The Fundamentalism of Rock

"All You Need Is Love"

Let it sink in for a moment; let the memories wash warmly over us, making us feel comfortable.

Now, what exactly is wrong with a mind-set that collapses the complexity of Life into a Universal Statement: "All you need is love"? It is similar to the problems I see with notions like "Absolute Truth": they are universals that give the appearance of infinity, but in actuality they have no anchor to the earth nor the heavens; they are silly testimonials to our urges, our obsessions, and our fears.

The view of Paul William Roberts ("Empire of the Soul") is that "All you need is Love" transformed into "All you need is Dope" which further transmuted into "All you need is Dough."

And that sums up where we are today.
Love is not all we need, for obviously we need to act in a proper way to ensure that our view of love is one that enriches and does not harm nor impoverish either ourselves or the beloved. It is an illusion to believe in the simplicity of Love being the answer for everything.
When I speak of simplicity, I refer to a simplicity which results from years spent searching for a singularity of faith, only to realize that the complexity of God is beyond comprehension, and my simplicity is an acceptance of a complex web of "good narratives"... my understanding is not one-thing, it is a Smithsonian Museum of all the names of God and Creation... and I just try to enjoy it in a humble manner.

You remember the game back in school where someone tells a story to a student, who then proceeds to tell the story to a second student, who then relates it to a third, and so on and so on. Then we compare the story heard by the last student to the original story, and see how greatly they have changed in transmission.
We expect change and transformation and losses through time, but if we start from an intolerable universal simplistic statement, we almost never escape from its prison into the light! It takes a revolution lasting hundreds of years to get from God's making the world in 6 days to the continuing creation of the universe over billions of years. And that fight is still going on in Tea Party legislatures!

Consider Christianity where one went from washing the feet of the apostles to the torture of the Inquisition. The Universal and Absolute Intent is unchanged, even though the particular interpretation has changed from 'holy service' to 'torture'.

Consider The Sermon on the Mount: not just one statement, but many. Jesus allows for the complexity of the world. Even the Golden Rule is not as absolute as it appears. Neither Jesus nor Rabbi Hillel, his contemporary, abolished the rest of the Law when they stated the Golden Rule, even though they dramatically indicated that the Rule is the Summation of all the Law.

In a recent poll, 44% of Americans believe (1) God is directly calling the shots in our physical world, and (2) it sure looks like the end of time.
That's like saying "All you need is God.... actually our idea of God... who is brutish when need be!"
Usually statements about God parade around as universal statements, so what we have is yet another absolute verity staring us in the face... again doing little more than summing up an urgent desire to believe and an urgent fear of the future.

God created diversity of Life and the Processes of Life. Complexity is innate in Creation. There are not only two sides to every question, there are a thousand or more!
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