SCRABBLE: & Faith
I’m getting pretty gutsy here. There is a good chance that the ‘Believers’, no matter what their slant, will judge me to be a heretic and block this site and think bad thoughts about me.
But you and I both know, if you have ever opened your door to a Jehovah’s Witness or a Fuller Brush Salesman, that ‘he who believes the hardest’ has no room for consideration outside of his own belief system.
Most believers believe that their beliefs are the direct ‘Word of God.’ They believe that their own understanding of ‘The Word’ is the ‘TRUE WORD’. That implies that all others who lay claim to other belief systems are simply ‘Wrong and Misguided’.
I contend that in spite of the ‘universal good works’ that so many well meaning missionaries and governments provide to people across the planet, much of it is done with an underlying self-righteousness.
The case is frequently that ‘enemies’ come together, standing side-by-side, during a Haiti or Chili or Katrina, providing help to the victims, in spite of their doctrines. All helpers feel empowered by being part of a universal helping force. But when finished, they go back to their individual doctrines and feelings of righteousness. Isn’t it obvious that there is something much bigger that guides all of us?
Faith and Belief with a small ‘f’ or ‘b’ have been the root cause for war and genocide throughout all recorded time. In spite of our computers, satellites, and bullet-trains, we are still only animals.
We rush off to do good works in Haiti and display our works grandly on newsreels and UTube. But we continue to fail our own citizens with filibusters in our congress, aligning ourselves in red camps and blue clusters, prolonging hunger, poor education, idle hands in search of work, all for the glory of some idyllic ism that is in itself a ‘FAITH’ based hinderance to achieving agreement.
Playing scrabble would be an impossibility if it were a ‘faith based’ game. Players themselves, would never agree upon which words we could or could not play. Players would rarely agree on the amount of time for a game. If we denied Methodists from playing the naughty words and yet permitted the Atheists that privilege, there would be an uneven playing field. What if Jews weren’t allowed to play words that were tref? What if we demanded to see your green card if you played any foreign based word? Pretty silly. And yet many people play their lives away being that silly, hiding behind their personal faith and beliefs, as their justification.
Scrabble helps me know all people and influences me to be a citizen of the world.