The Last Throes of Fundamentalism

Please don’t think that I think this will be easy or by any means quick (thus the Cheney parody)….we are talking generations, and we may not have time for that.

On the other hand we may!

IF, and man is that a BIG if, the human race can get its shit together to rise above the ridiculous pettiness that allows us to watch our planet dying while we argue over what can only be considered minutiae in comparison…

Then we could be on “the verge” (in anthropological time) of seeing Fundamentalism as a societal force self marginalize to the point where it takes its proper statistical place in the panoply of human beliefs and forces. Iow scaled back to the approximately 10% of crazy humans believing in ‘it’ that believe in other crazy shit. It is my belief that 10% of humanity always believes some variation of crazy shit or another. Again….statistics.

And not just Christian Fundamentalism, but Muslim and Jewish and any other Fundamentalism where people don’t just believe that God is speaking to them as His Chosen People….but act violently on that belief. And when I say violently, I mean politically violently too, as in trying to take over the political process to force their particular crazy shit on other people.

Because God told them to.

I believe in “God,” which is to say I believe humans are a small part of a greater intelligence or consciousness. I don’t believe humans have the capacity to define God, or interpret God’s wishes or that God favors one flavor of human over another. And I certainly don’t believe that “God” has a Hit List!

I do believe that humans are stupid and insecure and afraid and deeply deeply ignorant. I also believe as ignorance is exposed and brought out into the light, it is…..gradually……educated. And I believe that this is a process, as humans…..gradually……evolve.

Iow, for Fundamentalism to be cured, it has to be exposed and rejected….and it is. What was once a hidden and pervasive way of thinking is no longer hidden, and soon(ish) it will be roundly shunned, its leaders rejected and its practice neutralized.

Society, the NEW society, the coalescing and emerging planetary society, the society of ALL human consciousness and knowledge and shared belief that is forming as the planet gets to know each other and humanity gets to know itself…and see that it does indeed share far more commonalities than differences….. is being confronted by Fundamentalism.

And Fundamentalism will, gradually, lose that confrontation. It only flourishes, after all, in those remaining pockets of isolation from the emerging planetary consciousness. Places where it is easy to form little reality bubbles, where those reality are not confronted by information from the larger world, and confronted by a diversity of human beings of different races and religions. Once those reality bubbles do rise in to the wider world and are exposed to the ‘greater reality of agreement,’ they burst.

All the data I have seen about the people growing up today in a wider, more connected, more diverse world shows that our young folks are more tolerant, less hateful….and happier.

So just like any other wound, this wound in the overall human consciousness will heal….eventually. But in order to heal it has to be exposed…and it is. And once it is exposed it will be rejected, and once it is rejected it will lose its power, and once it loses its power….humans are one step closer to coming together, and one step closer to being able to cooperate, not separate and compete.

If we have time to do so.

Politically speaking, the forces of Fundamentalism are one of the two remaining constituencies of the Republican Party. As they are marginalized and rejected and their numbers drop and their power wanes….The Republicans will only have one constituency The Corporations. The Forces of greed that are actively killing the planet.

Forces of greed that are in someways excused and tolerated due to the Calvinistic belief system that is a milder form of Fundamentalism. The belief that if you are rich, it is because “god” loves and favors YOU, more than he loves and favors the Middle Class that you are robbing.

Once “God” is further removed from the political arena with the fading of Fundamentalism, there will be fewer excuses and excusers for rampant greed, less (self) justification for one group of people robbing another group to enrich themselves, and less excuse to rape and kill the planet.

And if this process of evolution gets stalled, the rising tides will help move it along, lol. There IS an objective reality on this plane of existence. And objective reality requires objective solutions that work.

And believing that YOUR God is going to smite all your enemies and impose your belief system on the world if you just kill enough people, or throw enough bricks, or learn to spit far enough to to hit Congressmen faces one main, and very real, problem…..it doesn’t work.

And whether it is a random set of larger environmental circumstances that drives human evolution, or some form of higher intelligence that can be shorthanded down to three letters, Darwin proved one thing. What gets selected….is what works.