I once had the opportunity to go on a picnic with a friend,
and Will and Ariel Durant, those historians whose books were given to people
who subscribed to the Book-of-the-Month club. I asked them what message they
could take away from studying all these different civilizations. They said they
found when a society lost its religious underpinnings it began to disintegrate.
My mother is close to death and I've been singing the favorite
hymns she loved to create a connection to a body that suffered from
Alzheimer's for over 10 years. They say there's no atheists in a foxhole and
yesterday I was praying and singing some of the gospel songs I have on iTunes.
The experience is very painful, but I had a way to let my
feelings out thanks to Steve Jobs and Jesus.
The need for religious underpinnings is becoming quite clear
in China. Before Deng Xiaoping, the people could believe in communism, despite
what Mao had done to them through the great leap forward and the cultural
revolution.
Now money is the new God in China. I was surprised to see
the image of Kong Fu Zi (Confucius) in the opening ceremony of the 2008
Olympics. Perhaps the nine men who run China thought the people needed a
old/new glue to hold them together. You can see how the tea party manipulates
that need for common values in order to take us back to 1951, where African
Americans and Asians knew their place, and white people could feel comfortable.
They say there are people who don't have the gene for
religiosity. I however, have a need for a belief system that can sustain me. As
I said in my article about Nirvana, I don't claim to have the only path to a
Higher Power or union with the cosmos. But it seems all societies need it and
some of us, individually, need it even more.
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