Specifically, it hit me that thoughts are like branches floating down a river, and that my experience is the river. The river is the PRIMARY reality, and thoughts merely a periodic interruption. Joy and happiness are found in the flow, and thoughts interrupt this flow, even if they are necessary.
And it hit me too that thoughts are a type of perception. Thinking is a sense like sight. We don’t think of it that way, but it is. It is a way, for example, of “seeing” the future, or possible futures. It is a way of seeing things far away in time and distance. It is a sort of magical power which can allow us to exist everywhere BUT the present moment. But since the present moment is the only place we actually can exist, thought and existence are incompatible in some respects, even if this magical power is enormously useful, and represents the primary difference between us and animals.
I am in an odd, unfamiliar territory. And whether I like it or not, my brain tells me that cautious optimism is in order.
To my point, I was listening to the history of the conflicts between the Arians and the Niceans, and was forced into the conclusion that Christianity may well have caused more specifically religious death and violence than any religion which came before, and if we consider that Islam merely takes the worst elements of Christianity–dogmatic absolutism based on a terror of eternal damnation, coupled with physical violence to impose conformity to that dogma–then we are forced to conclude that no more violent religion has ever existed on Earth.
Both great cultural imperialisms–Islamic conquests, and Christian conquests–arose from the atmosphere of early Christianity. Western languages and Arabic are spoken across most of the globe because of the early theological conflicts within Christianity, and, importantly, how they were resolved.
In pagan religions, by and large there is great tolerance. If you believe in a multiplicity of gods, there is no reason to fear new ones. There were cases of statues of Moses and even, if memory serves, Jesus, simply being added to temples as added objects of veneration and worship.
What Christianity adds, uniquely, is the idea of eternal damnation which, combined with the doctrine of Original Sin, makes nervous wrecks of everyone. I drive around the country a lot, and it is not at all uncommon to see giant billboards saying things like “Hell is eternal”, and “If you die tomorrow, where will you go?” (with the words Heaven in white, and Hell in red superimposed).
Do you think the people putting up these signs are uncommonly kind, uncommonly charitable in a spontaneous, open way? How would they react if they found out their child was gay? How do they raise their children? If they raise them anything like I was raised, they raise them to FEAR God. They raise them to fear disobedience. They raise them, in other words, in a loveless, oppressive environment which teaches them to embrace the psychological tortures inflicted on them gladly, to feel they deserved it, to feel what I might term Original Shame, and to find emotional release ONLY in the compulsive worship of a God who loved them so much he had to inflict the fear–and potential reality–of eternal damnation on them.
Only scholars remember the conflict between the Arians and Niceans. They differed, as Gibbon points out repeatedly in his inimitable and brilliantly witty and subtle way, more or less in the exact pronunciation of one Greek word, that for consubstantiation. The entire conflict rested on the exact interpretation of the notion of the divine Trinity.
And in the course of this conflict many people were slain. Literal rivers of blood–which filled the rain ditches–were spilled. Men and women had their mouths forced open by wooden devices that a Holy Wafer might be forced down their unwilling throats. Vestal virgins were whipped and raped, and had their breasts pressed between wooden plates.
All over nothing. Literally nothing. The difference between PotAEto and Potahto. Words. Empty words. And I know enough of the history of the Church to know a great deal more blood is coming, well over a thousand years of blood and rapine, all in the name of a man who preached Love.
It is inconceivable to me that if Christ was in fact a holy man, a deeply spiritual man, that he could have looked at what was done in his name and do other than weep at the vanity, folly, avarice, violence and stupidity of men.
All of this mania is driven by the profound fear, the horror and terror, of eternal damnation. It is an odd fact that we are required by this theology to love a God whose bloodlust, whose eagerness to condemn us to unending and unimaginable tortures, is without comparison in other world religions. The Chinese had nothing like this, or the Indians–Asian or American. The Greeks and Romans had nothing like this. I don’t know much about African religions, but I doubt they did either.
Much of what I suffered as a child was a direct result of these beliefs. I think my parents were driven largely by vanity, by fear that I would misbehave and make them look bad, but on to all of this was layered on weekly sermons teaching love through hate.
Fear and love are opposites. They cannot coexist. And it takes an enormously well developed spirit to overcome the fear of the lakes of hell in favor of genuine, real, spontaneous love.
The British conquered in no small measure in the name of love. So too did the Spanish, who tortured eagerly those who were too slow to embrace their new God. The gods of the Aztecs merely consumed the blood of their victims. The Christian God consumes the very souls of those who He deems unworthy.
As I grow as a person, I increasingly realize that most of humanity is crazy. There is no correspondence between what they do, and their own true interest.
I visited the Biltmore Estate in Asheville yesterday, and it struck me amid all the opulence that the only true and lasting pleasure it could have brought its inhabitants came from the pleasure of entertaining, and that the true and fulfilling root of that is simply the comfort and joy of human companionship, of love, of community, of connection. The quality of their lives was not determined by their wealth, but by the possibility of giving and receiving the affections of others with sincerity and depth.
George Vanderbilt seems to have been a decent human being. Certainly, one can expect the story to be skewed in his favor in his own home, but I believed what I heard.
But so much more is possible. There are METHODS of developing deep feelings which are incomprehensibly valuable.
I looked at those high ceilings, and it struck me that all the civil wars in the Roman world which I have been hearing about revolved around buildings of that sort, around petty vanity, around petty avarice, around the gratification of base feelings which were a curse on those feeling them. They did not really want or need fame and power. What they wanted was to feel less alone, to feel loved, accepted, valued, cherished, and to be part of a family of humankind. We all need that. I need that, perhaps more than most.
As I have often shared, I have ideas in this regard. I am very close to going operational, as I put it. I am going to do a trial run, then open my doors to everyone with what I am likely going to initially call a social experiment, but which I fully intend to become a Church of Goodness, which will accept everyone who is lonely, lost and hurt, which is most of humanity.
I have had an extraordinarily difficult time getting to this, but my hope is that I am on the verge of creating something great. My faults are sundry and on some days regrettably obvious to all, but thinking small cannot be numbered among them.