Why We Persecute Love
Yesterday, there was an inspired Thought For The Day on the radio. Some clergyman was commenting on why clinics which specialise in extending one’s penis size so often use junk email to market their service. As he pointed out, a man with a small penis is unlikely to want everyone to know about it by openly announcing that he is going to a clinic to get it sorted out – so responding to an email has a handy degree of persuasion. In fact, to be approached in the street by somebody offering to enlarge your penis is likely to cause great offence – even if one’s knob is tiny. Why? The service offered is trying to help the recipient – giving them something to potentially improve their quality of life. But admitting one needs a larger penis is admitting one is somehow inadequate, no matter how kind the intentions of the people offering larger genitals. As the clergyman elaborated: it’s the same with love. How often do we get preached at at weddings, or door-stepped by the Jehovah’s witnesses or evangelised at by environmentalists, and how often when it happens do we take great offence? Often. These people come at us seeming Holier Than Thou, telling us we need to change – pointing out that where we’re going is wrong, on and on and on….making us feel guilty. But hang on – take the Witnesses for example – why are they hassling us? What are they trying to get from us? They’re NOT! They’re giving to us. They’re showing us how we can have greater quality of life by incorporating a little loving giving into our lives. Practical love. It is because they want us to be happier that they feel we must all address the ways in which we all cause our own unhappiness through our selfishness, badness and lack of loving. So on the doorstep, our guilty conscience controls our actions, and we choose to close our ears instead – daft really because we’re cutting out the people who are trying to make us happy! Shooting ourselves in the foot. Do you like obstinate people? How often do we hear people making fun of the Jehovah’s Witnesses – butt of too many jokes. We should at the very least listen, thank them, and not be so weak as to belittle their efforts.
Lennon described it – he had a thing about Gandhi, and referring to Gandhi’s assassination – a good person being killed, Lennon said “I can never get my head round that”. It’s completely illogical when you think about it. There are scales of righteousness, as there are with every human quality, from God to the Devil. We’re all somewhere in-between, there really is good and bad in all of us (clichés are often such because they’re true). So when a person has listened to their conscience, and acted on it they take a step upwards on the Holy Scale. Obviously. So when we meet someone higher up, by virtue of the fact that the other person is more righteous, they define us as less righteous. We feel guilty, and the easiest option is to scapegoat the good people as they have the bloody irritating habit of exposing our badness just by standing in the same room as us!