Mysticism: A Worldwide Epidemic
Mysticism: A Worldwide Epidemic
Mysticism: A Worldwide Epidemic
An except from the book Professional Nomad by Maurice Marwood. See www.trafford.com/08-0776
Faith is believin' what you know ain't so. Mark Twain
Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. Bertrand Russell
Throughout my youth, Mother exposed me to Protestant Christian theology, doctrines, beliefs, and rituals. We attended church, Sunday school, and summer church camps. As a young adult I taught Sunday school and Bible Study groups, and my brother, Curtis, eventually became a pastor in the United Church of Canada. For the first 30 years of my life, I was immersed in Christianity and its teachings. I read the Bible, sang the songs, and performed the rituals.
It was distressing. According to the Christian message, I was condemned as a guilty sinner from the moment I emerged from the womband no one could explain how I had earned that condemnation.[1]
They said I had been fashioned out of clay or dust by what seemed to be an ill-tempered and threatening God who would not even show himself. I was to prostrate myself before that God with an attitude of submission, fear, and eternal gratitudegratitude for what?
I was told my life on this Earth was only a brief interval during which I was to prepare for some unknown eternal life after death that I might earn if I sacrificed myself sufficiently for the benefit of others.[2] The so-called "eternal life" was never much of an incentive because no one could describe it in a way that sounded attractive. At least Allah promised a gaggle of virgins simply for dispatching a few infidels to hell during the transition to paradise. (I wondered what the women could earnperhaps the opportunity to be the virgins?)
I wanted a productive, rewarding, and prosperous career; a comfortable and interesting lifeyet Christianity upheld deprivation, humility, and self-sacrifice as virtues, and those who practiced these virtues were held in high esteem. Mother Theresa is admired for her sacrifice and charitable work much more than is Thomas Edison; yet, in my judgment, Thomas Edison contributed far more to the good of humanity than Mother Theresa ever did.
They said I should bow down and kneel on the ground with humility. I wanted to stand up and reach for the sky with pride, yet Christianity ranked pride as one of the seven deadly sins; and the Bible says, "Pride goes before destruction."[3]
At a young age, I instinctively loved and admired some people, but certainly not allyet Christianity preached agape loveindiscriminate love for everyone. According to the Sermon on the Mount, I was to love my neighbors regardless of their character. That seemed to suggest it might be okay to disagree with Hitler's behavior, but I should nevertheless give him a big hug, forgive his actions, and invite him over for lunch with family and friends.
From earliest childhood, Christianity taught me to share, once again, indiscriminatelyyet there were those who clearly had not earned or deserved my sharing.
The Christian doctrine contradicted my aspirations and sense of life in every way. Those contradictions gnawed at me as I studied Christianity on Sundays and struggled to live a secular life the rest of the week. The religious leaders were no help; they became irritated with my persistent questions and told me just to "have faith"that God was beyond the power of comprehension.
At first, like most, I smiled, practiced self-deception, repressed the contradictions, and maintained superficial harmony to avoid the risk of alienating others. However, self-deception did not work; the contradictions continued to nag at me and created a level of anxiety that ebbed and flowed. I wanted clarity, understanding, consistency, and resolution, so I continued to search for answers. Was I the Devil incarnate?
Later I came to understand that the doctrines of all three great monotheisms were essentially the sameChristianity was not unique. The common thread running through all forms of mysticism was the admonition to practice submission, obedience, and self-sacrifice. They differed only in the detailsthe purpose and the beneficiary of the sacrifice, the choice of which deity to worship as the true and legitimate one, the rules of behavior handed down by the prophets, and whether the messiah has come or is coming. Remarkably, tens of millions of people have died fighting over these trivialities and they continue to die every day.
At a relatively young ageafter a nave existence in North AmericaI was suddenly immersed in the tribalism and mysticism pervading Africa and the Middle East. My sense of contradictions became particularly vivid as I gained exposure to the many different cultures, religions, witchcraft, tribal beliefs, and superstitions firsthandand observed their dire consequences on people's lives. The many faiths and practices I encountered bombarded my brain, shaped my thinking, and validated my notions about the significance and consequences of mysticism in all its forms.
