Let’s talk about God. Or god. Or gods. Or Gods.
How humans use gods to harm one another
Hey folks – let’s talk about god.
Okay, okay, before you all start rolling your eyes and worrying that I’m gonna wax metaphysical, I promise you, I’m not. I want to talk practicalities. Namely, I want to talk about why a god belief is a bad basis for adjudicating human interaction. You can’t wait, I know.
What do I mean by “adjudicating human interaction”? Well, on review, it’s an overly erudite way of saying using religion as a basis for governance and by religion I really mean religious dogma. Dogmatism is a locked system predicated on moral righteousness. The book (usually it’s from a book. If not a book, it’s from a crank or kook. Possibly a loon.) makes a claim, the believer accepts the claim because it’s in the book, the flock believes in the book, believes it is infallible, it is inspired by or written by the god that’s in the book and the book is therefore above critique. The book is the word, the word is god, the way is written. Religious dogmatism simplifies the world for believers. It engenders certitude. And certitude in turn shuts down rational thought. Once a person has become swaddled in the certainty of their dogma, morality becomes a weapon.
And when morality is a weapon it tends to get weaponized as in used to define law and custom. Consider the abortion debate. The dogmatic Christian in America believes abortion is murder and therefore cannot be moral. (We can discuss the just war doctrine another time…and capital punishment for that matter.) But there are clearly circumstances in which that moral binary (to carry or not to carry a fetus to term) is clearly insufficient to address real world situations. For instance, when the condition of the fetus threatens the life of the mother. Not treating the mother with an available procedure that ensures her survival is, if not murder, an allowance of a preventable death. And, if the fetus is not yet viable – meaning it can’t survive without the mother – it could mean the loss of two lives. So from a morally righteous position that says abortion is always wrong because it is murder, you could very easily get two deaths instead of one. Is that moral? Is it ethical?
Dogmatism, in its goal of simplifying an incredibly complicated universe, puts a choke collar on our ability to act morally and ethically. Rather than providing a methodology to tease out what is right and wrong, it flattens the moral landscape into right and wrong itself. We move from a color spectrum into a world of black and white. This is the world that enables Hamas fighters to kill families in their homes. They are so morally righteous, so ensconced in their belief, that performing acts of horror becomes a celebration of God’s will. The same bad thinking has infected the Israeli settlers in the West Bank who are doing similar acts of violence to their Palestinian neighbors. And irony of ironies, both groups pray to the same damned God - the God of Abraham. Nothing illuminates the insufficiency of religious dogma as a moral code like two groups of people killing one another in the name of the same deity.
Before you atheists and agnostics and ethereal spiritualists get too content with your moral superiority, let’s remember that dogmatism doesn’t require a god belief. The communist revolution in Russia and the rise of the authoritarian Soviet state was a prime example of dogmatism. The same for American Manifest Destiny and the genocide of indigenious communities in North America. When we believe in the righteousness of our cause, we are prone to making egregious moral mistakes, regardless of the actual righteousness of our cause. You can be right and act wrong. Drink that in.
My point: Beware your moral righteousness. Seek belief systems that don’t hinge on us/them paradigms. Explore alternate perspectives. Stay curious. Stay compassionate. Stay kind.
Internet of the day
The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly
The Good:
I have a weird affection for watching videos of people working, so long as the work involves some sort of clear, visual transformation. Whether it’s lawncare, shelter building, car and tool restorations, metalsmithing and more, I just dig watching people who are good at what they do do what they’re good at doing. My oddest find so far is Post10 who drives around the upper New England and clears clogged culverts. He LOVES it. I LOVE that he LOVES it. He’s a weirdo. So am I. Enjoy!
Wordle and group chat. I play wordle. So do a number of my family members - cousins and aunts and uncles. And we’re in a wordle chat, sharing our daily successes and occasional mishaps. It’s a lovely little way to stay connected to people I love. I have another long time friend and we share our victories anytime we achieve Queen Bee in the NYT’s Spelling Bee. Again, a lovely way to stay quietly in each other’s lives, even if she’s way way way way more successful at Queen Beeing than I am.
I visited my maternal grandparents’ graves in Portland, Oregon this past weekend. It’s good to remember where we came from. Grounding. Affirming. Moving.
The Bad:
Celebrity. I get tracking celebrity lives when they do something egregious or great or when they end (RIP Matthew Perry). But the industry of fame depresses me. Perhaps I’m too old and Gen X, but I preferred our culture when selling out was seen as a morally suspect choice rather than a life goal.
The New Apostolic Reformation, to which our new House Speaker purportedly subscribes is a movement within evangelical christianity that believes god is still appointing apostles. Why is this bad? Read back up about books vs. cranks. This movement is discarding the “good” book and going full crank. At least the bible has guardrails. Who knows what these folk will declare God is telling them to do.
The Ugly:
Looking for work is brain numbing, anxiety inducing, and overly easy to procrastinate on. Building out my portfolio and not enjoying it. No bueno.