Who Are You?

Are you the person you always wanted to be, or are you the person that someone else always wanted you to be? And is it even possible for us to ever really tell the difference?

If you ever saw the movie, Dead Poet's Society, you know how a child can be caught between being who they want to be when they grow up, and being who their parents want them to be. In that movie, Niel Perry is caught in this dilemma, when he discovers his true passion is to be an actor. His heavy handed authoritarian father, however, is adamant that his son become a doctor instead. In a sense, Niel Perry represents the Native Americans, and Neil's father represents the Native American's "White Father."

In many ways, this dilemma also illustrates on a spiritual level the difference between the "believer" and the atheist,  for it is the difference between the person who thinks it is a virtue to grow up to be who someone else wanted them to be - like growing up to please your parents, for example, by becoming a doctor or even "a good Christian" - and growing up to be the person that you wanted to be, Christian or not.

 Most parents think it is their sole vocation in life to ensure that their child cannot tell the difference between the two, working day and night to eradicate the child's will to be whomever they may wish, and replacing it instead with their own desires for who they want that child to be, and more importantly, how that child should think, and what that child should necessarily believe.

Religion was created, in part, to facilitate this processes by helping to convince the child that the voice of "guilt" they hear in their head for not striving to become the person their parent wants them to be, is not simply the echo of their parents (which the child has been conditioned to internally repeat to them self in their own voice), but the voice of God himself, who threatens with divine eternal punishment anyone who fails to take heed.

How many people go to church every Sunday, for example, simply because their parents had conditioned them to think doing so was necessary to have peace, meaning, or happiness, let alone avoid hell and enter heaven? Or who even do it out of a sense of nostalgia?

Hence, it is not simply that we should grow up to be the person our parents want us to be, but who God - the ultimate eternal, all powerful, all knowing parent - wants us to be, as defined by His "holy" Church.

All of this is designed to make the child conform to the will of their parents, and usually because the parent uses the fact that since they (the parents) provide the room and board, the child must therefore conform to the kind of person the the parents want them to be, not to whomever the child wishes to be. And this is certainly not up for debate, as everyone knows, because families are not democracies, and what the child wants is always subordinate to the wishes of the father and mother - who of course always "know best."

Cultures, nations, and societies all work in the very same way, of course,  teaching us always how to think and behave, and most of all what to "believe." And it is from this maze of molding hands that anyone who wishes to sculpt the clay of their own identity into something truly original, must first learn to escape. Only then, is a person free to answer the question of "who are you?" anyway they wish.

But those who do are always feared, and therefore often crucified.