Faith = Illness. Why I've had it with religious tolerance.

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Robert J. Berger" <rberger () ibd com>
Date: May 2, 2006 1:10:59 PM EDT
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>, Dewayne Hendricks  
<dewayne () warpspeed com>
Subject: Faith = Illness. Why I've had it with religious tolerance.

Faith = Illness.

Why I've had it with religious tolerance.

Douglas Rushkoff 4/30/2006 12:48:00 PM
http://www.rushkoff.com/2006/04/faith-illness-why-ive-had-it-with.php

<snip>

Okay, so let's get into this God game.

I think it's time to get serious about the role God plays in human
affairs, and evaluate whether it's appropriate to let everyone in on
the bad news: God doesn't exist, never did, and the closest thing
we'll ever see to God will emerge from our own collective efforts at
making meaning.

Maybe I'm just getting old, but I no longer see the real value in
being tolerant of other people's beliefs. Sure, when beliefs are
relegated to the realm of pure entertainment, they pose no real
danger. So, a kid believes U2 is really a supergroup on par with The
Beatles or The Who. That's *his* problem, and it doesn't really do a
lot of harm to anyone except those of us who still stop by MTV
occasionally to see what might be playing.

When religions are practiced, as they are by a majority of those in
developed nations, today, as a kind of nostalgic little ritual - a
community event or an excuse to get together and not work - it doesn't
really screw anything up too badly. But when they radically alter our
ability to contend with reality, cope with difference, or implement
the most basic ethical provisions, they must be stopped.

Like any other public health crisis, the belief in religion must now
be treated as a sickness. It is an epidemic, paralyzing our nation's
ability to behave in a rational way, and - given our weapons
capabilities - posing an increasingly grave threat to the rest of the
world.

Just look at the numbers. A FoxNews poll (no doubt inflating these
figures) claims that 92% of Americans say they believe in God, 85%
believe in heaven, and 71% believe in the Devil. (That's right - the
guy with horns and a tail who presides over hell. The DeNiro character
in Angel Heart, Pacino in Devils'Advocate and the one who tricks
people into signing contracts on Twilight Zone.) Given FoxNews
accuracy, we can cut these numbers in half, yet are still confronted
with a deeply frightening prospect: half the people amongst who we
walk and work every day believe some really fucked up shit. They've
taken the metaphors of the Bible or Dante's Inferno and gone ahead and
decided that these images and allegories are *real*.

Add to that the more reliable polls finding that 35% of Americans say
they are "born again" - a particularly modern phenomenon that came
only after the charlatan rabble-rousers during the Great Depression -
and you get a picture of a nation hoodwinked into a passive,
childlike, yet dogmatic relationship to the myths that were originally
written to sustain them, spur their motivation to social justice, and
encourage continuing evolution.

As I've always understood them, and as I try to convey them in my
comic book, the stories in the Bible are less significant because they
happened at some moment in history than because their underlying
dynamics seem to be happening in all moments. We are all Cain,
struggling with our feelings about a sibling who seems to be more
blessed than we are. We are always escaping the enslaved mentality of
Egypt and the idolatry we practiced there. We are all Mordechai,
bristling against the pressure to bow in subservience to our bosses.

But true believers don't have this freedom. Whether it's because they
need the Bible to prove a real estate claim in the Middle East,
because they don't know how to relate something that didn't really
happen, or because they require the threat of an angry super-being who
sees all in order behave like good children, true believers - what we
now call fundamentalists - are not in a position to appreciate the
truth and beauty of the Holy Scriptures. No, the multi-dimensional
document we call the Bible is not available to them because, for them,
all those stories have to be accepted as historical truth.

Forget the fact that this is pretty much impossible to do. The Bible
contradicts itself all over the place. There are even two different
creation stories! (One in which Eve is created at the same time as
Adam, and another where she is grown from his rib. And they're less
than a page apart.) Forget that the myths of the Bible had already
been understood as mythology by the pre-Biblical cultures from which
many of them came. And forget that the Bible comments on its own
stories, as stories, directly! On numerous occasions, the narration
asks its hearers whether they get the joke.

That's because, for the Torah's first hearers (Torah is the first five
books of the Bible), all those jokes really were jokes. They
understood that Jacob's sons weren't really the fathers of the Twelve
Tribes of Israel, but parodies - racist parodies, at that - of the
qualities that had come to be associated with each of these existing
groups. They understood that the "plagues" against Egypt were literary
desecrations of the Egyptian gods. (Blood desecrates the Nile, which
was a god. Locusts desecrate the corn, a god, and so on.)

That the Bible could be understood metaphorically helped people relate
to its "God" metaphorically, as well. It's not that God is some
character who really exists, but a way of relating to the events in
the world as they unfold. No one can grasp this, however, if they're
stuck believing.

So I think it's time those of us who have transcended this primitive
approach to collective storytelling to speak up. This liberation from
belief systems is precisely what the Bible is about. A people liberate
from the death of a creationist model of reality and go out into the
desert to write their own laws.

It's analogous to the story of America, in fact, where a bunch of
people leave religious oppression in order to write a Constitution as
an evolutionary document - something that, instead of being believed
in forever, is understood to be an ongoing process. A participatory
event.

Right now, America's true believers are locking down its laws along
with its Bible. They are fighting the science of evolution because it
accepts that things change over time - and such change is incompatible
with static, everlasting truths. They are doing to today's
progressives the very same thing that the Bible's Egyptians were doing
to the Israelites. And they're doing it in the name of a God who they
believe they'll meet when they die. This is the very mindset and
behavior the Bible was written to stop.

Perhaps the best way to kill their God, in fact, is to take charge of
the Bible. It is - in my own opinion as a media theorist - the
Greatest Story Ever Told, and deserving of our continued support and
analysis. For my part, I'm writing Testament, which I hope will bring
these stories - told both in their Biblical context and as a
near-future sci-fi fable - to people who might never have stumbled
across them before.

For others - especially our friends involved in the occult arts - I'd
hope they consider using some Bible imagery and characters in their
work and rituals. They're just as potent as anything in the
Mahabharata, and far more resonant with the Western popular culture in
which most of us actually grew up. For those of you looking for an
authentic tradition in which to base your art, music, or fiction,
consider the themes of revolution, universal justice and mind
expansion a they're depicted in allegories from Eden to Babel and
characters from Joseph to Jesus.

By appropriating these characters and metaphors as our own, we instill
them with the power they require to release the stranglehold that true
believers have over the myths built to help us face the truth,
instead. Their success in making the Bible seem like a sanctimonious
tome is just another testament to the deleterious effect of
surrendering one of the best books ever written about sacred magick to
people whose lives depend on ignoring the possibility of escape from
the nightmare of eternal bondage to a vengeful deity.

The more we can make its mythology relevant to our present, the more
easily we'll bring those who believe in it out of the past.

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Robert J. Berger - Internet Bandwidth Development, LLC.
Voice: 408-882-4755 eFax: +1-408-490-2868
http://www.ibd.com





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