Weak Gods
/March 22, 2015
When I hear about people being killed or threatened by people enraged that they had insulted their God, I am amazed that these people would worship such a weak God. An entity that created all of this is incapable of taking care of himself? He needs us lowly humans to defend and hold people accountable for their disrespect or disbelief? How can that be true?
Of course, it is not true. Any entity that is capable of creating everything can handle people that don’t like him, her or it. Isn’t that what the final judgement is supposed to be about? Meeting your maker and then getting their judgement?
What I think “blasphemy” or just “the attack on religion” is really about is the believers themselves. True believers, meaning those who force their beliefs onto other aggressively, have a very fragile internal sense of who they are, or even none at all. Meaning that when they close their eyes, there is no one home there inside. They are empty. So they fill that space with drugs, alcohol, food, music, and there are endless distractions from that emptiness. Using religion, or one’s interpretation of religion as a personal support in public space is a very old stand by and is socially acceptable in mixed company, particularly for those who swear they had “overcome” an out-of-control, destructive phase of life
If a person relies only on their religion to organize their internal sense of being, then anything that threatens that organization or those beliefs is also a threat to them. "Your attack on my religion is an attack on me." They have no way of separating the two aspects.
Society tends to let the fanatic get by with this by-pass (avoidance of the lack of self) because we are not really willing to call people out on their nonsense, since it is cloaked in the acceptability of religious fervor. It can be dangerous. There are sick people hiding behind religion because they have no real sense of themselves. That makes them dangerous on many levels. There are people guilty substituting a religion for a lack of self in all religions. This is not just an East or West issue; it permeates all cultures and is a miss use of religion that feels like it is consuming our progress and rational thinking. Not all religious leaders are narcissistic; not all followers are mindless, but there are plenty of them.
The next time you see or hear someone threatening or violent in defense of their GOD, just know, they are in a lot of pain.