Respecting ignorance

When I read, or hear, the wimpish clichés that we should always respect others’ religious beliefs, I want to gag. I gag, thinking of the millions (as Thomas Jefferson put it) of human beings who have been mutilated, tortured and butchered in the name of religion, even as is happening today around the world.

H.L. Mencken, one of the most respected scholars and journalists in America, spoke to this issue. It should be on the fridge door of every person.”The most unbelievable social convention of the age in which we live is the one to the effect that all religious opinions should be respected, no matter how ignorant.”

The insidious and seductive cliché that seems to saturate the wimpish mind is that you should not be critical of another person’s religious beliefs. They all deserve respect, no matter how ignorant… how bigoted… how ugly… how false… how cruel… how superstitious… they all deserve “respect.”

This pathology of “respect” for ignorance in our society even motivated nationally syndicated, conservative columnist George Will to write: “The principle of which all intellectual freedom depends is this: THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH OFFENDING SOMEONE IN THE PURSUIT OF TRUTH.” It reaches the absurd point where a person cannot even write a scholarly critique on a religious belief without being labeled and attacked. Distinguished scholars such as Joseph Campbell, or Dr. James Bennett Pritchard who was the biblical advisor to National Geographic magazine and Time-Life books write about the myth of the Hebrew patriarchs and the monumental exaggeration of Old Testament events and they are immediately attacked as being anti-semitic. An illustration from my own life. About a year ago I wrote a book review on “Biblical Archaeology and The Myth of Israel.” Only a book review, mind you. A book that received excellent reviews in the New York Times. Letters to the Editor came in calling me “anti-semitic” for reviewing the book. Read more

Frank Waters…an American treasure

Frank Waters is one of America’s national treasures. Five times nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, he was vigorous and sharp until the day he died in 1995 at age 93. For more years than I can remember this spiritual genius has been one of my role models. I have his sacred Native American pipe that meant so much to him on the desk in front of me now as I type.

As a student, scholar and practitioner of the spirituality and cosmology of the Native American Indian, he has no peers. The Frank Waters bibliography of fiction, non-fiction, biography and short fiction is staggering in its anthropological and religious dimensions. It is not too much to say that he is one of the true, genuine, Renaissance men of this period of history.

Many years ago he settled into his little adobe home in Arroyo Seco outside of Taos, New Mexico. It has been from that spiritual grounding, that piece of sacred earth, that he has roamed outward from the Maya of the Yucatan to the three mesas of the Hopi to become one of the pre-eminent Indian mythologists of our time. How and why did he choose Arroyo Seco? Here is his answer: “There is no accounting for the mysterious magnetism that draws and holds us to that one locality we know as our heart’s home, whose karmic propensities or simple vibratory quality may coincide with our own. My home is 8000 feet high. The rutted dirt road is almost impassable several months of the year. Living here for so long, I still do not have a phonograph, a recording machine or a TV set. Only two years ago did I put in a telephone. Every place on earth bespeaks its own rhythm of life. Every locality has its own spirit.”

I called him a “spiritual genius.” How did he treat the opening hours, the first light, of each new day? From his exquisite chapter on “Silence” in his book “Mountain Dialogues” are these opening words: “It is my habit to observe a time of meditation stillness each morning when the sun first tips the rimrock of the mountain range behind my adobe. The place is always the same. A rise in the waist high sagebrush, flanked by a clump of huge gnarled junipers. I did not choose this spot. It simply drew me years ago by some curious magnetism, until I have worn a barely discernible trail to it through sage and chamisa, around clumps of pinion and cedar, and across dry arroyos. Here I sniff the early morning breeze like an old coyote, to assure myself I am in the center flow of its invisible, magnetic currents. To the sun, and to the two oppositely polarized peaks, El Cuchillo and the Sacred Mountain…I give myself to…silence…” Read more

The Mayan prophecy…2012

NO…California is not going to slide off into the Pacific ocean. NO…the earth is not going to be sucked into a cosmic black hole. NO…all the volcanoes are not going to erupt at once…nor all the earthquake faults shift at the same time. And yet this is what a lot of the snake oil salesmen are predicting for 2012, based on the Maya and Hopi prophecy. If you google 2012 on your computer you will be just staggered at what the snake oil salesmen are trying to sell you. “Survival Kits for 2012.” Survival Kits…can you believe it? Yes, I can. The snake oil people are parasites that feed on the gullible. America, as well as other countries, are saturated with the gullible who are in desperate need of a BS detector. A built in BS (bull shit) detector is the most valuable piece of equipment a person can own.

The gullible, like children, are easy prey for mental infections. It is easy for their consciousness to be exploited by a mind virus that is identical in nature to a computer virus or a biological virus. The gullible are easy victims of insidious propaganda regardless of how ignorant or bigoted, and snake oil salesman have a field day with them.

I am really not surprised at the number of those who believe that 2012 is going to be the end of the world. What can you expect when you live in a culture where millions of the gullible still believe that a Jew who lived 2000 years ago was literally born of a virgin…and literally floated up from the dead ascending into the heavens…and even if he was traveling at the speed of light he would still be in our own galaxy. And the millions who still believe he could walk on water…and turn water into wine….and who still believe that there is a literal, physical place called “heaven” and one called “hell.” Ralph Waldo Emerson said it well: “Christian creeds and doctrines are a disease of the intellect.” In other words: a virus in the mind.

The gullible will finally be free when, as Emile Zola said; “the last stone…from the last church…falls on the head of the last priest.” Read more

Next Page »