The evils of ignorance and escapism…are of Biblical proportion.
The sad truth is, unconscious people choose to commit horrific deeds — lynchings, torture, burnings-at-the-stake, sexual abuse, war, and the abandonment of children — because they honestly believe them to be the lesser of the available evils.
Fear and escapism cause many people to recoil from the “harsh truths”, like death, and seek answers that make more sense to them. Sadly, in their desperation they will pay for those answers, and the people selling them (for money or obedience or whatever their price) have never been ignorant of their market. The weakness of character that makes people unwilling to keep their eyes open and look at the world for what it really is — to recognize things like the natural correctness of death, even premature or difficult death, as part of a functioning system — is only partly to blame. The other half of the blame lies with the rest of us, for not having real answers for these people’s questions; for letting the mercenary zealots and Torquemadas of the world be the ones speaking the loudest.
One of the jobs of philosophy should be to combat religious superstition. It’s what we’re trained in, after all. Not to give answers, but to frame questions in such a way that shows the truth of things — the truth that, often, there aren’t answers, but that this doesn’t reduce the moral culpability of hurting others.
No, we probably couldn’t turn the world around. But at least we’d be a rational opposing voice. It’s just too easy in this world for upset people with muddled minds to wander into the lair of beasts that will encourage them towards prejudice, hatred, and violence, and then put them to work spreading the same disease to others.
I think I’m equally offended by these practices as a philosopher and a storyteller, because what’s really being wielded as the weapon by these evildoers here is storytelling — twisted, black-hearted storytelling that strives through faulty logic and all sorts of dank emotional appeal to convince people that the easy way out is really the right one, and moreover it isn’t the “easy way” after all, if they have to pay for it, right? (Notice that the more cultish the religious practice, the higher the cost in money or fealty…making someone pay for something is a great way to keep them from questioning whether it really has any value.)
People who are hurt and scared want to hear that there’s a bad guy behind it. And they want a good guy, too, who agrees with them; who might demand money or obedience, but won’t demand that they give up their hatred and fear. They want to hear that their darkest instinct — to force sex on the teenager, ostracize the outsider, kill the unsubmissive wife, deny rights to everyone too different and scary, or kick the unwelcome orphan out onto the streets – they want to hear that that’s really justifiable, and they’re willing to believe, if it’s presented correctly, that those things are right because they have the stamp of approval from some higher source that, by nature, can never be questioned or argued with by all those disapproving faces in the crowd.
And for some reason, though it’s illegal to do a million things less harmful, it’s still legal to set up a church and earn your living spinning stories that encourage all these behaviors. Even in the U.S., there’s no recourse unless the soapboxer can be found to actually have participated in a crime; nor is there any method whatsoever for asking these snake-artists to prove their claims, to defend what they’re teaching to countless innocent youth and vulnerable adults. I could don some robes right now and start telling people all about how this big invisible being is watching them from outer space and said that it’s totally okay to be racist, to force one’s will onto others, to lie, cheat and steal as long as it’s only to people who aren’t in our church…and everyone would let me do it. Hell, they probably wouldn’t even notice; it’s not like such a church would be even a little unique.
Oh no, wait, yes it would — It would have a female preacher.
-PD
5 comments
Luv your blog.
You obviously have some examples in mind of immoral conduct being endorsed by a religious body, but don’t you think passing your judgement of an exception onto religion as whole to be unfair?
It’s still an open question as far as I’m concerned, but my efforts to find something really positive about religion that can’t be had without it are producing pretty dismal results. I certainly wouldn’t turn down help!
Note that this post is specifically concerned with religious superstition, which is present in some forms in every religion that I know of, but not in every *practitioner* of said religions. I think one of the key problems with religions as a whole is that they universally engender or encourage superstition, some more deliberately than others, and the superstition is an unmitigated evil — it lets people ignore facts and morals and justify the worst things about themselves, and it spreads like ebola at an orgy. (ew.)
