Is it possible, I wonder, to die of resentment? Can resentment magnified, as it is among so many citizens of the planet just now, be a disease? Can resentment kill the one who lives and breathes it?
One looks toward the Middle East and there sees resentment at a high and dangerous pitch as Islamists of various strains rise up against perceived oppressors and against each other. Shiite and Sunni duke it out to the death. The Israel-Hamas struggle likewise partakes in such a contest. Better to die than to give in. Resentment from smoldering to blazing is the dominant currency.
It is a mistake to ignore the parallels between the rage expressed by tea party-type zealots -- rage, for instance, against America's first African-American president because he is African-American, is a Democrat and is not playing the role of the corner shoeshine boy -- and the rage being acted out by such militias as ISIS on the makeshift battlefields of Syria and Iraq.
The resentment inherent in any version of that rage has to do at some level with religious conviction -- which is always a potentially dangerous disposition. Belief in a deity and its supposed will and law cannot possibly be based on fact, therefore dogma unfiltered by reason carries the day -- and often to extreme ends.
Whether or not there is at the ground of being an intelligent and even benevolent power is not an appropriate topic for debate because the concept is beyond the realm of human knowledge. Data for it there is not. Yet millions of people have believed there exists such a power and have called it by various names. Millions more scoff at the idea of deity.
About 80 years ago, H.L. Mencken published an essay called "Memorial Service" in which he wrote: "Where is the graveyard of dead gods? What lingering mourner waters their mounds? There was a day when Jupiter was the king of the gods. Any man who doubted his puissance was ipso facto a barbarian and an ignoramus. But where in all the world is there a man who worships Jupiter today?"
Mencken goes on to catalogue 186 other deities, including Yahweh. In his peroration, Mencken wrote: "You may think I spoof. That I invent the names. I do not. Ask the rector to lend you any good treatise on comparative religion. You will find them all listed. They were gods of the highest standing and dignity -- gods of civilized peoples -- worshiped and believed in by millions. All were theoretically omnipotent, omniscient, and immortal. And all are dead."
Mencken cannot be gainsaid on this point. Deities come and go, precisely because they are inventions of human imagination. Not that imagination is a bad thing. It is one of the priceless gifts Homo sapiens may claim, and -- who knows? -- somewhere on up the evolutionary path imagination may yield actual data and prove believers right -- or some of them, leaving others seething with anger. But we are not there yet. Deities still are entirely of human creation and thus dangerous as outlets of command and control.
The feuding Islamists of all stripes read Qu'ran and take from it what they decide is the will of its deity, Allah, and ride off with scimitars, bombs, grenades and all manner of military ordnance to maim and kill in the name of their god. Their resentment against the West, against America, against anything that denies their fragile dignity plays out in violence and mayhem. Israel's official resentment leads its leaders to an all-or-nothing place with its Arab citizens.
The gun-loving right-wingers of civic life in America are not that much different where resentment is concerned. If one pays close attention to tea party rhetoric and that of similar factions, the deity of Christianity is frequently referenced, as in the lament that "our God-given liberties" are being taken away, not by an external force but by the government -- thus setting a constitutional entity at all-or-nothing odds with one particular religion.
Even though in the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson made oblique reference to "Nature's God" and the endowment of human beings by a "Creator with certain unalienable Rights," it was not the deity of a particular religion or religious expression to which he alluded. Jefferson, if he was anything, was a deist. Deism is more an idea than a belief, viz. that some power brought forth the universe and then retired.
As for the mention at the end of the Declaration of "the protection of divine Providence," it is a fact that Jefferson did not write those words. They were appended to the document by the Continental Congress at the insistence of its super-religious Puritan members who were not about to sponsor a revolution without their god at hand. Jefferson himself is noted for saying that while there must have been something like "a fabricator of all things ... of the nature of this being we know nothing."
How far we have strayed here in America from that kind of wisdom. Piety now runs amok among the resentful whose fanaticism, religious and otherwise, drives the politics of all too many elections, the enactment of all too many laws and the ambitions of all too many who hunger and thirst to run the show in this country their way.
Personally, I'd like to see a bit more light between such movements as ISIS and American politics in terms of behavior and aspiration. The glimmer I see today is narrower than I remember and seems to be getting even narrower.
The late essayist Christopher Hitchens had a point when he so bluntly wrote, "God Is Not Great" -- at least the god posited by extremists on any lunatic fringe, who somehow live immersed in the boiling oil of resentment and seem to love every minute of it.
