Christianity

Fred Allebach  3/06 Pinacate volcanic area, Mexico

The history of Christianity is in many ways a travesty. Horrific things have been done in the name of Christ: the Inquisition, the Crusades, the conquest of the New World, intolerance and violence against Protestants and this isn’t all.

Any particular Christian cannot disown this history. Any Christian today is a branch on the trunk of this tree. There is no escaping the violent, intolerant past and present of Christianity.

Part of the root of the problem which causes the intolerance and violence, is something that is shared with all religions; this is what I call the “holier than thou complex”. All of the rest are deluded instead of us. We are the insiders with the REAL TRUTH. We know what God wants and others do not. You see this so much, in so many ways, in so many contexts, that it must be a universal phenomenon.

You have Christians of all sorts who stake out moral high ground against other religions, other Christian denominations, other political parties, other sexual preferences, against “science” and evolution etc. This is all undertaken zealously in spite of Christ’s actual admonishment to love others as you love yourself; the Golden Rule has become forgotten in a fog of self-righteousness.

People, Christians and otherwise, seem to have a need to own the truth and also to make a negative comparison in order to emphasize the ownership of that truth. This process of staking out the perceived high ground is the same for all; it has been explained well by Eric Hoffer in The True Believer, by Jane Goodall describing insider/ outsider dynamics of chimps and by Elaine Pagels describing the propensity of people to vilify of “strangers”. It seems to me that a basic part of Christ’s message was to encourage people to go beyond this parochial way of behaving. But people can’t seem to help themselves.

I have a proposition. IF the world is just messy and people will always do what they want and are always able to justify anything and no one ever changes any belief until they arrive at it themselves, THEN a lot of the angst and pissing and moaning among Quakers about injustice, Republicans etc. results in a feeling of having to DO something, to demonstrate to these heretics what the real true way is. The problem then is that people become condemned to living in a world of DOING rather than BEING. It becomes a superficial challenge. To want to have to change everything because it doesn’t fit your model of morality, right and wrong, condemns you to never having any peace for yourself. The best you can do is to be righteous.

With the above approach you must work to change exterior architecture in the world and not on developing any internal sense of peace with the way things are.  So I guess the basic proposition here is: can things be OK as they are, given that we don’t seem to be able to change much or must we constantly strive to change a world we find not to our liking? The following just kind of rolled off my pen in the Pinacate area of Mexico.

1.  People always do what they want regardless of rules or laws or other people’s morality.

2.  People don’t change their behavior until they themselves are ready. Thus it is futile to try and convert people or to manipulate them, as they will resist at every step.

3.  People believe what they do regardless of any definitive proof or justification. Belief does not hinge on facts. There are no facts, only beliefs. In the absence of any definitive anything, people fill that vacuum with whatever pleases them. For example, with questions regarding when the New World was populated by people, or about global warming, or the Out of Africa Theory of human evolution, or about the truth of astrology, Christianity or Buddhism, there are no unequivocal, undisputable answers and therefore, people just believe what they want to anyway. So, you can’t convince anybody of anything, as there is no recourse to facts; this just becomes an issue of volume. 

4.  If people don’t respond to any external efforts to control and guide their thoughts and behavior, it is of no use top try and change the world; that only makes someone feel righteous in and of themselves.

5.  As time passes and climate changes, whole ecosystems and species pass and become extinct. There are bigger wheels turning than human affairs.

6.  To accept the world and human affairs as they are, big, messy, out of control, changing on its own time, is to open up a path to inner peace, as you give up the struggle to try and change what is fundamentally unchangeable.

7.  It is human nature itself that people have problems with, and to try and change the disease with more of the same just doesn’t work. It will be a slow haul, as people will maybe wake up or not. A lot of “shoulda, shoulda, shoulda”, does a guy no good because people cannot be expected to hew to other ways of being other than their own.

8.  This all then may open up more avenues to BEING rather than DOING, but this then puts me back a few squares in my arguments by making a negative comparison to emphasize my truth.  The whole emphasis on being, here, is to accept human nature and people as they are; why fight an unwinnable battle?

9.  The world has always been going to hell in a hand basket, and pining away for some good old days is par for the course. People have always appealed to some utopia or idealistic form of human nature, the halcyon days and then made the negative comparison on the way things are today. Why not give up the sour grapes? The natural world is nothing but one big tragedy of creatures eating each other to survive, or it is just the way things are and have to be

Here in the Gran Desierto de Altar, there is peace and tranquility no matter if ironwoods are gone or if the loess soil is blowing away, in this NOW, all is OK and as it should be. The wheels that are turning are way larger than I can ever change.