© 2008, UrbisMedia
I have no issue with the man or woman sitting beside me in a café or on a bus mumbling prayers to themselves because their back hurts, a loved one is ill, or even if they think I am some demon or devil. I don’t care if they are supplicating God, Yahweh, Allah, Shiva, or Ron L. Hubbard in Latin, Hebrew, Arabic or jibberish “tongues.” It doesn’t matter if they are fingering rosaries, poisonous snakes or prayer wheels, wearing beanies or phylacteries, goofy underwear or nothing at all. I don’t give a rat’s ass if they think shellfish is unsacred, having sex on certain days is haram, practicing birth control is sinful, or that they think they are reincarnated or “thetans.” It is done billions of times each day.
As long as they keep it to themselves. Notice that I didn’t write as long as they keep it to their kind. Because that would be making the jump from individual belief to collective religion, and in my view that’s when the trouble begins.
Mind you, I think that believing in the stuff that people believe in is real WMD—willing mass delusion. I personally believe, and this is a more empirically provable point than most any religious belief, that most people just ingest their beliefs by growing up in credulous societies. Mothers are saying “God bless you” at your first sneeze, and then scaring the poop out of you by telling you about devils and demons—boogey men. Every society has them. Belief in what cannot be evidenced or proved is everywhere.
So, from the beginning we go into the same mode we go into when we read fiction or watch a movie—willing suspension of disbelief—there is no reason to believe any of it because there is no reason in it. Belief is a social construct passed on from generation to generation by habit, custom, environment, by hope and fear, and by threat, by the sword at one’s neck.
It might well be that, even if you excised these beliefs from societies, that people would come to some sorts of beliefs anyway, conjuring up some spirits or elves, or angels and devils, or whatever, to explain to themselves what their brains are yet incapable of find cause for. After all, Nature can be pretty amazing and mysterious; birds fly, rain falls, things grow up out of the ground, volcanoes erupt, so why not believe that there are spirits and demons and anything one might imagine behind it all.
That is where religion latches onto belief. It provides quick and easy answers. What is so amazing is that, for all the wonder and complexity of Nature, that religion comes up with such crappy nonsense, such lack of imagination, such silliness and foolishness, as answers. And what is more amazing is that people buy it. They swallow the simple-minded narratives that religion comes up with easier than they would anything they might accept in the secular dimensions of their lives. Why bother with trying to figure out gravity, the circulation of the blood, the orbits of the planets, evolution, DNA, and all that. God made it that way; that’s all you have to know.
What religion quickly figured out is what a good business religion is. Nothing to invent (other than the narrative); nothing to produce (other than the climate of fear), no costs of distribution (other than a pulpit and a few prophets, and now with television . . .). Nature does all the work, with its mysterious cycles, seasons, birth and death—all you have to do is invent a director and a story and willing suspension of disbelief will do the rest. What a business!
Well, there’s more to it than that, of course. There just might be some people who want to spoil your business—disbelievers, heretics, blasphemers and those pesky scientists. So part of your business need to get rid of these pesky folk. Inquisitions, purges, pogroms, witch hunts work especially well, particularly if you promise your assassins a free pass to paradise for doing your dirty work for you.
And then there is the competition, offering a different version of the product of belief—all these different religions, with different names for their gods. They can cost you money and power. Crusades promise the same paradise, but any war will do. It is amazing just how easy it is to start wars over religion. In fact, most wars are over religious differences, or religion figures into it in some way or another. Killing the other guy in the name of your god is a time-honored tradition in the history of religious belief. The amazing thing is that most gods are presented as gods of peace and even that “all men are brothers under the same god.” The key word here must be “brothers.”
Theological hegemony is why most religions seek out alliances with, or seek to supplant, secular political power. It is the time-honored manner in which religions become, officially, or unofficially, the state religion and thereby can begin official, or unofficial, persecution, or expunging of competitive religions. It also helps if religions can insinuate themselves into the military dimension of society. Most recently in the United States this has been most evident in the success Christian “chaplains” have been able to intimidate non-Christian cadets at the Air Force Academy. All but needless to say, is that military events and ceremonies are dominated by Christian, especially Protestant denomination prayers and liturgies and have built a reflexive association with “patriotic” expression and behavior. This process would be similar in, say, Muslim societies.
Thus, religions become an almost automatic influence upon societies, often retarding social and intellectual progress with belief in scriptural notions that are accepted uncritically. But there are even more subtle influences that make for a credulous society. Fantasy has a strong association with religious belief. It is required for the credulous to accept supernatural beings involving miracles and preternatural powers, none of which need to be proven to be believed. Some fantasies are necessary to establish narratives that give religion a pseudo-historical character and provide its dramatic (conflictive) dimension. This has been evident in the recent rise of entertainment fantasy in contemporary society. Some religions have become concerned with the popularity of fantasies such as the Harry Potter stories, which have been interpreted as involving witchcraft, and with “alternate realities” and alternate worlds fantasies such asThe Chronicles of Narnia and Lord of the Rings narratives, and even the Star Wars futuristic fantasies, that involve supernatural powers and events that are not related to the Biblical narrative. The great popularity of computer “games” with fantastic creatures and their doings has become a concern not only for religious authorities, but secular (behaviorists, psychologists and psychiatrists) authorities as well when (especially young) people spend large amounts of time “participating” in realms of un-reality.
Whether the rise in popularity of such fantastic stories signals a corresponding rise in belief beyond sense and reason in the current age remains to be seen. Long periods of human existence have involved belief in the unknown and unknowable. For long periods diseases and sickness were explained by demons and possession, and persons were regarded as witches and in league with forces of darkness and subjected to torture and execution. Humans have a great “creative” capacity to substitute fantasy where there is a vacuum of knowledge or a need for certainty. Large numbers of Americans believe in visitations to earth by extra-terrestrial beings, a large subset of these in their own “close encounters” and abductions. Much of these universally un-proven beliefs appears to rely upon a need to believe, a need for explanation, that comes from great dissatisfaction with existential personal life or with paranoia about political events and circumstances.
We live in modern times, but it is astounding how much fantasy there is in our lives. Fantasy and belief in that which is beyond the knowable are part of being human, but they are not part of the rational capabilities of being human. Many of us had imaginary “friends” as children, and were afraid of the dark. Some grow up to have multiple personalities and strange compulsions and are paranoid. Some “grow up” to believe in gods, angels, devils and heaven and hell. Still others see in belief a good business opportunity, a chance to wear silly hats and clothing, and means to exercise control over the lives of others. I see them as a dangerous enemy of reason and a threat to human development.
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© 2008, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 12.10.2008