Fear of things invisible is the natural seed of that which every one in himself calleth religion.
– Thomas Hobbes in the
Leviathan (1651)
We return once again to the history of humanity to give us some insights into P-A. Those of us who have read the Old Testament remember that Jews were taught to fear a capricious and judgmental God or suffer grievous consequences. “Through fearing the Lord at every turn, and building on that fear in others, the priests have contained the object of their fear in a complex set of rituals designed to guarantee Israel’s purity, immunity and safety. In the way of much liturgy, the very tedium soothes. One cannot be bored and terrified at once. Or, to put a somewhat less sharp point on it, one cannot simultaneously be paralyzed by fear and punctilious in observing rubrics [authoritative rules].”
Fear also rears its ugly head causing conflict between religions when a scapegoat is needed to be the object of fear projection. A fundamental source of fear in all humans is that of chaos and the Romans were no exception as they observed the growth of the early Christian churches. “By failing to give the traditional gods their due, people feared that the Christians would endanger the state and overturn the fragile order. Christianity seemed a barbarous creed that ignored the achievements of civilization.”
We have seen that fear can operate within a given religion as well as between religions. A characteristic of P-B religion is the projection of our conscious and unconscious fears onto the exoteric world creating a world of imagined demons. When this projection is done by a collective, be it the church or a nation, the enemy is another religion, ethnic group or nation. In this way religion is one of many sources of violence in the world throughout history.
The same dynamic is operating in individual projections but the victims tend to be the most vulnerable in the society, namely women and children. Nowhere in Western history is this more tragically illustrated than in 16th century Europe. For a woman to be declared a witch all that was needed was someone to point a finger and fabricate a story. Typically then a woman would be tortured to extract a confession. Of course, the confession was the only way the accused could stop the excruciating pain.
The defendant had no legal protections. Whether the accusers were motivated by jealousy, revenge or the greed of the inquisitors (inquisitors could often confiscate the property of the accused) it didn’t matter. The end result was preordained. The witch-hunt hysteria became institutionalized and began to target both sexes as the very dark shadow of the Church began to express itself unopposed. Greed became rampant as all the costs of the investigation, trial and execution were paid for by the accused or her family. This included “per diem for the private detectives hired to spy on her, wine for her guards, banquets for her judges, the travel expenses of a messenger sent to fetch a more experienced torturer from another city, and the faggots, tar and hangman’s rope.”
The scandals surfacing in today’s churches have their genesis not only in history but in the unconscious clergy itself. The violence stems from the sexual repression in the more fundamental religious communities combined with the male-dominated society and the misogynistic nature of the overall Western culture. As the more rational members of the communities in the Western world came to resist this overt expression of the repressed false self, it had to find refuge in the hidden recesses of lies, denial and secrets. The demons went underground.
Satan is alive and well in America today. “More than half of the Americans tell pollsters they ‘believe’ in the Devil’s existence, and 10 percent have communicated with him.” Demonology is still a part of many religious communities today. So is misogyny. Eve was not the first human female. In the Talmudic (Jewish) tradition, Lilith was made by God from the same dust as Adam. She was expelled from Eden before Adam and Eve. Her crime was insubordination—not to God—but to Adam.
Today’s demons, fairies, fallen angels, witches and devils have been updated to match the modern human imagination. They have changed their place of origin and their form since neither of these could have emerged from the human mind heretofore since they were unknown. Fear-driven humanity now sees UFO’s bringing aliens from other planets. As science influenced humanity to transcend belief in ghosts and witches, the human imagination influenced by science filled the vacancy with aliens.
Christian fundamentalist author Hal Lindsey in his book Planet Earth—2000 expressed either his anxiety or his desire to sell books, “I have become thoroughly convinced that UFO’s are real. They are operated by alien beings of great intelligence and power. I believe these beings are not only extraterrestrial but supernatural in origin. To be blunt, I think they are demons—part of a Satanic plot.”
How do children and indigenous peoples suffer at the hands of a fear-driven religion obsessed with control and a church hierarchy with the power to exercise that control? In Canada four churches issued an apology to the native people of Newfoundland and asked forgiveness for centuries of sexual and psychological abuse in the schools that the churches operated. It was bad enough, concluded a 1996 report by a royal commission, that attempts were made to “snuff out native culture,” but also that “Thousands of students died in horrible conditions at schools, and thousands more were physically and sexually abused in the effort to ‘elevate the savages.’”
After the terrorist attacks on the U.S. on 9-11, we have seen a further manifestation of the dark side of religion. Tom Friedman, columnist for The New York Times characterized the attack as the beginning of World War III, which he said will be a war against religious totalitarianism. As we have seen in this chapter, “religious totalitarianism” is innate within the religious paradigm itself and is therefore nothing new.
Only the form and the details differ from previous forms of religion-driven violence. We are not facing a struggle of one religion against another although it can seem to take that form, nor are we facing conflict within the major religions, that is, liberal vs. conservative factions, or, for example, Catholic vs. Protestant, Sunni vs. Shiite. The war raging in each human being is between the false self and the True self. This struggle transcends religion and we need to be aware of the deeper psychological origins of our own reactions to our inner fears and the influence of mass hallucination. Only when we understand the human false self and how it is an obstacle to human Self-realization will we discover the power possible in a religious community to overcome fear, superstition and ignorance.
What is the relationship between fear and sin? To return to Marlowe’s quote appearing at the beginning of this group of essays, “And there is no sin but ignorance,” we find a wonderful opportunity to engage in a challenging encounter with the whole notion of commandments, precepts, laws, and morality in general. Another take on sin, for example, is provided by the acronym SIN (Self Imposed Nonsense).
In the context of P-B religion, thinking outside of the box or the traditional narrative is frowned upon and in some parts of the world can be fatal. However, we can even find support in the Bible for a shift in perspective on “the laws” against sin. Paul wrote to the Romans, “No man is put right in God’s sight by obeying the law.” (Romans 3:20) Paul even went so far as to say that the only purpose of the law was to allow (and enable) people to label themselves and others as sinners. (Romans 3:20) And St. John wrote, “Whoever is a child of God does not sin, because God’s very nature is in him: and because God is his Father, he cannot sin.” (1 John 3:9)
We are not born as “sinners,” we are born as wonderful, extraordinary human beings with a divine essence. We are born to live and love by expressing that essence and we must reject any teaching—religious or otherwise—that would define away our potential for Self-realization. We have nothing to fear but the illusion of fear that we create and choose to keep alive consciously or unconsciously.
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References and notes are available for this essay.
Find a much more in-depth discussion in books by Roy Charles Henry:
Who Am I? The Second Great Question Concerning the Nature of Reality
Where Am I? The First Great Question Concerning the Nature of Reality
Simple Reality: The Key to Serenity and Survival
