Fear and Hope

[thomasf]

I’ve had this theory for a while now about people who like to be afraid. I think that people in general like to be afraid. People like to fear things, preferably things that they can’t see, and of which they have no control. Let me explain.

A few years back I used to work the night shift at a grocery store. I worked there for several years, and I was able to listen to the radio. I kinda got stuck on a overnight radio show called Coast to Coast AM. You might know it, or have heard of it. Art Bell was the host then, now there’s a guy hosting it named George Noory. They talk about a variety of things, but mostly supernatural stuff.

Many of the topics were about things that people feared. Mysterious aliens, shadow people that attacked humans. Dark planets that were going to crash into the earth. All kinds of cataclysmic events that would destroy society, mad cow disease, bird flus, etc. There was no end to the topics they would talk about that people would work themselves up about, get scared about. And I would hear these people calling in, making stories up, just to scare themselves more.

Then after the 9-11 thing, people used that to scare themselves even more about terrorists. The media was telling us to duct tape our windows, buy up extra food, be on the watch for mysterious dark skinned people. For a while people were whipped into a frenzy, over mostly nothing. And that stuck around long enough to have an effect on the 2004 election, many people cited safety and security as motivations for voting the way they did.

So I’ve been watching all this for a while and I’ve come to the conclusion that people like to be scared. Not watching a gory movie scared. Scared of stuff they can’t control, can’t see. I think some people just like to worry about crazy stuff, no matter how strange it may be.

This is where I’m going with this. Before I came back to the church, I had a lot of evangelical protestants trying to get me to come to their churches. I heard a lot of spiels from various people. And inevitably, I would hear the standard “God is coming back, and if you’re not saved you’re going to Hell! You’ll miss the rapture, you’ll have to live through the tribulation, and go to Hell!”

This never struck me as very good evangelization techniques. To begin with, you’re not going to catch many people by telling them they’re going to hell. And it always struck me that these people were using the fear of God as their major motivation. Being raised catholic, the fear of God was always there. But the understanding I had was that God was a loving and forgiving God, who wanted us to go to heaven with Him. He wants to forgive us, to give us eternal life. Not banish us to hell.

The other part of this is the whole rapture theory, which I never bought in to. I was, still am, amazed at the people who buy into the rapture. I think it gives them one more thing to fear. Because people like to be afraid. And moreso than that, people like to think they’re special and belong to an elite group. If you’re into the rapture, and think you’re saved, most likely you believe you’re going to be raptured.

So to wrap this up, I never understood this idea of being afraid. Yeah, it’s cool sometimes to tell ghost stories and freak out a little bit. But overall, I’ve never bought into the whole fearing the unknown thing. I’ve always seen it as a waste of time.

I was listening to some of the Catholic Answers mp3’s about the rapture, and I got to thinking how I never bought into it, how it applies to my theory about fear, etc. And I came to the conclusion that I manage to avoid this whole fear thing because I have hope for the future. That in the end, if I persevere, everything is going to be all right. I think about the Second Coming, and I don’t fear it. I look forward to it. It will be the end of suffering, and pain, and evil. And if I persevere, I will join Jesus and the saints and angels in praising God forever and living in His Kingdom. That’s a great thing, a hopeful thing. And I just can’t see why people would spend time worrying and fearing all this other stuff.

 

[BarbaraTherese]

I think very deep down there is primal sort of fear in all of us without exemption…and that is (if isolated) the fear of death - of ceasing to exist as we have always known it altogether. We fear too anything that will threaten our own survival, which of course is to fear a death. Rather than face this fear and name it for what it is and accept our fear of it…we rummage around looking for something to ‘hook’ this fear onto and all sorts of imaginings can occur. Fear of what is not real but purely imaginary or born of the imagination only is called neurotic fear. If we look at the fears that do crop up in us as a society from time to time…each of these fears are actually fears of death or approaching death in some way.
I wonder if it is so much that we like to be afraid, as that we know even subconsciously that we are afraid and will not name that fear as death and ceasing to exist and confront it for what it is…anything is better than that: spooks and gouls and clataclysmic events of some kind etc. for we feel that we just may have some control anyway over these…but we know we have no control at all over our own death and a ceasing to exist in that sphere which we know and the only sphere we have ever known, i.e. earthly life - but it will happen to each and every one of us. In life, we are indeed in death. We just dont like to accept and confront it?
Religious Faith may be able to take the edge off our primal fear of death…with many prayers for final perseverance I should think. Interesting that in the Hail Mary we pray “pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death”.
Interesting reflection…

Blessings …Barb

 

[puzzleannie]

I think OP is quite on the mark in his observations. My mom used to listen to that all night talk in her later years when she could not sleep, I don’t think she bought into any of it, but who knows.

there is a book by a historian, Richard Hofstadter (sp?) called the Paranoid Style in American Politics, and his thesis is that a candidate or issue campaign flourishes when the voters have something to fear. examples are the Know-Nothings, KKK, bolsheviks (this fear was hugely influential in the 20s, and reason behind current immigration laws by the way).

I mention it because I think there is a strong correlation between belief in an imminent rapture and apocolypse (in our generation) and political beliefs. I also think and this is just IMO, those engulfed in a fear of an immiment apocalypse and those whose pressing fear is global warming, are suffering from precisely the same disordered fears.