What Would Sappho Say?
Lectori Salutem! or L.S. (Greetings to the Reader!)
With the Royal premiere of Alice in Wonderland this past week I thought I’d bring her into the mix for what I’m sure will bring some jeers from the peanut gallery. And as Alice blindly and without much forethought ran down the rabbit hole into Wonderland (or was it?) so do children born of their parents follow them into the family’s religious fold. It is a predestined plan, one the child has no control over and once indoctrinated will fight to the death for those beliefs as strongly as their parents before them. Religion is really a geography problem easily solved with money when you get right down to it.
If we could wrangle up the low income expectant mothers and offer them relocation, a stipend to raise their child Catholic, and be attached to a certain parish for looking after during the child’s life…… Oh yeah, they already do that. It’s called missionaries. The stipends can be food and better shelter or any other basis need but in return the families are expected to dedicate their lives to Christ.
What of the other religions? Those innocents born from a womb are simply indoctrinated into Islam, Judaism, or whatever the majority of you think is so wrong the same way Christians do it to their own. What part is the evil plan. Where is the devil whispering in someone’s ear when the word hell is only mentioned four times in the New Testament (duplicated in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) especially when the word was translated from the original text it was not the word “hell” that was being said but the “Jerusalem Dump”, surely a hell on earth. Over translations “hell” was substituted in at someone’s discretion as it has been done so many times over 2000 years.
So as Alice was predestined to fall down the rabbit hole and meet the Mad Hatter, the White and Red Queens, so are the majority of us predestined to our religious beliefs. I find that quite disconcerting. The “if onlys” that would alter your whole faith because it is not based on something you constructed but a gift of birth was enough to drive this woman crazy in my younger years of self-discovery and I still am asking the questions that have no easy answer.
I was adopted and landed my first day of life in the arms of my mother and father who raised me for my entire life. You could say I was a gift or vice versa but the “what ifs” have driven me a bit batty at certain times in my life and since possible answers are out there I have recently decided I do not accept not knowing. Don’t worry gentle readers, you will go on that journey with me as well. Anyways, I have an allegory to being born into religion and complete acceptance, that blind faith, that so many in the religious community have, they cling to it like a safety blanket and throughout time have punished with vengeance those who have tried to take that blanket away and challenge their point of view.
My ancestors, those who challenge the dogma of Christianity, were burned at the stake, drowned, beheaded, sold into galley slavery, shot, gassed, forced to leave their homes, their books burned, their public voices silenced.
All this because some believed in the goodness of humanity on it’s own merits instead of in a Godly universe; in the goodness of human beings; in their possibilities; in human capacity for progress; in the promise and necessity for human freedom.
By believing in all of this we were seen as stripping away the security blanket of the Western World that held that man was steeped in sin, depraved, and helpless and could only be redeemed by pledging alliance to a god-man Jesus Christ.
Again I refer to Alice who said to the Red Queen, “There’s no use trying, one can’t believe in impossible things.” And the Queen replied, “I daresay you haven’t had much practice. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast”.
And that is what the religious do, right? That is what other faiths think about or what each one of you says about the other faiths: ones who believe in impossible things – like a first century rabbi walking on water and rising from the tomb; impossible things like Buddhist-style reincarnation; animating spirits in all objects; the cyclical nature of time; Joseph Smith receiving golden plates from an angel; the host of the Eucharistic Feast turned into the actual body and blood of Christ; eternity in paradise, a bevy of beautiful virgins for suicide bombers, a violence free society where everyone has a gun and so many more…
It’s not just the Queen in Wonderland but all of us that believe in six impossible things before breakfast.
1. In the face of 9/11, Pearl Harbor, The Holocaust, Nagasaki, and Hiroshima, we still believe in the goodness of humanity.
2. In certain face of global warming and severe climate change, we believe in the progress of humanity.
3. When science gives us technology that isolates us from real life, numbs our minds and dumbs down our culture, we still believe in science.
4. When our free church tradition gives us congregations that fuss and feud, lose trust and brutalize one another, we still believe in congregations.
5. In the face of overwhelming evidence of the capacity of humans for all manner of evil, meanness, selfishness, violence, and divisiveness—we still believe in a brighter future brought about by the free agency of human beings.
We might as well fess up and put a sign out front: “Only fools believe in the creative power of free human beings to do good in the world.”
So when you really look into a person you will almost always find faith in something – believing a few impossible things. Those should be the things that bind us together in this human condition as it is in humankind here on this earth where our greatest work is yet to be done whether you believe you journey ends in this place or goes on to the next.
Much Love.
Inspired By Sappho’s Muse
QUOTES OF THE DAY
What if I should fall right through the center of the earth… oh, and come out the other side, where people walk upside down.
Alice, from Alice In Wonderland
A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
Friedrich Nietzsche