Midlife And Treachery

Religion, Glib little prhases, and Imposition

May 23, 2007 at 8:01 PM (Uncategorized) (Religion)

There are those who will think that I’m going after a particular faith, or particular “brand” of faith.

I’m not.

I just think that deciding that you need to impose your beliefs on someone else in order to live a righteous life is one of the most wrongheaded parts of most religions. It’s also bad manners and wretchedly tacky.

And, thinking that *you* know the mind of any higher power is a dangerous line of thinking.

There are faiths that impose their rules on pain of death. That, in my view, is the worst kind of imposition.

But I’m talking about the subtler verbal written, and social conventions…

“God told me to tell you,” is really religious shorthand for, “I’m going to tell you how to fix your life, because I believe I have some sort of amped up radio inside me that gets divine messages that fit right in with a self righteous sense of my own importance.”

“If your faith was strong enough, you’d be healed, ” is shorthand for:

“My version of God can heal everybody. If you show up in my church blatantly imperfect, it means that there’s something wrong with *you* because all of my church just couldn’t be wrong about what “healing” actually means.”

Or, the stern, scary opposite of the healers: “You suffer because Deity is basically cold and heartless, and if you don’t rack up x decades of suffering, you won’t be as godly and perfected as Deity wants you to be.” They’re particularly dangerous to the physically vulnerable, because sometimes the temptation is just too great to help the suffering along a little.
And the imposition.

The knock at the door and the speechifying as ten minute verbal battle drill, because if they go back to base without any potential converts, they’ll be seen as less than shining examples.

The attempts to accost on the street with tracts, cards, placards….whatever.

We’re *busy.* We know where the church is…

And, if we feel the pull, the need to belong to a commuity of faith, it would be because currents in *our own lives* draw us there.

And good grief, respect the atheists and agnostics among you.

They hold their belief as closely as you do.

And going and putting your nose into their business is worse than the other impositions, because, merely by showing up at their door, the subtext is:

“You are wrongheaded, and we’ve come to fix you.”

If you must be a pushy attention junkie version of a faithful person, do that other glib phrase…”Lead by Example,” rather than imposing your belief system on someone who *has not yet asked and may never ask* for you to expound on your beliefs.

And, “perfect”faithful can be very tough on people with disabilities, or indeed anyone who appears “different.”

You can be a decent religous person without deciding who else must be harrassed into believing as you do.

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