In a post yesterday, Englishman asked "please name 'just one' atrocity done in the name of atheism". I offered the crimes of Gengis Khan, Stalin and Mao Tze Tung. I would have liked a discussion on that, but such as life is on a discussion bored, it never eventuated.
Anyhow, I'd taken the post to be a call to Christians, ranting fundies in particular, to defend thier faith. Perhaps it's just that Rex and co have been on my mind lately. For some time the fact that some "christians" posting here express views so out of kilter with the way i have seen christianity lived around me has niggled at me. Perhaps I'm going over the top and the plastic Jesus brigade with thier loud mouthed preaching and 'last days' mentality can be dismissed as harmless and uniquely American. In anycase i was in the local library yesterday and revisited my favorite history book "The Messianic Legacy" and treated myself to a refresher course in American religious history. Some of what follows is lifted straight from that book.
To make my position clear from the outset, I am a Taoist by nature. I have many christian friends and neighbours as well as buddhists, sihks, new age environmentalists etc... I have no friends, nor have i met any christian fundamentalists appart from the ones i encountered biblethumping on street corners* and in the twilight world of JW culture and belief.
The Christians i know rarely ever talk about thier beliefs, after all it's socially impolite to do so. I see though that many of them lead happy fullfilling lives, often involving themselves in charities and other acts of self sacrafice and benefit in thier communities. These people have hearts of gold, they're the salt of the earth. I'm sure not all Churches and congregations in christendom come under that general umbrella, after all any group of people is only as good as the combined good of its individual members.
Competing alongside the traditional churches is a prolification of sects, cults, therapies, disciplines and programs of one sort or another bearing witness that the quest for meaning hasn't passed with the advent of human rationalism, everything now recognised as relative and the wholesale failure of the western churches.
What was formerly sought in organised religion is now sought in the astrology column of the 'womans monthly'. Loneliness can be cured by naval gazing each wednesday night with Swami Chakra Cashmere, Self alienation? unlock you hidden memories of trips to Alpha Centauries with little grey men, trouble with witches? You need our course of Clairvoyance jamming techniques, Feeling Guilty? lay down here and let's work it in and out together .. and so on it goes, desperate people addressing themselves primarily to alleviating the symptoms of a lack of meaning rather than the cause. Accepting cultish therapies, tranquillising thier crisis of identity with new dynamic sounding short cuts to God.
There is nothing new in any of this, as a species we are inherantly lazy and so in our search for God and meaning we persue the big short cut. To avoid the work, the energy, the psychic investment, to drink from the Holy Grail the meaning of life, without a sacrafice in sight. In ages past such attempts to find a shortcut were invariably deemed suspect. Now, however, under the aegis of a consumer society, they have aquired an unpresedented legitimacy. Consumerism has rendered the shortcut respectable in virtually every sphere. Any shortcut is a marketable commodity. Fast food, frozen dinners, instant coffee, plastic Jesus competing with fluffy Elvis for space on the lavatory wall.
The German poet Stephan George spoke of the psycological or spiritual equivelant of this early last century. das Leichte - 'the facile'. We see facile running rampant today amoung the sects and cults that thrive in western society. Therapy, growth, pre-packaged 'self-realisation' programs, boil-in-the-bag white light, quick frozen, freeze dried enlightenment. At a farm in Cornwall a weekend of cuddling a pillow while making wild passionate love to ones ego reflected back in the mirrored ceiling high above can fill one with wisdom it normally takes a lifetime to aquire and exorcise a lifetime of demons and bad breath.
Many of these activities and organisations are harmless, sometimes they may even be benificial to ones health. Othertimes the newspapers run stories of the more sinister side to 'the facile' .. brainwashing, psychic manipulation, bullying, forced marriage, kidnap, reprisals against defectors and murder. The Jonestown massacre, Waco, Truth Aum, drug based sects like the psychedelic satanism of Charles Manson and his minions, Islamic suicide squads and American Fundamentalists arming themselves to fight this weeks anti-christ.
It has been fashionable for three centuries or more to scoff at esoterica. Today scientists and churchmen deplore the eagerness with which the esoteric is being embraced. While crystal shops spring up in every shopping mall, the self proclaimed moral reformers mutter darkly into thier one minute oats about the resurgence of witch-craft and paganism. Westerners have been looking to the east for more profound viable alternatives to the 'believe this or else' Judaeo-Christian model for at least two centuries and this has been accellerating since the 60's.
