Kenyan Mourning - Paperblog

We ignore religion at our peril. I may be a voice crying in the wilderness here, but just because church numbers are declining it doesn’t mean religion still can’t motivate. And in large numbers. A New York Times story tells how 179 Kenyans starved themselves to death because their preacher told them they’d meet Jesus that way. It’s amazing how many demons pose as angels of light, even if well-meaning. All it takes is to hold up a Bible. People are religious by nature and they tend to believe what they’re told. Jonestown and Waco taught us nothing about religion. Universities continue to hack away at its study, declaring it no longer of importance. Meanwhile useless deaths still occur because of something that “doesn’t matter.” Religion is so easily weaponized you’d think the Pentagon might want to get in on the action.

It doesn’t work unless you open it.

Our world is increasingly secular but that may not mean what it seems to. Belief, whether in traditional religions or not, is still belief. We may believe we know certain things, but knowledge is a lot rarer than we often suppose. Religion evolved—co-evolved, more accurately—with our species. We need it, even if its gods have lost their divine luster. And if we don’t have people who can teach us about it without resorting to mere metrics we may be on our way to perdition. You see, here in America we tend to be a pretty literalist bunch. I don’t know what it is about our culture, but we’re uncomfortable with metaphor. Even so we believe in all kinds of things and then deny that we do.

My mind keeps going back to those Kenyans who, trustfully believing, starved themselves to death. No doubt the introduction of the Bible, without proper instruction, into their culture, meant that such interpretations would eventually arise. Perhaps inevitably. Religious thinking isn’t a bad thing, but taking sacred texts from thousands of years ago as roadmaps for today is. We so want answers in black and white—we want someone to tell us that life isn’t this complex and that “it’s all really quite simple.” But it’s not. Religion does help us get through this complex world. Even though he was a Transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau tried the monastic approach. It works for a while, but if we all did it there’d be untold suffering in the world. In other words, there’s no easy answer. There never likely will be. Until such a time as that, we should be studying religion more, not less. And trying to make lives better, not worse.