Many of us don’t consciously choose some of the most important aspects of our lives. This includes the choice of religion. Many people claim that we don’t really choose the religion we end up following. After all, many of us end up adopting the religion of our parents. Is there a problem with this approach? There often is.
Those of us who fail to constantly raise such important questions on our own are falling prey to what Hannah Arendt termed “the banality of evil.”
Of Adolf Eichmann, Arendt wrote that he “never realized what he was doing . . . He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. Arendt claimed that “such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together . . .”
Therefore, it is not saintly, or even OK, to thoughtlessly take important aspects of one’s self as givens. It is not OK even if most of us do it most of the time. Being thoughtless and unquestioning is, more than anything else, dangerous.
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