I've known quite a few hippies who have thier personal guru's and passively accept the pre-packaged forms of nivana on offer. I've even enjoyed wafting incence and Tibetan music myself, but i like what the Indian writer Gita Mehta had to say about the generation of western youth flocking to India in search of enlightenment:
"Never before had the Void been pursued with such optimism and such razzle dazzle. Everyone suspected that whatever America wanted America got. Why not Nirvana?" ... "...the seduction lay in the chaos. They thought they were simple. We thought they were neon. They thought we were profound. We knew we were provintial. Everybody thought everybody else was ridiculously exotic and everybody got it wrong."
Amoung the questionable alternatives to religion embrased by contempary society are the Fundamentalist Universal
Christian Kult Evangelical Rightminded Saved christians of biblebelting USA. Christianity, in the time honoured way of all big organised religions, has always had its fanatics espousing over-simplified dicta and prohibitions, more intent on coercing conformity from thier neighbours than crystallizing thier own sense of meaning. It has taken a long time and a great deal of bloodshed to learn a measure of tollerance, so the fudamentalist tribalism embraced by the highest levels of American society is disturbing to us secularites. Did cowpoke Ronald Regan and his 'moral majority comrads' really rule the US for a while? or was that a bad dream? George Dubya's too smart to go to church surely?
Modern fundamentalism in America derives ultimately from 17th century Puritanism, with its concept of an 'elect' who enjoyed a special covernant with God. This elect included those lauded as the 'Founding Fathers' the United States. But the more immediate roots of modern fundamentalism lie in the fractured and free-associative history expouded by numerous 19th century theological propagandists.
One of these was the London phrenologist John 'head-bump' Wilson. In 1840 he published a book entitled Our Israelitish Origin. According to JW, "God had faithfully fullfilled his pledge to sustain the seed of Abraham. Driven into exile by the Assyrians, the Israelites became the Scythians, who in turn were the ancestors of the Saxons" Through this kind of demented logic JW eventually concluded that the English were in fact the lineal decendants of the tribe of Ephriam. Did you know that the ancient Hebrews and Scythians spoke English? Well according to JW the word "Saxon" comes from the words "Isaacs Sons"** This could all be dismissed as charmingly dotty or self pleasuring froth and bubble if it were not still being promulgated by fundamentalist textbooks today.
In 1842 JW published The Millenium in which shock, horror .. his reasoning led to the conclusion that the 'Second Comming' was at hand. Yes Jesus return engagement was imminent, prepare thyself for the 1,000 year Reich! First of course there would cometh the anti-christ followed by world chaos. But JW's anti-christ was doomed to defeat (which makes me wonder why he'd bother comming at all really.) European civilisation was so great that it could only be the product of a new 'chosen people' whom God, in adherance to His covernant, would never abandon.***
John 'head-bump' Wilson was followed by other influential writers of religious poppycock and sanctimonious dribble decending in a direct line to our good friend Pastor Russell and numerous other prophets tared with the same anachronistic naivety. The Bible is held to be immutable as it stands, the indisputable and unalterable word of God, as if councils such as Nicea never occurred and as if there were not alternative gospels. Nothing has ever been or ever can be added to it or subracted from it. It contains all the knowledge necessary for individual salvation. Despite numerous documented blunders by Old Testement prophets about thier own epoch, they are held to be infallible prognosticators about ours. Even thier dire fulmigations against each other are lifted out of the original historical context and deemed applicable today. "all things are written for our instruction and are beneficial for teaching, reproving and setting things straight"
Ancient Israel was but a loose knit, ill defined and often ungovernable political entity not much bigger than Sydney Australia and with a much less dense population. It occupied a inconsequential fragment of what passed as 'the known world', yet the records of it's petty internal squabbles are regarded as an infallable guide to the 21st century in virtually every sphere, from personal conduct to foreign relations. It makes as much sense as using records of the New South Wales Railways sub commitee meetings on the feasable development of a ticketing system whereby commuters are no longer troubled by paper cuts whilst hastily removing thier tickets from the automated ticket dispencers as a salve for problems facing men colonising beetle juice 3 in the year 144,000AD. Mad.
