We tell each other Fairy Tales
A lyric from a song keeps running through my head; the lyric captures the essence of how I view religion and the relationship believers have with each other when it comes to people of faith of all religions. The lyric is from Counting Crows Mr. Jones.
Mr. Jones and I tell each other fairy tales
Even some of the other lyrics fall magically into place.
I want to believe in something; I want to believe
Of course it'’s not a perfect fit but nothing ever is.
And in this scenario, the Christians tell fairy tales to the Muslims who tell their fairy tales to the Hindus and so on ad infinitum. And only the worst among each of these groups believes their particular fairy tale is THE ONLY TRUE FAIRY TALE, and that all other fairy tales are heresy and deceptions of the devil. These are the kinds of people who fly airplanes into buildings and seek constitutional amendments banning same sex marriages.
The less extreme are usually pretty decent people who go out of their way to respect and honor the differences in others's fairy tales and give these people the benefit of the doubt even if their fairy tales are different than their own. They perhaps subscribe to the idea that as long as they have a fairy tale they believe it's OK, because it's probably the same God, and they are just a little confused.
And the only people who are really suspect are the atheists and agnostics, cynics and skeptics who are reduced to shouting the Emperor wears no clothes. There are either inclined to say there is no God, or that the existence of God cannot be proved. And this is perfectly rational.
The Big Disconnect
I tend to believe in God, but not in any one set of beliefs. Because I have had countless experiences both induced and some just purely incidental in which things I've read in the Bible, snippets from other religions I've seen, maxims and adages expressed by sages and saints, ideas peddled in self-help books and on television make a whole lot of sense. My own spirituality is perhaps closer to Buddhism than anything else, in that I find the greatest peace and the greatest self-knowledge and clarity when I meditate. And in those experiences I unify with something that defies description. It's what the Taoists call the Tao that cannot be told.
By all means most people today are rational, logical, and even resigned to accepting science in most aspects of our lives. After all when we are ill we may go to church and pray but more importantly we go to a doctor. And if we are really sick we go to a hospital. And there we trust our mortal lives to those whose techniques and methods are based not on scriptures or fairy tales, but on solid science.
And when these same types of people come to us and tell us that we evolved, or that greenhouse gases are causing global warming, we put our hands to our ears and over our eyes, because we don't want to hear it. I mean right wing conservatives were OK with science when DNA testing proved that was Bill Clinton's semen on that blue dress, but not when science tells us we evolved, or that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is causing global warming.
