Fundamentalism and Da Vinci

I've been thinking lately about the problems of the world (as I often do between work and errands, and life), and I was beginning to come to the conclusion that religion seems to be playing an ever greater role in so many of these problems. Then I began to think though, that the religious impulse is something that also seems to be intrinsic to mankind; as an anthropologist I can think of no culture that has ever been devoid of some sort of spiritual component, with the possible exception of the Soviet Union, but that State Denial of religious experience was both fraught with, and the source of, many future disasters, and also could well be conceived of as just another type of religious experience within itself: a religion of Collective Control.

But being the case that religious experience seems central to the human experience (even for atheists-the religion of no religion-which consists of many pious followers), I then began to question as to whether it is religion that is the cause of so many problems, or is it how religion is conceived of. And then it began to boil itself down for me. Fundamentalism is the problem. It seems to be, as Nietzsche would say, a grab at, or a "Will to Power", disguised harmlessly enough as a wolf in sheep's clothing, in pious beliefs and grand overviews . People who believe, and say that their religious interpretations are the truth, and the sole truth, are grabbing at power through means of exclusion. If my beliefs are right and "true", then by definition yours must be wrong and "false". The interesting thing in all of this, is that these views cannot be proven; they are held in what is called "faith". Some religious traditions,like Buddhism for instance, do not hold to such exclusivisity of truth by means of faith, while others, such as Christianity and Islam, do.

In the drive for the "Will to Power", elements of these religious belief systems find that as they become increasingly oppositional to what their central tenets would profess, they create striking paradoxes which are covered over by ever more appeals to "faith", appeals that can cover over the most amazing inconsistencies as long as one still professes belief and adherence to the central claims of the system. We are living in a world now that seems to be going increasingly backward; as it gets warmer, as conflict between "truth" groups is ever on the rise, people cling ever further to their "faith", which states that they are in the right, and everyone else is therefore wrong, even though paradoxically, all fundamentalists believe this exclusively for themselves.

Jesus was a man who lived in the Greco-Roman milieu of the Middle East. He preached to his people for reform; to prepare themselves for coming times of great turbulence and strife, but with the knowledge that the Kingdom of Heaven is a potential, to be realized individually by one's efforts toward righteousness. His message was to his people, Israel. When he died, his followers, realizing his greatness and special nature, deified him, in the tradition of the time for those who were exemplary, or powerful, within the Greco-Roman world (something unthinkable from within the Jewish perspective). He preached and taught on the ethical and moral life, in a way so profound, that others (the Greco-Romans)wanted to be part of that message, even though the message was only for his people, Israel. And so, a new religion was subsequently born, and a Christ was proclaimed. And people, simply by aligning themselves with this new version of the story, became able to do the most incredible things in the name of this Christ, because Christ became Truth, and anything outside of the Greco-Roman Christ became untruth, and therefore "evil" and worthy of destruction. If you would only just believe, if you would only have "faith".

I still believe in a Jesus, however mine as been stripped of his Greco-Roman veneer, and is probably more Jewish (as he in fact really was) in his outlook; one who preached on the ethical and moral life, and also the one who told the Pharisees that it was in fact proper to pull a man out of a well on the Sabbath (contrary to the proscription against any "work" being done on the Sabbath) because a man is of infinitely more value than any rule, and that the rules were meant to lead one toward the Way. That was the message in a nutshell, and not that the way was to follow all of the rules. That view would be what is called fundamentalism.