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June 4, 2006 Occasionally I hear or read that "religion is for weak people." Was Constantine weak when he looked at the sun and received the message, "In hoc signo vinces"? Was Constantine the Christian really a weak man? How long can YOU look at the sun? How strong are your eyes, and how strong are you in Latin? One problem with the idea that "religion is for weak people" is that a person isn't weak in all ways. A person is weak in some singular way. For example, a young man may be strong physically, handsome as all getout, and have a dozen beautiful girl friends, but have no gainful employment and less than a hundred dollars in the bank. Financially this man is weak. But the man himself is not weak. So if you state that "religion is for weak people" or "God is for suckers," well, heck, you are painting with a broad brush. Your canvas is all one color and art connoisseurs will say that your work is not art at all. Karl Marx is a famous philosopher. How did Karl Marx ever came to believe that religion is for weak or opiated people? Karl Marx was a writer, and considered an important one. But wasn't Marx an economist? Wasn't Marx a student of history? What does an economic theorist know about religion? How thoroughly did Marx study religious people? Was Marx a psychologist? How can someone get away with asserting that "religion is for the weak" or that "religion is the opiate of the people" or "God is for suckers"? Let's take just one example. Consider the honeybee. The honeybee is weak in calculus. Don't expect a honeybee to define the least upper bound of a function. The honeybee is also weak in physical strength, compared to a skunk. A skunk can easily overpower a bee physically just as a lion can easily overpower a rat. But there are strengths besides mathematical knowledge, teaching ability, body mass, and raw muscle power. Consider this. The honeybee is armed with a barbed stinger, and a single bee sting can kill a human being. Most humans aren't that sensitive to bee venom but most people feel a lot of pain for several minutes after being stung by a single honeybee. That is sufficient strength to take your attention away from whatever you were thinking about before you got stung. In fact that bee had more power than a high flying jet fighter, power in the sense of drawing your attention. Even a jet's loud sonic boom is less able to hold your attention than a bee-sting just delivered to your belly, to your ear lobe, or to your finger. So yes, the tiny bee has a LOT of sting strength. The honeybee has another kind of strength as well. The honeybee is fearless. When a bear attacks a beehive, one worker honeybee will attack the bear and sting the beast without fear. The bee dies when its barbed stinger catches in the bear's flesh and is torn out of the bee's abdomen carrying various vital organs with it. The poison sac is pumped dry by muscles attached to it. All available toxin gets pumped into the bear. From a large bee colony fifty thousand worker bees can deliver fifty thousand stings. This provident onslaught is enough to kill or drive away most any large beast. But if honeybees had fear, they wouldn't attack the threat in this way. If honeybees had fear, even a small animal could come and break into a beehive and get the honey and brood with little risk. The same principle works for humans. If cultured humans didn't defend their stronghold with heroism, the culture and its stronghold would soon be plundered. The cultures destined to survive created fearless warriors by training young men to be fearless. Such fearlessness is a certain kind of strength. Of course bravery is not physical strength or IQ strengh or any other kind of strength except bravery. Bravery is a strength of "character," "psyche," or "soul." With this in mind, after we read "Religion is the opiate of the people," or "God is for suckers" we laugh, and we identify with the laughing Buddha and the regal Old Testament writer who coined the famous line, "The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God." We laugh because even if there is no providential "divine" power with a human-like personality, there is a providential power inside of worker honeybees and inside of many human beings as well. ------------ About the author: John L. Waters is an amateur psychologist and independent researcher on self-healing, integration, and problem-solving. John has created art, music and songs, prose and poetry, and helped people solve a difficult problem. For more information, read: John's letters of recommendation: http://members.tripod.com/johnlwaters/recommendations about John's self-healing and integration: http://members.tripod.com/johnlwaters/index.html about John's independent research: http://www.humboldt.edu/~jlw47/index.html about John's seeking an agent or a publisher: http://www.writers.net/writers/39295 Email: blueguntwo@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. Please link to this article rather than copying and pasting it onto your site (which would be unauthorized and illegal). |
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