Wonder and Dismay

I wonder about a lot of stuff.  Sometimes its stuff like what goes on over at the neighbor’s house and do they know their kids are obnoxious felons?  Other times its stuff like who was the first person to eat an artichoke, and how did someone figure out to dip the ends of the leaves in butter and scrape off the flesh with their teeth?  I mean, really, how do you get to that from looking at a thorny thing like an artichoke?  Would you put any part of it in your mouth?  And yet, they’re delicious.  Either that or it’s just an excuse to eat butter.

Mostly, I wonder at the difference between what people say on Sunday, and do on Monday.

Every religion I’m familiar with professes that each person has a responsibility toward others.  We’re all responsible in some way for the well-being and care of our neighbors.  Each faith says it differently, but that’s the basic premise.  Yet, everywhere I turn, people turn their backs on each other.  For evidence of this, check out Facebook.  Any discussion of health care reform, or immigration, or welfare, or any other endeavor that has to do with support of the less fortunate is met with malice and vitriol.

It’s almost a daily occurrence when someone posts something on my Facebook page about “my” Obama doing yet another thing to drag this country down.  There was a flame war over the issues in Arizona.  Bring up food stamps and AFDC and the stereotypes and prejudices come flying out faster than you can say “charity.”  There are more social issues that prompt wars of words than I want to list here, but I think you get the idea.

Religiously-observant people I know site the Bible as their guide to being a better person.  They say that any value worth having is in there.  The road map, if you will, is there – you only have to read it.  I’ve been told many times that a non-religious person couldn’t possibly have strong values and a commitment to her fellow human (they said “man,” but let’s not go there).  Children, I’ve been told, can’t possibly grow up to be caring and productive members of society without the guidance of god.

I don’t buy that.

I was raised Catholic.  I converted to Judaism.  I’ve flirted with Paganism and earth-based religions.  I’m pretty much comfortable being a Secular Humanist.  I believe, completely, that people are either good, bad, or as is most often the case, in between somewhere.  Values and morals are something your parents pass on to you, and something that you groom and hone as you live your life.  Way back before there was a Bible, or one god, or any gods at all, there were people.  They cared for their young, nurtured their old, sacrificed for the good of the clan.  They didn’t have Exodus 20:1-7 to tell them not to steal.  They didn’t do it because it wasn’t accepted.  It was a value.  No god involved.  There was only a society that didn’t value stealing from your clan.

Not so, today.  Now it’s apparently ok to take from those less fortunate, as long as you can get away with it.  It’s ok to kill because of the greater evil of “them.”  Depriving people of the opportunity to feed their children is fine because they didn’t fill out the form properly, or were allowed to even get a form to begin with.  The children in my neighborhood will never be forced into human slavery, but it’s ok to ignore it when it’s a teenage girl from China.  We would never let the next door neighbor starve, but the children of war torn countries are much easier to dismiss.

It’s really not about values, is it?  It’s really about money.  Money that “we” have and “they” don’t.  No one disagrees on a philosophical level that no one should starve.  But when it’s time to pony up the old checkbook, suddenly the hungry person is “lazy,” and “unmotivated” to move himself out of poverty.  Bashing Obama for costing “us” money on the healthcare bill is rather like blaming a child for his parents’ lack of financial sense.  Obama wasn’t the only one working on this.  He has said, in many sound bites, that there is no way for his vision to prevail when there are so many special interest groups out there undermining his intentions.  And before you start bashing me in the contents, do a little research on your own to find out just what parts of the health care bill came from whom.

It isn’t religion that dictates our values.  It’s society as a whole.  And as long as our society continues with the “me first” method of value setting, it isn’t going to change.