A Cult Classic

I still remember from so many years ago the warning my mom gave me against toying with the spiritual world.  I was leaving to attend my very first slumber party.  I must have been about 9 years old and my mom was nervous about giving up supervision of me overnight.  "And no creepy psycho chanting and no trances and no ouija board.  You don't mess with that stuff."  I thought my mom was being ridiculous, a ouija board was just a piece of cardboard and a plastic triangle after all, but when my friends pulled one out I became fearful, of the things unknown, maybe spiritual forces with undetermined amounts of power.  I didn't participate.

Years of warfare have resulted from spiritual and cult beliefs.  One religion or another has at some point oppressed the people of an apposing belief.  Followers of one religion or another have devoted their whole lives to a being or idea that they have never seen.  Though religion can give meaning to life, it seems to do so in a completely illogical and irrational way, which Salman Rushdie thinks can lead to mental instability. In The Harmony of the Spheres, without blaming any specific religion or cult Rushdie points his finger at a possible reason for madness, uncontrolled belief. 

"You never heard such a din as the ruckus in Eliot's head.  The songs of Swedenborg's angels, the hymns, the mantras, the Tibetan overtone changes. What human mind could have defended itself against such a Babel, in which Theosophists argued with Confucians, Christian Scientists with Rosicrucians?"

Rushdie uses this confusion of religions to drive his main character Eliot, mad.  What is a person to believe Rushdie asks, when he is given so many choices, all of which people have died for.  It is a heavy decision, deciding what to base your entire thought process on. That in itself, deciding how to decided can muck up the rational mind.

It is also the danger of religion in general that Rushdie warns us of. To give up control of our lives to a being we have never met. To let the irrational and unsure dictated our actions and tell us how to live is madness in itself. In one way or another it makes a believer a fanatic, leading him to do crazy things.