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Karen Armstrong, a writer on fundamentalism, has penned an interesting article in today's Grauniad. She starts with the observation that children know what to read, and it tends to be the sort of stuff parents would rather they didn't.
In fact, the best children's classics have always evoked the dark side of life. Alice's Wonderland reveals the arbitrary demands and heartless craziness of the adult world from a child's perspective. The sinister menace of the Wild Wood is a constant threat in The Wind in the Willows. In the novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett, children are regularly abandoned, bereaved, neglected and ill-treated. Some parents would prefer their children to read books that are more upbeat, but Wilson's success and the endurance of these classics remind us that children know instinctively what is best for them, and find that their worst fears become more manageable when they are made explicit. It seems that many children have not yet succumbed quite as fully as adults to thepositive thinkingthat is fast becoming a social orthodoxy.
She then observes how society doesn't like to cofront pain and suffering--An acquaintance once told me that quite the most difficult aspect of her cancer was her friends' strident insistence that she develop a positive attitude, and her guilt at being unable to do so
--before noting that fundies are the worst offenders.
At a literary festival, where I had been describing the fear that lies at the heart of religious fundamentalism, a man in the audience told me that he found this quite incomprehensible. If you have true faith, he argued, you cannot suffer. I suggested that if he lived in a more troubled part of the world (we were in Cheltenham at the time), he might find it more difficult to maintain his equanimity. But he seemed to regard religion as an anaesthetic that would even numb the pain of a concentration camp.
In contrast, Buddhism requires facing up to the fact that life sucks:
This is lazy, inadequate religion. If we deny the reality of suffering, we will ignore the distress of others. At its best, religion requires the faithful to see things as they really are. In Buddhism, the First Noble Truth that is essential for enlightenment is that life is dukkha:unsatisfactory, awry. The Buddha's father tried to shield him from sorrow by imprisoning him in a pleasure-palace, walled off from disturbing reality. Guards were posted to drive away any distressing spectacle. For 29 years, the Buddha lived in this fool's paradise, locked into a delusion and unable to make spiritual progress. Finally the gods intervened and forced the young man to confront mortality, sickness and decay. Only then could he begin his quest for Nirvana.
The Buddha's palace is a striking image of the mind in denial. As long as we immure ourselves from the pain that surrounds us on all sides, we remain trapped in an undeveloped version of ourselves. Denial is futile: suffering will always breach the cautionary barricades that we erect around our fragile existence. The ideal is to find a still centre within that enables us to face pain with equanimity and use our experience of dukkha to appreciate the sorrow of others.
She notes that the cheery prophets were the ones condemned in the Bible as false prophets, and all the accepted ones are miserable buggers. Look on the dark side of life - The Guardian, 21st February 2004.
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Superstition and Other Silliness
at 13:03. Last modified on September 28 2006 at 23:42.
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1: Posted by: pericat | February 22, 2004 6:42 PM
Interesting article. Puritanism never really goes away.
(btw, the placement of the quote beginning, "This is lazy, inadequate religion" suggests that the article's author is saying this of Buddhism.)
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