It started in Nigeria. During the official ceremony to open a new training center in Kano, we discovered that several students from other regions of the country would not attend classes for fear of being attacked by competing "tribesmen" who were also attending classes. These tribesmen were students, educated young men from Nigeria's middle class beginning their new career as service technicians. They were not savages; however, members of each tribe practiced different customs and mystical rituals according to the teachings of their tribal leaders, warlords, and witchdoctors.
Typically, these warlords were educated at leading institutions in North America and Europe. They had experienced the freedom and prosperity of Western civilized societies, yet despite that knowledge and understanding, they returned home and promptly set about oppressing their own people and bankrupting their nations. They used mysticism and witchcraft to instill fear, and elicit loyalty and obedience from their tribal members.
According to the Economist, corruption has cost the Nigerian people over $400 billionabout two-thirds of all the aid given to all of Africa since the 1960s.[4] During the past 25 years, per capita income has fallen significantly. It is a poor country only because military warlords plundered the oil revenue for their private gain, instead of using it to improve living standards for the people. Nigeria is just one of several countries in Africa that are slowly working their way back to the Dark Ages in that manner.
In Zimbabweformerly called RhodesiaRobert Mugabe assumed the reins of power after independence and ruled the country with brutality, trampled on human rights, and created a disastrous economic situation the World Bank has called "unprecedented for a country not at war." Over the years Mugabe has displaced almost a million Zimbabweans from their homes, disrupted the education of thousands of children, forcing many of them out of school, and confiscated the passports of those considered "injurious to the national good." Mugabe's brand of mysticism has brought the country close to collapse.
The Congo is no better. Dictator Mobutu Sese Seko launched a comprehensive nationalization plan in 1973 and subsequently plundered business for personal enrichment. During the past three decades, neglect, corruption, and tribal mysticism by Mobutu and his "kleptocratic" parliamentmade up of former warlordshave left the infrastructure in shambles. In a 2005 survey, the World Bank rated the Congo as having the world's worst business environment.
In 2007, several African countries had the audacity to ask the World Bank and others to forgive their international loans and help them climb out of their primitive existence. Leaders of the civilized world have shown empathy to that request, and are likely foolish enough to fall for the swindle and give more of the worker's money to the plundering warlords. Like the oil revenue, most of that money, like the money that should have gone to pay the forgiven loans, will undoubtedly end up in private foreign bank accounts.
When my colleagues and I traveled to Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Sudan, immigration and customs officials invariably searched our luggage looking for an excuse to harass us; we were "infidels" and "non-believers"therefore, the enemies of their God. Time, Newsweek, and Playboy magazines were routinely confiscatedthese publications were considered too risqu according to the established religious rules. However, our local contacts assured us these publications got well read as they were surreptitiously passed from one official to another. They especially searched for copies of Playboy to study, and occasionally glanced at the others for news about the free world.
In Saudi Arabia, the wives of our employees could not go out alone to shop or visit their friends. They could not drive cars or wear clothes that showed bare skin. In Jeddah, I witnessed men being whipped in the public square for drinking alcohol, and women being persecuted for not being sufficiently covered, or for violating one of the many other rules of behavior. The Wahhabi mystics and the Saudi Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vicethe Kingdom's religious policeenforced the religious Sharia rules of behavior and punished the non-believers and infidels. [5]
Fast-forward to 2007: Saudi authorities sentenced a married woman from the town of Qatif, who had been gang raped by seven men, to six months in jail and 200 lashesyes, she was the victim of the rape, not the perpetrator. What did she do to deserve that barbaric treatment? She was in a public parking lot to retrieve a photo from a male friend. According to Islamic Sharia law, women are not allowed to go out in public with men unless they are with their male relatives. The Islamic mysticism of Wahhabism still enforces strict laws on segregation of the sexes.[6] Obviously, nothing significant has changed since I first traveled the region 25 years ago.
Of course, the ruling classesthe political leaders and religious clericsexempted themselves from these rules when the situation made it convenient to do so. Saudi businessmen were very hospitable, and during visits to their private homes, we shared cocktails and hors d'oeuvres at bars well stocked with a wide variety of alcoholic beveragesnotwithstanding that the country officially banned alcohol in accordance with Islamic law.
