Fundamentalists (all faiths) are READY TO KILL

(Olivia Ward, continued, from The Toronto Star)

"But as the first decade of the second millennium reaches the halfway point, the reverse is true. In major religions there is a resurgence of fervent faith, sometimes to the point of violence, as intolerance rises along with determination to impose age-old standards of morality.

The flight to the margins, although proportionately small, is powerful. It is influencing the political agenda of governments in ways that would have been unthinkable a decade ago, threatening Western-style democracies and dampening hope for worldwide peace.

"Everywhere there is an explosion of passionate religious movements," says Peter Berger of Boston University, author of The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. "It happens at some periods, like the Crusades. Contrary to expectations, it's a very religious world, and always has been."

Berger and others who study trends in religion call this a time of "fundamentalism," a term once coined to describe an American movement begun by religious intellectuals a century ago. They wrote a doctrine of Protestant "fundamentals" to counter a new liberalism in Christianity, and the word became identified with stern puritanism. But it is increasingly used to identify religious extremism today.
"
In most major traditions there has been a resurgence of very aggressive, passionate religious movements, because people are feeling uncertain," Berger says. "And when you're uncertain, you're more aggressive."

Karen Armstrong, a British former nun and leading chronicler of fundamentalism, agrees. Those who embrace it, she says, are mainly motivated by fear in a world in which the moral ground is shifting at record speed.

"Fundamentalists have no time for democracy, pluralism, religious toleration, peacekeeping, free speech, or the separation of church and state," she writes in The Battle for God.

"Christian fundamentalists reject the discoveries of biology and physics and insist the Book of Genesis is scientifically sound ... Jewish fundamentalists observe their revealed law more stringently than ever before, and Muslim women, repudiating the freedoms of Western women, shroud themselves in veils."

Furthermore, Armstrong says, Buddhist, Hindu and Confucian fundamentalists are prepared to fight and kill in the name of religion, and "strive to bring the sacred into the realm of politics and national struggle."

"With such dramatic and inflexible beliefs at stake, those who flee to the margins of religion inspire equally strong reactions, ranging from outrage to uncompromising devotion. . . ."

--from The Toronto Star
Article by Olivia Ward
January 2, 2005

See The Star article for the rest. The entire article is worth reading and meditating upon.

Religious Extremism on the Rise

The Toronto Star
www.thestar.com
Jan. 2, 2005. 01:00 AM

Religious extremism is back
Moral ground is shifting at record speed
Followers are motivated by fear, expert says
by Oliva Ward, FEATURE WRITER

"In Britain, a popular play is closed down when Sikhs attack a Birmingham theatre that features a scene of violence in a temple. In the Netherlands, an activist filmmaker is shot and stabbed to death after producing a documentary on the abuse of Muslim women.
Meanwhile, an American president calls his anti-terrorism campaign a "crusade," and declares that "God wants people to be free." And Israeli settlers insist that leaving their land goes against a God-given right.

"Religious extremism, once believed a dying phenomenon, is back with a vengeance, symbolized by the shattered and blackened World Trade Centre towers. Videotaped threats by religiously focused militants are as commonplace as they are chilling to millions throughout the world."

Go to Star site for rest of the long article. www.thestar.com

Why Learning About Our Blind / Shadow Side is Useful, Important and Vital, for self and for others.

The more one denies the Shadow Self, the more ready one is to find fault in others. The more we hide from or refuse honest feedback from others, the less we know & understand ourselves.
None of us know ourselves completely. Besides being our own best friend, each of us is our own worst enemy. We all lie to ourselves and are far more self-centered that we can probably ever realize, particularly those of us who are convinced that we are not self-centered.

Whatever is incomplete or unfinished in our own development is bound to be projected on others with whom we will react according to our script which casts others into specific roles. I have several in my own extended network of family and friends who--out of touch with themselves--very much need to find fault in others.


The more I am sure that my "map equals the territory," or "my thermostat is where it's at," rather than realizing that my map only represents the territory, the more I am likely to have conflict and misunderstanding with others, all the while being sure that it is the others who are at fault.
The ability to be objective about oneself and accept criticism about oneself from others may be the single most important skill in communication and human relations. Everything else hinges on this.

