Unfollow

I found this a fascinating account of the psychology of indoctrination and extremism, seen from the inside out. The author writes beautifully along with telling a compelling story, and is able to minutely follow her own emotional and mental process with great honesty. The sequence where she finds her long-held opinions breaking up was astonishing. When one has been raised to have such intractable, inflexible thoughts, to change one's mind is truly an act of bravery and almost a miracle.

In literalist theology it seems to me that people take the guidebook that should be pointing them to an experience, as if it were the thing itself, as if they wanted to live inside the book. Scripture should only be a way to orient us toward God, not a God itself. And there are other ways, other possible guidebooks, other languages, and other concepts than “God” that can lead us toward the same thing. You can get there without using a book at all, just as you can take a journey without a guide! To look at a book as though IT were directing us, rather than the human mind and soul, is as much idol-worship as bowing down before a golden calf.

Human beings become what they worship. When they worship a dead idol, they become dead. That's why the practice is abhorrent - because the true purpose of all religion, and certainly of Christianity, is to enable human beings to become alive. Not in some hypothetical afterlife, but now. Even in the wilderness of our hearts, where we have slain the life-giving creator spirit through our hatred, our ignorance and our blindness, life can spring up again. I experienced that sense of resurrection through this story, for which I am grateful.

One can selectively quote scripture out of context to prove almost anything one wishes. It's the movement and direction of the whole that is important. Even the ancient Israelites changed and evolved, as is shown in the course of the Hebrew scriptures. And in the Gospels we see this transform even further, turning the concepts of previous religious life on their head, demanding that people change their hearts and minds and make a step in inwardly manifesting what had formerly been outer practice – a development that the fanatics of Westboro Baptist Church seem to miss entirely. If they had been among the crowd around Christ's crucifixion, they surely would have been shouting for his death.