by deadwhitemale » March 10th, 2009, 4:59 am
On the few other message board forums I haven't been exiled from (yet) -- on the few where I am tolerated chiefly just as a laughing stock, the butt of relentless ridicule, mockery, and personal attacks/smears (usually of a really nasty, vicious, below-the-belt sort) -- they think I have too much faith. I, of all people, when what I have is little or no more than a cold, dull intellectual assent to a set of doctrines or dogmas. I just think it's true.
But "the devils also believe, and tremble." I don't think God is on my side. I don't quite see how believing any of it helps me or works to my benefit in the here and now. I shake my head in bewilderment at these people who have suffered some ghastly misfortune -- like that country musician whose daughter was run over and killed in his own driveway, or the family of that woman who was mutilated by the chimpanzee -- who go on TV and talk about how their faith has sustained them.
I get no such sustenance from my so-called "faith." I am actually afraid to pray anymore, since I can usually count on the exact opposite of whatever I pray for happening. I feel like whoever that was the Psalmist cursed to have his very prayers rebound or ricochet onto him as curses. I have relatively little confidence that I will even get any of the pie in the sky, by and by.
And yet, they mock me for having a faith that can hardly be called a faith, and consider me too religious, even crazily so (and they are all amateur psychologists, and love to throw out pseudo-medical diagnoses like "paranoid" and "crazy") for just barely believing Christianity is true, at least in its essentials.
They are unable to distinguish a miserable, wretched clod like me from these people (whom I call "Jerkies," after those folks in Lewis' unfinished novel, The Dark Tower), who wear permanent, frozen, rictus-like grins, hopping up and down in place with hand claps and glad little cries of "Praise, praise!" or whatever.
They think everyone who believes anything at all is like that, or else is some kind of abortion clinic bomber. (And they seem to think there are an awful lot of abortion clinic bombers running around loose. I can only name one, off the top of my head, and I believe he's in prison.)
A lot of days I can't even open the mail anymore. I can't even go down and get the mail, or take out my trash, or go out and buy groceries, and I have no one to help me with anything. I'm just growing old and I guess dying alone, like I always knew I would. (And now someone will say "always knowing I would" made it happen, that it's a "self-fulfilling prophecy." Yeah, they really believe in the power of positive thinking, that "wishing (or fearing) makes it so." I might say they're the ones with the blind faith. Maybe I always had pretty good idea how things were going to play out because I was relatively good at reading the writing on the wall.)
Aaand I just realized I probably posted this in the wrong forum. I guess it should really go in Religion, Science, and Philosophy. Feel free to move it there, whoever can. I won't kick.
DWM
"It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun." -- Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim(1899?)