The people who go to Christian rock concerts should be locked into the concert hall and fed their bibles. I have concluded thusly.
From time to time I watch the god channel. I actually find it very entertaining. See, the nature of fanatical blind faith has always been fascinating to me. For some reason I’ve been drawn to understand it. Not just religious belief, but any sort of blind group following that sees people pitched against each other based on something unobtainable. That idea that everyone isn’t perfect, but if I do what I’m told without thinking about what I’m being told to do, without questioning the reasons… I can become closer to this ideal. The idea that perfection resides in all of us, but only this ideal can realize it. And in order to approach the ideal you have to completely surrender your will to this higher power. Or rather the person who claims to represent it. To question is the ultimate heresy. To follow blindly and believe is the road to ultimate piety, and the madder the things you believe and the more extreme lengths you are willing to go to demonstrate your ability to follow and act without question the more kudos you are entitled to. You don’t get anything for it mind you, if anything you get less because you are happy to sleep on cold concrete and give your suffering up for your love of whoever you are trying to achieve perfection through.
What brought me to think about this was a concert on the god channel on Monday evening. Now, in all fairness the band were not bad. Good musicians, competent singers… they had a nice sound. They could have been any band playing anywhere to any audience. The only difference, and I’ve noticed this of most ‘inspirational’ outfits, was that they seemed to be repeating themselves constantly, saying things like “give yourself to him”, and ”you need to believe” constantly. And while they were singing this over relaxing mellow music the audience were standing there, eyes closed, hands raised and swaying from side to side as if in some sort of trance. Now its fairly obvious what’s going on here. I won’t deny anyone the right to believe what they want to. Neither will I deny them their right to believe I’m wrong about it, but when your opinion and beliefs come from these sorts of mass self hypnosis sessions with people drilling this message repeatedly into your head, then I think you need to commit the cardinal sin and think about why you believe what you do. The trouble is, no one can ever give you a good reason for their belief. It’s about faith you will be told, you will also be told that it is true because their faith tells them it is and that’s all the thinking they need to do about it, which basically boils down to this;
I’m right because I think I am.
Now, everyone thinks they are right. Which is fair enough. However, if I have a contradicting opinion to you, and we discuss it, I’m going to ask you to back up your opinion with facts and figures, then I will back up my opinion with my facts and figures. Maybe we are both half right, and our biases have swayed us in separate directions as far as the semantics are concerned, but at least we will be able to make a lucid case as to why we hold the opinions we do, and not just assume that because I ‘believe’ my opinion to be true I can claim sanctuary from criticism simply because I believe it.
In my perfect world, people have a rational basis for their thought process, but I think in reality people will always look to their hearts before their heads. We are, by definition, an emotional animal, prone to follies of the imagination and as such will always be open to influence. However, I think its time we started to open it all up to the same codes of intellectual scrutiny that we apply to everything else before we start feeding it to our children as infallible truth. If Bronze Age myths are your thing then work away with them. You’ll excuse me if I choose not to ignore 5000 years of hard work on the part of humanity to make our lives (the ones we have now) better.
