Religion, Denial, Leaders And Followers

 

John Paul II was loved because he was an ‘everyman.’

He wasn’t distant and he wasn’t removed. His manifestation of faith was centered in this world- and not the next. We understood that faith through his eyes was the same as the potential of faith through our own eyes. If we tried, we could be like him, in matters of faith. We could share the very same values, morals and beliefs. Imagine that- we could be like him.

He was of course, the Pope, and as such, endowed with institutional obligations and duties, but we never saw that. He was a humble man. He was never the CEO- has was ever the parish pastor. He didn’t want to be regarded any other way.

We believed he was closer to us than to God- and that was a good thing. He was, one of us.

As ‘one of us,’ he had a past- and we liked that. With words and with his actions, it was his very human past that made him what he was.

He survived Nazism and Communism, up close and personal. Real life was no ivory tower or detached reality.

He saw beyond the church like no one before him. Because of him, Catholic parochialism was buried. He was respected and revered by Jews, Protestants and everyone else,because of the kind of man he was- and not because of the position he held.

He didn’t reach out because of his role as Pope. He reached out because of the kind of man he was.

John Paul II didn’t really change the Catholic Church. In fact, his real achievement was in letting the Church be what it was supposed to be, without being encumbered by political or agendized ideologies. The Pope that survived Nazism and Communism set the Church free. The lessons of Christ were to be true expressions of love. Under his watch, they became unconditional. They would not serve an agenda and they would not be be tempered.

True love, is of course, unconditional. When someone says, ‘If you realy love me, you’ll do this,’ or ‘If you really love me, you won’t do that,’ you can be sure the love is not real, but rather, the words are a hollow expression of a self centered existence. True love is based and predicated on the acceptance of the individual, for who they are.

When we read, ‘The meek shall inherit the earth,‘ the message is directed as much to the strong as it is to the weak. The words, ‘Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you, are directed as much to those who believe thay have the answers as they are to those who don’t. John Paul II made that clear. Under his leadership, the church was unbound.

There were mysteries, of course. When John Paul II went to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, or when he visited Auschwitz in his native Poland, it was never made clear, and rightly so, for whom wept more- The Church or the Jews. Of course, it doesn’t matter. Manking was especially blessed that day. Christians were rightly proud on thiose days. The humble priest from Krakow showed us what an unbound Church means.

Religious teachers teach students to accept and deal with the complexities of life. Students are taught how to make the right decisions and are given the tools to do just that.

Radical, political and power hungry zealots, masquerading as religious teachers, instruct students that life is black or white and decisions will be made for them, because the students are incapable of doing so themselves. The frenzied rage is cultivated, directed and orchestrated by pretend ‘religious’ radicals. The student submits him or herself willingly- not to God, but to the agenda of the radical teacher.

John Paul II didn’t tell anyone how to live. Instead, he gave Catholics and the rest of us, the tools we need to determine for ourselves the path we should follow. Those who oppose religion and faith often deliberately mischaracterize real religion with those who abuse religion. That deliberate deceit, designed to tar and feather all believers, is the equivalent of equating all physicians as barbarians, because of one Dr Jozef Mengele.

The impression (much of it reinforced by a groundswell of anti religious agendas) is that true faith was replaced by creed and worship has been replaced by discipline. Love has been succeeded by habit and routine, the intimate expressions lost to predictability. The crises we face today are ignored because they impinge on the neat and orderly splendors of the past. Living faith has in reality become an heirloom and not a vibrant, colorful and relevant expression of who we are.” We went on to note that “Too much of religion has come to speak in the name of an imperious authority and less in the voice of real compassion.

In fact, religion that loses touch with the ebb and flow of real life, is as AJ Heschel says, a ‘false religion.’ He also notes in ‘God in Search of Man,’ that it is God who reaches out to man with religion. We do not become closer to God through religion. Rather, God becomes closer to us.

The bar we face is a high one. God reaches out to us and we must know that and understand what that means.

John Paul II understood what God reaching out to us meant. He announced clearly and to all that Christianity was not no ‘false religion.’ In fact, through word and deed, he showed that Christianity was compassionate and inclusive- far more inclusive than most of her critics. He made clear the relevance of Christianity and he went to great lengths to be an example of what it meant to be a Christian, in no uncertain terms. Those who would accuse him and the Church were forced to deal with an unpleasant reality. John Paul II came to represent all those who defended faith in God with a thundering clarity. His message was clear and unimpeachable.

The inquisitions of today are no longer religious in origin. Pope John XXIII said at Auschwitz, ‘We have crucified Him Again.‘ John Paul II called that evil place the ‘Golgotha of the modern world.‘ The recognition of the evil that transpired, clearly enunciated by these two Popes, will insure that at least in the Christian world, such terrible events will not happen again-unless we allow our faith to become polluted by indifference and by attempts to appease of evil.

