I don't want to dog this woman's particular sensibilities, because I don't think she's incorrect, but it does raise the question of strange and arbitrary dichotomies, as our friend Jim Cunningham (pictured here) once showed us. Granted, he's a film character, but the point is that I've never really understood why oftentimes fear is pitted as the opposite of love.
A couple confusions, with regards to Christianity in general, and then to the blog's subject:
1.) Christians are supposed to fear God, but love him as well (the fear of God was one thing I could never understand); if fear is opposed to love, how can we love someone whom we are supposed to fear?
2.) It is true that fear can lead to hate, which is the opposite of love (I would think); as well, a healthy love for something can help to overcome fear. However, in this particular case, i.e. dealing with the World Trade Center attacks six years ago, is love the answer to surmounting fear of future encounters such as this?
I really am seeking honest clarification on some of these points. I think that ignoring problems such as the deep-seeded religious and economic conflicts that have caused a lot of the current global tension simply exacerbates them. Just loving "those crazy radicals" probably won't change a lot.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Fear & Love
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comments:
As everyone's favorite lapsed Catholic, here's my two cents on religion generally and then the blog post specifically:
1) Fear and love aren't wholly opposed. Best example: when you were a kid, you simultaneously loved and feared your parents. You understood that they loved you--or at least, took care of you--but could not have felt more guilty than when you did something wrong and were waiting for the worst...in my case, the inevitable, "I'm so disappointed in you, Oneelf." That was far worse than "Oneelf, what the hell were you thinking?!?" and usually made me reconsider later courses of action, even if that just meant being better at hiding it the next time around.
A slightly different example might be in romantic relationships. You can love someone and fear the kind of pain they are capable of inflicting on you; truly openly loving someone and being wholly vulnerable provokes a certain sort of insecurity and perceived weakness. Granted, having a girlfriend isn't fear of eternal damnation and hellfire, but the example effectively illustrates that two deep feelings don't have to be mutually exclusive. (Full disclosure: I don't think anyone who truly loves you can ever damn you, but I think that just makes me a bad Catholic.)
Anyone who tells you that fear and love (which I'm not even convinced are the best way to portray a relationship with God/gods/the universe) are mutually exclusive is likely evangelical and thereby totally batshit. But this, again, comes from a Catholic. We believe in transubstantiation, which, when analyzed logically, is somewhat akin to believing that perpetual motion is possible, flux capacitors will bring you back and forth between 1955, 1985, 2015, and 1885, and indeed, the Wolverines will round out this season as #1 in Division 1-A.
2) Fear can lead to hate, but fear does not necessarily result in hate. It can result in love, reluctant acceptance, or total indifference, along with (I imagine) the whole range of human emotion. Speaking of the whole range of human emotion, does Donnie D. argue that if you think the whole range of human emotion can be boiled down to fear and love that you can stick it all up your ass?
I don't think the solution to preventing future 9-11s is by loving "those crazy radicals." But freaking out about their existence and arming yourself against a threat you can neither define nor reasonably identify isn't the solution. The solution is likely something akin to trying to understand what went wrong the first time (if it was directly related to your own actions or some mystifying act by another person) and approaching later, similar situations with the knowledge of what works or at least, what will not work and end up in mindless destruction and the death of innocent people.
Post a Comment