Last post on the subject basically focused on my summary of the issue: we’re divided by cultures, and because we fear being alone, we group together in social clumps. Add to the fact that the cultures are diametrically opposed by a lie: we don’t know the future and prophesies are used to scare people into doing what the prophet wants them to do.

By consistently stating a prophet will come, religion lurches forward desperately grasping at each new potential prophet and then denying him/her when he/she outlives the social clump’s usefulness. Again, we see the divisions occur, like Orthodoxy vs. adaptative sects.

Inherently, people aren’t evil. At least I don’t believe so. Most of us deliberately set out on a path to do good things for all of the world. After we’re encultured with memes, we begin to perceive good and evil in others based on attributes: monotheists believe non-monotheists as bad, types of monotheists fight over the nature of bad and good monotheism, and sects of monotheists fight within themselves. The bigger issue is that we crave the emotional charge to get us in motion that comes from viewing the world in black and white. Black and white issues announce clarity.

But we don’t live in a black/white world. And it’s not gray either. Thinking an polarity doesn’t help. We live in a world with complex rules, and to initiate changes requires us to engineer such change so that it won’t be destructive. In Bill Maher’s Religulous, Maher isn’t outright rude to his interviewees - but when someone is offended by simply asking questions, I can see why people are so diametrically opposed to the movie by itself.

Zen teachings force students to a cognitive dissonance forcing them to think. “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” is a question using the trappings of language against itself.

We, that is the non-extremists, need to have a series of zen koans ready to crack extremist point of view.

Next Post: a list of those questions.