Fear And Intolerance The Deadly Combination

Fear And Intolerance The Deadly Combination

Well the recent violence in Norway is just another in a long line of violent events that the world has seen throughout history. In reading the comments that come after many of the on-line news stories of this event I see that people are always trying to link the guy Anders Behring Breivik to some group. I guess they do this because they want to have some understanding and with that some ways to control or predict this in the future and maybe prevent it. Some of the people commenting latched on to the fact that he claimed to be Christian and the people claimed religious extremists are always the ones doing this stuff. But we don’t have to look far to find people doing the same thing who are not religious at all such as Timothy McVeigh who said science was his religion (an Atheist), or Jared Lee Loughner who appeared to have no belief in God at all. Other claimed it was people with the right wing point of view that Breivik had that breeds this violence. But one of the people that knew Jared Lee Loughner in high school said “As I knew him he was left wing, and quite liberal.” Some of the news agencies quickly claimed that the event must have been done by Islamic terrorist, before they learned the suspect was Norwegian. And of course this event does not play into the theory that the racist guy that comments on my blog, has that paints black people as the ones who we are to fear.

This kind of thinking just plain lacks logic. Well Breivik is a 32 year old man so we should fear all 32 year old men. No that’s not it, but he is a white Norwegian so we should fear all Norwegians. Nope that won’t work. He is Christian so we should label religion as dangerous in spite of the majority of people of faiths throughout the world that love, do good, and are peaceful. You see no matter what group we try to blame there are none that are responsible as a group. It is just misguided individuals from different races, beliefs, or ideals. Crazy comes in all flavors.

The one thing that they all have in common is an intolerance of people who look different, or think differently than themselves, and often not just intolerance but a fear. What is sad and ironic is that the people who are looking to link these violent acts to a certain group of people are thinking and judging a group of people with a broad brush of fear and mistrust and going down the same illogical thought path of intolerance and fear that often brought about the violence. This kind of judgment of others is based in PRIDE. Thinking somehow that you and your group of people are above this other group and somehow immune to this pattern of violence. But in reality this is just the kind of thought that leads us down these paths of hate, and fear and doing it and talking about it causes other to do it and eventually we have some crazy person who listened to our hate and fear rhetoric and takes it to the next level of striking out in violence against the perceived fear. Or in some cases a mob yelling hang him or crucify Him. I just saw a story of a fire bomb at an abortion clinic, and commenters are saying things like "makes me want to go burn a church". Yea that makes perfect sense. 

Once we get to a place where we are controlled by fear we no longer are really in control at all. Scientific studies have shown that when fear comes into our thoughts the ability to reason leaves. We become controlled by more primitive survival parts of our brain. When I read the messages of the racist who comes to my blog, he can’t even debate with logic. He says things like “Fear not @ssh0!3” and tells me the bible say to not be afraid more than 50 times, and then in the same sentence he tells me to be afraid of all black people. Yea, that makes perfect sense. You see the bible says about those who choose to turn away from the light that is God and go toward the dark “in the futility of their mind, having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart; who, being past feeling, have given themselves over to lewdness.” And it say in the last days there will be those who are “ giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons, speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their own conscience seared with a hot iron.” So you see you can go to a point where you conscience is no longer in operation, and you don’t even see that what you do is wrong. So it is no surprise that when I write this stuff I attract this nonsense. The bible says it will be this way.

Fear has often been used by leaders to control the people, because it makes people unable to think clearly. They will often pick a certain group and use misinformation to vilify a group and then use fear to motivate the people to take action against them. Pretty soon they don’t even know that what they are doing is wrong, because they have no operational conscience. This is called a broken moral compass.

The problem is it starts off with pride, and then judgment of someone different, and then fear, and down the slippery slope to not even knowing how wrong we are in our prejudice of a certain group. And in the end we focus on our differences instead of our human similarity. I said this before “Looking for similarity not difference is the way to get along.” and that statement brought about a message full of name calling and profanity. Yep that seems level headed and logical. See what I mean?

I guess that is why Jesus said Fear Not. You can see in the example of Jesus that He did not fall for the segregation, hate and fear against groups of people that were part of His time. In his day it was the Samaritans, and women that were scorned and looked down upon, but Jesus went out of his way to travel through where Samaritans lived so He could talk to a Samaritan woman at a well and reveal to her who He was.

She was surprised that he would talk to her because she recognized that He was a Jew and she knew Jews did not talk to her kind. In John 4:9 she said “How is it that You, being a Jew, ask a drink from me, a Samaritan woman?” For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans. The result when Jesus crossed this social line of bigotry was He created the first woman evangelist, who shared with the others in her town about Jesus the guy who “read her mail” and about Him being the Messiah. You see Jesus was not about intolerance of others He was inclusive not exclusive. He was not about hate, He was about love. He was not about judgment of others, he was about grace, and forgiveness. And He and anyone that truly follows Him are not about violence, because he taught us to love our enemies and turn the other cheek. When the woman encountered this love that did not look down on her kind she ran to tell the people of the city. John 4:29, she said “Come, see a man who told me all things that I ever did. Could this be the Christ?” And I today say the same thing to you COME SEE, and that is for ALL people not just the ones who look like me or think like me. Come and SEE, could He be who He claims to be?

Strange Man, Jerry Garcia Band 5-21-76