Understanding the "terrorists"

I was standing at a kids bday party in Chucky Cheeze awhile back, and while tasting this hollow food, watching the blinking lights & overweight kids, I had an epiphany. I suddenly understood something fundamental about the middle east. It's so easy for us to use the rational part of our brain and say "democracy", "capitalism", "freedom"---who would NOT WANT that???

But the brain operates on deeper levels than surface logic---it's got built in mechanisms to maintain stability and consistency. Consistency of values (reverence & spirituality), consistency of self image and consistency about the nature of the world & of humanity.

My epiphany was that the greatest fear in the Muslim world is not of freedom or democracy. It's that WITH democracy will come Chucky Cheeze, WorldCom, porn & mullets!!!

These things represent fundamental differences of values and notions of world order. Our ancestors survived by fighting for consistency and stability, and those mandates are deep and mostly unconscious. But they drive so many choices...........

And a part of me agrees with them----they should fight like hell to avoid suburban mediocrity.

A "personal" God sets children up for hopelessness

A "personal" GOD (Man created "in his image") is a cornerstone of fundamental Christianity that has been around for centuries.

Yet I believe that telling kids that "GOD is a unique, personal individual who listens via the spoken word & answers prayers", is abusive and blindly ignores the way that young minds work.

This very day, millions of children around the world are praying to the GOD they've been taught to honor. They ask for their mom not to be sick or for their pet to come home. They ask for mom & dad to stop fighting or reunite. For those kids in more dire situations, they pray that someone will stop hitting them, or touching them in a way that feels so bad.

Each time their world does not change, these children assume one of two things (and usually both):
1) I am unworthy of GODS attention---in fact, this GOD seems to ignore me just as completely as my old, overworked, exhaused (or alcoholic) mom or dad
2) GOD is really not available---there is no higher authority; nothing will ever change; he/she is a mean or uncaring GOD

If I am unworthy of support and attention, what am I to do???
If GOD is mean, uncaring or simply distracted by overwork or addiction, then where am I to turn???

If help is really not available......why bother?
Children in this situation give up. They stop hoping, they stop praying, and they stop looking for GOD in themselves, and in the trees and sunlight.
This fundamental worldview, which was not intended by their "teachers", get stored in their semi-conscious, in a way that is different from adults.

If I teach you adults that all toothpaste contains sugar, you store it in the neo-cortex. I can come back a minute or year later and say "just kidding" and you are able to overwrite that belief with a new one. Children however encode their models of the world primarily in the limbic region of the brain. This region does not use logic, abstraction or conventional language. When we've held a belief for a long period of time, we forget that it is governing our way of being in the world. The belief recedes into the unconscious but still has a profound effect on attitude and happiness for the rest of ones life. Hopelessness is especially insideous because it promotes a repetitive "giving up" and abandoning of those efforts that could uncover this belief and help to amend it. It's taken me a long time to transcend the hopelessness that resulted from a distorted notion of who/what GOD was. On my journey, this transcendence occured through the Hakomi method of Somatic Psychotherapy. You can read more about it at:

http://www.ronkurtz.com/writing/Readings2004.pdf
or
http://www.hakomiinstitute.com/