The Main Street of Mendocino.
A patch of lilies between the main street of Mendocino and the bluff above the mouth of the Big River.
Big River before it flows under the bridge at Mendocino and into the Ocean.
The Boat Harbor on the Noyo River at Fort Bragg.
Noyo Harbor at Fort Bragg
Noyo Harbor at Fort Bragg.
The Pudding Creek railroad bridge at Fort Bragg.Journal Entry for January 29
If I hadn’t been there myself, felt the powerful need to belong to the faith community which was spiritual home to many of my friends and family, I might have a hard time believing fundamentalists in any religious tradition can honestly believe what they say they believe. Simple faith, unexamined and unchallenged by reason, comforts and reassures those who are willing to perform rituals as substitutes for critical thought. We may believe the worshipers at prayer in a church will not magically change the world around them, but it would be a mistake to think their experience is somehow fake with no basis in reality. It would be a mistake to believe they have no effect on the world. The history of mankind going right back to the very edge of prehistory is a story laced with religious fervor. Some of the greatest good done in the world has been accomplished in the name of religion. It must be acknowledged also that some of the grossest evils recorded in our history were prompted by religion. It is sad but true that religious fundamentalists are the direct cause of much of the pain and sorrow afflicting people all over the world. It is also sad but true that religious fundamentalism morphs easily from religion to politics. Power brokers around the world recognize that if they can convince people that God is on their side, they can persuade them to believe in the rightness (and righteousness) of criminal activity. From the Crusades in the Middle Ages to present-day Islamic Jihadist movements, the cry has been, “God wants us to eliminate HIS enemies,” and conveniently God’s enemies are the same ones who are the enemies of religious leaders. When the suicide bomber straps explosives onto his body and blows himself up in a crowded marketplace, his simple faith and belief in the rightness of his actions are real. He has been persuaded that he is doing God’s work. We may consider him and his faith and belief to be ridiculous, even obscene; but it would be a mistake to ridicule him or his religion. Scott Roeder obviously believed he was doing the right thing when he killed Dr. George Tiller to “save babies. He honestly believed he was doing what God wanted him to do. The suicide bomber’s belief is real and Scott Roeder’s belief is real. Their reality affects my reality if it changes the world in which they and I live and die.
Fundamentalist Mormons, fundamentalist Baptists and other fundamentalist Christians, fundamentalist Jews and fundamentalist Muslims order their lives around ideas which they consider to be basic to their faith and to their relationship with God. Fundamentalists live in a world where the rightness or wrongness of every idea and every behavior has been established already, so there is never any need to consider nuances and subtleties. They believe God has ordered the world in a certain, fixed way; and their responsibility is to know what that way is and to conform to it and to insist that the rest of the world conform to it. They usually accept the idea that God has appointed someone to be their leader who will keep them informed of God’s wishes for them. Their Supreme Ayatollah, their Pope, their pastor will tell them what God wants them to do. Fundamentalists live in a black or white, yes or no, do it or don’t do it world. They rely on texts such as the Bible or the Koran or on representatives of their religion, their preachers and mullahs, to interpret the holy texts for them so they can know what God wants them to do. If the Mullah says God wants martyrs, fundamentalist Muslims who long to please God and his representatives step up. If the preacher tells them that God wants them to go to the polls and to vote a certain way, they go and vote. If God wants them to hate, they hate. If God wants them to kill, they kill. If the religious leader, as the Ayatollah did in Iran yesterday, wants to get rid of political enemies, he kills them and says they had to die because they offended God.
I am not by nature a patient man. I am impulsive and sometimes react before I think. I confess that I react badly to people carrying signs that say “God Hates Fags.” I don’t like racists. I don’t like bigots. When I was a young man traveling in Mississippi and Louisiana, I reacted badly and without patience to “colored” and “white” signs on drinking fountains and public waiting rooms and restrooms. I refused to eat in cafes with the “whites only” or “colored served at the back door” signs in the front window, but my responses sometime moved beyond disgust. I confess that when I came face to face with bigots whose behavior was borne more of evil than ignorance, I sometimes allowed my disgust to become malice. I shouted slogans and accusations meant to humiliate and wound them. I wanted to do them harm. I was a danger to them and to myself.
I am older now and am supposed to be wiser than I was fifty years ago when I travelled through the segregated south. But when I look around me in church and see mostly white, old people, people who look a lot like me, and when i remember that my name is on the membership role of a United Methodist Church that refuses to allow GLBT members to marry whomever they love and withholds the blessings of the church on their relationship, I am reminded that we have not come very far from the segregated south. I remember that I am a citizen of the State of California where a slim majority of voters was persuaded for religious reasons to withdraw the right to marry from GLBT persons.
This journal writing is not wrapping up easily. I find myself almost embarrassed at having made the case that religion is perhaps our biggest problem. Religion continues to be at war with science and progressive education. Fundamentalist religious leaders generally dismiss scientific reports about global warming by saying “This is God’s world and he will take care of it in his own way.” Fundamentalist Christian leader Pat Robertson said the Devil caused the earthquake in Haiti. Osama Bin Ladin has been successful in persuading a tiny but dangerous fundamentalist Islamic minority that he speaks for God. The possibility is very real that right-wing political strategists are working now in America with fundamentalist Christian leaders to get them to lead their flocks to the polls in November “to do God’s will” in HIS favorite, HIS chosen country. Their highest goal is to get President Obama out of office, and they will devise many ways of suggesting to their religious base that it is God's will to vote Democrats out of office this year to prepare the way for reinstalling a God-fearing American like Ex-governor Sarah Palin or perhaps Cosmopolitan Centerfold Scott Brown in the White House two years from November... or maybe they can persuade Pat Robertson or Anita Bryant to step up to the plate. Where is she these days anyway?
1 comment:
Jerral, It has always been and always will be disheartening to run into someone who is so fearful that he would close his mind and heart into a frighteningly narrow and darkened worldview. "Mirror, mirror, on the wall...who is fairest of them all?" Fundamentalists of any type, class, clime, race, or culture, know the answer. It doesn't matter if Christian, Moslem, Jew, a fundamentalist is a breed of humankind that is vengeful, homocidal, and in the case of the man you met, sociopathic. But quite frankly, they are not the ones who frighten me the most. For me it's the people who are privileged and as long as nothing interferes with their sense of privilege they don't tend to give a damn. They don't vote for anything progressive, only what preserves their state of mind and lifestyle. They are not compassionate, unless it's a fifty/fifty, fundraiser dinner, raffle with a small percentage going to a charity that touches an immediate family member or gives a serious tax benefit. You know the story all too well. You've met them in all the schools you've administered and the churches you've attended. If you want to give yourself a spiritual boost go on line and search Ginghamsburg church. The pastor is Mike Slaughter and is an amazing man leading an amazing congregation. There is hope, a reformation movement growing within the United Methodist Church. Just spent 3 days with Mike and had the opportunity to spend time with him in October. He was in the Sudan in November where his congregation has had a miraculous influence. He's also a part of Not For Sale, the abolitionist movement trying to end human trafficking with whom I've been associated for the last 2 1/2 years. There always has been and always will be jerks, complete jerks, who hold a bible in one hand and a gun in the other. But, dear friend, we're the ones who count, not they. There needs to be more of us and we're very poor at increasing our forces and our presence. There needs to be more of us... Peace and everything that goes along with love... Bob
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