There is comfort in the family. Similarity is comforting. There are shared appearances and habits and customs. The tribe is a collection of related individuals grouped by family is the tribe and above that the Chiefdom and then the Nation. The chiefdom was an organization of families and tribes sharing commonalities. At about a thousand there became a need for an administrator or beurocracy of some kind. The Nation is beaurocratic. Which of course makes the indigenous claim to being ‘first nations’ questionable but superb politics and marketting.
I’m inteterested in the comfort we have with ‘our group’. I associate with others ethnically, by language and orings and by work and relationships. I feel comfortable in my church because we are a liberal Chritian community Anglican and United Church of Canada. My roots were Baptist. I’m a single doctor , specialist in psychiatry and addiction medicine with a lot more paper trailing that. I feel comfortable with psychiatrists. I’m in recovery and feel comfortable with those who don’t drink and drug and share the commons experience of recovery. I’m divorced and single with a close initiate friend of several decades. I don’t have children but am close with family and in touch with a large extended clan. I am bisexual by definitions of sexual medicine because I’ve had sex with both men and women. I’ve married and lived with women and loved them as intimates and friends which I can’t say I’ve known with men. I had wanted children and was deemed fertile but had relationships which were unproductive in that sense despite the lab saying I was fertitle and a girlfriend becoming pregnant and aborting our child refusing to have the child though I wanted to.
I feel comfortable with people who have shared traumas with me. Divorced men , single men, men who hunt, fish and sail and dance and cycle and ride motorcycles.
I feel comfortable with most women and other men mostly when we are involved in an activity together. I played old timers hockey and belonged to a group of cross dressers and their wives and started an improvisation theatre company enjoying the arts and sciences. There’s are subgroups of sciences folk and arts folk who don’t particularly ‘get along’. The university has this collection of faculties not unlike the military with its army, navy, Air Force and most recently Space Force.
The AA m moved started in the Christian Oxford movement but separated because people in recovery didn’t ‘fit’ or ‘feel comfortable’ with the greater group. Within AA the NA crowd separated because so many of the alcoholics didn’t relate with the drug addicts. There are now groups for every addiction, the gambling addicts, sex addicts and over eaters all like their ‘group’. The LBGT groups have their own conventions with Rainbow AA and NA meetings. There are meetings of every language and Colour. I have attended AA meetings and Church meetings and scientific conference where English, the language I speak was not the language spoken. Despite limited understanding I enjoyed the spirituality
It doesn’t matter really in a mortal or ethical sense. It’s emotional.
In general people feel comfortable with their ‘own’. People also feel they are ‘right’ when there is the political idea of ‘consensus’ or numbers. The oldest law of the world is the Chinese Law of the Fish which says there are big fish and little fish and the little fish must be fast and numerous.
The Chiefdomss developed Nations and the Nations and Empires and Corporations and other bigger and bigger conglomerations, There’s comfort in being part of the group. Adolescence is a time where the kids think they’re so individual and that they’ve chucked the ‘uniforms’ of their parents only to hare their own uniforms. In the church there as a major issues of the way monks cut their hairs thousands of years before the hair cuts of the 50’s and 60’s created sensations.
Today there is a term ‘bubble’. This is an ideological term. People are congregating in ‘bubbles’ created by ‘social media’ and ‘marketing’ and ‘politics’. These bubbles apply to religion. Buffalo Springfield wrote a protest song in 1966 “for what it’s worth’ with the famous lyric ‘people carrying signs mostly say hooray for our side.
The ‘either your for us or agin us’ mentality ‘I’m right you’re not’.
The trouble with Christianity and Jesus Christ lies in this quandary. He associated with the lowest of the low, tax collectors, for instance. He was crucified by the government of his day. The book Fields of Blood addressed the issue of political leaders and religious leaders .
Ecumentalixallism is the attempt to find common ground in all religions. Job, the least taught book of the Old Testament has God and the Devil wagering and playing together. Jesus wasn’t a ‘prophet’ or any of the silliness spoken today. Jesus was a ‘servant king.’ A major disappointment to early Christians. Herod was a child killing country king and Pontius Pilate was the Emperors man who refused to to help Jesus. Emperor Constantine would stop the persecution of Christian’s and make it the religion of the Roman Empire.
Jesus said “love your enemy’. This is not found in the Quoran by any means. Mohammed wasn’t a warrior king while Jesus was not. The Beatles song ‘Revolution’ was a disappointment to the Maoist aetheists who had just killed millions. Jesus sacrificed himself and Christians continue to be persecuted today.
It feels good to be in a group, a gang, a ruling party, a rave, the latest fad, the idea that you are God’s chosen or just Godly and the others are ‘outside’.
I believe we’re all going to heaven. Jesus didn’t teach that. He definitely taught there was heaven and hell.
But we know today that there is fate and free will still and that psychopaths appear to born with an abnormal lacking in ‘empathy’. There is clearly predisposition for addiction with identical twist having the highest disease correlations for alcoholism.
I believe is love and fear and am thankful my teacher pointed out that Jesus said ‘do not be afraid so many times and emphasized faith and that God was a ‘loving God’.
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