What is so wonderful about religion is the way its followers can just make a declaration, based on nothing but nonsense, and then it becomes a strong and noble belief backed with the full approval of an invisible god. Nationalistic Christians believe the US is their God-given holy land, Muslims deny that Jews never had a homeland prior to 1948, and Jews say that God led them out of Egypt and to their promised land — all beliefs based on the flimsy thing we call thought. All we have to go on is ideas, beliefs, hopes, and dreams. Can you imagine if we applied this faulty thinking to everyday life? Society would quickly disintegrate into absolute chaos if people just walked into a restaurant and sat wherever they wanted, or if they drove on both sides of the highway because they believed God said it was okay, or if they were compelled to invade other people’s homes because God approves of such behavior. Yet on a grand scale belief is somehow a reasonable excuse for invading countries, killing “the other,” oppressing nonbelievers, stealing the resources of other nations, murdering babies with bombs, banning and burning books, and so on — all based on a frivolous and outlandish idea. Is there any wonder why our society is unravelling? The issues we face are no different from those issues in the time of Jesus and which he was railing against.
Having said all of this, sadly, it’s not only the insanity of Christian nationalism that is so destructive. Society is rife with a number of destructive factions whose actions and words are based only on beliefs not limited to the belief in a god that is in their corner. Human beings are duplicitous and they create anchors not only for justifying their acts to society at large, but also to themselves personally.
Human beings are experts at taking complex issues and paring them down into talking points and actionable causes. They make arguments in ignorance of how things really are and condemn the whole due to actions of the few. What is more egregious is that they will not take a look at their own selves, their own emotions, their own actions, their own trauma, their own hidden desires, and so forth. Pointing the finger has become some form of therapy and we can see this behavior as far back into history as we want to go. But nowadays we have so many more avenues to vent our ill-supported demands and objections. Human beings are generalizers and even when they fight among their own party/group members, they still manage to keep their attention on their greater agenda of fighting against “the other.”
On another front… The so-called concerns of the Christian right are absurd and hypocritical at best. This has been argued ad nauseam, but because facts do not play a real role in effecting meaningful change, the absurd agendas continue in full force: Life is so valuable and important so that abortions are a sin, yet murdering and maiming abortion doctors, nurses, and staff is a righteous act. Jesus said we should all love one another, yet hate for “the other” is a keystone of the Christian right agenda.
We could go on and on with examples, but in the end any intelligent, reasonable, and compassionate person may ask where can we go from here and how can we turn the ship around? This is the real plague of human interactions on all levels and the question of what to do about our interpersonal problems has been with us since the beginning of social groups gathering in caves. The solution is to begin with ourselves, but this will never occur en masse, so all we are left with are bandaids and dreams of utopias, messiahs, and saviors.
