Question with boldness even the existence of God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear. - Thomas Jefferson
Blindfolded fear. An opiate for the masses. We often seek what is comfortable. We follow charismatic individuals who make decisions and tell us what is right and wrong. People across this world are looking for that. Simply look at the Self-help section of a bookstore. Growing up, I certainly don’t remember that section being as prominant as it is today, with Tony Robbins big grin smiling at me every time I walk nearby. People will follow without question, because they are living in fear of their own reality. They are afraid of being lost.
Growing up in Florida, going to Disneyworld is more of a routine event for families. Although a dreamland for children, it can be a nightmare for parents, weaving through crowds of strangers and waiting in lines for hours with impatient children. Well, one year it became a nightmare for myself. My family and I were working through said crowds on our way to Tomorrowland, when suddenly I got to a clearning, looked around, and saw no one from my family. There is rarely a more terrifying feeling for a small child than not recognizing anyone around you and being overwhelmed by a bunch of strangers trying to help you. I even remembered my GI Joe training… “Where did you see them last?”… but to no avail. Apparently knowing was only half the battle, and I was unaware what the other half was because Joe never told me.
This is the fear. If we slow down and examine things for ourselves, we can see suddenly how difficult and lonely life can be. But, in following blindly, we may also miss how wonderful life can be, and allow others to tell us how to think. By sitting on Church of Synagogues on weekends and allowing a Pastor or Rabbi to preach from “scripture” and never test the words he or she is saying is an extremely dangerous task. Faith has gone in a huge wave. Until the 1400-1500s, people had no choice but to follow the teachings of the religious leaders, because Scripture was extremely hard to come by, and most people were illiterate. Come the 1700-1800, with the printing press and literacy on the rise, we have things like the great awakening. Religious writers and thinkers knew scripture back and forth. More importantly, so did their followers. And their followers felt ready to question their leaders every step of the way… not to find fault in them, but to make sure they were not following blindly. We are at a day now when there are more bibles, torahs, etc than ever before, yet faith and scripture has become so casual and so nonchalant, that we are once again, blindly following what our charismatic leaders tell us.
I’ll use this example. I have attend a service in town where thousands of young adults/college students/etc go once a week. The speaker at this event has been heralded as a wonderful communicator and really can preach a message. To his credit, he really is an awesome, charismatic communicator, in a way that you almost want to eat up every word he says… and some do. The problem is, there were some real inherent flaws in his message. He was going on and on about this semicolon in the scripture… how God put that semicolon in there because the sentence was supposed to have this one meaning and cannot be interpreted any other way. This problem was two fold.
- There are absolutely no punctuations in the original Greek language, so the use of the semicolon was done by someone who was interpreting the scripture as they translated.
- The interpretation fit a very conservative framework, even though there are many that interpret differently.
Instead of simply arguing that there are different interpretations, and that he believes his way is the most accurate, he led people to believe that there was only one unequivocal message in the text he was discussing. This is dangerous. More dangerous than any secular attack on faith.
But people will follow. They want to follow. We are a country of followers, and are looking around for people to follow. We like to think that we are leaders, and unique, and think for ourselves, but we have been so ingrained through the media and through our schools, that we don’t even know we do it. It take a leader like Michael Moore or Billy Graham or Bill O’Reilly or Joel Osteen and people desire to follow, even if the message isn’t great. We are afraid. We are afraid to question because that requires us to think. Thinking requires us to be educated on the issue. Education requires us to work and study. We are left in our slothfulness to be led one by one off the edge of the cliff. We truly might be the stupid lemmings.