For the fundamentalist, the world has entered 'the last days' just as it was believed to have done in Jesus time. The acpocalypse is imminent,the horsemen are on thier way. A 'Great Tribulation' is about to begin culminating in the epic 'battle of Armageddon' in which the anti-christ (some US fundies say its the EEC) is defeated, cities from Manchester to Philadelphia lay in ruins, the earth is now a safe place for Jesus to decend in Glory, raise the dead, judge them, send the unworthy to hell and brothers Rex and Ronald Regan to ride off into a commie free sunset never again to be troubled by ten headed beasts and drunken harlots.
It's easy to scoff at the beliefs of our resident facile fundy fanatics, thier convictions make the beliefs of many so called primitive societies appear downright sophisticated. Yet an extraudinary number of people in America today take them quite seriously. If the television evangalists are anything to go by, mainstream American Christianity is a strange creature indeed. If I was a 'normal christian' i'd be mighty pissed off, these rapture ranting reverands and bible bashing baptists replace grace and the eternal mystery with cheap theatrics and crass pleading for the almighty dollar. They replace teaching us about the nature and meaning of sacrafice with the old testament themes of rape plunder and pillage. Instead of talking about the incompatability of spiritual asperations with the mundane world they talk of base famous people roasting on Satans Spit. Instead of inspiring us with integrity and charity they condem us for not being of thier sort. They emphasis the tribal aspects of Christianity, the elements that encourage an autocratic impulse to impose ones values or lack of them on others, that encouage an elite conviction of ones own superiority. Selfrighteous, sanctimonious and complacent they damn anyone not sharing thier narrow minded view to the thing they themselves fear most, to be abandoned by thier skittish God and sent to stoke the burning fires of hell with Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Ladin.
Back when the USSR was the anti-christ, (or is it still the evil empire?) US President Regan spoke at length about Armageddon being just around the corner, Casper Weinburger said he believed the same thing, James Watt, former secretary of the interior said to a White House commitee "I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the lord returns". Admiral James Watkins, Chief of United States Naval Operations has in public speaches blamed Lebanese suicide bombings on "the forces of the anti-christ" while General John Vessey, Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, urged young men to enlist in "God's Army"
This might all be laughable if it were not so ominous. The underlying premises of fundamentalism all conduce to make mass self immolation morally and theologically acceptable, even desirable. The AlQueda fundamentalist of Saudi Arabia is thoroughly convinced that in destroying his enemies along with himself, he is striking a blow against his version of Satan, and in the process earning an express ticket to Paradise. The Christian Fundamentalist is convinced of exactly the same thing, from a diametrically opposed point of view. Each is a mirror image of the other and each, when backed into a corner will react the same way. But if a man has his finger on the nuclear button, his act of self-immolation in the name of his God will drag the whole of humanity with him.
Even appart from Armageddon, the prevailing image for the fundamentalist is the image of war, rationalised and justified as a crusade. The fundamentalist 'moral majority' in the US describe themselves as engaged in a crusade against 'secular humanism'. They try to ban books like Farewell to Arms by Earnest Hemingway, Catch22 by Joseph Heller, 1984 by George Orwell, others by Mark Twain and Edgar Alan Poe. Fundamentalism is striving to alienate America from her own cultural heritage and her most gifted and intelligent citizens and with '6 day creationism' rampant one could say intelligence in general. No wonder the world gets nervous when a town in New Mexico burns Harry Potter books or a 'Star Wars' President uses the word crusade.
Fundamentalism rests not the acknowledged Christian virtues of charity, forgiveness and understanding, but on war, on an imaginary epic conflict between the self styled forces of God and those of his old adversary. Reality is reduced to a simple matter of 'us' and 'them'. We have in recent years stepped back from the brink of all out nuclear war. The minute hand is nowhere near midnight but humankind is still capable of creating it's own apocalypse, it's own Armageddon and passing the debacle on to God. If the hysteria of facile American fundamentalism is allowed to one day become a self fullfilling prophesy adopted or embraced as high up as the White House heaven help us all.
unclebruce
PS: Rex is this a fair assessment of American fundamentalism? I remmember you posting something along the lines of you promise keepers saving the decent American folk from the rest of us
or something.
PSS: I know this was long but now I've said all I ever wanted to say on a JW discussion board. OK, I'm a 'matress' poster, just stuff me.
* Why do soapbox preachers have a bent for doing thier self flagellating in red light districts at night?
**"Our Israelite Origin" page 97.
***During the ensuing 140 years this assertion of supremacy was to be eagerly embrased by Afrikaans settlers in South Africa. It became a major cornerstone of apartheid.