Death, Taxes, Religion, Prohibition & Bad Pennies.
A few thoughts on human ego, self-righteousness, propaganda and the will to exploit others.
If there’s one advantage to being both creative and mentally ill, it lies in the fact that one can never completely shut off the flow of information in the brain, quiet the mind enough to rest perfectly easy. It allows for random bits of memory to pop up from the bottom of the mental file cabinets and weigh on the mind until processed and rectified in sufficient order, often times manifesting in repeated dream imagery or common themes therein. In my case, family enters into the equation quite a lot, and not because I want it to.
In recent days, one random bit of memory comes from a dinner around the family table when I was a child wherein my fundie Uncle related a story about the history of christmas trees. At least that is the time-frame associated with the memory in question (it could be off considering how imperfect is memory in the depressed brain). In any event, he was relating an anecdote about a missionary from history who went to a place where they revered evergreen trees, because there was a cultural understanding that the trees bore the spirits of ancestors; to harm the trees was to harm the essence of those who came before. The missionary scoffed at this belief and decided he was going to end it by chopping down one tree to prove to the natives that nothing bad would happen if such a ‘sacrilege’ were to occur.
Of course, from his narrow perspective, meaning my Uncle, this violation of established precedent was perfectly acceptable because it can only be the case that the christian perspective is worthy of consideration and everything else is, at best, naive superstition. To back track for a moment, he fancies himself an intellectual to higher degree than most. He has a college degree, studies things academically, he watches birds with all the interest of an enthusiast, and aspires to the discovery of a prime number, or at least he used to. I haven’t spoken to him in years, so I can’t say if any of these attributes are current. What I do know is that he has tried on various occasions to fit the evidence to his religious assumptions rather than alter his assumptions as the evidence flows, what is considered the proper way in true scientific endeavor.
I won’t bore you with too many details, but he’s tried to argue for many things that run abundant in Evangelical circles where history and science are concerned. The more boring things have to do with claiming natural phenomenon like updraft and air currents as causes for the plagues of frogs and locusts described in Exodus and comets or supernova being the cause of the ‘star of Bethlehem’ which led the wise men to the manger, as per the Jesus myth.
Among the more bizarre claims made, he’s tried to argue that the Earth is actually inside a black hole, which supposedly explains why astronomers read the age of the universe in billions of years when the bible (erroneously) asserts that same age in mere millennia. Another ‘interesting’ one has to do with viruses like AIDS being some kind of genetic computer program which existed in the human genome before Noah’s (mythical) flood, which are now trying in desperation to reassert themselves into our genetic programming…weird, I know…
People see what they want to see, however, and no matter how far we advance as a species, it seems that some of the things one would expect would be made redundant over time never seem to fade from the human condition. Self-righteous moralizing is, unsurprisingly, one of those things which never seems to die out, no matter how much factual evidence science produces about the nature of reality. Evangelicals and many other religious people we would presently label as the ‘christian’ right are particularly guilty of it.
The mental disconnect is so great in many cases that it literally allows for a comfortable compartmentalizing of disparate sources of information in the more vociferous factions of that community. I could easily talk about how right-wingers are jumping on the ‘SSRIs are bad’ bandwagon, denying their legitimacy on the grounds of ‘anti-big pharma’ propaganda, despite abundant evidence that anti-depressants, as imperfect a solution as they are, can be backed up as useful by years of evidence, despite no clear information on an exact mechanism if action.
Other religious people like to engage in prohibition when it comes to things like food and drink. When I was a kid, excess sugar was the dietary culprit of the moment, much like cholesterol and fat had been the generation before. If I wanted a Pepsi, like a lot of kids did back then, but had already had a candy bar or a bowl of ice cream, I was denied on the basis of having consumed too much sugar. I was never quite sure what the exact connection was to a moral argument for the prohibition, but I have it as an impression in my memory banks that it had something to do with good religious people and their moral superiority.
And, of course, alcohol has always been the convenient victim of prohibitionists on moral grounds. Excess consumption therein is never a good idea, but there’s nothing inherently immoral about consuming alcohol in moderation. In fact, many cultures consider it a virtue due to long-standing assessments of its dietary benefits.
