GODS
I just had another sudden realization which reveals to me how slowly I think and how blind I am to the obvious. It makes me think that I might be the last person for this to dawn on. It is a little like Trump saying “nobody knew . . .” about something everyone knew and he was the last to find out.
What has dawned on me is the realization that belief in the sacred and the presence of the divine is embedded so deep in human beings that when our belief in one god or another is threatened we are willing to do most anything to defend our identity and the identity of our tribe.
This slow realization comes from realizing that wars over religion and persecution of people with different religious beliefs seems to be everywhere in the world. These tensions are certainly here in the United States where fundamentalist Christians feel threatened by secularism, getting along without any god at all. But it is true all over the Middle East with Sunni and Shiite Moslems unable to get along, in India with Hindus and Moslems not able to get along, in Sri Lanka with even tolerant Buddhists not able to get along with other religions. In Ireland and all over Europe it was Catholics and Protestants who were unable to get along. And the Protestants themselves were divided with mainline Protestants unable to tolerate those Protestants who split off too far. The Christian crusades are an example. The Christianizing of the South America is an example. My missionary parents, although agricultural missionaries not converting anyone, were an example.
The strange things is that Moslems and Hindus in India in any locality look just alike, speak the same language, eat the same food and yet have attacked each other at times brutally over gods that no one has seen and people know only through books and mythological stories. In the United States Jews and Catholics and Protestants are alike in every way except for the invisible gods that they worship. Hitler was determined to exterminate the Jews without being able to determine who was Jewish except for written records. And in India caste differences based on invisible ritual purity are a religious distinction that has divided classes of people from the time of the arrival of the Aryans in South Asia.
So how did this invisible religious identity gain such power? And how is it that one’s religious identity is almost our most powerful identity? How am I to figure this out? I have other tribal identities as well including race, gender, social class, education, language (even dialect “ain’t”). But my religious identity seems to be as strong any other identity. And yet it is a firm belief in a god, or a belief that there is no god, which is almost the same thing, that gets my hackles up when I am confronted by someone else’s belief.
Because I am convinced by scientists that the slow accidental process of evolution is how we became human I can only assume that there is some deep sense of the sacred embedded in our DNA that makes whatever religion we are born into fundamental to our identity. Not only that but it seems that in the United States this belief is much more significant to people who grew up believing in traditional American values, often rural people, then it is to those of us with liberal secular values. I am not willing to defend my faith in evolution with my life, but some fundamental Christians are willing to defend their faith in the Bible with their guns.
I have no idea how faith in the sacred and mythological stories became so important. But a large part of our polarity, and a great deal of violence, here and all around the world, is caused by arguments over which god, or which interpretation of god or the gods (Hinduism is said to have 330 million gods) is real. While this is not real by any scientific test, it is real in the sense of being at the center of our identity. Religion is somehow for many, many people, the belief that makes people feel most alive and impels them through life while at the same time causing tremendous friction.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 