March 2nd, 2007

A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.
-Rabindranath Tagore

* * *

There are all these absolutes that we all seem to dictate in life. Despite such clichés as:

(Or whatever)

We still insist that at least some parts of the world are black-and-white. We still labour under the misconception that it is possible to establish some sort of manifesto and just live by it all the time and never come across times when we are manifestly wrong.

The biggest and most obvious example is any of the various religious tomes that clutter our cultures around the world. Even such happy-time clap-our-hands brain-dead simple rules like the Ten Commandments can only go so far to simplify our interpersonal relations as humans.

The Quoran is a swampy mess, and the Talmud, despite its length and level of detail is just a mass of confusion and ignorance. I personally grew up with King James and his simpleton descendent Mr. Good Times (the bible) and I can tell you it is a mish-mash of cruddy sometimes poorly-thought-out and contradictory spaghetti.

And you know what the real problem with these works of fiction really is? The people who read them adopt them as a replacement for what they feel in their hearts. Often they are programmed to do so when they are children by their parents and communities, but sometimes they just jump on the bandwagon without any external help at all.

And when they surrender their common sense to the word of whatever written tract was available, it means they have adopted the religious tome wholesale ... nothing to think about, just read the words as literally as you can and then act accordingly.

So let's think about the most of us now. Not the extremists or the bible-thumpers, not the kosher-beyond-all-limits-of-physics, and not the raving fundamentalists and ascetics who lock themselves away for a lifetime. The most of us are pretty middle-of-the-road folks who don't take our religious words quite so seriously and literally. We sometimes may feel a little guilty about it, but at least we don't strap explosives to ourselves or practice polygamy either. The majority of us humans try to find our own middle ground where we can "tolerate" as much religious absolutism as our lives allow, but "fudge it" when we just can't take it any more.

Well, I have something to say about that: The real "fudging" is the religion. The back-sliding we do is when we come unhinged from physical, logical reality and, to avoid unpleasant truths and to avoid seeing that the world is full of danger, we suddenly find a little faith in our deity or cultural icon and use it to inspire us through the rough patches.

We have a lot of trouble hearing the words, "There is no God! There is no Muhammad! No Allah! Nothing!" because then we are grasping that knife of logic from the quote above. It hurts ... it cuts us deeply to think there is nothing there.

And so we create these absolutes ... like building the handle of the knife. And a well-wielded knife can kill, can't it?

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