Very Superstitious

Americans love to think of themselves, nationally, as a people who saved the world in 1945 and who continue to possess the capability to repeat this action as needed.  We don’t stop to think how willing we’d be if it came to saving Brazil from the Zika virus.

Just imagine Zika produces a catastrophic epidemic that affects 80 million residents of that largely impoverished country.  How willing do you think America — or any country, for that matter — would be to allow uninfected Brazilians to enter the country as refugees?  It’s hard enough when people are fleeing political repression or economic deprivation; how much harder would it be if it seemed to be something that had the potential for ruining the health of tens of millions of us?

How would we respond to any country that had a health catastrophe?  Like Christians?

Hah!

Brooks claims Christians are feeling like mainstream culture is against them.  That mainstream culture is against Scripture and that they will be persecuted for adhering to said Scripture.

In the first place, it’s against Old Testament bullshit, not New — which is what should be the concern of Christians.  Leave the Old Testament to the Jews, who don’t seem so upset about having mainstream culture running against them…maybe because when Christianity defined mainstream culture in America, Jews weren’t invited to be a part of it.

How’s it feel, Christians?

Here’s a link to Brooks’ column:  The Next Culture War

What a load of bullshit, huh? Caliphates in the 21st Century. Well, they are a negation of nationalism; a denial of the direction of world politics for the last 1,000 years or so. What blows me away is the idea that those people in ISIS really believe that some Deity they have never seen nor heard — but which happens to be the RIGHT Deity, oh lucky they, born in just the right time and place to have access to the truth! — is behind their new/old way of governing themselves.

Although religion is not responsible for the tragedies of human nature, it sure doesn’t make things better.

Sigmund Freud is, of course, a familiar name in North American households.  Usually his name is adjectified in accusatory phrases, such as, “That was a Freudian slip!”  But he is less well known as a philosopher, which he very clearly was. 

Perhaps those who are impressed by his work in psychology are afraid of his equally impressive work in comparative religion.  Which wouldn’t surprise me.

Freud’s historical explanation of religion is set out in his Totem and Taboo. There he imagines a father of a primal horde, whose sons envy his access to the tribe’s women, and so overwhelm and kill him. Even after their rebellion, the sons cannot fulfil their desire to emulate their father, due to competition between them. Religion arose out of the frustration and guilt that they felt.

Freud’s psychological explanation of religion builds on the ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach. Feuerbach developed the idea that God is projection of the unconscious mind; Freud added to this a psychological foundation. For Freud, as for Feuerbach, religion is wish-fulfilment. Freud adds the explanation that the adoption of religion is a reversion to childish patterns of thought in response to feelings of helplessness and guilt. We feel a need for security and forgiveness, and so invent a source of security and forgiveness: God. Religion is thus seen as a childish delusion, and atheism as a grown-up realism.

Why is this so hard to take for so many people?  There is no god, there is no afterlife.  My beloved brother is gone; I will never see him again.  Yet he is still so alive with me every day.  I say something and hear his phrase; I hear a song we used to whistle together; I look at the car my wife and I bought on his recommendation.  I don’t have to wait until heaven to see him.  He will only be gone when people stop remembering him.  And so it is with us all.

Imagine you’re some unfortunate chap scraping out a living as a shoemaker in some remote Sorbian village in the center of Europe. You’ve been hearing about mass deaths in far-off Vienna, and your priest has been darkly hinting of a coming End of Days. Doctors have their leeches ready, ever prepared to use the latest alchemy to treat illness. Someone says it’s the Jews poisoning wells; others say it’s the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; you say your prayers and hope for God’s protection.

As it happens, the plague comes to your house and kills your entire family: six children and your wife. You alone are left alive, to grieve and mourn and ask of God, Why me? No answer comes back from the sky. No answer comes from within you; there are hundreds of voices in your head and you can’t decipher any of them. Slowly, one thought rises above the others and sticks in your throat like a rose-twig: God did this to you and others like you because you are a sinner. You might not know what sins condemned you in God’s eyes, but that’s not for you to know. Meanwhile, your neighbor, also a sole survivor of his family, has come to a different conclusion: he believes that he was specially chosen by God to re-establish a lawful, God-fearing community.

You both go to the same church, where, a year later, a new priest is invested. He warns of a new scheme by the Jews to steal the first-born child of every Christian household so they can perform their obscene blood-thirsty rituals on babies. Everyone in your Sorbian valley believes that Jews are responsible for the plague, for didn’t the plague pass over the Jewish quarter? Surely! No Jews died, is what you hear from every tongue. How can you let them live in your midst, these killers of Christ? So you and others go out one fine April day, determined to exterminate the Jews who, so you’ve been told, are all set to poison your crops. After setting fire to a Jewish settlement (which curiously is rather empty of people, fancy that!) and crucifying resisters, you settle down again in your Sorbian village, content that you’re doing the will of God at last. You’re so hoping not to sin again, because the consequences last time were so devastating.

Nearly 700 years later, imagine your brother has been diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. A man who is larger than life, who loves his family with an all-encompassing dedication, is struck down within months to life in a wheelchair. There is no etiology, there is no cure. There is no God to ease the pain, no God to answer questions, no God to blame nor reward you. Someone tells you how God works in ways we can’t understand his wonders to perform, and you hit this someone in the face with a frying pan.

No, I do not want eternal life with a God that would kill my family by plague; I do not want eternal life with a God that would visit such a horrific illness on the best of men; I cannot tolerate anyone speaking of this God as if it actually existed. To do so is to belittle our suffering here on Earth, and I want everyone to know it is real, it is painful, and it is indelible.

God loves Ebola.  God loves all viruses.  He made them.  Given that there are billions upon billions more viruses than humans, is it not conceivable that your god — yes, your god — created viruses in his own image?  In which case, Leo Tolstoy was indeed right: the kingdom of god is within you!

God is on our side. No, God loves the other guys. No, us. No, them. No, us. No, them. Okay, pal, prove it. No, you.

Now we know whose side he’s on.