Your Dogmatism is the Problem

What is Your Sacred Cow and How Does It Control You?

Last night, after a meeting of the online discussion group my daughter and I are participating in, she called me to review, and about a reaction to something I said in the group, she laughed and pointed out: “Those Jungians don’t like it when you attack their sacred cow.” Thank you, Bridget, for handing me that term when I needed it. I have a tendency to break through to important ideas via many words and round-about ways of getting to the point, so when someone hands me a succinct way of naming what I’m thinking, I want to dance with joy! And “sacred cow” dances beautifully with the word I came up with early yesterday: dogmatism.

Once again, I am looking down the barrel of another failed friendship because I dared tell the truth about a situation. I named the elephant in the room and proceeded to talk about it, and in this case, what I did quite literally amounted to a great “sin,” because I called into question the religion that she is still wedded to: the one I rejected after a lifetime of trying to conform to its contradictory tenets.

Now, some people would tell me that the problem in the situation is mine, because I dared cross a boundary into the territory of someone else’s personal beliefs. That can be valid. In this particular situation, however, it certainly is not, because our friendship has suffered significantly from a lack of honesty and an abundance of avoidance ever since I left the Catholic Church—left Christianity, actually. What’s more, I was responding to an email from her that was very much about religious matters, something we freely talked about when I called myself Catholic. Interestingly, back then, because I wore the correct (though ill-fitting) label, she was happy to listen when I shared my doubts and far more than once conceded my point.

From what I can fathom (because she is now ghosting me, like so many in my life who simply can’t handle the risk of being honest), in my (former?) friend’s eyes, not only am I wrong, I am impugning her God, her religion, her Savior. But is any human called to defend God? Isn’t He all powerful? Can’t He take care of Himself? What about her religion: isn’t the Roman Catholic Church doing just fine without her standing up for it? It seems to me that the answers to those questions are: No, Yes, Yes, Yes.

So, knowing her and knowing the tenets of the Catholic Church, I imagine that she thinks the issue involves some sort of sin, but I think there’s more to it than that. After all, doesn’t Jesus say to “turn the other cheek,” not slam the door or run and hide? What would offering the other cheek mean if we are talking about being “hit” by views that are different than our own?

I have changed, I have grown, and there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, it’s right. It is what we are supposed to do, and the people in my life who have told me that I am the problem because my Soul can no longer rest in untruth and proceed as if everything is just fine are the ones living in fear. That does not mean, however, that I find no value in what used to be important to me. The truth is all around us. It comes packaged in many ways and gets delivered by people with individual experiences and beliefs. None of them have all the answers, but most of them have some. Madeleine L’Engle is one of those individuals. For many years, her Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art was very important to me, and I’d like to share three quotes from it, because they make me think:

To be truly Christian means to see Christ everywhere, to know him as all in all.

We human beings far too often tend to codify God, to feel that we know where he is, where he is not, and this arrogance leads to such things as the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem witch burnings, and has the result of further fragmenting an already broken Christendom.

Unamuno might be describing the artist as well as the Christian as he writes: “Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.”

I know God, but I do not know Him in the way any one religion packages Him.

So, sacred cows: they don’t show up only in religion as it’s typically defined. Anything can become a religion, and anyone in a position of power who wields it to control others knows that very well and absolutely leverages it. How many people worship at altars of political correctness, of science, of veganism or carnivorism, of the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, of Wall Street or Main Street, of Carl Jung or B.F. Skinner?

Dogmatism is the problem. If something you believe cannot be questioned because it might endanger your soul or make you look like a fool or force you to think or cause some emotional discomfort, than you are being controlled by what you (claim to) believe in.