These Two Things

The first word that comes to mind is hypocrisy.

A close second, would be mendacity.

Every time a pious, peace-loving servant of the celestial monarch (that is to say, one of the several claimants to that throne) taps me on the shoulder and says –

‘‘What the world needs, old friend, is tolerance – a universal respect for the diversity in it. Men should have the liberty to live as they please, and the freedom to worship as they will …’’

Each occasion upon which those rehearsed, sanitized syllables proceed beyond the threshold of the self-confessed serf’s lips – I come within a sliver of emptying the unsavory contents of my gut upon the poor fellow.

Often, worse things cross my wicked mind – regarding the elaborate possibilities that might unfold if only providence for once grew a sense of humor – and somehow or other conspired to chain the glorified thrall to the mildew-infested walls of a dark, dank subterranean-cellar of some abandoned middle-of-nowhere sited warehouse, and place a jagged-edged farm tool wrought from once-sharp steel gone rusty, into my anxious hands.

Returning to the civil, sober and tolerant realms of existence – and the matter at hand;

This increasingly popular line of thought and speech, which is little more than an offshoot of the hyper-postmodernist theorization of a multicultural world-order, is repellent – if not for its theological absurdity, then for its hidden, but no less harmful insincerity.

For the votary of any one given god to concede the right of fellow citizens to believe otherwise, or not to believe at all, is essentially to say that it is permissible, even fine, for those persons to not gain the ultimate reward of faith – namely; heaven, paradise, Nirvana, Moksha, Zion, etc.

It is, in one renowned bronze-age charlatan’s words – to give up the good fight.

In this case, the good fight of evangelism and proselytization – the cardinal commission given unto all good and contrite converts of nearly all the world’s major faith-groups; with the dubious exception of Judaism’s jingoist and insular preachments.

How then, honestly, does a man let a fellow human creature walk ‘willingly’ into the unending afflictions of Hades, simply to respect the ephemeral ends of an earthly existence, or uphold the short-winded aspirations of a strife-rife terrestrial multiculturalism?

How then, if that man be not sadistic or driven by incurable schadenfreude?

Perhaps cowardice, added to hypocrisy, can best explain this peculiar sentiment.

Cowardice, because one is afraid to tell the infidels what one really thinks of them, or indeed – what one’s holy book really says about such unbelieving swine and their assuredly bleak prospects for the afterlife.

Then hypocrisy, because most religious congregations (or at least their clerics) are aware of the stalemate they’ve arrived at by way of the tortuous route beaten out upon the blood-soaked terrain of history.

As these verse-spouting folk well know – multiculturalism and its attendant abstractions of cultural and moral relativity ­– are only ‘deals of convenience’ brokered among several long-warring and principally mutually-incompatible faith-factions, to check the alarming tendency and desire to crusade each other out of existence – a very real possibility attested to by religious antiquity, and a threat made all the more achievable with the dawn of the nuclear age.

Religions (or spiritual traditions) therefore, will only let each other be, professing to tolerate each other – alas! – even attempting to reconcile the teachings of their divergent scriptures, when they concede their (regrettable) inability to convert, silence or altogether exterminate each the other; or after acknowledging the unconscionably colossal cost of the same.

The hushed subtext of this state of affairs, of course, being that each separate faction and individual denomination only bids its time, hammering out the necessary alliances, and waiting for the opportunity to rise up, at that nightly hour when all else slumber, and strike the mortal blow – or indeed, for its particular god to show up first and beat his contenders to the wanton, albeit gleeful decimation of life on earth.

We cannot then deny it – at the end of the day, either only one of these faith-groups, by their own explicit claims, must be true (and the rest false); or indeed – all of them must be false, since their respective claims to the truth have perfectly equivalent evidence hitherto adduced; which is to say – none at all. 

To attempt to propose a halfway-house position, or third course; which holds that each of these hearers of voices bears an equal claim to the truth; is really to appeal to sociological or political utility as crutches for the defense of superstition – or it is to take us all along for one blatant ride.

I strongly suspect the latter.

                                                                   *****

Then, this second thing.

Visualize the tender, hardy bonds of intimacy growing between a [human] mother and her newborn babe.

The mater’s world, for the several formative months of her latest newcomer’s existence, revolves around the bundle of living flesh swaddled about her bosom.

She fends for the thing, like it’s some little gurgling king; and defends it from all manner of clamor and noisy ring.

Fast forward to several annums later – and the erstwhile hapless entity, once a fussed over infant capable of drawing goonish babbles from the stern-most, stoic-most snoot, has matured into a dull, disappointing excuse of a teenager (or worse still, adult) with numberless insecurities, countless annoying habits, and a multitude of ineffable dependencies.

Time, that famed great healer, thinking to rediscover his lost youth at the sorry age of three-hundred, instead unearths his cynical side, and turns into the great ruiner.

Teenager, falling out of favor with formerly affectionate mother, becomes nonconsensual recipient of parental pity; and unconsulted subject of supplications beseeching unknown deity, aimed at securing divine intervention in the lad’s life.

Upon the failure of which – remorseful mother washes her sap-stained hands clean of the incorrigible soul, and wipes saline tears from her windburnt face and seamed cheeks – giving him up for damnation.

She, for her part, holds fast onto the savior’s promise of a glorious rebirth into the bright hallways of paradise, where she’ll spend eternity away in unimaginable bliss, and whence she will, in the company of fellow faithful, occasionally superintend the torments of the damned in the deep pit of Sheol, where her grimacing son’s face – contorted in a paroxysm of excruciating plight – shall enjoin in pleading tones for a single drop of water to be let upon his thirsty, lolling tongue; to which she’ll facetiously reply –

‘‘Son, I told you to get saved (or get circumcised, or immerse thyself in the Jordan, or the Ganges, or eat a monkey, or etc ... at least one of these sacrosanct rituals, though arguably not all), but you wouldn’t listen …’’

Hence died the only real affection men could ever hope to secure  on this – fickle planet.