Boredom and Wars

     I wrote in a previous essay that fanaticism has been the chief source of wars, riots and other violent disturbances throughout history.  Parenthetically, I said that boredom was probably next in line.  Here's why.
     Shakespeare enthusiasts are familiar with the opening soliloquay in Richard the Third.  The play opens with Richard telling us that he is bored.  There is peace in the land, everyone is enjoying life by pursuing a variety of worthwhile interests like drunken parties and jolly bedroom romps with castle babes --- everyone except Richard.  Richard has nothing to do all day.  He could of course wander the castle grounds observing nature, or he could take up knitting sweaters, but that's not enough.  So he started a civil war.  It didn't turn out well for him, he lost, but at least he wasn't bored any more.
     Think about this.  In Shakespeare's time and throughout the centuries before and thereafter there really wasn't much in the form of canned entertainment for anyone to enjoy.  There was work, of course, but the leisure class had no real work which had to be done in most cases.  There was no radio or TV, no computers, no cell phones or movies.  And you couldn't go to Paris or London if you lived somewhere else, at least at any reasonable speed.  In fact up until the twentieth century there really weren't all that many ways to fill up leisure time.  There were  parties and athletic events, and romantic assignations in the castle, but that wasn't enough for the restless spirit of man.  Anyway, Richard wasn't cool enough to have even that.  He was bored.  What better to do with time on one's hands than start a war?  War can be a real hoot if you win and you don't need to think about losing.
     But we still have wars, oodles of them; two world wars, Korea, Vietnam, the middle east, war here, war there, war everywhere.  Why?  Because there is no end to the human desire for stimulation and excitement.  And a lot of world leaders aren't ready for a rocking chair and a pension. They still need stimulation and excitement and are ready to satisfy the need with their expertise at starting wars. 
     Anyway, our old companion fanaticism is and always will also be around.  This tribe doesn't like that one.  That means that that one is evil.  And of course this religion doesn't like that one; nations, ethnic goupings and races don't like each other.  So you still have plenty of reasons to start wars even with TV and movies to fight your boredom.  To help us resolve any boredom still remaining, and supply plenty of fanaticism, along come charismatic leaders --- Hitler, Tojo, Castro, Mao, Ahmadinijad and Khadaffi (or however they spell their names this week) to start our riots and wars for us.  Bin Laden is gone but there are plenty of other psychos, sociopaths and crackpots to take his place.  Who really needs nutty dictators anyway?  We've got plenty of politicians in both parties to take up any slack.  And it's actually easier to start a war in some ways now, possibly with the hope of winning, than it used to be because if you can buy a few atom bombs from Pakistan, Iran or China, which shouldn't be too hard if you look funny and wear a turbin, you don't have to be a dictator of some important country.  Any old sink hole or banana republic will do and there's only so much TV.  So we can always count on fanaticism and boredom.
    

