Do you question authority?

One night, a few months ago, I encountered perhaps the perfect example of synchronicity.

Resting after being on the road for nearly a week, I was surfing through the channels of my motel television in search of news. And I happened upon two separate news items, which were floating there on the sea amongst the usual flotsam and jetsam. The first was a snippet of an interview with Maya Angelou, and the second was a snippet of a speech given by Rick Santorum to a group of Christian conservatives.

Ms. Angelou, at the moment I surfed by her, was speculating on how wonderful everything might be if we, people in general, just used our intelligence. Mr. Santorum, on the other hand, was in the process of telling his audience the following, "We will never have the elite, smart people on our side, because they believe they should have the right to tell you what to do."

It was a matter of moments before I could shake off the effects of Mr. Santorum's irony overload, but once I did, I had to spend some time pondering my synchronous event.

The first thing I asked myself was why Mr. Santorum felt that his words would strike a harmonic chord in his audience. While I don't necessarily consider myself to be elite, (I said, modestly), I certainly consider myself to be intelligent. And I would be insulted, livid, horribly offended, by the insinuation that there were intelligent people on one side of an imaginary divide of some kind, while on the other side, there was I.

I would be offended as well to be placed in a group in which Mr. Santorum included himself, although, of course, he was only including himself to pander to his audience. He certainly doesn't believe it. Allegedly.

So why did his little speech not turn into an ugly incident? Why did his audience fail to rise as one and denounce him? Has something caused the members of his audience, not only to believe that they are not intelligent, but also to believe that this lack of intelligence is somehow acceptable, even desirable?

Why would people rally around a man who tells them they are not intelligent, rather than around a woman who knows they are, and who only wonders why they don't act like it?

The answer came to me far too easily. The answer is that there is a very large swathe of our population which has been trained, from birth, that mankind's purpose on earth is not to question, but to obey authority.

And this is unconscionable. It is an abuse of children greater than any other. It is an abuse which destroys the minds of children, and makes the minds of those children, and the adults they become, as useless as rotten cauliflowers inside their heads.

It starts with the kinds of parents who make rules they will not explain, other than, "Because I say so!" It continues into the kinds of churches whose preachers scream from their pulpits, "Because the Bible says so!"And insist that those who question are "of Satan."

Those preachers do their best to break down the spirits of their congregations. They tell their congregations that they are unworthy of the love of God, and that God will throw them into hellfire if they do not do his will. And the people, growing up in the shadow of this terror, become more and more docile, and more and more willing to do whatever the preacher tells them they must do. No matter how wrong the things he tells them make them feel inside.

And eventually they believe the lies. And they believe them adamantly! And they will wave their arms in the air if it makes their preacher think they are holy! (Even though Christ did not approve of making a big show of prayer and worship). And they will say such things as, "If it's in the Bible I believe it!" And they will defend the lies they are told, and they will hate those who challenge those lies, and they will hate even those who quietly turn away and choose their own paths.

"They are going to hell!" is their answer to everything. The preacher taught them that. It doesn't really feel very much like the sort of thing Christ would have said, but the preacher said it, and the preacher is the representative of God on earth. Right?

And those people carry their Bibles around aggressively. And they insist that the Bible is infallible. And they like to quote various verses to back up any argument they might happen to have.

But they don't read those Bibles. Not really. They couldn't possibly. They probably stopped long ago, when they had questions, and they were told that questions were "of Satan," or that there was no way they could possibly understand because they hadn't studied as long or as hard as the preacher, or gone to seminary school, or Bible college, or whatever.

They couldn't possibly be reading those Bibles, because to a Christian, the most important words in that Bible should be the actual words and deeds of Christ. The rest is other people's interpretation of those words, and some of those interpretations should probably be open to question, except, of course, for the fact that to question often leads to being deemed "of Satan."

But the words and deeds of Christ, as far as we can ever, possibly know, were written by people whose only agenda was their hope to save those words and deeds forever, for humanity. And even though much of what is now the Bible has been redacted, rewritten, tweaked by powerful men with agendas, the words and deeds of Christ seem to have been spared. Various versions seem in agreement, not contradictory.

If I were a Christian I would read those words, study those deeds, perhaps discuss any questions with others - not others who claimed to know better than I, but other questioners and seekers, and gradually I would have my own understanding of what it would be like to be a Christlike person.

