Chuck Lorre #240

[Liebling]

A wise man once told me that we are all God in drag. I like that. Sometimes when I'm in a public place or sitting at a stop light, I'll watch people walking by and I'll silently say to myself, "He's God. She's God. He's God. She's God." Before long I always find myself feeling a warm sense of affinity for these strangers. The experience is even more powerful when I do this while observing a person who is clearly suffering. On occasion I'll test my little spiritual practice by turning on Fox News. Within minutes I become an atheist.

I am a big Chuck Lorre fan, and I think he has a really interesting way of looking at things some times. I particular like this one, because it gives us a different perspective on the world. What if we walked around convincing ourselves that each person we encountered was a God. Would be be better people, would we treat each other better. Would we become atheists as the experiment progressed?

As I walk around, I always try to see the special in everyone I meet. It's just something I do, along with smiling at complete strangers. Some people think I am mad crazy when I do it, but a lot of people smile back genuinely. Sometimes we don't see each other as important, and I am not sure if that has to do with religion making us focus on saving people or if it has to do with us being concerned about saving ourselves.

I also think that we put too much value in the idea of 'privacy' and personal life. We don't want others to come in and view our lives, or to judge us but I also think that the judgment comes from a mostly religious standpoint. Religion has seperated us as the believers and the non believers of varying degrees and beliefs. Should we never get involved with our neighbor because it's not our business? Should it take a tragedy for us to reach out to one another in comraderie? Or, should we start viewing each other as individually divine beings, and give each other the same respect in kind?

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

That's the way religion was supposed to work. If there's a bit of the god we believe in inside of us, then there must be a bit of the same god inside everybody else, and this gives us something really important in common.

It may have worked that way in the Paleolithic and Mesolithic eras (the Middle Stone Age and the Late Stone Age), when people lived in small clans of extended family units, regarding other clans with hostility because they were competitors for our limited hunting and gathering territory. If we could see them as people just like us, it might reduce the feeling of hostility, so we could begin cooperating. This would have been especially effective at the end of the Mesolithic Era, when the Agricultural Revolution ushered in the Neolithic Era. Inviting more people to join a farming village could actually improve its efficiency and provide a greater surplus for surviving hard times.

But as fabulous as this idea sounds, somewhere along the way it simply stopped working. At least it stopped working here in the far corners of Mesopotamian civilization, where the three Abrahamic religions with their one single god have become dominant. Even though Jews, Christians and Muslims believe in exactly the same god, they are unable to see him in each other. Their view is obstructed by the different traditions and fables that have sprung up over the millennia, and their religions actually cause them to distrust and even hate each other, often to the point of justifying homicide or even genocide.

They certainly do not see their god in people who are not members of one of those three religions. The Muslims and Christians have obliterated three entire civilizations (Egypt, Inca and Olmec/Maya/Aztec) because they were "infidels" or "heathens." The destruction of a civilization is a "sin" of incalculable scope; the loss of all those ideas, motifs, and ways of observing and analyzing life impoverishes us for all eternity. It's difficult to imagine anything the Abrahamists could do to redeem themselves of that sin, and their continued resolute love of war, slavery and genocide is not likely to lead them on a path to redemption.

Even within a single one of these religions, the differences among the various cults of Judaism, Christianity and Islam cause hatred between them. The wars between the Catholics and Protestants at the beginning of the Reformation were incredible, and they were still fighting to the death in Ireland up into our lifetimes. The hostility between Shia and Sunni Muslims has erupted into violence many times, and today it is still an intractable conflict in the Middle East as Iran and Iraq, the only large and important Shiite-majority countries, attempt to disrupt the Sunni hegemony over the rest of the world's 1.5 billion followers of Mohammed. Since Judaism is not an evangelical religion and Jewry only grows by childbirth instead of conversion, there aren't quite enough Jews to make war among themselves, but Orthodox Jews throw rocks at ambulances driven by Reform Jews in Tel Aviv on the Sabbath.

Religion may very well have served a positive purpose ten or twelve thousand years ago before we began joining our clans into ever-larger civilizations. But today it has a destructive effect on civilization and humanity needs to find a way to outgrow it before it finally succeeds in "bombing us back to the stone age."

I don't know if these same comments apply to the non-monotheistic religions. We Westerners regard the Buddhists and Hindus as serene people worth emulating, but Sam assures us that at one time the Buddhists made war on their neighbors. The Japanese, with their mixture of Shinto and Buddhism, regard all of us as their inferiors, and in my lifetime were trying to make the whole world their colony.

To be on the safe side, perhaps all religion should be rejected.

 

[Jenyar]

Chuck's religious experiment makes a good case for the inadequacy of superficial spiritually. In other words, you can't fake it. Like mankind collectively and over millennia, every person individually, in his own life, has to come to the inevitable conclusion that people aren't God[i/]. At best we can maintain that there's a divine spark in each of us, that every human is equally made in the image of God.

But it's a poor image.