Fanaticism and its Consequences

     No human  condition is more threatening to civilization than  fanaticism.  It reflects a  terrible flaw in the human makeup and most of the mass oppressions, civil disturbances and collectivist ideologies which plague mankind can be traced to it.  (Curiously, as to the causes of war and riots, the second most threatening condition is probably boredom, which in a way is almost the opposite of fanaticism).
     Fanaticism should not be confused with principled advocacy.  You can champion any cause  with  intensity without without becoming a fanatic.  Fanaticism is extreme intolerance of  dissenting views, an intention to supress them if possible, and the refusal to engage in rational debate.  Reason never matters. The fanatic demands that everyone he controls or seeks to control --- frequently the entire human race --- adhere strictly and without question to a party line.  Absolute conformity to ideological orthodoxy, which is the hallmark of fanaticism, is endemic to all collectivism, be it Naziism, Communism, Islamic extremism or radical-left American liberalism.  Some socially conservative positions which are meritorious in and of themselves have been embraced by dangerous fanatics on the right.  The fanatic of left or right insists that devient individualists be converted or actually destroyed with avalanches of propoganda or violence if nothing else works, and in many cases even when the  cause or movement which the fanatic seeks to protect and advance is not seriously threatened.   A despicable example of attempts at personal destruction is the left's campaign to destroy Sarah Palin. Though she has at present not announced her candidacy for President or any other office, the Left is engaged in a massive effort, costing their high priests millions of dollars, to find something, anything, suggestive of some wrongdoing even though there is no reason to suspect that there has been any.  Also, if one believes in a benign existence in the after-life he will tolerate political ideologies and religions he does not like or share because he believes that the imbalances of life will be rectified in the end.  But if this life is all their is, or if some putative god of the fanatic's invention or imagination so directs, two consequences follow:  First, all departure from the fanatic's idea of perfection must be supressed now.  We cannot wait, because the poor, the downtrodden or the spiritually deprived will die without hope except in compliance with the fanatic's self-made 'religion'.  In other words unless the fanatic comes to the rescue with his coercion, rioting mobs and violence their lives will have been wasted.  Second, we are told that we must live under some Command --- the inflexible directions of some book, some ayatolla, some dictator or code of conduct to which absolute obedience will be due.  The fanatic always looks for a source of authority which cannot be questioned but can only be "interpreted" --- interpreted by him of course --- and that results in his refusal to entertain thoughts of alternatives.  "So it is written, so it shall be done", said an Attila-like character in a movie.  Once anyone begins to question the orthodoxy of the fanatic's movement or his heroes, and is allowed to continue doing so, the fabric of lock-step orthodoxy and obedience starts to unravel and the manifest nonsense and immorality of the movement begins to be apparent. 
     Thus some book, god or charismatic leader is substituted for universal principles of honor, decency, kindness, fairness and justice, except as defined and decreed by Command.  The key is innerancy, the denial of any possible or permissable questioning of a Supreme Authority. 
     Corruptions, not real understanding, of the central messages of Christianity and Judaeism lead fanatics into the command-and-obey mentality.  Judeao-Christianity properly understood and practiced requires the faithful to use their God-given intelligence.  General principles are affirmed, of course, those which have always been recognized by decent people at all times --- rejection of theft, murder and adultery for example, or honoring ones parents, but the application of those principles in particular circumstances requires the application of reason and logic, and that is incompatible with fanaticism on any level.  The New Testament does not record a single word spoken by Jesus which applies more than incidentally to the masses or to any collective, governmental or otherwise.  All of His admonitions relate to actions and attitudes of  individuals --- and ultimately to their salvation one by one.  No group, race, tribe, nation or movement is "saved".  Only individuals.
     A church in Kansas produced a bunch of fanatics who went about obstructing the funerals of our men and women in uniform.  Let us pray that this is not a forerunner of things to come.  This is not the Christianity which any understanding Christian will recognize as the Gospel preached by Christ.

An In-depth Analysis of Congress --- the Problem and the Solution

     Five hundred forty-five (545) individuals in Washington have all the political power in the United States to overrule all the politicians and judges in all fifty states.  There are 435 members of the House of Representatives, 100 in the Senate, 9 Supreme Court Justices and 1 president.  They can do anything they want to do.  Yet these 545 individuals and their predecessors have bankrupted the country, created a debt  of over 14 Trillion Dollars which can never be paid, allowed hoards of drug-dealing illegal aliens across the boarder, made this great and resource-rich country energy dependent on a miserable bunch of mad dicatators in the Middle East --- a flock of crackpots and psychos such as the world has never  seen before in one place at one time --- and destroyed the credibility and respect which the United States once enjoyed throughout the world.  If that's not enough they have gotten into three wars in ten years, which is an average of about thirty in a century.
     Why not select 545 people at random from any urban telephone directory and set up a better government than the flop that we have now?  With any luck this new government would consist of men and women with more brains, character, human decency and honor than the miserable collection of clowns, buffoons and bumble-brained morons who are there now (no, not all, but all too many.  I still go for the telephone book method).  Or we can try to persuade Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth to take us back.  Unfortunately she's probably too smart to do that.
     That's my analysis of Congress.  God Save the Queen

