposters or apostates who must repent of their ‘hypocrisy’ or be abandoned to their fate.” He goes into great detail re the rivalry and hostility within the Muslim extremists as each sect tends to attempt to set itself apart as “the true Muslim” faith.

I’m personally sensitive to this type of lunacy as I grew up in a Southern conservative Christian sect which taught that it was the only true church. And within that sect there was the same “purity” emphasis which included, of course, moral purity but also doctrinal purity. The latter in particular often gave rise to dissension and “splitting” of churches.

Purity is a dangerous notion.  But when it is overly emphasized, one needs to beware as lunacy is beckoning. To be human is to recognize ambivalence, to recognize the presence of good and bad in all human hearts. Those that can’t handle ambivalence gravitate toward some form of extremism.

I strongly recommend Mary Douglas’s book, Purity and Danger.  Douglas approaches the purity notion from an anthropological stance and provides insight into its origin and function in tribal cultures.  And her observations are relevant to our particular “tribe”.

Reza Aslan on fundamentalism

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I am now reading for the second time Reza Aslan’s book, Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization. Aslan, an Iranian born American citizen, explores fundamentalism of all stripes though his main focus is on Islamic fundamentalism. He thoroughly explores some of the basic concepts of fundamentalism and how that when core beliefs are taken to an extreme, the consequences can be severe.
For example, he notes that the word “jihad” in Arabic means simply, “a struggle” and comes from the verb “jihada” which means, “to strive for something.” Aslan argues that the word in its context implies “a struggle against the self, against one’s passions and instincts and the temptations that oppress the soul.” But that is a far cry from the popular meaning of the term in today’s world. This demonstrates how easy it is for anyone or any group to take a simple word or concept and interpret it to fit their own ends.
Ideologues of any stripe are dangerous people. If you run into one, give them wide birth! Unless, of course, it happens to me moi!
Aslan’s exegesis of the term jihad reminds me of Proverbs 25:28: He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down and without walls. And of course we know what happened back then if the walls of a city were broken down. The enemy could get in.

Book review: Carolyn Briggs

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I just finished reading Carolyn Brigg’s book, “This Dark World: A Memoir of Salvation Found and Lost”. This is the story of a young woman’s conversion to fundamentalist Christian extremism and how that she eventually became disenchanted and left that faith for what some would call “secular humanism.” This is one of a growing genre of books by people who have left fundamentalism and adopted a more open-minded faith or have eschewed faith altogether.

What I admire most about this book is its description of how social pressures and manipulation are used to “convert” people, especially young people, into the fundamentalist fold and how those same pressures are used to keep them there. Religion of this genre is not about the Spirit of God leading but about “group think” and the powerful human need to belong. And it is important to “belong” to various social groups…and certainly to the human race!…but this social belonging must not be confused with mature spirituality.

I have noticed that many readers of this blog are evangelical Christians. When I made this discovery I was really surprised for I assumed that the beliefs I’m promulgating would be anathema to them. I’m pleased to learn that this is not the case. My heart still lies with evangelical Christianity though I can never go back. I don’t need to and don’t want to. But I’m pleased to see how that an open-mindedness and humility is springing up in the evangelical faith here and there. So, my dear evangelical brethren and sisters, I strongly recommend that you read this Carolyn Briggs book. It does not have to shake your faith but it will bring your attention to the social pressures and manipulation that are often the bedrock in your churches. It is possible to see through those “social pressures and manipulation” and still maintain the rudiments of your faith.

And I might add, “social pressures and manipulation” is not the exclusive domain of evangelicals! It is present in any grouping, “spiritual” or otherwise. In fact, Ms. Briggs wrote a very insightful article several months ago about the same sort of pressures being very apparent at a gathering of atheists. See the link provided below:

(http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/culture/5283/waiting_for_lightning_to_strike%3A_a_wobbly_agnostic_among_the_atheists)

losing god

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Donovan in the 1960’s made famous a zen koan:  First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.  This is a pithy note about object loss, one important step in the road to emotional and spiritual maturity.  The mountain first exists as a concept, then the mountain is lost, and then it is again.  The experience of “mountain” is transformed in this process—the concept becomes infused with emotion…one might even say with spirit.  Now this idea can be applied to any notion, including even one’s very identity or conception of self.  But, I want to apply it to “God.”  Therefore, to make a long story short, I am saying, “First there is a god, then there is no god, then there is.”  One first learns “god” as a concept but at some point in one’s life it is important that the conception becomes spiritual.  But this must entail a period of “loss”.  Now for some people, this “loss” is dramatic such as with the Apostle Paul on the Damascus Road.  For most of us this loss is much less dramatic, often appearing as an identity crisis, a period of doubt and confusion, even depression and despair.  But the experience can deepen our faith, taking it into the domain of the “spirit of the law” rather than the domain of the “letter of the law.”

 

If one never undergoes this loss of god, his/her religious expression will merely be whatever he/she happens to have been indoctrinated with.  And even though this indoctrination might be with a very noble ideal or spiritual leader, it will still merely be an idea and one will merit the description “ideologue” or, even better, “fundamentalist.”  Fundamentalists are in love with ideas, mistaking words and ideas for the “thing in itself.”  The “thing in itself” always lies just beyond our reach as words and ideas cannot be wrapped around it.  Or, to borrow a Buddhist line quoted last week, “The finger pointing to the moon must not be mistaken for the moon itself.”