Broad Speculations

In the early 1970’s living in Oregon I would periodically encounter members of the Children of God. This group was a fundamentalist Christian group regarded generally as a cult. The group lived communally and recruited dropouts from the hippie movement with an evangelical message about End Times and salvation. The ones I encountered were young, about my age at the time, and very sincere. They would say various things: “Jesus loves me.”; “Christ is my salvation”; “The Judgment Day is near.” These are all “words of belief”that led to the recruitment pitch for me to become one of their community.

What struck me at the time was the fundamental abstractness of their statements combined with an obvious internal emotional resonance that they felt but that I did not despite my attending a Baptist church in my childhood. While millions of Christians may believe in the statement “Jesus loves me”, the basis of this belief cannot be checked factually. It is a statement that a person saying it finds true through internal sense and feeling. It comes from hearing others – usually parents and loved ones or, in the case of the Children of God, the other members of their group – profess belief and the association of certain feelings with that belief. The words in themselves mean nothing. None of the people had ever seen Jesus and had known anyone who had. The belief can only come from hearing other people say they believe. In a sense the words are like mantras that make internal alignments in the psyche of the speaker but have no meaning in themselves. They are words that grow out of shared belief. The affirmation of others in the group is what makes the words real to the individual.

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