Today I drew a cartoon and wrote a post called Garbage for Brains. You might want to take a minute to read it. There’s some fascinating links there to an inspiring and insightful video about advertising and women, as well as the CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch disgusting statement that he doesn’t want fat people in his stores. We are conditioned what to believe is beautiful. Now it’s becoming policy.

The real point I wanted to make is that we are also conditioned what to believe is true. What does religion, and perhaps specifically the church, want you to believe? What does it want you to believe about itself? What does it want you to believe about yourself? What advantage, financially or otherwise, does the church gain by you believing as it dictates? What is really true, and what is not?

If you follow the tendrils of your beliefs long enough, all the way to the root, what do you find? At the root of many of our beliefs is fear. We are conditioned to be afraid of so much: error, sin, rejection, excommunication, punishment, hell. What if we decided not to be afraid? What would happen to our beliefs if we examined them to the point where we discerned they were rooted in fear?

Yesterday, Seth Godin wrote:

“… most of us are avoiding the things that might merely trigger the emotion itself. That’s how distasteful it is to us.”

We even avoid things that remind us of fear because we are afraid of fear itself. So we won’t even approach questioning the things rooted in fear because we don’t want to be afraid.

When it comes down to it, the question has to be:

Do you want to know the truth or only what you’ve been told is the truth?