Cue the Dawn Fanfare – part one

If I were a dedicated multimedia blogger I would have this post start the Dawn fanfare from Richard Strauss’s Opus 30: Also Sprach Zarathustra, a program piece based on the ever popular book, Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. Nietzsche, Nazi, nitwit, and neocon all seem to go together in feeling that they can’t feel better about themselves unless they work to degrade others.

This is a reaction to an error I made before I consumed my first quart of coffee this morning: I deleted a real comment while ridding myself of a dozen bogus blurbs that promised either to reduce things or enlarge them.

The comment from Minou of French Tidbits dealt with the hypocrisy of violence during the month of Ramadan. This also connects into the this entire net of nut cases that people have had to deal with since someone thought it was a good idea to form groups larger than a family.

People really need to read the works of Joseph Campbell because he gets it: religion is about metaphor, about lessons for life, about finding your way. Once you start down the path of literalism you have lost your way, because you are denying faith and belief.

A good place to start is Campbell’s six-hour interview with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth, but people really should read The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Both are available from the Joseph Campbell Foundation, and the usual suspects.

If you look at the numbers: there are 2.1 billion Christians, half of them Catholic; there are 1.3 billion Muslims, over 70% are Sunni; and the third largest group, 1.1 billion people, do not want to be bothered with religion.

Within every religion you have the whackos. These are a small minority in all groups that have come to define those groups for the rest of the world. The reason should be obvious: people who just go through life minding their own business and attending their religious services once a week and on holidays aren’t very exciting and no one wants to write stories about them. If the only time you hear about a particular religion is when some whacko claiming to be a member, and claiming to act in line with religious belief, goes around blowing things up and killing people, the religion gets tagged as murderous.

[End of Part One of Two Parts.]