I am a formerly Roman Catholic atheist. I was born into the faith and educated in it
through seventeen years of Catholic school.
I was extremely devout until I was a young mother when for reasons that
would seem mundane if I described them here I abruptly lost my faith. It was as if I had been living inside a soap
bubble, and it suddenly burst. It was
gone. And that was that.
But that is not to say that I lost my interest in
religion. Or my knowing what it felt like to be part of
a church that informs, comforts, and restricts a person’s day-to-day thoughts
and actions. My first two historical
novels involve devout religious faith as part of the lives of my characters—as
would certainly have been the case in South America in 1650 and 1868. Now I am in the throes of writing a series based
on the Ten Commandments along with themes of other evils left out of the Law of
Moses.
During the time I was a practicing Catholic, orthodoxy was not
an issue for me. “Catholic” meant that
the teachings of the Church were the same all over, so there was no question of
sectarian competition. One accepted it
all or not at all.
I was in my thirties before I began to see how—within a sectarian
form of religion—orthodoxy might work to narrow what was permissible, what was
admirable, how one defined the difference between right and wrong. In fact it was observing the life a Jewish
friend that I began to see what orthodoxy could do to a person.
When I met this particular friend, she was working in a huge
insurance company as a management trainer.
Despite serious physical disabilities from an early childhood case of
polio, she flew around the US lecturing and training employees. In her private life, she performed on stage
and on the radio with her charismatic persona and lovely singing voice. She gave inspiring and entertaining lectures
that helped people concentrate on their opportunities instead of their
challenges. She was (and remains)
irresistible.
But then, after her mother died, her father and her brothers,
all rabbis, began to crack down on her activities. As the
years went by, especially after her father also died, her brothers’ ideas of
what was right and proper for her constantly escalated. All of a sudden they declared that it was
immodest of her to present herself in public and speak before groups of that
included men. She complied, even though
it meant quitting her job. Not long
afterwards they ordered her to confine her free-lance personal appearances to
religious subjects. And then they said
she must confine her activities to religious venues. And then to religious venues where only women
were in attendance. They made her
smaller and smaller until she was practically invisible.
Whether in the context of Judaism, Islam, or Christianity,
this is how orthodoxy seems to work. The
leader of a sect says X. His (It’s never
a her!) competitor in the Holier-Than-Thou race says 2X. The rebuttal is 3X. And off they go, making the rules stricter
and stricter and stricter.
This rush to ultra-orthodoxy seems also to be affecting the secular
side of life. In politics, what does it
mean to be conservative? Or
liberal? Nothing seems to be enough. It is not enough that President Obama has
walked an extremely difficult path to get the country on an even keel and keep
it there in such roiled waters, that he managed to break the color barrier to
the presidency, that gay marriage is now the law of the land, that 36 million
more Americans now have health insurance… I could go on.
Several of my liberal friends rail against him for not doing _______,
fill in the blank with whatever their personal pet peeve happens to be.
It is not enough for the Republican Conservatives in
Congress that John Boehner has given our Democratic President all kinds of hell
to deal with and halted much of Obama’s progressive agenda. Boehner has not turned the country into a
paradise for the right wing. He has
therefore been branded as the enemy of the orthodoxists in his party and has
been forced to step down.
It is not enough that Pope Francis has changed the
conversation and sought to find common ground where none seemed to exist. He must be vilified because he has not
jettisoned everything about the Church that some people happen to dislike. He is a “fraud” and a “hypocrite” because he
has not taken that aircraft carrier he is steering and turned it on a dime in
the direction they want it to go.
What I find astonishing in these people is not that they
still have issues. I do too. It is not that they want to speak out on what
they think is still needed. I do
too. It is that they become outraged
when they do not get their own way IMMEDIATELY.
They seem to think they have a right to judge and DICTATE to the whole
human race.
They want to be the head rabbi, the head imam, the head priest,
the boss of the entire world and until they get their way, they declare an end
to any form of civilized discourse. They
never softly say I disagree. Shouting
and name calling is their knee-jerk response.
A picture is worth a thousand words. I recently came across a photograph by a splendid
artist that says all these nearly one thousand words in one image. His name is Boushra Almutawakel. And here is
his instantaneous indictment of the evils of creeping orthodoxy. It is called Mother, Daughter, and Doll.
Annamaria - Monday
