Freedom and the ability to live one’s life as one chooses is the highest and most threatening calling of human individuality and spirituality. We live in a world of conformity, and it’s getting worse, not better. Someone always demands that you see the world through their eyes and filter one’s religious and political beliefs through their filters. Organizations can demand that one abide by their established values or lose one’s status in that organization. Voters demand that one man be all things, which is impossible no matter what the Apostle Paul said, for all people. Anyone who can please everyone, or be whatever they need to be to make them feel comfortable, is foolish and inauthentic in the extreme. You could never trust a man or woman who literally practices “being all things to all men.”
The government can make you feel unpatriotic for questioning the wisdom or lack of wisdom in its policies. When we say “their policies,” we generally mean the ideas of the very, very few human beings who have stopped asking “we the people” if they should do what they want to do. And if we say, “no, you shouldn’t,” they just find a way around us and lie about it.
Fundamentalist types can make you feel like if you don’t go to church, let alone your church, you are flawed, lost, doomed, unelected, pagan, and doomed. They feel free to push their perspectives on world events as revealed in their insights into Bible prophecy come to life, but if you say a word that even hints that you think they might try not to read their Bible like a newspaper, you’ll spend eternity. in the hot place. (Okay, that’s where my real friends will be anyway.) Try this, when someone hands you a religious tract, just say “NO, thank you” and watch the disdain and pity they have for you. If I gave them a brochure countering your idea, they would be furious. I once tried to give a book written by a well educated and highly credible reading theologian to someone who was speaking through her hat. They saw that the author was a woman and simply said that nothing a woman had to say could interest them. What intellect!
If you see both sides of an issue where only one side is acceptable, you’re out, if you choose the wrong side of the coin. Of course, if you don’t realize that today’s Israel is a nation chosen by God, just like in the Old Testament, and as one man said to me, “God won’t stand for anyone messing with Israel,” well… to get you! memes, memes, memes…
So, let’s make a short list of things you can use to gauge if you are powerless as a human being who thinks, cares, and says “that’s fine with you, but leave me alone.”
1. You may be powerless if someone forbids you to read the books you find interesting.
2. You may be powerless if you have to justify the movies, videos, and media you enjoy to others.
3. You may be powerless if you have to agree with a president who thinks stem cell research is akin to assassination and not to mention how many hundreds of thousands the presidential dynasty has empowered others to assassinate in his name.
4. You can lose power if you have to tell others why you don’t go to church, no church or THE church. This includes not being able to look them in the eye and saying you’re not going because you don’t agree.
5. You may be powerless if you have to smile politely when religious people tell you what it is like, who God really is, how he thinks, not her, what it demands, the rules you must obey that constitute “God’s Law.” and what true doctrines to accept… and never be able to say “well, that’s great, but I don’t agree with that.”
6. You could lose your power if you allow them to crush, behead, torture, dismember, slap, shun, expel, imprison, belittle, mock, ridicule, judge, or otherwise penalize you for not abiding by their imagined truths and beliefs. requirements that you must meet.
7. You may be powerless if you have to kill people you don’t know in countries you don’t want to go to, in an army you never willingly joined, for ideas you don’t agree with.
8. You may feel disempowered if others can read your mail, videotape you at work, secretly check on your performance, learn about your personal failings, pry into your finances, keep a list of what you see, read, and sites you visit. visit, or otherwise invade your privacy without your express permission.
9. You may lose your power if you think you are voting for a candidate but have a lingering doubt that your vote will count or be counted accurately and professionally, reflecting the true will of the good people of your country.
10. You may be powerless if you live in a country where you have to ask yourself “what is voting?”
11. You may be powerless if you are herded by a narcissistic dictator who uses the Bible to pummel you with fearful, shameful, guilt-ridden religious behaviors, which in your heart you know are crap, but are too afraid you don’t belong. a, “in case he be the man of faith and power chosen by God.”
12. You may be powerless if you have a boss who is making your life miserable and you have NO surefire way of signaling that the man or woman is beyond your reach to work successfully with other human beings for a common goal. .
13. You may lose your power if you regularly yell at TV, radio, newspapers and magazines, where no one doing such crap to others in the world can hear or care.
14. You may lose your power if you feel you cannot speak, go to a protest, or write an honest editorial in your community without reproach.
15. You may feel disempowered if you feel like you have to have a gun, something you’ve never had before, but it seems like something you have to do and you don’t know why and you really can’t afford one or know how to use it. You wonder…”would I really use this thing on someone?”
16. You know you’re powerless when you can’t dress the way you want.
17. You might be powerless when, as a woman, you can’t look a man in the eye and say, “That’s stupid, I’m not going to do that,” without feeling like your life might be in danger.
18. You might be powerless if someone else selects your friends and forbids you from having friends outside of their circle of approval.
19. You might run out of power if you want to speak in writing, or literally, but somehow you know the price will be too high, so you don’t.
20. You may be powerless if you find yourself defending yourself on the INSIDE, but sitting on the OUTSIDE to appear compliant and maintain your job, status, money, family, things, or sanity.
21. You may lose your power if you see both sides as a problem and dare not express the side that disagrees with those who pay you, feed you, protect you or love you. This includes phrases like, “well, can you blame the Palestinians, Iraqis, Iranians, Syrians, Lebanese, children, women…” and the like…
22. You may lose power if you have to ask, “Where am I going and why am I in this hand basket?”
I think we all know when and under what circumstances we feel others dominate our feelings, ideas, expressions of those ideas, and the desire to be ourselves without tribal, religious, or governmental approval. Being yourself is not in style these days and it’s only going to get worse as ideologies clash and tell you that you’re either with us or against us. Now there’s a stupid idea that leaves no room for other perspectives or solutions to difficult problems! It just so happens that it is the meme that is firmly in place even as we speak and that is why so many feel so powerless.
The solution? Practice saying what YOU mean and meaning what YOU say. It doesn’t matter if you’re right or wrong and that may still be relative to the truth of the matter. Someone once said, and it is harsh, that “true freedom will only come when each King is strangled with the intestines of each Priest”. Sure, that’s pretty harsh, but it goes to show that the disempowerment of the individual is so often perpetrated in the name of government and religion that the average person, who fears both and rightly so at times, has no other way of expressing it. frustration with groupthink and its effect on real human progress.
Without skeptics and without those who question authority, there can be no progress. We have done that at times in history and always end the Dark Ages until enough is enough and the sun can rise again on freedom, until the next time it threatens the ignorant.