“I don’t give it any thought.”
Recently in a snatch from the very influential Oprah Winfrey show I heard Oprah ask a gentleman (essentially), “So what do you think happens to us when we die?”
Oprah’s question was not what do you think happens to the plundered and butchered millions when they die but what happens to us when “we” die. It’s astonishing how the complexion of the question changes when we ask what happened to the raped and murdered children and what happens to the rest of us who are well fed, housed healthy and befriended.
This gentleman’s answer was, “I don’t give it any thought.”
Precisely!
In this mode and religion everything's about himself and ourselves.
I gather from the brief remarks in the dialogue that the poor man’s view of God was that God is an “experience” and not someone independent of our experience, not someone to believe in.
“Now, let’s all sit in silence and feel ourselves breathing!”
There now, don’t you feel better?
Who cares if there is a Final Judgment?
Who cares if the multiplied millions never see justice and restitution?
Who cares if they aren’t allowed to feel themselves breathe while others wallow in sheer self-indulgence of a religion that feeds their own hunger for emotional experience?
Who cares if there is no resurrection to life for the beaten, starved and defenceless children, butchered by machete-wielding brutes?
“Let’s all sit here in silence and feel our divinity.”
It’s interesting to me that the atheist Dennett and Ms. Winfrey end up at the same point—Godless and content that it should be so.
Hmmm.
Here lies the corrupt heart and rotting centre of all these synergistic religious movements—they’re designed to feed us who are already so well-fed (in every sense) that we’re bored witless.
This much is clear: Say "God" is your experience or that "God" is wishful thinking and you've sealed the doom of the multiplied millions of the plundered poor. Remember that when you sit down to worship your inner divinity and fix your mind on your breathing.
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.