Create Your Own Religion (24 page)

Now, obviously men and women
are
biologically different, but eliminating individuality from the picture, and reducing everything to some kind of biological determinism is pure fascism. This modern apology for patriarchy sounds very much like the “separate but equal” doctrine once embraced by the Supreme Court, and history tells us how well that worked . . .

I am not trying to deny biological reality. The problem is when gender roles force individuals to conform to a fixed model created by exaggerating these natural differences. Little girls are taught to be delicate, graceful, and pretty, while little boys are taught to wrestle, play in the mud, and act tough. Any boy or girl who doesn't fit the mold becomes an object of ridicule: a sorry example of gender confusion that will be unmercifully teased to death until he or she falls back in line. In this way, boys are taught to squash their more sensitive side, and instead develop exclusively toughness, aggression, willpower, and other “manly” virtues, and girls are taught to repress these qualities in favor of nurturing “feminine” qualities. This is how individuality is sacrificed on the altar of gender ideology. This is how society makes nature's formula much more extreme, and ends up shaping very one-dimensional types of human beings.

Many religions are built on a dualistic mentality that divides up existence in opposite, mutually exclusive categories: spiritual or physical, earthly or heavenly, civilized or wild, good or evil, logical or mystical. This harsh dualism is applied to everything, so it is hardly surprising to find it applied to gender roles as well. Rather than allowing for the possibility of so-called masculine and feminine qualities to complement each other, most religions have built an insurmountable wall between the two, and force them to live in a state of apartheid.

This rigid gender ideology is obviously bad for women since traditionally they've gotten stuck with the less glamorous and more dependent role, but is also bad for men, since they are trained to suffocate their feelings in the name of upholding a meathead, macho image. By following traditional gender roles, men may have more authority, but they also end up being a fraction of the complete human
beings that they could be: tough and powerful, but insensitive and emotionally crippled.

Refusing to turn into the stereotypes of what men and women are supposed to be seems like the logical next step, but even this may not be the solution. Don't worry, I haven't suddenly changed my mind, and I'm not messing with your head for the fun of it. It's simply that the solution to our riddle cannot come from simply rejecting the traditional formula. Much of the modern world has been trying to move away from these stereotypes, and yet the results have not been ideal. In losing their macho posturing, many men may have become more pleasant and less abusive, but also whiny and weak. It's as if getting rid of chauvinism came at the price of losing their balls. It's as if they only knew how to be strong while they donned the armor of patriarchy, but when they took the healthy step of stripping it away, they found themselves lost and without an identity. It's as if the emergence of independent women were enough to throw male identity into an existential crisis.

What I am suggesting to counter this is not to turn back the clock and invite patriarchy to return. A strength built on putting other people down is no strength at all. What traditional male roles used to offer was the parody of strength—just a bossy, tyrannical façade that has nothing to do with real power. The new “separate but equal” recipe cooked by the fans of a neo-patriarchy is as pathetic today as it ever was. The solution we are looking for is not in rejecting feminine and masculine stereotypical qualities. It's about developing those qualities
and more
. It's about taking the best from each and combining them.

Once, a woman who happened to be a master in a particularly brutal form of martial arts told me she believed fighting helped her
to be more feminine.
²¹³
Needless to say, I was intrigued. How exactly does training to drive your knee into people's heads make a woman more feminine? I wondered. Many women, she said, are afraid to let their guards down and trust people, so it is harder for them to embody stereotypically feminine qualities such as being loving, warm, and affectionate. By becoming a good fighter, though, one can shed fear, which in turn frees you to be more relaxed and open to sharing your feelings despite the possibility that you may get hurt. Developing so-called masculine qualities such as toughness and a warrior's attitude, she concluded, can paradoxically end up enhancing a woman's femininity.

This marriage of seemingly contradictory characteristics is what can rescue us from an abusive patriarchy as well as the general weakness of modern gender roles. I found the same message on the skin of a woman I love very much: tattooed there, a tiger jumps out of a heart. The message couldn't be clearer: strength with no heart is mean-spirited and predatory, but a heart with no strength lacks the raw energy to burn with intensity. Only when the two go together do we have a real individual. What we need are toughness
and
tenderness, bravery
and
sensitivity, willpower
and
kindness—for these are not masculine or feminine qualities. They are human qualities. And all men and women who wish to be anything more than a living stereotype need to develop all of them.

To make up for their unforgivable historical support for patriarchy, modern religions can begin to teach people that abandoning stereotypical roles is not a loss, but a chance to be creating something better and more complete: individual mixes of “masculine” and “feminine” virtues that are much richer and more rewarding than traditional identities.

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz
.

—Janis Joplin

Nothing in the world can excite the minds of men quite like the two
G'
s—God and Gold. (The third
G
that boys dream about—Girls—ranks much higher than either of those on my personal priority list, but it has nothing to do with the subject of this chapter, so I'll try to keep my hormones in check and not get sidetracked.) If it is certainly true that religion is one of the most powerful forces driving our collective psyche, cold, hard cash is not far behind. God and gold are the objects of worship most revered by humanity. Countless people obsess about them, want them, crave them, and center their lives around them. For them, we fight, cry, and struggle. In the hope that they'll grant us their favors, we sacrifice on their altars unspeakable amounts of time and energy.

