08.15.07
“God’s Warriors” - CNN Special News Program
If you are planning to watch CNN’s series “God’s Warriors” reported by Christiane Amanpour starting next Tuesday, August 21, be thinking about the belief stages as you watch. As I don’t know a whole lot about the Jewish and Muslim warriors in the Tuesday and Wednesday program, I will be particularly interested in the Thursday program about the Christian warriors in the US. Of course I have not seen it yet, but I am pretty sure we will be able to see typical Stage Two patterning in the people Ms. Amanpour describes. Remember, Stage Two’s are the ones who need stability. (see my article “Religious Development….for Dummies”) They need the forms in their lives to remain constant and are dependent upon society’s structures for their personal governance. When the forms in their lives appear to be in flux, these people feel very threatened and can rebel. In their fervor to maintain the worldview (and the Godview!) that keeps their lives in order, these people can be led to all sorts of drastic actions. Their vision of God of course is that of an entirely external being, who is judgmental, punitive and of course, masculine.
If only these people could be allowed to see that those they find so threatening are not evil after all. If only they could understand that those they perceive as evil were in fact just living in a different stage of life, that these people simply do not need to have tight rules imposed by society or the church to keep their behavior in line. I of course don’t know how to share this information in a way that they would accept. But if the Stage Threes and Stage Fours in the world only understood it, then it would become part of the collective intelligence of our culture and the Stage Twos could maybe (?) relax their fervor and be more likely to accept their society as it is.