The reason I would do it this way is because, if I were a Christian I would want to follow Christ's teachings, and Christ taught, in no uncertain terms, that small groups of people discussing his life and his deeds were what he wanted his church to be.

He warned his disciples not to become authorities and force their beliefs on others. He spoke against calling any man "Father" except for God himself. He taught a prayer for speaking directly with God, and never said any human had to go through any other human to talk to God.

He made miracles everywhere he traveled, he walked on water, he rose from the dead, and before he died, he let his disciples in on a secret: All of the things he had done, they would be able to do as well. In fact, he said, they would do even more than he had done, because they would have more time to do it.

So it makes me wonder why preachers even exist. They are claiming authority when Christ said not to do so. They are destroying the power of people who are meant to be able to do miracles. And it seems fair to say that Christ spoke against that as well. "Do not destroy the faith of these children." So when a child is in a church, and a preacher is screaming that the child is unworthy, and that God will let him burn in hell, that preacher is destroying the child's faith.

Children know, at birth, that they are born to be Christ. They are born to do miracles. But preachers take that knowledge away. And children squirm and cry in church because they know what is happening, but they are too small, just then, to run away.

I have often heard the parable of the mustard seed, and I have never heard a preacher explain what it really means, although some pretend to know. Those who pretend to know usually act as if it is some esoteric mystery we are not meant to understand, or that it simply means we must have faith that we will grow as we are meant to grow. And it occurs to me that the latter explanation is exactly what it means. A mustard seed has no doubt that it will grow to become a mustard plant. No one ever screams at it and tells it it is worthless, and that God, its father, who created it, would just as soon throw it into the fire as let it live.

So do children have no doubt that they will grow to be as Christ. Until preachers scream at them and take away that faith.

And what are we left with, when the churches wreak their havoc on our souls? People who are broken, who dare not question authority, who believe things told them by the very people Christ warned them about, and who allow those very people to create divisions among mankind.

Preachers have a lot of power over their congregations. Much of that power is based on fear, and fear is a strong motivator. And there are always others who see that power and want it for themselves. So there are politicians, like, perhaps, Mr. Santorum, (allegedly), who will try to turn that power to their own advantage. Such politicians will deliberately appeal to people whose will to question authority has been broken. They will deliberately appeal to people whose knowledge of their own power has been erased. They will deliberately appeal to people who are accustomed to being told that "others" are going to hell, and are therefore not worthy of empathy, or assistance, or common decency.

And those politicians are legion, these days. We can see it in their blatant disregard for the citizens. They are, in many ways, much like some preachers who make far more money than they need while their congregations, and people all around the world, are starving. Preachers have been known to say, when questioned about such things, that wealth is evidence of God's approval. And people in those preachers' congregations ignore the starving children, and believe whatever those preachers say, and pray that one day God will do them the supreme honor of making them wealthy, although Christ himself spoke of the difficulty a wealthy man would have becoming worthy of heaven.

Politicians would probably have taken over the churches by now if it had been feasible to do so, but with the aversion to the mixing of church and state which was once a strong part of our political belief system, that would have been a difficult task. Fate, however, was on the side of the politicians. It came, about a half-century ago, in the form of integration.

After ignoring the evils of segregation for years, because politicians thrive when the populace is divided, they were suddenly faced with a new system which had the very real possibility of unifying that populace. They were practically forced to become involved in the nation's school systems, and they could have done the right thing, those politicians of a half-century ago. Some of them probably tried to do the right thing. But other politicians, with an eye on their desire for power, chose instead to overhaul the school system which had once shone like a beacon around the world.

Since schools were the main focus of integration, politicians set about ensuring that integration would not work to bring people together, and the overhaul of the education system was a large part of their plan. They insisted that standards needed to be lowered, and that tests needed to be simplified, because, according to politicians, black children were unable to keep up. Politicians are so accomplished at dissembling that today, half a century later, that myth still lives. And those who believe the myth watch the continuing crumbling of our school system and blame black children, or, nowadays, hispanic and other immigrant children who, we have been told by politicians, simply cannot learn English without separate classes taught in their own language.

Among those who do not use their God-given intelligence to see through this lie the politicians have succeeded in creating, among their followers, resentment and anger among the races. The destruction of the school system was worth it, apparently, for politicians to achieve this goal.