In the minds of some people, it may appear strange to discuss economic issues within the context of religion. But the relationship between religion and wealth is a complicated but meaningful one. Sometimes, they are bitter enemies competing for the hearts of human beings. Other times, they shamelessly flirt with each other. Religion would seem irrelevant if it were silent about such a key human concern; likewise, the quest for wealth is very much affected by religious attitudes.

The nitty-gritty reality of survival forces everyone to make choices about wealth. How much is enough for us to be happy? What do we want it for? What are we willing or unwilling to sacrifice for it? How much of our time will we devote to chasing it? The answers to these questions influence most other aspects of our lives, since any discussion of wealth is intertwined with the choice of what we'll do for a living. And inevitably, what you end up doing seven, eight, or nine hours a day will affect the person you become. Whether we like it or not, our job becomes one of our priorities. So it's naïve to expect religions to have nothing to say about such an important topic. Speaking of purely “spiritual” values without ever addressing economic issues means relegating spirituality to a corner, removed from day-to-day events. This is why most religions throughout history have expressed very strong opinions about money and wealth.

Despite their enduring rivalry, when it comes to their attitudes about wealth, Judaism and Islam can lay down swords, Uzis, and atomic weapons, and find something they can all agree on. Both religions, in fact, advocate similar positions. Both stress the importance of
charity. In Leviticus and Deuteronomy we find passages commanding Jewish people to give away as a religious obligation a percentage of their wealth to the poor.
²¹⁴
Along the same lines, Islam elevates charity as one of the Five Pillars of Islam. To varying degrees, they both frown on charging high interest rates for loans, and they make clear that the pursuit of wealth is subordinate to religious duties. Other than that, they see nothing wrong with wealth in and of itself.

On the other hand, Christianity—the middle child in the Middle Eastern monotheistic family—forcefully establishes its own identity by adopting a very different stance from its siblings. Over and over, the New Testament attacks the desire for wealth as fundamentally incompatible with Christianity. Jesus himself clearly forces his followers to choose between God and wealth. “No one can serve two masters,” Jesus tells us unambiguously, “for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye can't serve God and Mammon.”
²¹⁵
Reinforcing the same concept, Matthew 6:19–21 reads:

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
²¹⁶

Still not convinced? Try this then: “Woe to you that are rich! For ye have received your consolation.”
²¹⁷
And just to make sure there are no misunderstandings, other parts of the New Testament spell it out for us:

For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. And having food and clothing, with
these we shall be content. But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and harmful lusts which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, for which some have strayed from the faith in their greediness, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.
²¹⁸

Nowhere, however, does Jesus get any more radical about wealth than in Matthew 19:23–24. Communists are wimps compared to Jesus, who takes his attack against the love of money to new heights: “And again I say unto you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”
²¹⁹

One thing is for sure; good old Jesus could deliver a flowery speech. Easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven? Wow. No one can accuse him of lacking imagination. But besides being funny, his metaphor is unequivocal in its meaning. Jesus' statement would make even Karl Marx blush. Read the last quote again and then consider how readily most Christians chase wealth. Tell me you see no contradictions. In regards to wealth, the majority of Christianity today seems to have conveniently edited Jesus' words out of their theology.

Baloo, the bear from
The Jungle Book
, embodies Jesus' spirit much better than popes or preachers. Baloo happily sings his anti-capitalist tune, inviting us to work less, not worry about the future, and enjoy the bare necessities of life that will fall in our laps when we stop struggling so much. This is the Sermon on the Mount sung by a furry animal coming to you courtesy of Disney. In one part of his most famous speech, in fact, Jesus preaches the exact same concept. Look at the birds of the air, and the lilies of the field, he says. They make no plans for the future. They don't stress about food and
clothing, and yet they have more than they need. Learn from them and quit worrying.
²²⁰
Can you think of anything more contrary to the spirit of capitalism than this?

Jesus is in good company though. Besides Baloo, he can also find a kindred spirit in Lao Tzu, the mythological author of the Tao Te Ching. Much like Jesus, Lao Tzu had no inclination to mince his words. He writes, “There is no greater curse than the lack of contentment. No greater sin than the desire for possession.”
²²¹
“To be proud with wealth and honor,” we find in another passage, “is to sow the seeds of one's own downfall.”
²²²
Statements like these pop up all over the Tao Te Ching. Neither Jesus nor Lao Tzu are interested in winning a popularity contest, and that's why they say exactly what's on their minds without concern of pleasing the powers that be. Most rulers, according to Lao Tzu, being the greedy bastards that they are, overtax their people and let them starve in an effort to accumulate more wealth than they know what to do with.
²²³
This is what pushes Lao Tzu, long before Robin Hood, to argue, “It is the Way of Heaven to take away from those that have too much and give to those that have not enough.”
²²⁴

Similarly, the pursuit of wealth is also no friend of Buddha, who gave up his position as heir to the throne and kissed goodbye to a life of luxury in order to become a wondering monk. The otherwise easygoing Buddha condemned any job profiting from suffering—selling weapons, slavery, butchering animals, selling poisons and intoxicants—as being unequivocally contrary to a Buddhist path. But even more radically—just like Jesus and Lao Tzu—Buddha viewed attachment to wealth as fundamentally misguided. His problem was not with wealth itself, but with the attachment and the never-ending desires that usually accompany it. If one could enjoy wealth while remaining completely unattached to it, then wealth is no obstacle.
But according to Buddha, most people are incapable of this; they become dependent on wealth as the source of their happiness, and this attachment is the root of much misery.