Saudi customers attending a product seminar in Malaga, Spain, were entertained with the finest champagne and Spanish women that money could buydespite the Islamic Sharia rules of behavior. I was there; it was an unforgettable experience.
One day while I was flying from Jeddah to London on British Airways, my seatmate, wearing a full burka, quietly retreated to the bathroom.[7] A few minutes later, that Arab woman returned looking like a model out of Vogue, wearing a short skirt, sheer nylons, four-inch heels, long flowing hair, and plenty of jewelry and cleavage. It was a transformation. No doubt, she would arrive in London and meld into the fashionable crowd at Piccadilly Circus unnoticed. Of course, on the flight back to Saudi Arabia, she would change costumes again and disembark wearing the burka. Quite obviously, the mystical rules of Islam are flexible when necessaryat least for some. I suppose if one has the power to make the rules, one has the power to ignore them.
The entire Middle East is dysfunctionala boiling caldron of mysticismand it has been for more than 2,000 years. Three of the world's dominant religions originated in the Middle East. The city of Jerusalem is claimed to be sacred to all three in their quest to reach eternal salvation.[8] It is not possible to explain the human slaughter that has occurred in the name of these religions over the years. The fundamentalists of all three contributed to the slaughter, including the Christians. All three share a common ideathat they and they alone, have the one "true" religion and will therefore have exclusive passage to the "life hereafter." They each believe their God is the only true God and their faith must reign supreme. The human slaughter will continue so long as the masses continue to accept the teachings that their version of the truth is the "exclusive" version.
Although the world's attention is focused mainly on the Arab-Israeli conflict, the majority of the slaughter has not involved Israel. For example, Syria killed 20,000 Arab Muslims while crushing an uprising in Hama in 1982; Saddam Hussein killed more Arab Muslims than the Israelis ever have and many consider him a hero; the 10-year Iran-Iraq war killed well over a million Arabs and Persians;[9] and over 2 million Sudanese have died in the ongoing civil war. The outrage over Israel and the Palestinians continues, while Arabs killing Arabs and the weakness of their society and political systems are overlooked.
Obviously, the suicide murders are more about money and power than supreme acts of genuine religious beliefs. The Muslim clerics have not strapped on bombs and committed suicide murders to martyr themselves or their sons for the glorious benefit of going to heaven with 71 virgins. Instead, they send their sons to the United States or the U.K. to get a good education. The suicide bombers are the outcasts, the orphans, the retarded, and the young hotheads. Suicide murder is simply a vicious form of terrorism, a weapon used by those seeking personal affluence and power, and mysticism is the tool used to make it happen.
India is particularly rife with mysticism. Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism were all born there, and the country has more Muslims than any country other than Indonesia.[10] Religion is an essential part of the nation's character. I found the Hindu brand of mysticism particularly astonishing. According to the National Geographic magazine, the ranks in that society come from a legend in which the main groupings emerged from a primordial being. One groupcalled the Untouchablesis considered too impure, too polluted, to rank as worthy human beings. Prejudice defines the lives of these 160 million people, particularly in the rural areas. Untouchables are shunned, insulted, banned from temples and higher-caste homes; made to eat and drink from separate utensils in public places; and in extreme cases, are raped, burned, lynched, and gunned down. [11]
The religious mystics of the Hindu persuasion expect these people to accept their misery and practice the self-sacrifice that might get them into a higher class of society when they are reincarnatedprovided, of course, that their sacrifice is sufficient. I watched children from that caste begging for scraps of food outside the four-star hotels in Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras. Meanwhile, cows freely roamed through the market, eating whatever they wanted and generally destroying whatever got in their way.[12] Where is the virtue in a brand of mysticism that values cows over children and preaches the basic precept that all men are created unequal?
