Friday, July 13, 2012

Fundamentalist frustration and additional alliterations

I've traveled many of the world's lands; crossed borders of mountains and oceans, languages and history. I've endured the company of ethnocentric, selfish people and enjoyed the company, mutual trust and wisdom of many, many more. My grasp of our place and time tends to wander and degrade as I move through it all so my thoughts come attached with appropriate caveats. Many women and men, wiser than I, are secure in their conviction that their god is the most nobel, kind and loving to its followers. Accounts differ on acceptance of heretics but we are all heretics to one another's god. I don't mean to cast aspersions on your beliefs in particular. You are 1 in 7 billion humans but it doesn't diminish the odds that you and your god may still have the universe figured out. I simply ask that you allow for the modest possibility that your particular invention of sin is just that and that you allow some leniency towards us hop polloi. Consider, at least for the sake of enlightened self interest, that you and others might be happier and more judicious with their tolerance and love if you ask your lawmakers, enforcers and society to allow others to determine their own definition of sin, freedom, god, sexuality, intelligence and joy within the confines of physical safety for other individuals. I realize that flourishing prose do not account for the difficulties and details of grey areas caused by linguistics but if you can allow that there are edge cases which will be subject to interpretation, then you can allow that those freedoms are also not polemic in their virtue and definition. Conservative, liberal, Muslim, Christian, if you degrade life in service of a higher power or believe that your god hates as you do and fail to see your fellow humans as such, you are the one that is troubled. We all think, care and feel as much as each other and about many of the same things. Your humility and understanding that life is sacred is all that is required to move beyond fundamentalism and enjoy this life. I don't claim to be enlightened, far from it, but I accept that there are insoluble questions and that connectedness and love provide a meaningful sanity break from them.