Tabula Rasa

Tabula rasa in Latin means, “clean slate”. It denotes a mind similar to a child’s, undisturbed by experiences and impressions. It is a pure state, as upon birth. With growth and life encounters, we naturally lose the “clean state” status. Our brain’s neural pathways become imprinted with data and learning that are very much integral to our successful maturation processes. Ironic as it may sound, if that “clean state” is mistaken for a virtue, it brings us to a state called, “naiveté”. And, this is clearly undesirable as an adult. Sarah Palin (the US Republican VP candidate) and Carrie Prejean (a US beauty pageant contestant) were
heralded as the emerging new Republican brand. Their virtue was their views, which were tailor-made for Republican right-wing ideologies. Never mind, that those views held little merit or substance. When they spoke, anyone with more than 10 gray cells in his/her brain, shuddered. Palin, if victorious, would have been a heartbeat away from Presidency should the aging McCain have had to step aside. Prejean not only opposed gay marriage, but also sought to defend her breast augmentation by saying, “I did not see anything in the Bible where it said I should not get breast implants”. I have no doubt that she also checked the Bible before she, as a 17-year old, sent solo sex videos of herself to her then boyfriend.

Why, one cannot help wonder, are such people a perfect match for the Republican right-wing mindset? The answer is what brings us back to our caption: tabula rasa. Or better, a chronic case of “naiveté”.

Equally disturbing is the fact that such naiveté is greeted with great aplomb in the USA when the rest of the western world can only be dismayed at America’s indiscretions. However, past the initial dismay, the reason for it becomes less obscure once we clue into the making of a conservative mindset. A conservative mindset is born out of the adult state of tabula rasa, or naiveté. In the absence of well developed neural pathways of logic, such a mind is immature, defenseless and emotionally volatile. This is the type of mind that organized religions tap into with astounding success. In the absence of rationality, this mind is unyielding and stubborn, with a dense coating of anti-logic plaques making it disoriented to reason and context.

So, now we have an army of plaque-brained people who know exactly what
their God wants for the rest of the world: God is anti-gay/lesbian, period, let alone invest them with any rights; God is Jewish; God is
Muslim. He is male and hails from the Middle-East. He is partial to his “chosen” people, and if you didn’t get the drift, it makes the
rest of us just bit players with bit parts in the epic stories built around the lead actors from His chosen tribe. You are born into your faith because God chose you. Your neighbour, if of a different faith, obviously had no such luck of the draw. This God is in the blessed wafer bread and red wine; He is in Jerusalem, He is in Mecca. His son resurrected from death. His Prophet rode a white horse into the heavens.

His naïve and intellectually obtunded flock of people are in the service
of those desiring and wielding power from the churches and the minarets.
These power mongers are complicit with the State. Such collusion of the
priestly and the ruling classes has always been the standard modus
operandi from the time of recorded history. In recent history one such
collusion reared its ugliest head in what transpired between the Church in
Rome and the despicable tyrant called, Der Fuehrer. Jeff Sharlet is a journalist and a visiting research scholar at New York University’s Center for Religion and Media. His recent bestseller, The Family – The Secret Fundamentalism at the heart of American Power – is a terrifying view of the American right. Most Americans, who are not rightwing nuts, and the rest of the world, knew how wrong a choice Palin was. Yet, we are baffled by how a nightmare like her – who said that Africa was a country and could not cite even one magazine, one book, or one newspaper she had read, and touted her foreign policy experience as being able to see Russia from her window (that is, whenever she was not winking) – could have a bestseller even months before the actual book, Going Rogue, came out! The Family has the answer: all you need is a Bible thumping IQ of 40, and you are deemed eminently qualified to be in the American government.

The Family (just like the mafia) will do all it can to make the likes of Palin to be up and forefront, and to be their conduit to the higher echelons of legislative and policy making branches of the government to make America the Christian version of Taliban’s Afghanistan.

The fact is that even Mother Teresa was an outcast with the Roman
authorities because she refused to convert those whom she fed and
nursed. With her, a dying soul had his/her choice of faith to pray to as he/she took the last breath. Her “Jesus Prayers” easily morphed to
incorporate the name of Allah or any other name that the person
requested. She was the true face of universal spirituality and prayer: the
genuine ambassador for Spirituality without Borders!

When we get ensnared in a time warp of repressive intellectual and
emotional notions, what gets stoked are the superficial “feelings” that
disregard facts and context. This is precisely the mechanism described
in “mob psychology”. We are then, as adults, reduced to a state of tabula rasa. In our naivety, our baser instincts get exposed and exploited. We
reject what is righteous just as we did with Pontius Pilate. Ironically, the fundamentalists will crucify Him again. Mother Teresa had a prayer that
broke the barriers of race and creed, but we are told to be intolerant of those unlike us. Her Christian faith sought equity, but we seek pride in our separateness, and will seek special status from Rome to endorse our tabula rasa.

We mock Him again. Death would be His liberation this time, not
ours. The only question is, how long will it be before He reaches Golgotha, again? He shall not suffer any longer for our refusal to grow up.