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-=[ The Unbearable Darkness of Light ]=-
Mark Sanford, Newt Gingrich, Mark Foley, Larry Craig, catholic priests as serial buggerers of boys... Ahhhh... the long and storied tradition of right-wing religious hypocrisy! Reflecting on the most recent neoconservative moral crime wave, I am reminded of how simple conceptualizations of “good vs. evil” often lead to a perversion of morality. By separating evil from good, the light from the dark, we condemn our dark sides to the recesses of our unconscious and in that way they gain power over our actions.
Take the Iraqi war, for example. The rationale for that war was framed in simplistic terms of the “evil doers” versus us. It’s the “us” against “them” mentality. Such language means we’re busy creating an enemy, oftentimes an enemy with no grounding in reality.
If only it were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere committing evil deeds and all that was necessary is to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them!
::sigh::
It’s a child’s moral understanding of the world, people, that stands in contrast to a mature, evolved sense of morality that understands that the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who among us is willing to destroy a piece of their own heart?
I like to say that repression is a poor substitute for morality. Behind the repressed darkness lies that which has been rotting inside of us. You witness this when a member of the Morality Police is caught with their pants down (or their hands in someone else’s pants/ panties). A great example here is the
One primary purpose of religion is to define wrong and right and to prescribe human moral behavior accordingly. Every religion has its way of slicing the moral pie into good and evil; the more razor-sharp the slice, the more “clear-cut” the ethics.
In a black and white universe of “evil” versus “good,” right and wrong are two distinct paths, one leading to heaven (and virgins!), the other to hell (anal sex with “been-there-done-that sluts” LOL!). The so-called true believers of any tradition say it’s an either/ or choice. As the Dylan song famously says, “You got to serve somebody. It may be the Devil, or it may be the Lord. But you got to serve somebody.”
We vilify the dark at our own expense, because light and darkness aren’t separate, they define one another, the light contains darkness, and darkness contains light. In other words, we must learn to love even that which we like least in ourselves or suffer an existential alienation. Growth -- true growth -- means integration. Christians have not done well with integrating their dark sides. This is part of the reason we see so many Christian fundamentalists failing to live up to their own ideals.
Christian theology has not always done well in acknowledging the darkness. This influences the capacity for higher-level stages of moral reasoning. If you are striving to be perfect and pure, everything depends on achieving absolute purity and perfection. In this way, we fall into the trap of adhering to a perfection that leads to a rigid perfectionism. This form of speculation creates an image of God that is foreign to the human heart. A god thoroughly purged of anything that we consider dark. When we try to live up to the standards of a God that is purely light, we take away from our ability to handle the darkness within us. And because we can’t handle it, we suppress it. And the more we suppress it, the more it takes on its own life, because we have not brought our consciousness to bear upon the dark. Before we know it, we’re in serious trouble.
Just ask mark
Love,
Eddie
