Homeless god (Mingun, Burma) ©UrbisMedia
I don’t care much for organized religion and never did, really. Now don’t jump to any conclusions that I am an atheist, or an agnostic (although I doubt that I am not one). But organized religion of any kind I don’t like or trust. Organized religion is what you get when you teach Theology in a Business School—salvation that somebody else has put a price on. And organized religion is what gives you people like Osama bin Laden, Rabbi Meir Kahane, and a President of the United States who says he consults his “personal savior” on decisions like making preemptive war on Iraq. I have no objection to people wondering, or even believing that there is something or somebody out there or “up there” making the sun shines and things grow; but when it gets to “my god can kick the crap out of your god,” and “God wrote this book that has the all the rules for your life,” and there are people who claim to have a special line to what their god wants not only for them, but for you as well, then its time to worry that organized religion is actually a sickness.
And I worry that it is a plague of sickness afflicting our world. I know that we don’t need another neologism to thicken the Oxford English Dictionary, but I am proposing the word theopathic to stand for a disease that afflicts individuals and societies with a condition that increasingly sees and interprets all things through what is, essentially, mythology, through a cosmology that elevates belief over reason, faith aboverationality , the imagined over the empirical, one would think that after millennia of human experience in which religion has given pulpits to theopathic madmen, in which innumerable wars, massacres, persecutions, pogroms, crusades and ethnic cleansings have been waged in the name of one god (readreligion here, and its greed for wealth and power) and the sovereignty or domination of this or that faith,that, if the fundaments of faith are still open to debate, the judicious notion of the separation of church and state is not.
But, alas, the theopaths will not rest until God and country becomes God’s country, until patriotism and faith are fused in the minds of the gullible, until the law of the land is sharia or the ten commandments. In the current “crusade” the Muslim combatants might wear their theopathology as closely as their girded suicide bombs, but the Christian warriors scarcely conceal their religious fervor beneath their body armor, and at least one American general has espoused that the conflict is one between faiths as well as armies.
Theopathology is, of course, rooted in the homeland, and in America its virulence is pandemic. Nurtured in the most credulous developed society in the world—vast majorities profess not just belief in God but belief in the “virgin birth” as well—all public policies are vetted through the prism of metaphysical-correctness. With one political party so beholden to and solicitous of Christian fundamentalism, and where, reciprocally, evangelists openly court political power, a sickness has invaded and corrupted the secular marrow of American society. Public interests in health, scientific research, women’s control of their own bodies, and the rights of those with “lifestyles” that “threaten” the religiously righteousness are more influenced by thumpings of dim-witted pray-boys rather than judicious policy analysis.
The war between and among theopathic societies is a race to the bottom where the basest instincts of intolerant and inflexible fundamentalism contend for dominion over a new dark age of their own creation. Theopathy is religion drained of love of one’s neighbor, devoid of grace, bereft of tolerance, and that revels in its own ignorance of history. It’s a religion that that is organized to inherit the wind.
Amen.
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©2004, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 7.15.2004)