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Of
Circus Elephants and Human Children
Syed
M. Islam
I've
been reading this remarkable book: "The Gift of Fear," by
Gavin De Becker. Link: http://www.wayneandtamara.com/gavindebeckergiftoffear.htm.
An excerpt: "The way circus elephants are
trained.: When young, they are attached by heavy chains to large stakes
driven deep into the ground. They pull and yank and strain and struggle,
but the chain is too strong, the stake too rooted. ...One day they give
up and from that day forward they can be “chained” with a slender
rope. When this enormous animal feels any resistance, though it has the
strength to pull the whole circus tent over, it stops trying. Because it
believes it cannot, it cannot."
These words triggered some reflection NOT related to
elephants, but related to the way we raise our young, putting heavy
chains on their freedom of thought when it comes to learning about the
faith of their ancestors.
Consider how we're herded into religious schools, or taught
by religious people for the majority of whom any notion of philosophy
beyond faith is ostensibly absent. As adults some of us delude in
thinking our religion offers free thought, but do we pause to wonder how
exactly we came to learn about its tenets? As children,
weren't we "forced" to believe whatever our parents did?
Interestingly, if we were to analyze critically whether
they have actually lived their lives accordingly, they
very well might put those enforced religious beliefs to measurable
shame and disgrace?
We catch
ourselves often with deep-seated, yet largely unexamined,
prejudices about people and lifestyles unlike our own. Most such
prejudice stems from the brainwash we forcibly receive as
children, involving arbitrary notions of superior/inferior among
various groups of humans. Socially conscious, we are also
quick--and foolishly so--to contend our religion considers all
other faiths as equal. That we negate the
very purpose of its arrival, in case our religion is the last
one among the three-tiered Abrahamic mythology, we are too focused
on isolated faith statements to recognize.
Like
these elephants who can later be ""chained"
with a slender rope", most of us remain tethered to our
faiths with little additional force upon us. Many feel
socially obligated to retain their parents' faith. They participate
in social rituals and try to live in a manner NOT overtly in contrast
with it. Most of us do modify our faith, a
hypocrisy often downplayed, as we conjure up justifications
for such deviations. Yet we feel justified telling our
children others who do not share our faith are inferior in the eyes of
our God!
Do
we ever wonder why a proposal for living life with a sense of
humility---insofar as we have equal respect for other faiths,
jettisoning all notions of superior/inferior as well as penchant to
prejudge, living in a system of government and law where solutions are
based on reason without deferring to charlatans that pretend to
KNOW what our gods want, reason that offers no preferential
status for one's race, religion, or culture---would be against anyone's
idea of living according to their god's Deen?
We
have evolved to reason in ways other than arbitrary stratification
as to whose faith is closest to God. Faiths offer us an
unearned sense of superiority due simply to happenstance: the faith of
our parents. We can validate our decisions now with reason. In contrast,
arbitrary divisions cannot be so validated, other than by
declaring, "It is so because I say so,
according to my God who knows everything."
According
to the faithful God has supreme power and nothing happens without
His endorsement. Evidently, then, our evolution of thinking
has God's support. Often slipped through non-arguments
from literal interpreters of faith who choose to be His footsoldiers,
why would God allow humans to evolve in a manner directly in
contrast with His guidance? Does God prefer discord and anarchy
among humans, arising due to people's deviating from His path? It
seems only reasonable to contend He shouldn't, if we are to also
believe He loves us all equally and champions peace. All the
conjectures are, of course, based upon the allegation that He
exists---as a charming chameleon of many forms, with features
congruent or otherwise, as various groups of people believe about
Him.
God
also supports evolution in other ways. For instance, why are
there three versions of His dicta, at least as per the Abrahamic
mythology? Does His latest book contend
that the previous two books had been incorrectly rewritten so
by their followers, or did they simply become outdated? If
those were rewritten, why are their followers allowed to live their
lives based on erroneous renditions, when God could just will them into
accepting His latest demands and commandments? If on the other
hand those had become outdated, evidently evolution seems to occur even
in God's thought process, due to which He chose to update his older sets
of dicta. Quite likely, then, He did not know everything
all the time, as His faithful contend.
