Omnes Sancti et Sanctæ Coreæ, orate pro nobis.

Now Blogging Afresh at Ad Orientem 西儒 - The Western Confucian



Sunday, February 22, 2004

Cult of the Self

Here's an article that's so horrendous, I couldn't resist quoting from it:

After expounding upon the themes listed in the title, the author justifies his claims by quoting from the "great genius heretic Joseph Campbell:"
    "'The wicked thing about both the little and the great 'collective faiths', prehistoric and historic, is that they all, without exception, pretend to hold encompassed in their ritualized mythologies all of the truth ever to be known.

    "'They are therefore cursed, and they curse all who accept them, with what I shall call the 'error of the found truth,' or, in mythological language, the sin against the Holy Ghost.

    "'They set up against the revelations of the spirit the barriers of their own petrified belief, and, therefore, within the ban of their control, mythology, as they shape it, serves the end only of binding potential individuals to whatever system of sentiments may have seemed to the shapers of the past (now sanctified as saints, sages, ancestors or even gods) to be appropriate to their concept of a great society.'"

After this long quote from "our finest minds" [sic], the author advises the religious to "to drop the dead weight of a dead book from the spinning modern kaleidoscope of your ever-evolving id." He goes on to advise us as to what to do after we've been liberated from the clutches of religion:
    "Dumping stagnant doctrine and tired patriarchal notions does not mean you must immediately pick up another system to replace it. You want a new worldview? You want a fresh, unbounded ideology, as flexible and porous as you are? Simply start looking inward, at the one true god of the self."

We need need, however, completely reject the notion of God, but only God as a "misogynistic homophobic Republican male,... one with a thing for guns and trucks and repressed Catholic priests?" We can, of course, "reignite the feminine divine in this exhausted, macho world."

Finally, once "happily self-defined" and free from that "scowling bearded father figure who pulls strings at random and builds monster warehouses of guilt and dread in your heart like some sort of dour Wal-Mart Supercenter," we can then spread this new gospel to those still living in the darkness of a religious worldview and "introduce them to their own personal Jesus: themselves."

Sadly, this solipsistic worldview, which the author surely holds to be liberating, revolutionary, and counter-cultural, is nothing new. It is only an updated version of the of the radical individualism that has been the dominant worldview of most of the Western world since the so-called Enlightenment. What else are the New Age Movement, "cafeteria" Catholicism, and I daresay the endless divisions and interpretations of Protestantism if not the attempt at "individual spirituality, independent of dogma and screed" touted by the author of the above article?

"Obedience is life. And the opposite is also true." - Saint John of the Ladder