Another holiday season has come and gone and I am still not sure I believe in God. To be more precise I am not sure whether God made us or we made God so I guess technically I believe in some form of godliness.
In an edition of the New York Times last week a lawmaker from Kentucky was describing all the ways he has illegally mixed church and state for decades claiming that without god: "America would be anchorless." A few pages away two economists gave a detailed description of how major players in the financial universe, both private and public, behaved unethically (and in some cases illegally) to slowly build up to our present-day financial and economic disaster.
When I was an adolescent proudly evangelizing in mid-western strip malls I truly believed that the only way to be a good person was to adhere to very narrow, specific tenets of one form of Christianity.
Young and naive, I understood little of the power of such human characteristics as loyalty, honesty, balanced actions, critical thought, empathy. Today, having traveled to many countries, seen more than my share of deaths, wealth and poverty, I would say my position has changed somewhat.
But I do wonder just where we learn to set aside ethical principles in order to, for instance, make absurd amounts of money (or if indeed we had them to begin with)? How does a man like Donald Rumsfeld, a self-avowed adherent to devout Christian principles, justify spending so much of his life backing initiatives that cause death and pain? How does a Madoff brazenly steal from Jewish philanthropic organizations? How does a Jewish state created after the atrocities of World War II fall into creating so much havoc in the lives of others?
One thing I have noticed about people who don't exhibit a strong personal ethic is a profound aptitude for what Erich Fromm called incestuous behavior. In the incestuous system these people cling to a group identity and lack any kind of critical thinking towards the actions of that group or that group's leadership, even behavior they would find abhorrent coming from another group's leader. These groups can be small such as a fraternity, a platoon or a football team or as large as having an address in the Hamptons, a member of the Southern Baptist Convention or resident of the state of California.
Studies show that the desire to be in relation to others actually trumps the desire to make good decisions. I believe this incestuous pull is the very mechanic that drove rich people to blindly sell unethical mortgages and poor people to somehow believe they could get something for nothing.
Fortunately I have seen that incredible acts of kindness or cruelty don't seem to have anything to do with whether one is a believer or a non-believer, educated or not. Clearly some people -both in and out of churches and schools- have chosen to live with a conscience and an attention to Life at certain moments of their existence. A rare few have chosen to devote their very lives to these endeavors.
Perhaps in the end God is nothing more than the call to be a good person and resist that incestuous pull. I feel fortunate enough to enjoy sufficient stability and serenity in my own life today to be able to notice it when I see it in front of me.
Dare I say, "Thank god!"?
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Dear Greg,
ReplyDeleteHi there! I still check billenet from time to time,saw your "chunk" of this post, and hopped over here to read the whole post. Nice writing, nice thinking.
I disagree with your characterization of the Jewish state -- in fact, I think it may be an example of the groupthink you notice. But that, like the underlying conflict, is an argument no one is going to win.
Mitch Trachtenberg