Magical Thinking and the Army of God

When I saw that 16 people died when riots erupted in the Islamic world after a news item describing the desecration of the Quran in American military prisons was published, I got a really sick feeling in my stomach. It's not the idea that some uniformed interrogator would trash a supposed holy book that bothers me so much as the notion that there are people who would kill one another over the treatment of paper and ink. Even more, I fear that the corrosive mentality and pathological culture that would give supernatural powers to bound wood pulp, and kill over it, is now growing here in America.

I value the widsom, ideas and insuppressible love of life found in books as much as anyone. The words of another human, written centuries ago or yesterday, can carry truth to isolated souls and inspire dreams in weary minds. But something happens when we ascribe magic to man-made items, whether it's a volume bound in fine leather or a string of beads with a cross on the end. Sooner or later, the divine power we give to those items starts to talk to a part of us that's deep in our psyche, a primitive part that tells us that more recent human developments like compassion, tolerance and mercy just won't cut it in a world where we think we have to kill or be killed, convert or be converted.

The ideas in books, and beliefs, are critical to being human. Without the ability to believe in the ephemeral, in the unseen, we revert to dull creatures, lacking the spark that makes us special among what lives on Earth. Under stress, though, the behaviours we know as "faith in God" or "belief in the supernatural" take on the properties of obsessive compulsive disorder. Thus, a believer in the unseen unity in the Universe becomes a crackpot. This is where the Religious Right in this country are going.

It's no accident that the fear-causing events of the last decade or so have been followed by surging numbers of people calling themselves "born again" or Evangelical Christians. The old saw about "no athiests in foxholes" was never so true as in a time when people are faced with terrors and decline that are outside of our control.

Let me be clear: I am not saying that all religion is pathological in nature. It's only when artifacts start to become "holy" and beliefs are not only outside the realm of observable, scientific phenomenon but actually opposite to what we can see and hear, that believers become fanatics. So, not only did God create the universe, but he did it in six days, and only six thousand years ago, despite the geological record and fossils that we can hold in our hands. Prayer become incantation, ceremony becomes ritual.

The 20th century was hard on us little creatures. Diseases seem to represent God's wrath, wars, disasters both ecological and social seem to take on supernatural origins. Stressed-out believers want to protect themselves any way they can, which opens them up to magical thinking. Talismans, hex signs, crossing themselves when passing through a doorway. My grandmother, only a boat ride away from being a Sicilian peasant, was a devout Catholic who kept a bottle of holy water behind her bedstead, and buried a statue of St. Joseph upside-down in the front yard. You can talk to immigrants from anywhere in Christian Europe and find the same stories. Superstition is part of human history and every ethnic group. How does it differ from sacred Qurans being kept off the ground or rubbing rosary beads? Religious beliefs, like all belief in the supernatural, is a rich part of human experience. At its best, it can open up our minds and hearts to understanding beyond what we can see and touch. It can connect us to each other and important mysteries within and without. It is not diminished by being related to all superstitious beliefs. The medieval fanaticism that is exploding in the Islamic world toward which the Religious Right in America is hurtling shows what it can become at its worst.