Life Is Not A Cartoon
The root cause of many of the divisions we feel in the “Culture War” I keep hearing about so much on talk radio and cable news is classification itself. Any time we simplify a complex person to a simple ideal, we are committing a form of violence. In essence, we are dismembering that beautiful person in front of us until they fit into a convenient mold.
I’ve had to do a lot of work talking to people to show by example that, while I’m one of those Christian types, I don’t fit into the classification they may have built from their youth. Likewise, I’ve had to learn that my own childhood notions don’t fit anyone other than some non-existent ideal caricature in my head.
One of the lessons I’ve had to really learn in teaching myself to draw is that lines aren’t really all that common in the world. Boundaries aren’t made with clear cut lines segregating things. Most often, when you really look deeply at the boundary in question, you see that what we interpret as a line is really just a difference in tone (or “value” to use my recently acquired artistic jargon).
In much the same way, our categorization of the people around us has fuzzy boundaries. Christians aren’t a single group mind. Both the lapsed Catholic and the fundamentalist Southern Baptist are Christian. Atheists are likewise a diverse set. Richard Dawkins is an atheist out to expose what he sees as harmful ideologies of the theists. Other atheists are just quiet people who don’t share a belief in God. There are theist Buddhists and atheist Buddhists, but both groups attempt to follow the same dharma.
I resist the attempts of my culture to balkanize us via religion, race, politics, ideology, gender, and sexual preference. Sometimes I don’t notice my biases, but I’m always happier when I do so that I can mindfully seek what they have to teach me about myself.
Technorati Tags: Religion, Culture, Difference, Culture War, Balkanization