God gets better signal in the wilderness.

One thing that struck me about the video we watched for Wednesday was the Boboshanti's idea that physical isolation enhanced their abilities to perform those tasks which in their mind are required by God (or Jah, to use their term).

This is a tendency which has cropped up in religions around the world centuries, if not millennia. Hermits take to the wilds, taking nothing with them, in the belief that physical proximity to their fellow man somehow distances one from God, as though humans emit some kind of signal which interferes with God's messages.

The Christian hermits are perhaps the best known, but the same instinct can be found in Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, etc.  And it goes even further than that.  When one actually examines the religious texts in question we find that the greatest prophets received their most important revelations while they where in the wilds, removed from society.  Jesus walked the desert, Buddha became a beggar, the great prophets of the Jewish tradition were vagabonds.

I really wonder where this disdain for our own society comes from, this conviction that our day to day life is somehow ungodly unless an attempt is made to distance ones self from its trappings.