After the 2000 elections, I blamed the Christians. I didn’t bother to sort out Christians by type or shade of belief—all I saw was the rigid, authoritarian judgmental types who had a scary self-righteousness, people who were sure they knew right from wrong and were qualified to push their judgments onto the rest of us. I was pretty sure that this brand of belief was rapidly leading us down the road to a fascist theocracy and I started talking about leaving the country for good. However now I am starting to see that the fundamentalist types are a symptom, maybe not the cause of a larger problem we have in this society.
I was a consecrated boy myself, spent many pre-teen hours on my knees, passed out in church a couple of times from obeying Father Crockett’s stricture that it was very bad to have eaten anything in the morning before you took communion. I can still remember what the bishop’s oily finger felt like tracing that cross on my forehead at confirmation. Oh boy, I thought, I’ll go to heaven for sure now, this is serious stuff— it definitely made my day that Sunday in the spring of 1963.
So with my Christian creds intact, I felt I had been there done that and I resented these people being concerned about my spiritual well-being and having the temerity to bug me about it. To bug me AND to reserve for themselves the right to judge whether I was on the winning side or not. People like that STILL bug me. But to save myself time spent thinking about it, for years I extended my sense of irritation to all religious types and concentrated on my handwork and the mastery of interaction between tool and object, a wordless process that, although quite spiritual, carries it’s own definition of good and bad that has nothing to do with anything written in anyone’s Book.
It has struck me in the past few years, though, that people of firm religious convictions often are calmer than those without. Easily explainable I suppose—they don’t have to worry about figuring it all out, they already Know. I guess I’d like to extend a truce to the Christians; having any thoughts whatsoever about the Big Things in the universe and the hereafter is better than just living your take-all-you-can-get-and-run consumerist American life while worshiping 7 days a week at the Temple of Walmart.
BUT—I still have some basic quibbles with what growing up in this Western, more than nominally Christian society has done to me and most of the rest of those around me and those quibbles go pretty much to the root of the whole Judaeo-Christian tradition.
When I was in college being prepped to study in Japan, they made us read Ruth Benedict and Sir George Sansome and other early 20th century analysts with a missionary bent who were at that time the only Westerners who had written at all perceptively about Asia. These people drove home the point that the West was a “sin” based society while Japan and other Asian societies were “guilt” based. OK, whatever we said and proceeded off down the runway to live in Japan for a year and be normal college students—we didn’t give a rat’s ass whether we should feel guilty or sinful while we were following the hedonistic instincts of healthy 20-somethings. But 35 years later, I think there really is something to this and it’s more about judging versus non-judging than sin vs. guilt. It seems to me that there is something uniquely Judaeo-Christian about making an absolute clear-cut distinction between right and wrong. Note that I am not saying “Good and Bad”, a choice which even paramecium make, but am looking askance at the concept of sin—Right vs. Wrong (spoken in a stern, deep quavering voice like the bishop used to use.)
(TO BE CONTINUED. . .)
I was a consecrated boy myself, spent many pre-teen hours on my knees, passed out in church a couple of times from obeying Father Crockett’s stricture that it was very bad to have eaten anything in the morning before you took communion. I can still remember what the bishop’s oily finger felt like tracing that cross on my forehead at confirmation. Oh boy, I thought, I’ll go to heaven for sure now, this is serious stuff— it definitely made my day that Sunday in the spring of 1963.
So with my Christian creds intact, I felt I had been there done that and I resented these people being concerned about my spiritual well-being and having the temerity to bug me about it. To bug me AND to reserve for themselves the right to judge whether I was on the winning side or not. People like that STILL bug me. But to save myself time spent thinking about it, for years I extended my sense of irritation to all religious types and concentrated on my handwork and the mastery of interaction between tool and object, a wordless process that, although quite spiritual, carries it’s own definition of good and bad that has nothing to do with anything written in anyone’s Book.
It has struck me in the past few years, though, that people of firm religious convictions often are calmer than those without. Easily explainable I suppose—they don’t have to worry about figuring it all out, they already Know. I guess I’d like to extend a truce to the Christians; having any thoughts whatsoever about the Big Things in the universe and the hereafter is better than just living your take-all-you-can-get-and-run consumerist American life while worshiping 7 days a week at the Temple of Walmart.
BUT—I still have some basic quibbles with what growing up in this Western, more than nominally Christian society has done to me and most of the rest of those around me and those quibbles go pretty much to the root of the whole Judaeo-Christian tradition.
When I was in college being prepped to study in Japan, they made us read Ruth Benedict and Sir George Sansome and other early 20th century analysts with a missionary bent who were at that time the only Westerners who had written at all perceptively about Asia. These people drove home the point that the West was a “sin” based society while Japan and other Asian societies were “guilt” based. OK, whatever we said and proceeded off down the runway to live in Japan for a year and be normal college students—we didn’t give a rat’s ass whether we should feel guilty or sinful while we were following the hedonistic instincts of healthy 20-somethings. But 35 years later, I think there really is something to this and it’s more about judging versus non-judging than sin vs. guilt. It seems to me that there is something uniquely Judaeo-Christian about making an absolute clear-cut distinction between right and wrong. Note that I am not saying “Good and Bad”, a choice which even paramecium make, but am looking askance at the concept of sin—Right vs. Wrong (spoken in a stern, deep quavering voice like the bishop used to use.)
(TO BE CONTINUED. . .)
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