“The good or ill of man lies within his own will.”
Epictetus
As a linguist, I’m probably more aware than most people that words are just words and that it is people who give them their inflammatory power. That’s what’s happening with God damn America, the three words uttered by a Black preacher, heard out of context, that shook white America – or a large portion of it, anyway – to its very core.
As a linguist and Humanist, I find so many things that are wrong or laughable about this situation that it’s hard to know where to begin.
The sentence is technically a third-person imperative, similar to more familiar subjectless commands like (You) wash the car. Since it also calls down God’s wrath on America, as in (May) God damn America, it’s a curse.
Rules for effective curse
In order for a sentence like this to “work” – i.e., be perceived as an authentic, valid curse – both speaker and hearer must believe in its power, which is twofold: the power of God to damn America and the power of the speaker to make such a thing happen. In other words, both sides must subscribe to the same fantasy-dream-psychotic vision of the world, in which deities can wreak suffering and people can ask them to do it.
To someone on the outside – a Humanist, for example – they’re just words, and it’s interesting to watch the way people predictably respond to them.
Whether or not they sincerely fear that the shaman’s curse will actually work, many Americans take it as an unpardonable attack on their country. This response is a sign of their weakness and susceptibility to the power of words. You shouldn’t let other people push your buttons.
How’s it gonna happen?
But in context, the sentence is just as ludicrous. The preacher was not calling for a general condemnation of America, but saying that God will call America to account for the wretched way it has treated minorities.
How exactly is that going to happen? Plagues? Asteroid hits Earth?
I’m interested in knowing how the preacher can know the intentions of God, how he can know what this imagined judgment process will consist of (something like the movie “Defending Your Life”?) and where it will take place.
I’d like to know which disasters represent God’s judgment on America (I think George Bush does), and which ones happened merely because he was out to lunch or is an underachiever (two explanations that have been advanced for the ills of the world), as with slavery or the Holocaust. Isn’t everything, including the suffering of Blacks, God’s will?
Very quickly the God-logic stops making any sense, which may be why Blacks like to sing so loudly in church and praise Jesus so enthusiastically.
God- and Jesus-talk
Also discouraging rational thought is the preacher’s habit of using God and Jesus (as well as the names of other mythical Biblical figures) so freely and frequently as the subjects of sentences -- God wants…, Jesus is saying… -- that the rhetoric gets very confusing, almost hypnotic.
Sometimes he’s reporting what they did or said in the Bible, sometimes he’s giving an inference or interpretation of it, sometimes it’s his own riff on what they might have meant. Mixing of all these modes creates a fantasy world in which divine figures exist and express their will inscrutably in the world (why can’t we get a public demo like Moses did?).
“What’s God got to do with it?”
That’s what my father, the first skeptic I ever met, would say when Mom started babbling about “God’s will.” Epictetus would have agreed.
Indeed, what DOES God have to do with anything? He doesn’t make anything happen in the world; people make things happen (but relentlessly give him credit).
Blacks can pray their lungs out, but God won’t deliver them from their misery any more than he delivered them from slavery or Jews from Hitler or the Armenians or Tutsis or any of the people massacred down through history, much of it in the name of religion.
Giving up on human action
People whose situation is desperate, who lose faith that there is an end to suffering and indignity in this world, take refuge in fantasy. Jews have done it too. They give up on reality and people – which is most unfortunate, since that is the only way Black salvation has taken place.
Every minute praising Jesus is time that could be spent loving your neighbor and doing good deeds. We are our own salvation. Will Blacks en masse ever face this truth?
Black salvation
If brave civil rights workers had not stood up to the fire hoses in Selma, Alabama…Jesus or Mary would not have done it for them. Martin Luther King put himself in the line of fire, but Jesus didn’t take the bullet for him.
Not that Black churches don’t do good things. The impulse for civil rights came from the churches, among other places – and it’s really a shame that people couldn’t figure out for themselves that we’re all created equal, but had to rely on ancient authorities and the accompanying myths.
Plus – and I can’t emphasize this enough -- all that time spent singing and talking to Jesus could be devoted to improving ourselves, society and the world.
Religion and morality???
Churches say they’re a force for morality, but the fact is that correct ritual and belief typically excuse bad behavior: warfare, burning, torturing, child molestation, and much more.
Harmful product
Religion strengthens immorality through dependency, because its product/service line also includes absolution granted by imaginary deities (through the cleric), and thus, no matter how much they may advocate self-control, clerics are enablers, relieving people of the restraint NOT to sin.
Sorry folks, but praying afterward on Sunday doesn’t make up for it! Shame on clerics for promoting the idea that imaginary deities grant forgiveness. Only people can grant forgiveness. Only people can keep themselves from doing wrong in the first place.
Morality and myth
But now Blacks are wedded to the morality AND the myths. For most Blacks, they’re inseparable. The overpoweringly emotional music and hypnotic cadences of the preacher help make sure of that. These are well-studied and documented -- and much appreciated (especially by a linguist like me) as performance art forms.
You go to church to learn to be good AND to talk to and sing about God and Jesus. There is a little hope for change. It’s encouraging to see the emergence of Black humanists and atheists, like that Black atheist rapper and my friend Reggie Finley, The Infidel Guy; Blacks will never listen to white skeptics like me.
Blacks’ salvation lies in themselves and their fellow human beings – not imaginary deities and hypocritical politicians. When they realize this, they will achieve the freedom that Dr. King and others dreamed of.
Blessing and damning
Let’s get back to the blessing and damning of America. Since there is no God, all blessing and condemning must be done by people. And indeed, America is, worldwide, not blessed, but quite damned enough without God getting into the act.
We are damned in the eyes of the world for consuming a quarter of its resources while we are only 6% of the population. We are damned by the world for our arrogant self-appointed status as world policeman. We are damned by the world for our countless unsolicited foreign interventions, our support of brutal dictators, and our “might makes right” attitude, for which we would severely punish any other nation.
So, like the average sized kids on the playground, the rest of the West stands by, humiliated, as the bully wreaks his havoc.
The other countries of the world have to just stand there or pretend to help (have the last Bulgarians left Iraq yet?) while our idiot president orders an unprovoked invasion of another country, just because we can.
Around the world our flag is burned regularly, and angry mobs call for death to America. I can’t remember seeing a pro-American rally in a foreign city for very long time – perhaps never in my adult lifetime, except for the occasional exuberant welcome the President gets, but they’re ceremonies and don’t really count.
No, Black preachers don’t have to worry about God damning America. The government’s outrageous behavior, squandering our prestige, world respect, blood and wealth, has assured our damnation, by people all over the world, for decades to come.
_______________________
Alan M. Perlman is a secular humanist speaker and author -- most recently, of An Atheist Reads the Torah: Secular Humanistic Perspectives on the Five Books of Moses. For information, go to www.trafford.com/06-0056.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment