Faith And Collective Trauma 1

On the heels of writing here my spiritual autobiography, Gentle Reader, it does behoove me to continue on this theme of faith, spirituality and religion. I would like to pursue this around the theme of collective trauma. I am not thinking here about the trauma that is suffered by ethnic groups or statistical categories of persons who have been historically or ontologically mistreated. I have already explored this theme to exhaustion, only to conclude that really we are all traumatized, and to be a human being is to partake in the huge collective trauma of our species. I would like to begin this series with a little reflection based on a portion of an article in this weekend's Globe and Mail (Canada's own little brother or sister version of the famous New York Times) written by historian Yuval Noah Harari. Now like most eggheads this guy is going to be an atheist, and like all atheists, whenever the subject of faith, spirituality and religion is touched on, his eyes suddenly glaze over and all critical thought goes out the window as he categorically dismisses it all as fantasy and lies. Not because he has troubled to critically investigate the matter, but because his bias against God is so profound and so blinding. We are all selective in these matters, even the most rational persons among us, because, Gentle Reader, at the end of the day, none of us is ever really very rational. This is part of being human. We read and interpret things selectively and all to correspond with our prejudices and fears and to protect ourselves from things that could badly hurt our precious worldview. Religious people do this about science and anything that casts doubt or skepticism on their sacred cows. Atheists do the same. For example, Harari's refusal in his article, "Why Some Fake News Lasts Forever", published in this weekend's Globe and Mail. He lists sacred writings as "fake news', while offering as a kind-hearted sop to the offended faithful that even if the sacred writings of Christians, Jews, Muslims and Hindus are all lies, at lest they provide a cohesive sense of ethic and morality that helps bind people together in communities dedicated to doing good and performing acts of charity. He clearly has not given much time or study to those writings, and rather than have his sacred atheism threatened with the possibility that there might be truth in some of those writings, he dismisses them all wholesale as fake news. It is impossible for humans to be truly objective. About anything. We are too damaged and too wounded by this ancestral brokenness that we all share in common. We have only glimmers of light along the way to guide us through this and to bring us to places of healing. It is very tragic, but inevitable that throughout history we abuse and debase those glimmers of light, and turn them into something ugly and destructive: for example all the abuses of the Catholic Church; Islamic Jihadists; Buddhists in Myanmar committing murderous genocide against Rohingya Muslims. And in the other corner, the bastard offspring of the Enlightenment: the atheists, who simply will not consider the transcendent reality that inhabits the human soul (they don't believe in the existence of the soul. It's all neurons and bio synapses) and the human existence, out of which have sprung all the sacred writings and teachings throughout the world. It takes a lot of humility to sit in the seat of the unlearned, especially if you're an academic egghead atheist who presumes to know everything, and also especially if you're a religious dogmatist who refuses to allow his sacred tenets to be challenged. But we have to acquire humility and accept that we really know nothing if we are going to ever really begin to learn anything of value. Knowledge can either empower or it can breed hubris and we have to learn humility if we are going to extract the ultimate value from learning without falling into intellectual or religious arrogance. In our collective woundedness it is very difficult to face that we are broken and incomplete beings, but for us to begin to learn anything of value that is the place where we are going to have to start. In fact, throughout history this has been the only way to really learn anything important in life.