If
that can be a logical deduction, what made God so sure His
third attempt would get it "perfect"? All we are left
with is a belief that His last was the very best, but throughout 1400+
years since its arrival we have seen humans interpreting it in peaceful
as well as militant and ballistic ways. Which version is
correct? Its literalists claim they are right, while its
allegorists contend they are. Must there be this
confusion? To make matters worse, we see charlatans, scholars of
religion, defending both versions. Where is God when we could well
use His presence: to settle this needless confusion, which has often
lead to sanguine wars?
Could
it be that His faithful got it all wrong? Explications offered as
to the need for the third version may seem rational as isolated
statements, but their overall congruity can often be
contradictory. With shouts of blasphemy and fatwas of
death outlawed in Western countries, a curious but
not-so-faithful researcher can combine these isolated explications
and identify their logical. Pointing it out often generates
interesting apologetic arguments. Most such arguments ignore the
logical law of the excluded middle, which holds that a statement is
either true or false. As most apologists ignore this obvious fact,
their tendency to defend not only every single religious contention
about God but also to cover up their incongruencies, when those
statements are considered altogether, becomes increasingly comical.
Such
comedy is an embarrassment to our present ability to argue and reason,
which marginalizes if not denies the faith-claim that we can hit
the nail on the truth by intuition alone, which is really the singular
defense of faith. Faiths claim that the natural process
of deductive reasoning must be abandoned and the indefensibility of
isolated statements in defense of each God must be acceptable
because human ways are insufficient to understand Him. This is
interesting as we presently have no verifiable superhuman ways that
any person of God, alive today, possesses by which his or her version of
Him can be substantiated. Therefore, this contention is
reduced to being a matter of faith. Back to square one!
I
find it mind-boggling that any humanist approach to problem resolution
that considers everyone as equal in regards to rights and privileges,
and any secular approach to keep public institutions free of religious
symbolism and what not are criticized by people of faith as violation of
their religious right and even human right, as some flash
utter chutzpah to so contend. If a proposal is based on reason, if
its basics support a country's Constitution, and if its majority
who cherish its hard-won ideals of inclusion of all as equal support
those, why must a minority cry foul that the proposal is an attack on
their religion? Where is the spirit of compromise and mutual
respect, if the alleged attack revolves around wearing a headgear that
cannot even be defended as religiously-mandated as such, and is worn by
only a small percentage of adherents of that faith? Doubly
embarrassing is the fact that people from all around the world, the
Diaspora of that faith, seems headstrong in its shout of human rights
abuse in this regard, when they have been equally silent about
blatant human rights abuses in countries where their religion is
practiced by the majority and enforced on minorities without much
regard for their equal rights to practice their faith and
lifestyle.
I
propose that we consider an alternative approach to this
elephant-training by NOT teaching kids the balderdash of our
unverifiable faith, but instead show them all the alternative forms of
faith people adhere to in a pluralist society in which most of us live,
and then wait until they grow up with an uncluttered mind to choose
as adults if they should conform to any faith or live life without any
such mythologies. That should be the option for a free
human; it ought not to cause social embarrassment for their parents
because they "deviated." [Oh my god!]
Perhaps
this is how transitions in history occur. Evolution as learned
about from written history shows this as repeat phenomenon: the old
fights to protect its turf, no matter how weak and shallow it has
become, while much energy of the new gets wasted in fighting for
what seems natural rights. For example, consider the right of
women to vote and of Blacks to have equal rights here in the US.
Yes, that's right, in the US, which has taken it upon to itself to tell
the rest of the world how to live freely.
However,
I admit it has made strides in matters of equal rights, so I must not
critique it for its past without acknowledging its accomplishments
since. Sadly, smaller strains of recent immigrants to the US often
choose to shun much of its progress in matters of equal rights and
individual freedom---let's put aside for the moment the reality that
this country has also afforded them so much better a life that,
despite ostentatious revulsion against its culture and lifestyle they
continue to live here---and they cry foul over every little thing about
it that their faith systems' interpretive charlatans consider to be
at odds with their tradition of totalitarian orthodoxies.
