[lit-ideas] Don't Screw with My Cookie! Was:: Bizarre Faith
- From: Eric Yost <NYCEric@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 05 Nov 2004 00:30:57 -0500
Paul propositions: "Is it REALLY because you think I'm not being honest
with my inquiry?
or:
Is it because it's too difficult a question to answer?
Is it because you don't really know?
Is it because you secretly don't believe it?
Is it because you fear that if you lay it down it will sound insignificant?
is it because, as a nasty non-believer, I don't deserve to know?"
_____
Back to my feel-free-to-have-emotions thesis. By trying to frame an
emotional experience in intellectual terms, Paul is attacking the
emotional significance of the religious experience.
C'mon guy. Church is one of the few places where people can bump and
grind without guilt. (See Erin's description.) Now you are asking them
to account for that experience in purely intellectual terms.
Sorta like somebody on a strict Pritikin diet who is allowed to have one
cookie--one measly cookie for chrissakes!--and then some diet Nazi comes
in and gives them a hard time for having it, wants to stand over their
shoulder watching them consume it, lecturing all the while that eating
that cookie is irrational "because why would you want something that's
bad for you?" No wonder AK-47s are legal.
If we lived in a healthy culture where wide-ranging emotional expression
was valid for mature adults, all this sacred therapy wouldn't be so
urgent. But we've all been conditioned into living as emotional
pinchpennies (hence booze, drug, and church fetishes). We've all been
conditioned to display shopping emotions only, in part a protection
against the grisly things done to us and in our name, so the hallelujahs
have to multitask for us. Poor us! People standing right beside us, but
we can only get ecstatic about our imaginary Friend.
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