Further illustrating the shocking nature of Hindu mysticism, fast-forward again, to 2005, and read about the story of a girl whose grandfather arranged her marriage at the age of three to a neighborhood boy who was five years old. The marriage was blessed by the caste panchayatthe caste council, a powerful group of local leaders. In 2005, the girl, now 22 years old, broke the rules of marriage and refused to move in with her husband. By persisting, she could be stripped naked, persecuted, ostracized, and perhaps tortured to death. Once again, the Hindu mysticism of the caste panchayat ruled over the lives of the people. Her religious affiliation became a matter of life and death.[13]
After relocating to Hong Kong in 1979, I had occasion to visit China shortly after the death of Chairman Mao. In China, it was not a religious mystic that had been calling the shots for 30 years; it was a mystic of muscleChairman Mao. He had created his own divine persona, the altar at which the Chinese people were expected to worship. He even provided them with a "sacred" textthe Little Red Book. Under Mao's monotheism, the people had to confess their sins to the regime and sacrifice their lives to the Communist ideology with as much fervor and submissiveness as the followers of any religious mystic. Chairman Mao's mysticism of muscle resulted in the death of over 50 million of his own ethnic Chinese people through mass starvation and persecution during his reign of terror. Mao was not unique; many other strongmen down through history understood the power of mysticism and fear to control the massesAdolph Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, and Fidel Castro, to name a few.[14] Like Chairman Mao, they held total control over people's lives and demanded unquestioning obedience to the dogmatism and doctrine of their ideology and cult of divinized personality.
In Beijing in 1979, the engineers attending our training seminars were not allowed to enter the hotel without a permission slip from the Communist Party. Nor were they allowed to inspect our equipment in the field without travel documents giving them specific permission. Control over individual choice and personal behavior was so extreme, it was difficult to tell the men from the women because they were all forced to wear the same drab blue Mao uniforms. Fortunately, several economic liberties have been granted since then; however, political freedom in China is still practically nonexistent.
The epidemic of mysticism is not limited to the lesser-developed countries. In Northern Ireland, the Catholics and the Protestants killed each other for years over differing beliefs, doctrines, and rituals. The same occurred in the Balkans during the dissolution of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia where a once-modern society crumbled into chaos. To be Croatian is to be Christian Roman Catholic, and to be Serbian is to be Christian Orthodox. Here, Slobodan Milosevica Christian Orthodox Serbled the Holocaust-like practice of ethnic or religious cleansing against the Croatians during the battles over religious, cultural, and ethnic differencesChristians killing Christians.[15]
Radical mysticism is also starting to rear its ugly head in the United States, specifically in the ranting of the right-wing Christian fundamentalists as they advocate breaking down the constitutional separation of church and state and converting the government into a Christian theocracy. Madeleine Albright, the former United States secretary of state, advocates mixing politics and religion to help solve the world's problems,[16] and President George W. Bush, as well as Osama bin Laden, firmly believes "God is on our side."
In Canada in the 1960s, the Federation de Liberation de Qubec (FLQ) used violence and intimidation in an attempt to extend their control over the Qubec "infidels" who were not of the same "tribe," who frequently did not share the same religion and did not agree with the FLQ's plan of "salvation" for the province. Fortunately, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau declared marshal law and brought out the army to restore order before the situation got out of hand.
My wife tells stories of her persecution as a young girl while being educated by the Catholic Church in Qubec. The religious mystics of the Christian faith told her what to read, what to think, and how to live her personal life. Young students under the nuns were not allowed to read the Bible independently until they were about 20 years old, for fear they would not be sufficiently brainwashed with the doctrine and the dogma to resist the contradictions and temptations they might encounter. Meanwhile, the Catholic priests were having a heyday sexually abusing the young boys in the local orphanagestragic events no one spoke about until 20 years later. Today, my wife is a recovering Catholic. She personally experienced methods of intimidation and mind control similar to those used to brainwash Muslim children to become suicide bombers in the name of Allahthe supreme mystic of the Muslim faith.
It is not an accident that free societies are relatively prosperous and enjoy a good standard of living, whereas totalitarian theocratic societies breed fear, ignorance, and hate as they struggle to meet the basic needs of survivaleven those nations that enjoy bountiful wealth from oil. The cycle of desperation is not caused by poverty; it is caused by repression and ignorance, which creates vulnerability to fanatical beliefs in ancient tribal mysticisms. Mystics do not want their followers to be educated, independent thinkers; they want them to be ignorant and fearful so they will blindly follow the tribal leader who promises to take care of them in return for loyalty and self-sacrifice.