Almost everyone who defends religion to me (and oh, they are Legion) does so on the basis of the fact that the superstition isn’t a necessary part of it, and that some religions (though not many) will let their practitioners get away with not being superstitious. I agree that that’s true, but what’s better about being not-superstitious-and-religious versus just not being superstitious? The only real benefits I’ve found are social gains, and those wouldn’t be there if religion weren’t so prominent already.
Thanks for your thoughts! -PD
The Soviet Union called religion the opium of the people, that it was just something that made them feel good. Naturally, anyone who thought they would answer in the next life for what they did here could not be controlled, and did not have a place in the grand communist world order. Many, many people died because they believed in God. Those people obviously thought there was something more in what they had than just good feelings.
I am not really sure what you mean by superstition. I understand superstition to be a useless belief, like in a good luck charm. Good luck charms do not produce good luck. But people do change when they are touched by something “holy”. I would not call their experience superstitious. I put “holy” in quotation marks because people have a vague idea of what that term actually means. There are holy things out there, things that people have traded their lives for. No one will trade their life for a superstition.
Hmm, you draw a distinction that’s difficult to argue because it seems arbitrary. It sounds like you’re saying that all superstitions which have positive benefits are holy, and all sacred things with negative effects are superstitious. What is something that’s “always holy”? And is a “good luck charm” merely superstition if it’s a nun’s crucifix that she claims saved her life once?
And what about god? Surely people arguing about superstition and holiness would say the concept of “god” has to be one of the holy ones, but why? Some people gain something positive from believing it, and others get driven nastily insane and hurt people.
I use “superstition” to refer simply to a dogmatic belief with no possibility of proof or disproof. God– “the guy in the sky”–is a solid example. As a concept, it can’t be proved, it can’t be disproved; and Occam’s razor says it’s unnecessary: there’s absolutely no good reason to believe it exists other than a desire to believe in it because it addresses some psychological need of the believer. That the net effect of having the psychological need met is positive or negative doesn’t change the fact that the belief is superstitious.
You make a good point about the Soviets, except they weren’t outlawing superstition; they were just demanding that *their* superstition — the unquestioning faith in Soviet socialism — be the only recognized one. This is hardly a new trick; it’s just that in their case, they did it by condemning “religion” and defining their superstitious dogma as something else. Scientology, as an example, does the same thing, with even more disgusting results IMO.
Hey, thanks for taking the time to have this discussion with me! It’s fun and I like being challenged, and you make good arguments. -PD
I see superstiton as something negative, false. A good luck charm is something false, even if someone is convince that garlic will keep vampires away. Nothing would be holy unless there was a God. So I would have to prove that there is a God.
For experimental proof of God, I offer the following: Every year in Jerusalem the Holy Fire descends at the Lord’s tomb (the central holy place of the Christian East) before a crowd. It is a fire that does not burn for the first couple of minutes after it appears. It is not natural, but supernatural. For photos, see http://www.holyfire.org. This is a good example because it is public, and the ritual is under the auspices of the Muslims who own the temple, and they do not benefit from a Christian miracle like this. The miracle is not in control of those who could benefit from it, and there are documented examples of Muslim attempts to discredit it. Historical documentation (archeological argument) shows that this miracle has appeared annually since the 4th century. We have nifty technology now to fake all sorts of things, but a thousand years ago they did not. Anyone can fly over there and wash themselves in the fire and they will not be burnt.
I do not think God is a concept. That would mean He would have been invented. The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions describes people as having brain protein which gives them an instinctive need for God, this is why every primitive and developed nation that ever was had an idea of God. I would love to know which protein that is. I find it more than coincidental that everyone came up with such an abstract notion independently, despite that our surroundings and experience do not clearly imply God—except for the order, beauty and intelligence of surrounding creation. We know that life can not exist without life. Nothing dead springs to life. Do you not think that there is a strong probability that life is created?
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