Relativism and Objectivity

     The essence of Relativism is that one person's opinion is just as good as another's even though the two are mutually exclusive.  Lately, some Liberal clergymen, joining other liberals in their bonding with Islam, have been opining that 'all religions are basically the same and they all have the same purpose'.  This remarkable idea is symptomatic of a dreadful moral and intellectual poison --- that of Relativism, which denies all objective truth on the claim of "tolerance", perhaps the most misunderstood word in the English language.  It is easily provable that the various religions of the world are incompatible with one another, though they may coincide at certain points.   If Judaism is true then Christianity is not true, or not entirely true, and if Islam emobodies the ultimate truth then  Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, or Budhism does not.  Any two or more of these may contain similar concepts on certain points but they are inconsistent in their final conclusions.  In other words, any one of them could theoretically be true but no two of them could.  If you seek the truth you must pick one to exclusion of the others or opt for some other choice, such as agnosticism or atheism.  Furthermore,  to deny objective truth, to claim that any viewpoint is as good as another --- in religion, baseball or anything else --- requires the conclusion that that claim itself is not objectively true.  If any opinion is as good as any other, why should we be influenced by anyone else's opinion on anything?  And if the response is "well of course I wouldn't go that far" the respondent in all honesty should be able to explain when he would and when he would not "go that far".  In the end he will be backed into a corner because he will either affirm the existence of objective truth, including the "truth" which tells him that everything is relative, of which he should now start to see the absurdity, or he will admit that even that claim is relative and his argument has defeated itself.  In other words, a relativist destroys the basis on which his relativism rests.  At that point anyone should logically lose the slightest interest in anything he says unless it is a mere personal preference, such as a preference for one flavor of ice cream over another.  The only way out of this conundrum for the relativist is the assertion that his truth is entitled to a privileged position in the hiercarchy of opinion.  Someone else may wish to continue the discussion after that but I opt out.

    

Jesus and the Woman at Jacob's Well

      Jesus' encounter with the Samaritan woman, recorded at John 4, is interesting for a number of reasons and is one among several instances in which He shows His disapproval of racial, religious and gender discrimination. The Samaritan woman is the first person to whom Jesus expressly reveals who He is. He comes close to revealing his status as the Son of God to Nicodemus in John 3, but he refers to Himself in the third person.  He does not expressly say to Nicodemus, as He does to the Samaritan woman, "I am he, the one who is speaking with you."  This is also the longest conversation that Jesus is recorded to have had with any individual in the New Testament. Jesus and his disciples did not have to go through Samaria, Jews normally bypassed that region because the Samaritans had their own religious outlook and did not practice Judeaeism.  In other words He intended to go there. He was not just passing through.  And we encounter Him talking to a woman, for one thing, and a Samaritan, for another. A Jewish man would never drink water proffered to him by a Samaritan because they were considered by the Jews of that time to be unclean. The woman was at the well at noon time. Most people gathered water in the morning or evening, when it is not as hot. This woman went at noon in order to avoid people, perhaps from shame. The fact that she had had five husbands and was living with a man who was not her husband, indicates a shameful personal history.  So Jesus is revealing His divine sonship to a woman, a foreigner, a half-Jew, a sinner, and to her people who are outside the pale of Judaism. It shows the breadth and scope of His kindness and tolerance as distinguished from the narrowness and intolerance of the times.
     There are a number of instances in which the same principle is shown --- the story of the Good Samaritan, His willingness to go to the home of a Roman Centurion to heal the man's servant, His encounter with the gentile woman, a Scyrophonecian gentile, whose daughter was desperately ill and whom Jesus healed --- these among others.  And all of this when tolerance was not generally the order of the day.

What About Hell?