Israel is the only country in the Middle East that has a legitimate multiethnic, pluralistic form of government that protects individual freedoms to a significant degree. Israel has only 1/1000 of the world's population, and yet its $100 billion economy is larger than all its immediate neighbors combined. Israel has the highest average living standard in the Middle East, and in the year 2000, the per capita income exceeded that of the U.K. In contrast, its neighboring countries practice religious totalitarianism in one form or another and large numbers of the population are functionally illiterate. Totalitarianism and illiteracy often seem to go togethera coincidence, perhaps? I think not.
India has about 150 million practicing Muslims who are generally productive and quietly go about making better lives for themselves. It is the second largest community of Muslims in the world, yet we do not hear about them trying to kill us or destroy America.[17] Perhaps it's because, like Israel, they live under a political system (a form of democracy, perhaps) that, although fragile, messy, and corrupt, is also multiethnic and pluralistic. In addition, a basic secular education is widely available and most have economic opportunities and a political voice open to them. In addition, most individual liberties are acknowledged, which allows grievances to be expressed and addressed, usually without having to resort to violence.
So what is the point? The point is that mysticism in all its many forms is a worldwide epidemic. Whether it is a self-appointed mystic of muscle or a mystic of religion, both share a common threadthey both demand self-sacrifice, submission, and unquestioning obedience. The outcome of that epidemic is always the same: millions of people living and dying in ignorance, poverty, conflict, and desperation.[18] I fail to see the virtue in that altruistic morality. My experiences have convinced me that only under a secular political systemone protecting individual freedom and maintaining an independent judiciary to enforce the separation of church and statecan people with differing beliefs and value systems enjoy freedom and co-exist peacefully.
The epidemic of mysticism desperately needs a vaccine. It is availableit starts with a quality, secular education that teaches all children they are sovereign individuals with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of their own happiness. A worldwide inoculation program should be implemented to wipe out that epidemic before it destroys the societies that are still mostly civilized.
Good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad thingsthat takes religion. Steven Weinberg
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[1] According to the Christian belief in the concept of original sin;
[2] I always wondered: if that was my purpose in life, what was the purpose of the others? Were they to be my slaves and sacrifice their lives for me, even though I was a total stranger?
[3] Proverbs 16:18.
[4] "The Good, the Bad and the President," Economist, January 5, 2008, 36;
[5] Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East (2005). Wahhabism is the strict conservative Sunni Islamist religion of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, founded by the 18th-century cleric Mohammed Ibn Abdul-Wahhab (17031792). The Taliban clerics are products of the Wahhabi madrassasreligious schools for Muslimsfunded primarily by Saudi Arabia.
[6] Economist, November 24, 2007, 52
[7] Burka: An all-over garment with veiled eyeholes, worn by some Muslim women.
[8] It is worth noting that King David founded Jerusalem. For over 3,000 years,Jerusalem was the Jewish capital. There are no indications that Mohammed ever set foot in it. It was never the capital ofanyArab or Muslim entity. Even during Jordanian rule, Jerusalem was not made the capital. Jews pray facing Jerusalem; Muslims face Mecca.
[9] Persians are people born in Iran and are descendents of people who lived in ancient Persia and who founded an empire around 550 BC. Their language is Farsi, and they are not Arabs. Their dominant religion is Islam.
[10] Edward Luce, In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India (2007).
[11] National Geographic, June 2003.
[12] The governments of India offered to import and protect the cattle facing slaughter because of the "mad cow" disease that swept through Europe in the 1990s.
[13] Washington Post, September 6, 2005.
[14] See Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe (2007); and Andrew Nagorski, The Greatest Battle (2007).
[15] In the 1940s, the Catholic Croatians slaughtered thousands of Orthodox Christians or put them in concentration camps.
[16] Madeleine Albright, The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God and World Affairs (2006).
[17] Indonesia has the largest Muslim community of any single country.
[18] Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great (2007); the author provides detailed documentation of how mysticism, religion, faith, and superstition destroy civilized societies.
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