And as much as we’re told that it’s not excusing anything and it’s for us, not for the other people, the Old Testament principle of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth did not arise in a vacuum, either. It’s merely a modification of the lizard brain’s very natural desire for vengeance way out of proportion to the offense: both eyes for an eye and all your teeth for a tooth, and we can add to that millennia of conditioning that insists that if anyone or anything does us any hurt or harm, real or imagined, we’re supposed to make them pay for it, with interest. “Oh,” says the lizard brain, “you hurt me? Just wait ’til you see what I have in store for you, when you least expect it. I will bite you hard.” And “Oh,” say some of the more warm-blooded or perhaps hot-blooded denizens of the brain, “were you just now being insufficiently submissive? I will slap you.” Besides, what is the point of a grudge, we may ask, if not to hold it? And so there goes all that energy that could have been put to so much better use by being focused on healing. Thus we may be grateful that Hazrat Inayat Khan said, “Forgiveness belongs to God; it becomes the privilege of mortal man only when asked by another.”
Which is all fine and dandy as long as we don’t have any issues with the “G” word, which, usually depending on what we were taught in childhood, carries so much baggage for so many of us that in fact yes, we do have issues. That old White guy with a long beard meting out rewards and punishments has, over the millennia, earned the reputation of being a harsh and vengeful geek, the pinnacle of the patriarchy, and a gonzo control freak up in the sky whose job is to make us very sorry if we don’t do what the control freaks here on earth tell us to do—all those people who sincerely believe that we should turn our will and our lives over to them. Or perhaps the most powerful God we have known is money, so often and so fervently worshiped as the source of all happiness, the solver of all problems, and the answer to all our prayers—a God so powerful that there are plenty of people willing to sacrifice human lives to it: all those injuries and deaths in the factories and fields, all the grinding poverty of low wages and high rents. Or worse—the syncretic toxicity of a harsh and vengeful control freak up in the sky who measures our worth in money.
Perhaps we have been told (every major religion tells it) that God is Love. Which is lovely unless that’s a conditional love, conditioned by—oh Lord—those same control freaks here on earth: a love that is very disappointed in us. All in all, whole other books could probably be written—have probably already been written—about the wounds inflicted by both organized and disorganized religion in our relationships with ourselves and any genuine spiritual power greater than ourselves.
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