A friend of mine is an up-and-coming
singer/pianist/songwriter. One of his songs, the title of which I stole for
this post, has become a favorite of mine. It’s come up in my head over and over
since last Saturday morning when I woke up and heard about the shooting that
had taken place in Newtown the day before.
I’ve ready so many responses from individuals about the
shooting.
One response has really given me pause to stop and think
about the role of religion in society.
I’ve debated about whether or not to link to his page,
because much of his writing is nothing but hate and violence robed in
quasi-academic religiosity. I really don’t like to give airtime to this kind of
thought. But out of fairness (read it for yourself if you think I’m not being
fair) a desire to always site my source, here it is.
And here’s my response.
It’s time—it’s well past time—to stop looking for someone to
save us from ourselves.
I can’t get over the mental contortion that the writer has
to perform in order to begin a paragraph with “We have, for years,
systematically stripped our public classrooms of any acknowledgement of God or
moral absolutes,” and end with “We reinforce the self centered belief that it is ‘all
about me.”
You see, the thing that the writer leaves out is that he’s
not interested in hearing about your god, or my god, or anyone else’s god. He’s
only interested in hearing about his god and in the versions of god that he
thinks are close enough to his version of god. It’s ironic and revealing (not
to mention remarkably self-aggrandizing) that the writer’s website is called
“Truth Observed.”
Mr. Tacket wants us to understand that an it’s-all-about-me mindset is the root of
evil insofar as social problems go. But the author conveniently forgets that
the religion that he thinks will save the world is really just his own version,
his own understanding, packaged and sold for our consummation. In other words,
it’s his version of all-about-me
dressed up like religion so that we think that it has been delivered from on
high and then promulgated through blame, shame and guilt.
It’s-all-about-me
is fine, as long as we say “It’s really all about Jesus.” Right?
OK. Fine. Our president says he wants to have a national
conversation and your response is derisive, dismissive, condescending and
self-contradictory and totally not helpful.
But, those like Mr. Tacket should understand that choices
have consequences.
When you allow yourself to stop taking responsibility for your
actions (gun control won’t help us, we all just need Jesus), the end result
will be a violent country where this sort of thing happens over and over again.
When you begin with the premise that man is evil and needs
saving, you’ve planted the seed for violence.
When you dismiss the role of individual meaning-making in
religion, and say that you (and you exclusively) have found the “truth,” it
creates violence in your heart towards others who “need saving.”
And finally, when your response to a national tragedy is so
dramatically off-topic (let’s end abortion and put prayer back in schools), not
only do you partake in the violence that plagues us; but you also deny our
nation that possibility of a conversation with outcomes that evince our shared
understanding of what it means to be safe while respecting the safety needs of
others.