How proud do we feel as parents to put heavy chains on our children's
minds, of unverifiable, communalist faith systems that teach them
to judge others as inferior? Please resist the temptation to deny this, because,
while I can empathize, I can refute your faithful denial of the
obvious by quoting direct verses from the book that you believe to have
come from your God. Consider these verses, for instance, that may
fly in the face of "equality for all" contention:
1).
"Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life:
no man cometh unto Father, but by me." [The Bible: John 14:6]
2).
"He it is Who hath sent His messenger with the guidance and
the religion of truth, that He may cause it to prevail over all
religion. And Allah sufficeth as a Witness.
[The Qura'n: Verse 48:28]
For
both these world religions, these statements are either true or false,
if we understand the classical logical rule of the law of the excluded
middle. For all the high noise of claim that either religion
offers so much love, peace and what not for ALL of humanity and also
that it is our incapacity to understand their "core"
messages, ask yourself how you might feel--equal or inferior--if you
lived in a land where religious dictates were enforced upon society
by the majority religion, and either Christianity or Islam was the
majority faith, both endorsing its exclusivism and
superiority. While there may not be any theocratic Christian
countries anymore--thank goodness for that-- there are
many theocratic Islamic countries.
Speaking
in present tense as in (2), does the message seem to embrace the Trinity
of Abrahamic legacy: of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and does the
word "messenger," the _expression "the religion of
truth", and the thunder "cause it to prevail over all
religion" seem to offer high provision for equality and democracy
for all religions, despite the headcount of its adherents living in a
Muslim-majority country of today?
If
intellectual bottlenecks such as tradition, culture, religion did not
get in the way, the exclusivist attitude of both the religions would
have been acknowledged. Exclusivity of the majority faith was
often flaunted in the past, when religious orthodoxies were much more
influential. While that has changed in the West, many Eastern
countries now employ the services of neo-con footsoldiers, educated in
the West with a modicum of logical argumentative skills who are playing
modern apologists, offering the fairly-secular Western liberals barrage
of balderdash about the peaceful nature of their faith, while failing to
explain its opposite manifestation in the cultures from which they
migrated to the West? Calling all violent interpretations as
"wrong" is a process of either lying or of cognitive
dissonance, for there is no way to confirm what is right. In
addition, both interpretive possibilities have been acknowledged by
those whose heads are not too deeply buried in the religious sand.
As
parents, how do we dare contend we are pro-peace, when we compel our
children to go to faith schools and learn all this arbitrary division
among humans? What would be so morally wrong if they are taught to
love everyone equally, instead? Would that be AGAINST the wishes
and dictates of the essentially-communal Gods that we endorse,
regardless of our political posturing to the contrary? But, wait a
minute. If we were to raise our kids with such basic humanism,
oftentimes it would nullify our moth-eaten religious dictates of
superior/inferior. We can be good in this world, and ethical and
moral, but that doesn't have to be only when we declare all
those that do not consider our little gods their personal savior as
kafirs. In real life all human trauma as well as death do not seem
to differentiate between faiths of individuals but democratize our
miseries in, and departure from, this earth. Would it not have
been reasonable to see some earthly manifestation of superior treatment
for believing in one communal faith or another?
Or
is that too much for us to expect our gods to explicate, even though we
are expected to believe whatever our parents has chained into our
conscience early in our lives, no questions asked. In the world of
many faiths existing juxtapositionally, could we pause and reflect over
this, asking ourselves if we must continue to force our kids to learn
such divisive hogwash? Would embracing reason and rational living
where we respect everyone's rights equally be so much a deviation from
our godly dictates that we must torment ourselves with fear of hell and
damnation for thinking independently, for USING the evolved brain that
He has given us, if we must insist that He IS the giver of life?
Would it be inhumane to abandon all guidance that clearly sow
inexplicable yet poisonous seeds of hatred among us, embracing humanity
as the only true religion?
Fear
not. Quite likely it is time we ask ourselves these questions.
For the sake of humanity to survive peacefully, and NOT for its
opposite.
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