BRINGERS OF
GODSPELL
Why is it there are so many people who feel
compelled to lead their hopelessly befuddled, spiritually addled brethren to
Truth, as they see it? Who are these bringers of godspell and what
lies behind the ever-incessant push of their ideological mainsprings? What makes them tick?
I personally know a few of these demagogic
voices in the wilderness. They walk
around with small Franklin
stoves burning inside them, stoked by the scriptural fuel of the Pentateuch,
books of the prophets, Judges and a match-head's fever to ignite a prairie fire
in the dry heart of a lost or friendless passerby.
These hard-bark Ezekiels make no bones about
their mission, -they are here to offer you SALVATION. Whether in the name of Jehovah, Christ, or a god
unknown, their purpose is one of impeccable sacrament. And they are happy to do it for you. Fervently so.
They'll tell you it is a mandate, a commission accorded them by God himself. And they'll tell you about their visions, so
obviously conforming to their deepest desires.
Now how does God want them to disseminate his
message? Well, many of these desert holy
men hang their shingle on the Internet.
This is quite ingenious because, by and large, the Internet seems to be
a wasteland of rudderless, collapsing psyches, -a support system for avowed
loners whose ebbing self-esteem gives them the license to post web pages with
3-D marquees that read, "Hi, my name is Bobby Abbeville, click HERE for my
hobbies... And here is a picture of me and my cat Socrates..."
Someone with that kind of spiritual vacuity
is easy prey for a modern day prophet who can command the cyber elements and
muster for an accidental tourist a veritable barrage of multimedia
persuasions. Exotic, textured
backgrounds vaunting parades of semi-transparent Pre-Rafaelite patriarchs in
attitudes of savage serenity over which, in a 12 pitch italicized blue Britannia
font, the voice of redemption is chiseled in Rosetta stone. Streaming audio and video, Flash animation,
Shockwave, Java-scriptures, Facebook, Twitter, all surrounded by clouds with a cherubim
wreathe. It’s the trumpet of too much
spare time and it sings out the designer's fullness of soul and self. The oracular concatenations of the verses,
the vociferous judications of the author all but show him standing on a
pinnacle of rock with outstretched arms, long hair snapping in a Red Sea breeze, staff angled toward a diseased carpet of
Philistines struggling to escape his righteous wrath.
A weak mind is one that has nothing of value
stored in it. It is a penurious void
that thirsts after some kind of wealth, and the easiest way to breach this
empty deposit box is to pointedly expose the very thing that created its
weakness –its vacancy.
The desert prophet is a vessel without scuppers,
swamped to the beams by Old Testament chapter and verse. He is so far from being empty, so filled with
purpose and destiny, that his gravity digests the uninhabited acolyte. Those skeptical enough to resist his embassy invite
a hair trigger explosion, fetched by a progressive word, aberrant clothing, a knowing
glance, a liberal bumper sticker, or any of a thousand modern conventions that
have no analogue in the books of Moses.
Ego and authority is a Janus god that
protects man’s nucleus of fear. They are
a double-backed mirror that reiterates itself and creates the vast pecking
order of social survival. On the Janus
thermometer, those whose temperatures are high, who burn hot with the fever of
selfhood, subsume others with more moderate or cooler egos.
But the weak are not abandoned. The desert prophet steps forward to offer his
guidance. He will be their lodestar, their
shepherd. He shakes the cascades of his
beard and strikes the pose of perennial father and confessor. And after a course of time, when his
followers have studied his message and learned the truth, they will become his
apostles. They too can wield the staff
of esoteric knowledge and bridge the void of their empty lives with the
playthings of a mind filled with the scions of Fear.
Don't doubt it. The scribbling and howling of every ancient
and modern prophet are born straight from a deep well of psychological
fear. It is not by accident they appeal
directly to people who suffer the same malady.
Shared guilt and dread is the glue that bonds people into nations,
whether geographic or religious.
In the 21st Century, modern
prophets have assumed micro-corporate dimensions and in all aspects are not
unlike the rags-to-riches rock stars of the past few generations. As in any ‘art’ form, self-promotion is the
enzyme that catalyses the aspirant into the clover of public adulation. Religious prophets, initially lacking agents
and managers, must fill these offices with a high degree of Philistine cunning
and ruthlessness. Like fiction’s Elmer
Gantry, or the very real Jimmy Jones and Sun Myung Moon, a carefully honed
ability to sound and appear utterly sincere, or better yet, a genetic mishap
that withholds the common-sense-filter that polices a balanced mind, is an
absolute necessity for a guru-in-waiting.
The former is the preferred affliction, -there is always the possibility
of a dine-and-dash libretto which leaves the victims merely financially sober
and religiously disillusioned. The
latter option is the dangerous one. A committed
prophet (or, depending on your point of view, someone who has escaped being
committed), will not quit. Ultimate disillusionment
often occurs only moments before wholesale self-annihilation.
It’s been said genius is the ability to
surround oneself with talented people. This can be borne out by the lives of
prodigies like Thomas Edison, Howard Hughes, Walt Disney, Steve Jobs and any
goalie for the Canadian Olympic hockey team.
Once the religious zealot has established a tax shelter (aka a church) and
finds an audience sympathetic to his or her brand of spiritual polemic,
statistics happily steps in and supplies exploitable talent. Mathematically speaking, a guru will collect
an above average person for every six that clot around him, a superior one for
every eleven. So in theory, it wouldn’t
take much of a crowd to find a decent sampling of talented people.
