Dogma and Cynicism

I can't remember why I began to think ... oh yes, I do.  My wife and I, who're both of us 'non-believers', are both involved in causes that would have been classed as Christian service (my wife a lot more than I).  We often find ourselves 'praising the Lord' with fellow workers who are sincere Christians.  This happens a lot to my wife, who is heavily involved with service projects that are strongly supported by Christians.  Of course, these conversations are heavily burdened with expressions of how much God directly influenced some outcome.

My wife relates these incidents to me, and deplores that religion has to come into it; what it usually means is that some person was simply persuaded to do the right thing.  (Many people, even if we expect them to be hardened cynics, still have the ability to do something altruistic.)  At times, both of us feel like screaming: no, it isn't God!  It is just common decency!!  But of course we can't; there is a delicate network of beliefs inside the heads of these people, that makes their—sometimes amazing—work possible.  They often see the light of the 'Love of Jesus' shining out of my wife's eyes.  But she has given up on that sort of belief for well nigh 15 years!  That does not, of course, mean that she has turned her back on what was called Christian Service.  It's just service,  since the 'Church' has hijacked the word 'Christian'.

Throughout the world, people are abandoning the various mythologies, the different dogmas with which they were saddled as children.  The paths on which they arrive at this de-mythologization are varied, and often unique to each person.  But often—and this is important—it leaves behind a lot of cognitive damage.  We're quite familiar with the phrase 'trust issues' in psychology.  But trust issues are also involved here.  The secularization of individuals (making them non-religious) causes problems for that individual's functioning in society. 

I write all this not as an expert, but simply as an observer.  Over the last several years, we have observed the cynicism of numerous, numerous Congressmen and even some Senators, supreme court justices, and all sorts of people who were believed to hold the public trust.  When they're revealed to be complete hypocrites, we're essentially secularized from the dogma of civic responsibility.  We become atheists of declaring our assets truthfully to banks.  Much of how a president was expected to behave—let alone supreme court justices—were seen to be only suggestions, that were ultimately myths. 

Much of the practices that seem to have been abandoned by these new, improved conservatives, are just the simple extensions of the process of abandoning religious dogma. 

We cannot shove the genie back in the bottle.  Quite irrelevantly, it is the conservatives, who realize that something is not as it should be, and try to encourage a new religiosity on the population, via very large gospel churches.  Ironically, the ministers of these churches confirm, rather than dispel, the cynicism of a typical person. 

The phenomenon that is the engine of the attraction of mega-churches is nothing more than entertainment, and a desire to influence, or be recognized by, an enormous number of people.

Despite the culture of cynicism that we live in, many of us have altruistic instincts which emerge intermittently!  In the weeks and years ahead, we're going to see a lot of that. 

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