S.F. Chronicle


Is your god really, really angry right now?

Is your god telling you, like it tells G.W. Bush every night, that
your unwanted unprovoked ultraviolent war against a nearly defenseless
nation is not only justified and righteous, but is His deepest wish?

And does your religion tell you, like it tells so many of the
Christian Right, that homosexuals are a dire threat to humankind and
should be stopped at all costs before the so-called gay agenda sneaks
into the playground and the drinking water and the "Spongebob" scripts
and starts covertly converting our blessed innocent hetero children to
a life of sin?

Or maybe it instructs that gay people are simply misled, morally
derailed by a hunky leather-clad Satan with great hair and Prada
sandals, and, despite that sad fact, they are still all God's children
and should therefore be pitied and patronized and helped over their
"sickness?"

Is your religion telling you that women who dare to control their own
bodies and sexual reproductive powers should be shut down and
restricted by legislation and deep guilt and electroshock therapy, and
the doctors who treat them imprisoned if not beaten with sticks and
set on fire?

Or maybe you say no, it's not like that at all, it's much milder and
nicer than that. Maybe your religion, like the carefully spoon-fed
religion of millions of Americans, is quieter, calmer, a little more
numbly sinister. Maybe your religion, like so many modern incarnations
of dogma, is telling you simply to have faith. Does this sound
familiar?

Maybe it's telling you to not think too much about the horrors and
complexities and odd sexual orientations of the world, that they are
simply too ugly and debauched and convoluted to really understand for
mere mortals, and if you just leave it up to God and let Him sort it
all out, everything will be fine. This is the church line. It has
worked for centuries. It is still working today.

God has a plan, after all. This is what they say. He has an incredibly
obtuse and impossibly dense master blueprint that explains all the war
and death and burned babies in Iraq, all the cancer and animal cruelty
and Lynne Cheney, and you are just too small and unevolved to possibly
understand, or do anything about it. Right? Well, no.

Because if it is, if your religion is telling you any of these things,
you might want to reconsider your options. You might want to consider
dumping the whole thing and becoming one of the outcasts, one among
the godless throngs, one of the spiritually inquisitive, one of the
sacredly self-defined.

You might wish to radically change your perspective and your
worldview, to forgo the doctrines and the pious gooey safety net of a
sanctimonious religion that pretends to know all the answers, and go
it alone, figure it out for yourself -- before it's too late and you
end up shriveled and miserable and dead. As the saying goes, it's
never too late to have a happy karma.


That great genius heretic Joseph Campbell summed it up best when he
said, "The wicked thing about both the little and the great
'collective faiths', prehistoric and historic, is that they all,
without exception, pretend to hold encompassed in their ritualized
mythologies all of the truth ever to be known.

"They are therefore cursed, and they curse all who accept them, with
what I shall call the 'error of the found truth,' or, in mythological
language, the sin against the Holy Ghost.

"They set up against the revelations of the spirit the barriers of
their own petrified belief, and, therefore, within the ban of their
control, mythology, as they shape it, serves the end only of binding
potential individuals to whatever system of sentiments may have seemed
to the shapers of the past (now sanctified as saints, sages, ancestors
or even gods) to be appropriate to their concept of a great society."

See? Even according to our finest minds, major religion is just
terribly unhealthy, excruciatingly limiting. Causes brain polyps.
Perspective warts. Fear blisters. Hate rashes. Sanctimony drip.
Chronic nose picking.


Of course, it must be noted that there are millions who believe in a
gentle form of organized religion, a tolerant, forgiving Christian
God, persons who are warm and open minded and who do not ever attempt
to shove their beliefs down anyone's throat. They are kind and
selfless and practice their beliefs quietly, tenderly, in their own
nontoxic way. This is glorious and good. This is not the slightest
problem. This is, in fact, to be encouraged.


But, sadly, these people are strongly overshadowed, publicly
overpowered, by the far more outspoken and well-organized religious
fire breathers who attempt to set the spiritual agenda for America and
delineate what actions we can take and what kind of sex we can have
and whom we can and cannot love. It is these karmically scrunched
people whom we are now working to save. And it is the call of any true
patriotic, open-minded American to come to the aid of the misinformed
and the lost. You know who you are.

It is not a pill, this radical change you might now wish to undertake.
It is not a program. It is not a series of eight-minute power workouts
on VHS or a stack of subliminal meditation CDs you play while napping
and dreaming of Donald Rumsfeld baking blueberry pies in a rubber
chicken suit.

It is not a class or a book or a series of daily affirmations you
stick on the fridge and check off every time you suck down a yogurt
drink or sneak a cookie.

It is merely a choice. A decision to drop the dead weight of a dead
book from the spinning modern kaleidoscope of your ever-evolving id,
and see what happens. Letting go, de-clenching, letting the spiritual
blood flow, is half the battle. Dumping stagnant doctrine and tired
patriarchal notions does not mean you must immediately pick up another
system to replace it. You want a new worldview? You want a fresh,
unbounded ideology, as flexible and porous as you are? Simply start
looking inward, at the one true god of the self. And what a gift it
is.

It is a perspective slap. It is a choke hold on spiritual timidity. It
is a radical peeling back, a falling away, an explosion, karmic
whiplash, a massive transformational belch. And it is desperately
needed right now.

Ask yourself this: What would happen if you suddenly turned around and
said you don't believe in that sneering angry God anymore, or in that
specific, nasty interpretation of Bible verse?

What would happen if you said, hey you know what? Life is simply way
too short to think that this is all there is and that the church has
all the answers, or that I can't just read the Bible as this profound
curious literary mythological funkarama full of sex and blood and
death and random acts of kindness and not take it all so damn
seriously or literally, because that's when the trouble starts?

Why, furthermore, must I think that if there is a God he must be,
well, a male, and an angry misogynistic homophobic Republican male, at
that, one with a thing for guns and trucks and repressed Catholic
priests?

Why can I not, say, reignite the feminine divine in this exhausted,
macho world? Would that really be so horrible? So confusing? Could it
possibly be worse than now, what with all the hate and fear and pious
finger pointing? The answer is shockingly clear: You can.

It is not too late. You can heed the call, make the change, intervene
today in a hardcore religious person's desperate life, present them
with a new way, a fresh path, introduce them to their own personal
Jesus: themselves.

You can teach them to be one of the heathen godless throngs of
America, the happily self-defined, the spiritually adventurous,
unafraid to take on a deeply felt, difficult, messy, gorgeous type of
individual spirituality, independent of dogma and screed and a
scowling bearded father figure who pulls strings at random and builds
monster warehouses of guilt and dread in your heart like some sort of
dour Wal-Mart Supercenter.

It is never too late. It is your choice. Won't you join us?

Just to keep things straight, this opinion piece is *not* from the San Francisco
Chronicle, but rather from the Chronicle-affiliated online gateway, sfgate.com.

The author is Mark Morford, who, AFAIK, writes only for SF Gate, adn not for
the Chron.

Joe Parsons

On 20 Feb 2004 09:10:56 -0800, (basskisser) wrote:

S.F. Chronicle


Is your god really, really angry right now?

Is your god telling you, like it tells G.W. Bush every night, that
your unwanted unprovoked ultraviolent war against a nearly defenseless
nation is not only justified and righteous, but is His deepest wish?