And teachers are forced to teach "to the test." The test, which is set to the lowest possible standards, is the sole measure of success and failure now in many schools. Teachers are told that their students must, first and foremost, score high on the test, and are encouraged to forego any "extraneous" teaching. In addition to limiting the amount of knowledge to which a child will be exposed, teaching to the test also limits the amount of critical, analytical thinking a child will practice.

Students who learn to think critically and analytically ask questions. They ponder situations in their minds and sometimes realize that what they know, or what they are taught, might not be the best answer, the only answer, or even the truth. Politicians do not want people who ponder. They want people who learn by rote, who learn only what they are specifically taught and who do not question anything - especially authority.

Politicians benefit greatly from the work done by churches that teach that questioning is wrong, and by  schools that teach that questioning is counter-productive.

Politicians want people who will not ask why so many of us lose our homes while politicians thrive. They want people who will not question the justice, or the morality of a government that sends people to prison for reporting political crimes while the politicians who committed those crimes gain more power and wealth. They want people who will not realize that the decisions made by the government are overwhelmingly unfavorable to the citizenry and overwhelmingly favorable to big business, big energy, big pharmacy, and anyone who can give the politicians the most money "for their re-elections."

And politicians, like preachers, have a book about which they want to be seen as the authority. They have a book they want people to believe is too difficult for anyone but politicians to understand. Like preachers want the power that comes with being the perceived authority on the Bible, politicians want the power that comes with being the perceived authority on the Constitution.

And like the Bible, the truth inside the Constitution is not always what the "authorities" say it is.
Like preachers, politicians will say that when we the people question certain things in the book to which they claim authority, we the people are simply misinterpreting it.

"Leave it to the authorities," they will say, condescendingly, as they destroy the very soul of the book.

And any minute now I expect to hear politicians say, if they aren't saying it already, that anyone who questions their interpretation of the Constitution is the enemy - the political equivalent of "of Satan."

Watch out if they do, because while preachers can threaten hellfire and damnation from God in the future, politicians can actually bring it today. In fact, they've been doing it for decades. They can send their minions to break down the door of your home, seize your property, throw you in prison, take your children, or, to make matters easier, simply kill you. They face no repercussions whatever, except, perhaps, for a few days paid leave. All they have to say is that they had reason to believe you were a criminal, even for something as innocuous as smoking marijuana, and/or that you had the unmitigated gall to resist arrest (!)

None of this is Constitutional, of course. The plunder and pillaging of the homes and property of American citizens who have not been convicted of a crime is actually, specifically unconstitutional. Every one of us should know that. But too many of us have been taught not to question authority, so politicians have convinced huge numbers of us that such things are Constitutional, or that "making an end run around the Constitution" is perfectly acceptable. And these days hardly anyone even blinks an eye at the fact that mere suspicion of almost any crime is grounds for home invasion and seizure. (Please don't take my word for this. Learn for yourself how many more home invasions by police are occurring now than were occurring in the 1980's.)

In fact, if we read the Constitution, we would find that, instead of being helpless to control the kinds of things politicians are doing, we have the Constitutional right to simply tell them, in no uncertain terms, that their services are no longer required.

We can simply fire them. A passage in the Constitution, Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment, states that if any politician, on a national level or even on a state level, undermines the Constitution that politician cannot hold office. Period. Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment was written in the aftermath of the Civil War, but it still shines brightly. And if we ever read the Constitution, instead of taking the word of politicians that we are too stupid to understand it, we would know that passage is in there, and maybe we would not be in the fix in which we find ourselves today.

Politicians, lawyers, judges, justices, governors and attorneys general will try to argue us out of it, of course. Congress, if any members of that body are still eligible to retain their positions, will try to avoid the responsibility of enforcing it. But maybe, just maybe, this time we will hold our ground, and refuse to be treated like the nation divided, the nation convinced of our own ignorance, the nation which never questions authority, the nation which preachers and politicians have tried so hard to mold. Maybe this is something that will finally make us realize what we can do if we stand together as one.

Maya Angelou said that things would be better if we all used our intelligence. And of course she was right. No one could do the kinds of things our churches and our government have done to us if we all used our intelligence. It is, after all, our God-given intelligence. Such a wonderful gift. Why would anyone ignore such a gift?