Belief and Fantasy

The thing that puzzles most Free-Thinkers, like myself, is the strange habit many people have of accepting the most impossible and bizarre ideas, based on evidence that is meager at best or idiotic at worst.  In fact, there seems to be, for most believers, an inverse relationship between Truth and Evidence.  For many people the lack of evidence becomes the strongest argument for the Impossible.  For example, millions of people believe in the existence of Extra-Terrestrials here on earth, and the absolute lack of credible evidence for this seems to have become the strongest evidence for its truth.  They believe that mysterious Men-in-Black visit people who have evidence of alien spacecraft, steal the evidence, and then disappear.  Certainly, this idea is extremely convenient for the believers.

I imagine that some Atheists believe that something similar happened in the Dark Ages.  Every time a non-believer found evidence for the purely human nature of Jesus Christ, a group of black-robed Jesuits would arrive, steal the evidence, and disappear in a puff of sanctified smoke.  Certainly a lot of evidence for the Arian view has been suppressed over the centuries, but we don't have to concoct any mysterious Jesuits to explain this.  Most of the evidence for Christ's non-divinity was simply allowed to disappear, to fall out of history.  And what could not be ignored was easily distorted, misinterpreted, and disguised.  For example, references to Jesus' brothers and sisters had to be "re-interpreted" once the Catholic Church decided that Mary was born and died a virgin. 

Today the Catholic Church seems to take the gullibility of the faithful as a given.  Bishop Law can proclaim that Father X, Father Y, and Father Z are not child molesters, no matter how many children claim otherwise.  And, according to court papers, Fathers X, Y, and Z have been relocated to where they no longer have access to children to molest.  And since the Bishop (or one of his minions) makes this claim, the faithful are obliged by Faith to believe him.  Non-Catholics are often surprised by the willingness of the faithful to accept these claims, without any proof whatsoever.  Nor do the faithful seem to be bothered at all by the fact that they have, for years, taken Holy Communion from the hands of a child-molester and sexual predator.

Good Cop, Bad Cop

The U.S. Government continues its "good cop, bad cop" game, with the Republicans and the Democrats acting in one role or the other, depending on whether you are supporting a right-wing agenda or a left-wing agenda.  The parties shake down their members for cash on a perpetual basis. The only ones who benefit from this game are the big media outlets who collect the advertising revenue.

Exorcism and Child Molesters and Priests, Oh MY!

Another claim, that most people accept, is the idea that child molesters can be "cured" though psychoanalysis or psychotherapy.  There is, of course, no clear-cut evidence for this strange claim.  But since a "doctor" representing the Psychotherapy Establishment makes this claim, all Liberals must accept this idea as gospel.  The idea that "bad" ideas and behaviors can be banished from child molesters is not very different from the idea that a priest can drive a demon out of the body of someone who is "possessed."  

The idea of demonic possession had fallen onto hard times in the 20th century, until it was revived by Hollywood.  The film The Exorcist (1973) showed on the big screen the power of demons.  A little girl levitates a bed into the air, screams insults (though not nearly as bad as some the stuff I have heard coming from my Irish grandmother), makes her head spin around, and pukes up buckets of pea soup—much to the chagrin of her wealthy mother.

You have to wonder, of course, how a priest could intimidate a demon into abandoning a demonically-possessed body.  Throwing Holy Water on the girl and chanting in Latin don't seem to have much effect, at least not in the film.  It must seem strange then to non-Catholics that the priest could have such power over a demon to be able to drive him out of her body.  To Catholics, however, the answer is clear.  Anyone who has talked to a priest for more than five minutes can readily understand why the demon would abandon the fight and exit the room, post haste, as soon as the priest comes through the door.  I myself have seen a particularly boring priest clear a room full of guests in five minutes flat.

Mikhail Bakunin

From the anarchist Michael Bakunin (1814-76): 

"Then, remembering that he was not only a God of vengeance and wrath, but also a God of love, after having tormented the existence of a few milliards of poor human beings and condemned them to an eternal hell, he took pity on the rest, and, to save them and reconcile his eternal and divine love with his eternal and divine anger, always greedy for victims and blood, he sent into the world, as an expiatory victim, his only son, that he might be killed by men" (God and the State (1882). 

"All religions are cruel, all founded on blood; for all rest principally on the idea of sacrifice–that is, on the perpetual immolation of humanity to the insatiable vengeance of divinity" (ibid., pp. 25-26).

