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Proving God By Consensus
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TITLE (EDIT)
Proving God By Consensus |
DESCRIPTION
My Problem with the Religious Right
[977 words] |
TITLE KEYWORD
Psychology |
AUTHOR
Robert Levin |
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR
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[March 2019] |
AUTHOR'S E-MAIL ADDRESS
rlevin@earthlink.net |
AUTHOR'S OTHER TITLES (18)
3 Poems (Poetry) - [129 words] [Humor]
A Passel Of Plumeria (Short Stories) Can an act of violence be a gift? [5,935 words]
Arena (Short Stories) A man finds a way out of his midlife crisis. [1,495 words] [Action]
Donald Trump And The Fear Of Death (Essays) Propelled by a pronounced extinction anxiety, white America’s dread has led directly to a heightening of racism, and with it, the presidency of Donald Trump [581 words] [Psychology]
Everything's All Right In The Middle East (Essays) A mutual solution to the problem of being mortal. [686 words] [Psychology]
Free Jazz: The Jazz Revolution Of The '60s (Essays) "Man, In another ten years we won't even need traffic lights we're gonna be so spiritually tuned to one another." [2,615 words] [History]
No Stars For The Eclipse (Essays) I thought more interesting work was being done at the Electric Circus back in the '60s. [529 words] [Comedy]
On Mental Health (Short Stories) If I ever see a shrink again it'll have to be under a court order. [2,573 words] [Drama]
On Turning Sixty (Essays) The rewards of turning sixty [544 words] [Humor]
Peggie (Short Stories) My chance to cross gross obesity from the list of body types I hadn't yet scored. [1,519 words] [Comedy]
Recycle This (Essays) "I don't even sort and rinse the stuff I keep?" [885 words] [Humor]
Schindler's List: A Fecal Matter (Essays) - [1,047 words] [Psychology]
Stupidity: Its Uses & Abuses (Essays) Stupidity is rivaled in its genius only be schizophrenia. [1,337 words] [Humor]
The Killer (Short Stories) This story contains a graphic depiction of a deed that some readers may find upsetting or alarming. The story is an attempt to explain the motivation of the mass murderer and what the meaning of “suic... [3,058 words] [Literary Fiction]
The Monstrous Season (Short Stories) When you call your Dog Debbie you're asking fror trouble. [8,188 words] [Literary Fiction]
When Pacino's Hot, I'm Hot (Short Stories) A comedy about a pathetic loser with a talent for looking famous. [5,929 words] [Humor]
Why Peace Will Forever Elude Us (Essays) Although the guises may differ, people who study history are no less doomed to repeat it than those who don’t. [769 words] [Psychology]
You Don't Know What You're Doing (Or Why You're Still Fat) (Essays) People with perpetual obesity issues are playing a game with themselves. [804 words] [Psychology]
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Proving God By Consensus
Robert Levin
A few decades ago I was awakened at seven o’clock one Sunday morning by the persistent droning of my downstairs door buzzer. I was living then in a back apartment on the top floor of an East Village walk-up that was without an intercom or the capacity to buzz visitors inside. This circumstance made it necessary for me to descend five flights of stairs to personally open the frosted-glass front door and to see who it was.
In this instance it was two Jehovah’s Witnesses.
At the time I bore no animus toward people who presented themselves as fervently religious. Though I deemed them delusional, I respected both their right to their delusion and their need of it. The proselytizers I encountered were more likely to draw pity from me than to provoke my ire.
So if I had good reason to be put out by the inconvenience they’d caused me, an inconvenience compounded by the ungodly hour they’d picked to pay a call, my reaction to the elderly and finely attired black couple with soft Georgia accents who greeted me—he with a bible in one hand and a straw hat in the other; she wearing a hat bedecked with white and yellow flowers—wasn’t in the least bit hostile. In fact, while I made it clear that I had no use for the message they were delivering, I was as courteous as I could be. I didn’t want to tamper with their fantasy or hurt their feelings and when I closed the door on them it was very gently.
But that was a while back, before religion assumed the weight and influence that it has in our cultural and political affairs and before I understood just where the so-called “True Believers” are coming from.
We tend to allow that, unhinged as we may judge them to be, evangelicals, in their efforts to make converts or to bring “more religion” into the culture, are doing the work of a God they feel with genuine confidence to be real. Some of us might even imagine that they care about our salvation. But this isn’t what’s happening. Dealing with their fear of death, a fear exacerbated by 9/11 and the destruction of the myth of American invincibility, and wanting desperately for a God and the potential for eternal life implicit in the concept of God to exist, the real mission of these people isn’t to share a revelation but to validate beliefs they’re not sure of by securing the agreement of others. To prove the existence of God to themselves by achieving a universal consensus on the matter (the only way to achieve something like certainty about anything) is the true aspiration of the religious right.
And I mightily resent the manifold ways in which their ambition to, for starters, make a formal theocracy of America—a more than adequate means of certifying their beliefs—is already poisoning the lives of the rest of us.
I’m speaking, of course, of their interference with a woman’s freedom to end a pregnancy and of homosexuals ability to marry one another. I’m also talking about the brakes they managed to apply to government sponsored stem-cell research and the role they played in obliging us to endure a George W. Bush for a second term (let alone what his presidency has left in its wake) because he professed to share their faith in Jesus Christ. And I’m referring as well to what turned out to be a politically pivotal quantity of Tea Party candidates that they were instrumental in electing to Congress.
And, again, none of this has been, at bottom, to the purpose of spreading a vision (which could maybe have claimed some level of legitimacy), but rather to, in their own minds, ratify by numbers, law or custom, the presence of a deity.
Since there remains a sufficient population of heathens to challenge their beliefs and to keep their uncertainty alive, reaching their unspoken goal will only become more urgent for the evangelicals. They will get louder and more insistent. And their successes will be more pernicious. Is a President Rick Perry completely out of the question?
I should say that having a few issues of my own with the prospect of death, and quite capable myself of twisting and distorting reality in order to live in the world with a semblance of equilibrium, I can, even under the present conditions, experience some empathy for the Christian right’s agenda. (And I can also appreciate the necessity and durability of religion itself. I’m always taken aback when people whose minds I admire predict that human beings will one day “outgrow” the need for religion, as if it were merely a stage in our evolution. Like the biologists who are looking for a religion gene, they miss the point. For as long as death is a precondition of life, a need for some kind of invented deity, with a plan for mankind—and a collection of rules and practices which, if scrupulously followed, offer the promise of an afterlife—is going to prevail for a large percentage of humanity.)
But while I’m not insensitive to the evangelicals’ cause that doesn’t make its increasing encroachment on the lives of the secular any more acceptable to me. I repeat: Is a President Rick Perry out of the question? No. If there was once a time when we could indulge the folks of the Christian right at no substantial cost to ourselves, that’s not the case any longer. Their quest to conscript us into their immortality project has gotten too much out of hand and leaves no room for such generosity. At this point there’s little choice but to do battle with them; to fight their actions at every turn. The consequences for those of us who live for this life rather than the next one have become too dire to let them slide.
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COPYRIGHT NOTICE
© 2011 Robert Levin |
STORYMANIA PUBLICATION DATE
December 2011 |
NUMBER OF TIMES TITLE VIEWED
2704
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