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March 21, 2006

Understanding Fundamentalism and the Coming Apocalypse

While engaging in my usual daily Internet “research” (also known as surfing), looking for answers to the questions that incessantly pop into my mind all day long, I stumbled across this Web site. What I found was a veritable treasure trove of intellectually stimulating articles on a wide range of topics, including many on my own favorite topics – politics and religion.

In this article, Heather Gray begins with some interesting insights into the origins of Christianity and how learning about it affected her. She then moves into sharing her first-hand observations of the dark side of the Christian influence in the world throughout the past few decades. Reading it, one can't help but wonder how a belief system founded on the loving teachings of Jesus could engage in such cruelty and exploitation – a question I have struggled with for many years. She touches on it, but seems to still be searching for the answer to that question.

I found the answer here in an article by Walter Davis. The problem is fundamentalism and the psychological neurosis it represents. Dr. Davis explains it eloquently:

"Literalism is the linchpin of fundamentalism... It offers the mind a way to shut down... It thereby exorcises the greatest fear: interpretation and its inevitable result, the conflict of interpretations and with it the terror of being forever bereft of dogmatic certitudes."

"Literalism is the first line of defense of a mind that wants to put itself to sleep. ... It is the great protection against a world teeming with complexities. Literalism offers a way out, a way to keep the mind fixed and fixated at its first condition."

Sounds like a lot of right-wing ideologues I know. Dr. Davis continues:

"There is a single text, the Holy Bible. It contains clear, simple direct messages - proclamations – that establish the Truth once and for all. All of life's questions and contingencies are resolved by statements that are beyond change and interpretation. ... one need only point to the appropriate passage and 'Pouf' all doubt and ambiguity about what one should think, believe, or desire on a given situation vanishes. One need no longer wrack one's brain or one's heart or live in the terror that the world exceeds one's grasp."

So how does literalism/fundamentalism result in the evil that Christians too often inflict upon the world? Dr. Davis writes that from childhood, Christians are taught

"the correct posture: the assumption of absolute certitude in which there is and can be no conflict of the heart with what it is told to believe, no possibility of wondering about a God who is capable of the titanic condemnation" of hell. "Literalism protects the heart from everything, even its own deepest urgings."

Dr. Davis was kind enough to respond to my personal email and he tells me the article is part of a book that now available on Amazon.com: Death's Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche since 9-11.

Which segues nicely into the next article I found by Michael Ortiz Hill. It provides a very lucid explanation for the current growing Christian obsession with apocalyptic prophecies and the imminency of the "End Times." In the post-9-11 era, he writes, apocalyptic visions

“bear a ritual intelligence consistent with rites of initiation that are hundreds of thousands of years old. As the soul approaches the incomprehensible it is cut away from the community and "common" sense. Stripped bare it suffers the raw truth of the moment, its conundrums and heart break and witnesses the death and rebirth of the self/planet. The images are contemporary but my initiations as a tribal healer in Africa confirmed that the ritual grammar is ancient: Separation, vision, return. If history is a nightmare the apocalyptic initiation is about waking up from its self-destructive imperative."

About the Christian/Muslim conflict raging across the globe today, Ortiz Hill writes:

“Two honorable and sometimes radiant traditions are led towards the abyss by their lunatic fringe: Each driven to conquer the world for God, each bearing the sword of unassailable righteousness.”

"Cluster bombs dropped into a suburb of Baghdad will deliver the unbelievers to damnation but if the pilot is by chance downed not a small portion of his people are assured that he will rise to heaven. The Jihadi whispering "Allah Akbar" as the plane strikes the World Trade Center knows exactly where he's going on the other side of death and exactly where he delivers his not-quite-human victims. One commandment forever in stone whatever the bloodshed: Thou shall not for a moment recognize any resemblance between thyself and thine enemy."

"Beware the fascination with what is larger than life, this vulgar Passion Play that would crucify the world."

That is a statement that sends chills down my spine.

Posted by Becky at March 21, 2006 07:26 PM