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 21^st 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.