The two craziest types of people are the hard-core religious
fanatics and the knee-jerk anti-religious fanatics.
And when I say “crazy,” I mean it in the literal sense. It’s a well-known and poorly-kept secret that
religions tend to attract people who are clinically insane. A lot of hard-core adherents are either clinically
insane or hanging by a thread. I’ve seen
it personally. I have a family member
who was a hard-core religious adherent, and clinically insane. I’ve been to temples where someone goes on
and on about Buddha without any awareness of his or her audience.
Strapping a bomb to yourself and blowing up unarmed people,
or shooting them, or firing rockets at them, is clinically crazy. Supporting that behavior is also clinically
crazy. So if the people chanting BS
about how Hamas is right seem like lunatics, it’s because they are.
Religion has the same problem as society – it has a serious
mental illness problem.
The other side of that is the knee-jerk “anti-religion”
people who can’t stop themselves from going off the rails every time religion
is mentioned. It’s the same clinical
insanity manifesting itself. When I was at
school in Berkeley, it wasn’t unusual to see the bat-shit-crazy bums arguing
over religion, both the adherents and opponents, shouting crazy talk at each
other. We had a guy in my neighborhood
who spent his whole life homeless, driving a van plastered with “Jesus” all
over it. In both cases, people treated
the mentally ill as objects of amusement and cheered on their mental
illness. (I’m going to withhold my rant
about what I think of those bastards who celebrated people exhibiting serious
mental illness, but let’s just say there are a lot of people who desperately
need God in their lives.)
Leaving aside the mental illness, which is disturbing in and
of itself for a lot of reasons, I find the knee-jerk “anti-religion” people to
be particularly annoying. The annoying lack
of self-awareness in how they’re exhibiting the same negative traits they claim
to see in religious people. The
idiotic-while-acting-superior-and-rational jackassery of cherry-picking of
facts and theology. But the most
annoying feature is the damage they do to innocent people’s relationship with
God.
What do I mean by a lack of self-awareness? When you boil it down to the essence, you
find the anti-religion people aren’t really concerned about where religion
fails and helping it to be better and more aligned with the true nature of
God. They simply want to present *just
enough* evidence to make themselves feel comfortable in rejecting religion, but
not go deep enough in their inquiry to allow for the possibility of anything other
than a knee-jerk reaction.
They experienced a bad reaction to religion – usually a
family issue but sometimes other people did something wrong to them or someone
they care about. And instead of dealing
directly with the issue, they’ve projected their wounds onto religion –
religion is the enemy, so now I don’t have to do the work of healing this messy
wound.
Or they’ve just made a lot of mistakes and instead of facing
and owing up to them, they’d rather get rid of the whole “right-wrong” thing
and imagine that disavowing religion can be their reset button.
They’re entire energy is based on some version of a deep-seeded
belief that they’ve hopelessly failed and, were religion to be accurate, they’d
be going to hell. So the entire
philosophy of anti-religious people comes down to shame and limiting beliefs
about themselves. (And a false
interpretation of the religions they believe they’ve hopelessly crossed.)
And I’m saying this with compassion and love. Most people exhibiting mental illness are
hurting. Some aren’t – a lot of
clinically insane people attest that their insanity is euphoric and like a
drug, but the people exhibiting these intense negative feelings toward a loving
God that gave them life, they’re really hurting inside. And they don’t see a way out.
But compassion for suffering doesn’t change the fact that
knee-jerk anti-religious expression is an expression of mental illness, not an
inspired religious viewpoint.
I’m also not minimizing the damage people do to others in the
name of God. There are a lot of abusive
people who misuse God (especially the “going to Hell” part) to do some really
horrible things to other people. The
Crusades, the Inquisition, many wars, but also on an individual level – lots of
child abuse, spousal abuse, and generally shitty interpersonal behavior (up to
and including murder) is committed in the name of God.
As I said, the mentally ill are attracted to religion, and
for too many it’s a way to avoid actually dealing with the issues. Are you hearing voices or hearing the voice
of God? Are you speaking jibberish or
speaking in tongues? Are you autistic or
an enthusiastic proselytizer? Are you
abusive and treating people as less than human or being a loyal follower of the
literal word of God? It’s easy to hide
your neurosis, psychosis, or straight-up evil behavior, behind a religious facade,
and nobody can question you because “freedom of religion.”
And I agree that healthy religions need to allow space for
this conversation. Because the
overwhelming majority of religious people really and truly are good people who
want to be better people. And they’re as
appalled with these abuses as I am, and as those who imagine religion is out to
hurt them believe. More and more
religions are opening up to this important process and working to clean out the
festering infections in their families.
This is difficult but good and will make us all better people.
And I get that this is difficult and some aren’t there
yet. We want to give some space for
people to find their way through the healing process. Some try to find
alternate religions, or make their own.
The whole “I am God, you are God, everyone’s a god-god,” “divinity in
everything” BS is part of that “choose your own religion” mentality. It’s another flavor of rejectionism: If I can’t succeed by following
an established religion, I’ll make my own where I’m guaranteed to win.
And I know I’ll get the questions – well weren’t all
religions created by “crazy people” who downloaded some stuff that turned out
to be aligned with God? Well, yeah,
probably. Not all the stuff that comes
out of crazy people is nonsense. Some is
pretty inspired stuff.
So what’s the difference between your drug-induced “enlightenment”
in the jungle and Buddha’s Sutras? Who am
I to say that you aren’t adding the next Sutra to the canon instead of spouting
off crazy bullshit? Well, first of all,
I’m not dismissive of every insight.
Some I test as accurate, at least in part, but many don’t hold up to
that test. And by many I mean 99.99+% of
the “insight” out there.
And within that very large percentage of BS religious
insight, there are big patterns. One of which
is that the “insight” conveniently aligns to the, well, convenience, of the
person conveying the insight. That’s a
big red flag. The ones God has chosen to
convey his message have to suffer tremendously, and usually the message is one
the person really doesn’t want to hear.
At best the message is neutral.
But in the huge majority of cases, God wants the messenger to throw away
their entire life up to that point, embrace a life of poverty as a social outcast,
and likely be murdered by an angry mob or die in abject poverty. So if God is telling you “you’re God, keep fucking
around, doing drugs and playing in the desert and giving crappy spiritual
advice to people who pay you,” …yeah… no… no.
No. That ain’t God talking.
God isn’t going to waste his time telling you “you’re doing
just great.” He *might* encourage you to
keep going through really bad shit, but why would God go out of his way to say “You’re
awesome, Dave! Rock on, dude!”
That’s not to say you aren’t awesome and don’t rock on, but
don’t confuse yourself and spiritually vulnerable people by claiming it’s the
voice of God saying that. Positive
self-talk is important and a healthy self-esteem, but don’t go crazy.
And if this triggers you – “Are you saying that I’m crazy?!?
You’re not qualified to say that!!! You don’t know me!!!!” Consider that trigger
is yet another of probably many, many signals you’ve been getting that you need
to attend to your mental health and seek professional help.
Because seeing a religious statement doesn’t trigger an
emotionally healthy person to respond.
And challenges to one’s mental health also don’t trigger a response in
people who are emotionally healthy. People
who are not mentally ill can handle opposing viewpoints or challenging
questions and don’t feel compelled to react or respond to everything. And if the thought of religion compels you to
create an alternate fantasy religion to escape, well, if it walks like a duck
and quacks like a duck, it isn’t an alligator.
And the damage you’re doing to vulnerable people is real and uncalled
for, you need to stop that shit.