The real inquisitors of today are those who preach and seek to ‘finish the job’ and either seek new holocausts, with new victims or ignore today’s holocausts because they interfere with their political agendas. The the foot soldiers of the real inquisitors of today are those that would withhold freedom from those less fortunate, and leave them to be devoured by the beasts of tyranny.

Those with the most blood on their hands are those who support the call for more death and destruction or an advancement of a scenario that would do just that- and do so with a religious zeal, pretending all the while to do so in the name of ‘peace’ or ‘love.’

The real inquisitors are those who who support an agenda of hate as opposed to John Paul II’s agenda of faith. The real Inquisitors are those who deliberately mischaraterize faith and those who choose faith as a way of life. That deliberate mischaracterization is a deliberate result of denial- an attempt to negate even the possibility that people with religious beliefs and values are moral equivalents to those who are non believers.

In the third installment of Strategies Dealing With Denial, Dr Sanity writes,

At the center of all psychological denial is a hidden agenda. That agenda is usually not completely consious- meaning the denier has not always thought through the issues surrounding his denial.; and may not even be aware of what his motivation is in asserting something is true when it isn’t; or false when it isn’t.

Denial need not be absolute and completely cut off from reality. Even among alcoholics and drug users there is a varying level of awareness of their problem. Some accept that they are in jail or sick because of their substance use, but yet are still not willing to do anything about it. Some may recognize some facts about their drinking (like that they get put in jail), but completely deny the impact of those facts on themselves or their families; or the future implications of continued drinking or drug use (e.g., that they are killing themselves and will die).

Simply put, denial is about denying the reality of one’s own agenda, deliberately obfuscated and camouflaged so as to appear ‘neutral,’ as it is about denying the ‘other.’ In fact, Dr Sanity’s remarks make clear that ideas that are deliberately presented as complex, ethreal and abstract, are often a deliberate attempt to hide and obfuscate ideas and agendas that on their own, would be recognized for what they are- unacceptable expressions of agendized ideologies and beliefs.We noted elsewhere that MoveOne.org ( a highly effective and well run organization) is now calling for Fox News to be ‘excluded’ from the presidential debated and ‘de certified’ as news organization. Why? Because they don’t like what Fox News has to say.

In other words, MoveOn wants to do exactly what many on the left openly accuse the right of doing- stifling speech and opinion inconsistent with their. Funded by the free speech rights of George Soros money, MoveOn want to ensure their free speech is the only truly free speech.

Even as they accuse the Bush Administration of stifling free speech, that is exactly what a mainstream leftist organization is doing. One does not have to sit down with the Board of MoveOn to understand the disconnect and the pathologies involved. One does not have to sit down with the Board of MoveOn to recognize behavior paranoid behavior (”Make them go away. We are afraid of what they have to say. What of people like them instead of us. We don’t like what they have to say. Make them go away.”)

Further, (and actually, even more troubling) one only has to regard the lack of outcry on the blatant assault on free speech from other leftists and realize, from an observational standpoint (almost conclusive, in fact) that issues of denial and projection are in full bloom.

A real commitment to a principle (free speech) is not dependent on who is speaking. That MoveOn and others, with their silence, want to do the same thing they accuse the Bush administration of doing (and so viciously denounce), is more than disingenuous- it is pathology of serious nature. This kind of behavior is indicative of a lack of credibility, which in fact, is the ‘welcome mat’ for deceit.

As Dr Sanity notes,

That awareness was so frightening, that a temporary psychological bargain evolved into a binding contract that allows the person to suspend cognition and reason so that he is able to ignore any knowledge or evidence that alters his fantasy reality.

Too many people treat ideas like fashion: ‘I look good in this color, so I’ll stick with it.”

That does not work for ideas or dealing witn an ever changing world. We have to be able to see the world and recognize our place within that changing world. While our values must guide us, we cannot view the world and our realities with the same tinted lenses all the time. We need to be able to see clearly and without the filters of politically correct ideologies.

The consequences of denial can be deadly.

At the other end of the spectrum are those people, groups, and nations committed to the denial of reality the way others are committed to truth. Their entire sense of identity is dependent on a certain view of the world and they would rather die than relinquish that view.

Those individuals, groups, or nations who live in the world of deep denial are practically untouchable by reality or rational argument. They go through their daily lives secure in the knowledge that their self-image is protected against any information, feelings, or awareness that might make them have to change their view of the world. Nothing–not facts, not observable behavior; not the use of reason, logic, or the evidence of their own senses will make them reevaluate that world view.

Ah, the religion fanaticism of the non believers. In a couple of hundred years, their religion too, will come round.