The greatest delusion of the human race is people thinking they can avoid confronting the unconscious and solve the problems of life by the "face" or "mask" they put on for others, creating a righteous exterior, that is, by being "good." Sadly, this delusion is held by most of our religious leaders today, and we shall not even mention political leaders.

According to Freud, the penalty for repression is repetition. Painful experiences not dealt with are unconsciously repeated. We do not quite realize that we are repeating ourselves, because the very diversionary schemas we are repeating keep the fact of their repetition from awareness. On one hand we really forget that we have done this before, and the other, do not quite realize that we are doing it again. We can see this pattern easily in others but not in ourselves. The self-deception is complete.

The diversionary schemes we employ to hide from ourselves and from our own motives are extensive and well-mapped. Little has been added since the time of Freud although we understand now how the family is the matrix of dysfunction much better. We now understand that love itself is never enough, and whatever the unfinished business parents have refused to face in their own development or marriage is handed on to the children like a hot potato. Adult children repeat the same/similar script/scenarios.

There are some people who must be right, who in any conflict situation, are convinced that others are wrong. They are often very closed and easily defensive. They cannot believe that others can see them differently than they see themselves. They usually learn only from the hard knocks of life, but often do not learn easily or well, since they carry a stubborn blindness concerning themselves into every new relationship, remaining defensive and very protective of their public "ego."

An Ego-Protective Inventory has been developed and is currently being researched to measure this tendency. It has been found frequently in business executives.

Until we confront and befriend our Shadow, we will continue to live with the illusion of virtue and righteousness. We remain vulnerable to the sabotage of marriage, family, career, love and important friendships. When befriended, our Shadow can turn out to be 95% gold.
Unless honesty with oneself is valued more than being "good," secure, successful or accepted, more than any other virtue, one is destined to a life of self-deceit, full of hidden ego-inflation, programmed for self-sabotage.

Tools for understanding the Blind/Shadow Self are:
Dreams, Journaling, some movies, drama, fiction, Shadow workshops, courses or books on the Enneagram, psychotherapy, personality profiling, group work or spiritual direction or guidance where feedback is welcome. © Paschal Baute, 1984

Discussion, anyone?

Introduction

We need a way to understand the prevalence of evil in the world as well as our persistent ability to often sabotage our own best efforts. Many of the new spiritualities assume that if we only stay with Love and ignore all the shadow side of life, this is all that is necessary. Love will overcome Fear and Hate and all negatives. Maybe so. I find good and sincere people sabotaging relationships, outside their awareness.
Even the Apostle Paul said: "I cannot understand my own behavior. I fail to carry out the things I want to do, and find myself doing the things I hate." In the same paragraph, Romans 7, Paul called this tendency his unspiritual self: although the will to do what is good is in him, the performance is not.
I know from my own life that I have not paid enough attention to what Carl Jung calls the Human Shadow. The Shadow is the hidden part of our personality. It consists of the characteristics, impulses, programs, scripts, and psychological games that are not welcome in our conscious life. The Shadow self includes the pervasive ways we hide from ourselves and from our motives.
The Shadow is not only personal, that is, the result of my individual life, but cultural. Jung proposed that there were archetypes, a sort of story-template that guides our conscious minds. The hidden program shapes personality in many ways. I am taught what is right and what is wrong. What is unacceptable, for example, sexual desire for a celibate, then goes into the shadow where it becomes more powerful.
Our Western Caucasian culture relegates a great deal of our feeling function to the shadow, so it is not proper for men, at least, to be forthright with feelings, either positive or negative.
Our spiritual task is to not be afraid of what is in the shadow, but to welcome it, embrace it, see it as a valuable part of ourselves, and learn to integrate this. When this happens we are more whole, less scared of the interior life, also more humble as it teaches us what is common to our humanity.
In marriage, for instance, it usually takes more than a few years to realize how different were the families in which we and our spouses were raised, with different assumptions and expectations about almost everything. We are only in the past few years discovering how differently we are programed from the time we are labeled blue and pink in the hospital nursery.
The dangerous persons are those who assume because they are so sincere, they cannot be wrong and further, should not be questioned. The most dangerous today are those who believe that "God" is on their side. Their righteousness with God gives them the permission to judge others as further from God than themselves. The gift of faith has become an hidden idol.