     When someone expresses doubt about the existence of Hell as a real place where 'non-believers' reside in eternal torment, he may be referred to one or more of many places in the Bible which seem to apply to such a place.  See, for example, Rev. 14:11, Mark 9:43, Luke 3:17, ll Pet. 2:1, Matt. 5:27-30 or Mark 9:48-49.  And there are others.  Christians are urged to take all these references literally. 
      Nothwithstanding insistance otherwise, however, Hell may be a metaphor for the source of the evil which is sweeping the world. Is it only that which matters?  Are bread and wine literally body and blood?  Even those who answer yes --- Roman Catholics, for example --- will admit that these elements are wine and bread to a chemist but they contend that they are converted to something else in some mystical or metaphorical sense which no one but Catholics, and perhaps a few others, even claim to understand.  The Catholic doctrine is called 'Transubstantiation'.  The Lutherans have a variation called 'Consubstantiation'.  Does it really matter?  Jesus asked for an act, not understanding (this do, not this understand).  He did not care about actual physical facts but only their meaning.  Or is that entirely true?  Without going too far into that, there is a good deal of support for those who believe that the physical facts and the literal reality of events reported in the Bible does matter a great deal.  Was there a real Abraham, a real Moses?  I go from one side to the other on such questions.  I tend to believe along with C. S. Lewis that the earlier events may have a mythical aspect to them but that there is no doubt about the reality of Jesus, the Virgin birth, miracles, crucifixion and Ressurection.  Where the mythical blends into the literal, while even then retaining something of the character and flavor of myth, I don't know.  But the Christian story is true.  Everything depends on its being true and there is sufficient support for it to state categorically that it is true.
      Is Hell real?  Yes, you can see it in the eyes of lunatics, of those who are slaves to alcohol, of sociopaths, of people so burdened with guilt that they cannot get through the day without breaking down.  Are there demons, those denizens of Hell who are said to torment the damned eternally?  There are certainly human demons --- Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, and conspicuously those lovely Jihadists of the Middle East who think they are vindicating God's will by torturing and decapitating people, blowing up buildings, passenger jets, trains, night clubs and theatres, and oppressing women.  Yet I have to admit that there is more to it than that, joining to a degree those who advocate belief in Hell as an actual place.  There is an evil force making its way across the world with frightening effect.  We see it in "spontaneous" protests and riots, in crazed Jihadism, roaring and seeping into societies everywhere and threatening civilization.  We see it in the horrific crimes which are committed with the insistence that they are  in compliance with God's will.  Though I am not convinced that Hell is literally a place, it is very likely something more than just a state of mind, though it is certainly at least that, and that is bad enough.  Beyond that the notion of a literal Hell in a specific place seems far-fetched.  The Earth itself is constantly changing locales within the Solar system, and the Solar system within the Galaxy, and no doubt the Galaxy with reference to the Universe itself.  The similarity to a physical Hell, however, lies in the fact that it would be impossible for all of the hellish events going on around the world to be the result of some master plan, coordinated efforts,, a grand conspiracy promoted by people gathered in a room somewhere plotting.  There are plots going on here and there; in Washington, Tehran, Wall Street, union meetings, Moscow, Caracas and elsewhere;  no doubt about that, but not one grand plot.  At least not one grand human plot. There is simply too much hell in the world for that.  Hitler did not sit around hatching wicked schemes with George Soros.  They didn't even know each other.  Yet we see it as if everything had in fact been orchestrated at some central venue much like, if not actually, a real hell by a real devil.  Which makes me tend to believe that such a grand ongoing conspiracy exists in reality but not in some human board room or meeting hall.  What's the point of these evasive and presumably immaterial conspirators?  Whay bother with plots and conspiracies designed to injure humanity without any apparent benefit to themselves? Do they never quit?  Why don't they get bored?  I find street riots, wherein teenage boys throw rocks at tanks, and that sort of thing, just plain boring.  It's all the same.  It may take place in Paris, or Seoul or Cairo but if you've seen one you've seen them all.  And evil dictators who all seem to wear some sort of bizarre or garish costume with a strange hat, or a hat that's too big.  They want power.  But what will they do when they get it?  Do they even know?  Yet it never stops and this to me suggests something very evil going on the origin of which is not apparent.  Where does it originate?  Who originiates it?  And why?
      

 

The Danger of Fundamentalism in a Nut Shell

     The shocking excesses of the fundamentalist church in Kansas which has been sending people out to disrupt funerals, etc. points out the danger of fundamentalism if it turns in the wrong direction and then goes unchecked.  The fundamentalist represents every opinion he has as an "interpretation" of scripture, allowing him to excuse any number of reckless or violent acts with his all-purpose excuse, "so it is written, so it shall be done, thus sayeth the Lord" meaning that some Holy Writ has shut off all further revelation, inspiration or use of the mind and intelligence which are themselves gifts of God and intended by Him for use.  All further discussion and the thought process itself is shut off.  While many or even most fundamentalists may not go that far I submit that this explains jihadism and Islamist extremism to a large extent because it indicates the dangerous direction in which fundamentalism can go.