The nice thing about fanaticism is that it
has a large extended family. Relatives
like obsession, resolution, fixation, dedication, habituation, enthusiasm,
bias, and a hundred DNA-related kin, relegate every ounce of their enthusiasm
to the cause of an alpha demi-god. And in any religious uphill climb, nothing
pushes with greater ground-covering results than a forest of talented hands.
The average Church of the Crying Wilderness Voice
eventually has production problems and logistical constraints to resolve. The roster of required talent is long. Accounting, transportation coordination,
crowd control, housing, sound and lighting, public relations, advertising,
television, internet presence, door-to-door proselytizing, performance artists,
personal trainers, writing, camera work and countless other purposeful
departments need to be energized by the vitamin of talent.
Whether the oracle is a sole proprietorship
or the focus of a corporate hive, the end result is a cult of personality. The prophet’s appeal could be friendly,
paternal or wrathful, it doesn’t matter.
There are plenty of people who thirst for any shade of promise, rivers
of followers whose inner antenna will obsequiously vibrate around any flavor of
authority. And some of these followers
will have talents. A latent Noah
Dietrich, Josef Goebbels or Colonel Tom Parker will slave quietly in the
background for the reward of the prophet’s hand on their head behind closed
doors.
The true Wilderness Voice is one firmly
grounded in religious fundamentalism, the kind of steam so aggressively
practiced by William Jennings Bryan in the famous “Monkey Trial” of 1925,
couched deep in the biblical heartland of Tennessee .
As Darwin
noted in his autobiography, skepticism and rationalism are tools of the
educated elite. In America these
tools have been dramatically blunted by a long and successful campaign to dumb
down the general population. How dumb
have they become? Within a year of its
appearance on store shelves, 1.5 million people purchased a ‘Pet Rock’.
Fundamentalism walks with long strides down
the avenue of the public’s diminished mental capacity simply because its roots
are in simplicity, the easy answer to a problem. When the problem is Universal Fear (these
days, the US
cultivates fear like a cash crop), the answer is an appeal to the protective
arm of a heavenly patriarch. Other
countries, just as skeptically and rationally challenged, invoke their own arm
of protection. Some call it Allah, others
name it Yahweh, still others label it Vishnu.
They are all warrior gods, supreme symbols of authority. And they have become basic and ready answers
for irrational and nonskeptical populations.
The gladiator image has become a modern icon,
whether masquerading as a juvenile wizard
or represented by a weaponized, muscular soldier of fortune. Hollywood ’s
not-so-subtle campaign to elevate violence to the status of art has opened the
throttle on extravagantly barbaric images whose only nod to aesthetics is that the
scene’s blocking, lighting and expansive time lag imbues the carnage with a
ballet-like elegance.
Violence is another simple answer to a
problem and has often been an avatar of religious delusion. The aberrant actions of cults such as Jonestown,
the Solar Temple , Heaven's Gate, Aum Shinrikyo and
the Branch Davidians illustrate the latent turmoil at the core of any religion
that sustains a living, centralized authority.
It’s always been more effective when a guru is deceased and has attained
a mythic or legendary status. He can no
longer behave in a way that might abrogate his teachings and any guilt attached
to questionable conduct during his lifetime has been expunged, extenuated,
acquitted or redacted by his followers.
There have been several medical studies that
suggest there is a link between schizophrenia and emphatic religious thinking. This is possibly due to the empowering nature
of religion. Schizophrenics, like many
diagnosed mental illnesses, suffer from depression, stigma, feelings of
control-loss and low self-value.
In a psychiatric center in Toronto , Ontario ,
fifteen schizophrenic out patients participated in life history
interviews. The taped data was analyzed
for emergent themes. It revealed the
patients struggled to maintain or regain personal power. They were challenged by stress and
pressures created by perceived social expectations, concerned about their
ability to connect with other people, and suffered angst because of discrepancies
between the self they wished to be and the self they actually realized. Aren’t these the very symptoms that are
moderated by a religious environment?
At the very least, it is
empowering to believe in an omnipotent personal god who cloaks you with
paternal affection and care. And it is
enabling to grace the splendor of a divine surrogate, the prophet who includes
you within his chosen circle to survive the end-of-days.
The purpose of fundamentalism is to preserve
the promise of this empowerment. For many it is a shield, a safe harbor, a
reassuring paradigm, a medicine cabinet against the sickness of modernism, a
sleeping giant that will one day vindicate itself. None of its adherents see fundamentalism as
either the source or the product of a troubled mind.
Freud viewed religion as a kind of universal
obsessional neurosis. Is there any proof that, as a tribe, founders of
religions were of sound mind? Auditory
and visual hallucinations are common to schizophrenics. By definition, schizophrenia is a
complex mental disorder characterized by a difficulty in recognizing reality,
regulating emotional responses, thinking in a clear and logical manner and
behaving in a socially acceptable manner.
Doesn’t this describe every prophet and holy man since the discovery of
fire?
The bringers of godspell
have been with us a long time. They have
managed to divide a shared human neurosis, the need to believe in a powerful
protector, until over time a simple consort like Christianity has suffered
over 30,000 divorces, each a benefaction of some holy man’s message.
For the one in seven who warm their hands at
the flame of skepticism the question remains, -why do great masses of humanity
follow apocalyptic voices, both living and dead? Because skeptical thinking is hard work. Because religions have talented agents and PR
men. Because a carefully engineered
bovine public will always buy a ‘Pet Rock’.
And because after all, that’s what keeps the cults of prophets and
profits in business.
Written by Randy Kerr (JWR Kerr). Read more about the author at Google+ or Amazon.