Various measures and attempts to clean up this image or correct the distortion gave rise to religion. Sometimes the concerted effort becomes widely recognised and respected - organised religion - but it can always be deconstructed into individuals who are still poor images.

Variously people emerge who grasp the wisdom that it's not about me. It's about other people. That's the idea that is initially useful in seeing people as divine, but it falters at the altar unless some internal shift takes place... unless an individual is motivated/driven/persuaded into personally manifesting the change he wishes to see in the world.

I argue that people have become no more destructive because of any religion, and are no less inclined to destruction in spite of religion. Superstition avails, and short-sightedness is everywhere - within every fortress as well as outside them.

Post-Enlightenment and Post-modernist thinking has done wonders in breaking down the old judgements that had become prejudices, but in the process also undermined the process of identifying new categories of good and evil.

The continued fear of identifying the roots of evil in ourselves and others - in a vain attempt at avoiding the gross excesses and narrow judgementalism of past generations - has created an array of diverse societies smug with criticism, but bankrupt in moral authority.

Thankfully the tide seems to be changing at higher levels, with more and more academics reassessing and rediscovering rational belief beyond outdated, sceptically-assigned boundaries. But as long as the masses still orientate themselves along old battle lines, no new definitions of good will come about.

While we hold on to old grudges still defined by such superficial distinctions as race, creed, or religion, we will not make any new friends. We will never be able to redeem our 'enemies', nor convincingly demonstrate the alternative - the redemptive power of the good we believe in. Only then will we come to know ourselves and maybe even God, at least finding out which image is uncorrupted and incorruptible. Then we might at last replace the old divisive word 'religion' with something more useful, like 'best practice'. If not for our own benefit, then at least for those who have to live with our legacy.

But no faith that depends on how well we succeed at being human can have a long life-span. The source of such hope has to come from somewhere else.

 

[Medicine*Woman]

Chuck's religious experiment makes a good case for the inadequacy of superficial spiritually. In other words, you can't fake it. Like mankind collectively and over millennia, every person individually, in his own life, has to come to the inevitable conclusion that people aren't God[i/]. At best we can maintain that there's a divine spark in each of us, that every human is equally made in the image of God.

But it's a poor image.

Various measures and attempts to clean up this image or correct the distortion gave rise to religion. Sometimes the concerted effort becomes widely recognised and respected - organised religion - but it can always be deconstructed into individuals who are still poor images.

Variously people emerge who grasp the wisdom that it's not about me. It's about other people. That's the idea that is initially useful in seeing people as divine, but it falters at the altar unless some internal shift takes place... unless an individual is motivated/driven/persuaded into personally manifesting the change he wishes to see in the world.

I argue that people have become no more destructive because of any religion, and are no less inclined to destruction in spite of religion. Superstition avails, and short-sightedness is everywhere - within every fortress as well as outside them.

Post-Enlightenment and Post-modernist thinking has done wonders in breaking down the old judgements that had become prejudices, but in the process also undermined the process of identifying new categories of good and evil.

The continued fear of identifying the roots of evil in ourselves and others - in a vain attempt at avoiding the gross excesses and narrow judgementalism of past generations - has created an array of diverse societies smug with criticism, but bankrupt in moral authority.

Thankfully the tide seems to be changing at higher levels, with more and more academics reassessing and rediscovering rational belief beyond outdated, sceptically-assigned boundaries. But as long as the masses still orientate themselves along old battle lines, no new definitions of good will come about.

While we hold on to old grudges still defined by such superficial distinctions as race, creed, or religion, we will not make any new friends. We will never be able to redeem our 'enemies', nor convincingly demonstrate the alternative - the redemptive power of the good we believe in. Only then will we come to know ourselves and maybe even God, at least finding out which image is uncorrupted and incorruptible. Then we might at last replace the old divisive word 'religion' with something more useful, like 'best practice'. If not for our own benefit, then at least for those who have to live with our legacy.

But no faith that depends on how well we succeed at being human can have a long life-span. The source of such hope has to come from somewhere else.

*************
M*W: Well, I haven't changed my opinion about god, but I do love Chuck Lorre. He's a friggin' genius! I think every aspect of humanity is covered in his long running show, Two And A Half Men. I've seen every episode, have recorded and rewatched every episode. It beats everything else on TV... But I'm closely watching ABC's Modern Family...

 

[Skeptical]

On the business of human hostility, we work at the level of family and tribe. Most of evolution leading from pre-human to human involved family and tribal units. The nation is very recent, and in fact, unnatural.

Members of one tribe being hostile to another is so common as to be virtually normal. However, tribes form alliances also. Recent history is encouraging, suggesting that in most parts of the world (Africa may be an exception) hostility is reducing.

I live in a quiet rural area. It is normal for us to smile at strangers, and even go up to them and start a conversation. Sometimes with city folk, they are startled. However, almost invariably, within minutes we are gossiping like old buddies. As an ex city dweller myself, I love it!