The Hoax of Mormonism

The gullibility of human beings must be genetically programmed into the human species.  Nothing else can explain the widespread acceptance of bizarre ideas.  In fact, it seems as if the more bizarre a belief system is, the more rapidly it spreads and the more firmly it is held and defended by the True Believer.  The remarkable growth of the Mormon church is proof enough that, the more bizarre and ridiculous a religion is, the more likely it is to spread like wildfire.  Plenty of evidence exists to show that Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, was essentially a con man, a cheat and a liar.  In his youth, Smith and his father ran a swindle called "dowsing for treasure."  In this con, Smith would convince a rich farmer that buried treasure was on his land, and that for a small fee he would discover it through dowsing (much like dowsing for water).  Of course no treasure was ever found.

This con game does bear a resemblance to Smith's most famous con.  He convinced a group of Mormons that he possessed the gold plates on which the angel Moroni (aptly named) inscribed the text of The Book of Mormon.  As "proof" of this, Smith led his followers, one by one, into a darkened room where they were allowed to feel the plates through a burlap bag.  These followers later signed an affidavit testifying to the existence of these gold plates, an affidavit which is reproduced in the many various editions of The Book of Mormon.  In truth, no one ever actually saw these famous gold plates--they could have been hubcaps off a 1951 Buick for all Smith's followers could tell by feeling them.  

Smith also claimed that The Book of Mormon could only be read and interpreted by his spiritual vision from the strange characters inscribed on the plates, so there was never any reason for anyone else to look at them.  Later, as more and more people asked to see the plates, they mysteriously "disappeared" or were taken back to heaven by Moroni.

At about the same time, Smith claimed to be able to read Egyptian hieroglyphs; and on one occasion he provided a translation of hieroglyphs from an Egyptian sarcophagus.  The message on the coffin, according to Smith, was a religious text similar to the writings found in The Book of Mormon.  Several years later, when archaeologists finally learned how to read hieroglyphs, Smith dropped his claim to be able to read these symbols.  The message on the coffin, which he earlier "translated" into Mormon-ese, turned out to be pretty much the standard prayer to Osirius usually found on ancient Egyptian coffins.

Despite the wealth of evidence which proves that Joseph Smith was basically a pious fraud, millions of Mormons will defend their faith as if it weren't the ridiculous hoax that it obviously is.  Even serious Mormon "scholars" recognize the fact that Smith was basically a liar who plagiarized most of the ideas in The Book of Mormon, yet they pretend that this fact has no effect on their own belief.  This is proof that humans are able to hold, at the same time, two completely contradictory beliefs.  There is a remarkable ability to compartmentalize in the human psyche, so that these ideas don't come into conflict.

“I’m not religious. I’m spiritual”

I hear a lot of people use the expression:

“I’m not religious. I’m spiritual”

To me, this is like saying, “I’m not a liar. I’m just factually-challenged.”

It brings to mind the old tv commercials where an actor from a popular medical program would appear in a commercial for a new drug, and he would say, “I’m not a doctor. I just play one on tv.”

I wish people could just admit that they enjoy the company of like-minded people, whether that is in a church or someplace else doesn’t really matter. Humans are social animals and they have always been.

Klingons with Bathtubs

Recent events have led many people to wonder where they can go to find guidance for living a fulfilling and meaningful life.  However, conventional religion has proven itself to be morally bankrupt.  The Pedophile Scandal continues to rock the Catholic Church, while the destruction of the World Trade Center has revealed Islam as a pious veneer laid over a foundation of hatred and violence.  Although the news media try to play down the scandals of "The Religious" by attributing the evil to individual priests and holy men, it is becoming more and more obvious that religious institutions attract these sorts of people: the liars, the thieves, the power-hungry, the violent, the devious and the sexually deviant.  But stories of religious abuses, or abuse by the religious, rarely find their way into the national news.

Every effort is made by news organizations to play down these stories.  The focus of the media is typically on efforts to "reform" or "renew" or "correct" the problems that led to the particular scandal.  During the Catholic Pedophile Scandal, the national media spent very little time talking about the abuses, focusing instead on the efforts to "reform" the church.  The evening news spent a great deal of time covering the Bishops as they met in Dallas to discuss ways to "solve" (read: defuse) the problem, but the victims of abuse remained mostly faceless.  The national news media were determined to focus attention on the church's clumsy efforts at reform.  Only a group created by lay Catholics was ever shown on television criticizing the reforms.

The Catholic bishops have a real problem, trying to start a reform.  In spite of the fact that Christianity identifies itself as a belief based on the spiritual renew of the believer, the Catholic Church approaches reform the same way a Klingon approaches a bathtub.  They don’t like it.  They live in a culture where the believers patiently submit to all sorts of abuse, and have for centuries.  The idea that a priest might be vile, disgusting child molester is, for most Catholics, just too difficult an idea to wrap their minds around.  The idea that the priest, whose fingers are sanctified so that only he (until recently) could touch the Host, that he would use these same sanctified fingers to molest a child—the idea is just too hard to comprehend for most believers.