social terrorists
when i was young and spiritually searching i interacted often with converts to various paths. generic jesus freaks. jehovah's witnesses. liberation theologists. jesuits. catholic workers. hare krishnas. buddhists of many stripes, especially zen. yogis. hippies living as born again native americans. my tai chi teachers. new age pagans. u-u's. sufis. recovering drug addicts with a burning twelve step desire. as a discovery based learner the study of spirituality easily held my interest for many years. i read the bible, blake, kierkegaard, gurdjieff, suzuki roshi, watts, sartre, levi-strauss, bateson, gibran, dostoevsky, plato, and more. i was one of the few people i knew who was not annoyed by jehovah's witnesses, with whom i had many friendly discussions.

early in the eighties one of my hippie pals, morningstar, told me his simple test to separate spiritual seekers from spiritual predators.

the morningstar test
a seeker says, "god loves me."
a predator says "jesus loves you."

using the morningstar test served me well over the years. it helps discriminate between fellow travellers who practice a fair minded tolerance for divergent views and nervous hustlers preying on the weak when they should be praying for release from their own obsessive weakness.

today while watering the garden it occurred to me that many americans who call themselves "social conservatives" are not as benign as that soft edged description implies. hard core social conservatives are really predators with the same basic agenda as terrorists. in america, hard core social conservatives assume the right to force their beliefs on the entire country. for american social conservatives the ends clearly justifies the means. i don't follow that path because of the misery it leads to as inexoribly as gravity pulls apples down to the ground. you're either with us or you're against us.

i can say the same thing about tolerance. you're either tolerant of others, or you're not. and in the case of americans who call themselves social conservatives, many are acutely intolerant of others. what do you call a person who says they are a "social conservative" and who also supports a bigoted or intolerant agenda? i call that person a social terrorist, a menace to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

i consider myself a social conservative in a truer sense of the actual meaning of the words than our domestic social terrorists who seek to cram their beliefs down my throat in the name of what they call "social conservatism." what can be more conservative than practicing tolerance? than patiently interacting with people of different beliefs without condemning them loudly simply because of their beliefs? than being trustworthy and honest in relationships with others?

is it a sign of the dominance of intolerance among social conservatives that liberation is needed to break the bonds trapping us beneath stiffling paradigms of social exclusion and domination? left or right, conservative or liberal, from what i can see intolerance of the other is encouraged at both extremes. it is a yoke i live beneath as surely as the citizens of colonial salem feared the accusation of witchcraft. it is so easy to look back a few decades and see the misery and mistakes of earlier intolerance as unjustified suspician and elitism. it is much harder to flush out the current demons from our web of prejudiced assumptions and not so subtle justifications. ethical quicksand engulfs those who justify intolerance. in the future, we'll call them social terrorists.
posted by Will Ross at 08:29