Brody's Scribbles... Rational Fear

By Bart Vogelzang | VANCOUVER ISLAND, B.C., CANADA -- Fear is obviously nearly a universal feeling, as it has been a significant aspect of stories told and retold for generations. Whether depicted verbally or in writing, fear is a central theme in much of our thinking and culture, and certainly in our religions.

Some fear, what I will call ‘rational fear’, comes from past experiences, which might be one’s own, or those of another. Falling off the branch of a tree to the hard ground below probably produced pain and injury. Thereafter the person has some fear of climbing onto branches, and may instill that fear in their acquaintances, maybe by retelling their story with embellishments. Attacks by wild animals probably accounted for many of the earlier stories creating fear.

Of course, some fear is simply there because someone is dealing with the unknown. We don’t know what is happening in the dark while we huddle around a campfire, or look out of our front window at a crowd of loud and rambunctious young people in the vacant lot next door. We don’t know if the people we hear fighting in the next apartment are gun wielding, or just verbal jousters. We don’t know if those figures wearing hoodies and closing in around us are just happy teens on their way to a party or the mall, or are gangsters looking to rob us. Fear like this is at least rational, if not entirely so, since there is a basis for caution. The fear itself has a benefit, in that one is a bit more careful, and less likely to be hurt.

Sadly, religious fear is completely groundless. There is fear of the Devil, fear of disobeying obscure and ambiguous ‘rules of conduct’, fear of anyone with a belief that is not identical, and fear of any person who seems to exhibit any trait that has been mentioned in the Bible in any way but 100% positive. Those fears, as irrational as they are, right from the get go, become compounded when clergy start to deliberately incite fear, and thus hate, on a regular basis. There is no net benefit to religious fear. Neither the fearful, nor the feared have anything to gain from religious fear. The only benefit goes to those who incite the fear, generally by claiming a right to either funds or power, in order to ‘save’ people; saving them from a threat that is non-existent in the first place. 

A perfect example is the fear of same sex marriage. Absolutely nobody benefits from banning it, everyone loses, and there is no threat to anyone accepting it. It is a completely fictitious fear created and maintained by religious groups, whose main goal is getting your money in order to fight this fiction of danger.

It is time that everyone throws those irrational fears right back at the preachers, bible thumping zealots, and religious bigots, and insist they pay back the millions they have spent fighting a threat that simply isn’t there.