Topic: Mysticism
Oprah Winfrey, Jesus, And Why DO Mountains Exists? Questions that can be asked, cannot always be answered.by Scott from Oregon
(libertarian)
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Oftentimes, I find myself completely out of the national consciousness loop, preferring, instead, to avoid most television for a walk out the front door, or a walk out the back door. I do admit, though, to having a couple of vices. CSI, House, and every minutiae of American Idol (I think they should extend the coverage of tryouts in Hollywood Week to about eight episodes).
So I missed the whole Evangelical/Oprah-going-to-hell thing and just happened to bump into a You-Tube clip while looking for more fornicating monkeys and drunk elephants...
Apparently, Oprah is pulling good paying housewives from the pews, and giving them some New Age Magic in its stead, and this has got the Christ movers and shakers in a tizzy.
Oprah is not only stealing money from their donation plates, she is giving these women "tools" to send themselves straight to hell. It is all very upsetting to Oprah's ratings, I've since discovered.
When I was a child, Werner Ehrhart and his Cultish EST Pay-To-Be-Program was big in our neighborhood. My friend G was sent to their teen program by his mother "They made you sit all the time without going to the bathroom and fed you peanut butter and mint sandwiches and talked and talked and talked..." His mother had gone through several of their programs, and "Got It."
G, a slightly hyper boy of ten, just got squirmy and bored.
My Pops also went through the program, and other than learning a few catch phrases for which to use on us kids as "reasons" for not letting us do something-- "It's just SO!" he would say-- it didn't alter his life all that much. He was always a lucky bastard, and that continued whether he "Got It" or not.
My Pop's mother was a Southern Baptist born and raised. She got wind of this Cult and would call my father on the phone, crying and pleading with him to get back in line, to believe in Jesus and the bible and go to church on Sundays. She was genuinely in fear of her son's soul going to hell, and we, as a non-believing family, were genuinely amused.
"Spirituality" of any kind has always both intrigued and puzzled me. Within the word is the idea of "spirit", which has forever been bantered around human cultures (almost universally). Watching something die, you get the sense that the essence of what made something "alive" had "departed" and you are led to ask "where did it go?"
"Where did it go, indeed?"
One of the fundamental characteristics of humanness, is that we like to ask questions and have them answered. In this case, the truth is not hard to understand, but is oftentimes hard to accept.
Think of a bright, vibrant boy with a high IQ, musical talent, and a love for driving reckless on his bicycle. One day he is struck by a car and he suffers massive head injuries. Instead of the super kid, you are met by a blurry-eyed, barely functioning boy who requires 24 hour care and cannot develop a thought or get his motor-functions to do anything purposeful.
"Where did "he" go?"
You know the answer to this. He did not go anywhere, his brain simply got scrambled and no longer functioned metabolically accurate.
If he had partial cognitive function, would you say that the boy's spirit was "half in heaven and half in his body?" (or if he was naughty and a non-believer "halfway in hell and halfway in his body"?)
You wouldn't. (Well, not if you were at least as smart as Yogi...)
The body creates the "spirit" in a living thing by allowing organic processes to occur (how cool is that!) and when the body is damaged or dies altogether, there is less or no more of this "spirit" because the processes no longer function. The smart musical boy doesn't travel to some other place. He disappears within the chemical and electrical impulses that he arose from.
The fear of death is the greatest human motivator for not accepting this fundamental reality. In order to be comforted in times of death, we make the choice to disregard the physical reality and opt for a softer, wish-it-were-so "spirituality".
That's fine, as long as we recognize our spirituality for what it really is-- a way to cope with reality. And since we humans can ask the hard, unanswerable questions, there really is no shame in "coping". Coping is a survival mechanism. Surviving is something to be proud of.
All that babble said, I have to say that I am both puzzled and amused at the new massive appeal for Oprah's ?new? "spiritual" movement, and especially amused by the Christian response to it.
These cycles of intellectual battles between the "spiritual" have the aura of vaudeville surrounding them. And the cause for all of this circus-like upheaval is simple- we humans demand answers to questions that we think we have a right to ask. In other words, because we can ask the question, we think we can answer it. I'd like to ask the question "WHY DO MOUNTAINS EXISTS?" and see what response I get. I am not looking for the geological reasons for different types of mountains, but the "spiritual" reasons. The profound reasons. The reasons that come to you while you are walking beneath them on a starry starry night. Why DO mountains exist?
What is their ultimate purpose?
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