… Do things like this happen often? I don’t understand HOW this could happen! J said she cried because of it, and I was sick to my stomach when she told me the entire story. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a situation where someone has tried pushing their religion on me, and if they tried I GUESS I would understand why they would, but how could one resort to doing something like that?
“When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti
Those are some of the hardest words ever to understand properly. But as one man said, “Heaven is the feeling of complete Unity, hell that of separation.” Obviously the attacking christianists* had defined themselves as true and only followers of Christ. There is little doubt in my mind that they sincerely believed what they were saying and in what they were doing as good.
You wouldn’t do that, and neither would J, I’m sure. But anyone who distinguishes themselves by a label is separating themselves out from the rest. Is this not a world of labels? And I would hazard to guarantee that few know from the inside what another’s label means to them. I will also hazard to guarantee that anyone who adheres to
any belief is convinced that they are right and few or no one else sees or understands what they do, and are wrong. The brain is wired that way. It is a survival mechanism, as is faith, or belief, itself, no matter in what. It takes a
lot of work to see and understand oneself as a believing machine, regardless of the contents of those beliefs.
Don’t think so? Is “believer” a bigger category than “Muslim?” “Republican?” “Young Earther?” “Liberal?” “Liberation Theologist?” The capacity
to believe is universal.
What one believes is largely parochial. What a life-long Arctic dweller believes is different from a tropical islander, from a desert sweller, from a forest dweller. All beliefs are critical to where those live, and would get them killed in another environment.
But we have mental environments as well, and emotional ones. the post above demonstrates that well. In this day and age, they have far more access to each other than in the past. Is it any wonder they clash? They might be living on the same ground, but see it entirely differently. Some friends and I tried a game once: we were to walk to the end of the block and back, once on each side of the street, three times. Once, it was to be as a civil engineer looking at the infrastructure of utilities. Another, as a law officer looking for a hiding criminal. Last time as a painter or landscaper looking at the condition of properties to approach for work.
It was amazing to all of us how very different the street looked each time. Then we went and played “blind follow-the-leader.” Again a vastly different world. How different does the same world look to people who out of necessity, familial or otherwise, were brought involuntarily into a set of perceptions and values? It is literally incomprehensible. But it is very comprehensible that each believes their own story, even unto death, until they take very assiduous stock of who and what they are independent of their beliefs.
You see, we mistake the contents for the vessel. We are absolutely certain that our thoughts correspond to reality, 1/1. They cannot. We are positive that our thought trains are on the right tracks, and everyone else is stuck in the switch yard. It cannot be otherwise. We are wired to “know” that we are right, because what we see is all that we see. We don’t take into account, that similarly to seeing only less than 1% of the spectrum, we have no clue not only what is in someone else’s head, we have less clue as to what
could be there. We also don’t know how pertinent that contents is or was to their surviving childhood, and how deeply it is imprinted there. Even the language one speaks makes assumptions about the structure of the world!
We don’t know what grace or shock might bring anyone to see themselves even for a second from the outside of what they believe their world to be. Argument and logic sure don’t. Having “proofs” sure doesn’t, or everyone in the world would be on the same page. Are they? Most probably never thought of sitting down and reading their own book with a bit of compassionate and non judgemental distance just to see, out of curiosity, what is there.
Many who do this come across monsters. Most retract in fear and don’t open the book again. But some have to get to the end, and are willing to go through the monsters to do that. They actually end up in another world than the one they started from, while still on Earth, usually at that same address.
So maybe those people who attacked J and her family thought they had the world by the tail because someone told them a story that for the first time in their lives made them feel right. Were they? Did that matter? I shudder when I hear stories like the one you told. I can only do one thing. I open my book and look. What story am I buying?
- I call all “Christian” religions (40,000 of them) “christianist” because for sure, as far as I can tell, their practitioners have only little to do with Christ, as Ghandi said.
I live in Riverside,which is about 60 miles east of Pomona. I call it pure IGNORANCE!