Recently, however, new studies have cast doubt on the net benefits of alcohol and prohibitionists are now jumping on that bandwagon again, asserting that to ingest something that isn’t good for you is immoral, this time on scientific grounds, as if they’ve ever had a chance of changing the discourse by distorting current science. I could write volumes on how badly the Ken Hamms and Ray Comforts of the fundie world use dishonest distortions of science to push a biased agenda, but I’ll save you that pain.
My point is that new studies have also cast doubt on long standing benefits associated with drinking coffee as well, but I doubt very much you’d be able to convince these same prohibitionists to give up their statutory morning triple soy venti moca-nilla cremo from their favorite local bean-ery. Preference plays a role in our sense of bias and I prefer to indulge my bias by enjoying a good cocktail or beer once in a while in moderation, benefit or no benefit.
Of course, one need not be abundantly religious to become a prohibitionist. There are many self-righteous diet-cultists out there who adhere ‘religiously’ to one kind of fad health fetish or another, whether we’re talking vegans, or paleo-hippies, or organic psychos, or what have you. I will say that one thing these people probably get right is that consuming an abundance of highly processed foods is bad for the diet in general, but what they fail to remember is that it’s nearly impossible for poorer people like myself to afford a purely non-processed diet. I would literally have to forgo eating every other day if I were to attempt it, the price of food being so absurdly high at present.
As an example, I paid something like seven dollars the other day for a package of ‘organic’ fresh figs at an upscale health food store. I like eating good things but the economics of the matter prohibit doing so in full. That said, I will concede that science is on their side in some sense because a recent article was published linking processed foods with a higher degree of cognitive decline. That said, other articles have been published recently linking napping with a higher risk of cognitive decline so pick your battles…go stupid from bad food or go stupid from too much sleep…if you can’t afford a more affluent life, that is.
Again, people see what they want to see and most of the time they take the barest surface interpretation as the legit story and forsake any other reality. I could easily mention how the song ‘Every Breath You Take’ by Sting has developed a positive ‘love song’ reputation over the years despite having a very sinister narrative, and about how ‘You Can Sleep While I Drive’ by Melissa Etheridge has become a gay wedding staple, or just a happy wedding staple in general, despite the sad conclusion to the story, where the lovers are parted because one can’t take the same journey as the other.
People see what they want to see, and in scientific terms, there is some emerging validity here. I’ve read articles recently which comment on research indicating that the eyes are seeing things fifteen seconds out of phase with reality. As far as I can comprehend, it has something to do with the brain being thrown so much visual information at once that the brain can only cope by averaging the visual input with known patterns in the brain to give the best ‘average’ of visual reality possible in a way that doesn’t overload the input pathways. So, the implication is that we are seeing what we want based on previous sets of visual data. This, of course, has nothing to say on the inherent cognitive biases we too often exhibit when it comes to moral equations and ethical behavior, in my opinion at least.
It’s one thing for a group of people to come together and, after reviewing the evidence, decide on a sensible course of action for the future. Gun safety, restricting the supply of deadly weapons in the general population, is a perfect example of how people can come together to realize a safer society for all concerned. Australia famously realized this cooperative ideal when it changed its gun laws years back in the wake of too many deadly shooting incidents. It’s quite another thing for a bad penny of a walking bobble head propagandist to come along every so often and stir up shit merely to manipulate the masses, obfuscating the truth to satisfy a spurious moral agenda.
The power and will to exploit are both too potent and the tendency for naive credulity too great among the masses to settle for a prima facie explanation of reality. In order to be of sound judgement, one has to investigate further and never take for granted surface explanations. People lie and in order to not be fooled by lies, one must necessarily know and understand any given lie for its own truth, and then they must do all they can to ensure others are not drawn in by the same lies. Only when we collectively understand and accept the FACTUAL truth of reality can we evolve as a people.
Until people like my fundie Uncle GET WOKE and realize the potential harm of their bias, of how unethical it is to spread bad information on the basis of a bad agenda, or a naive agenda at the very least, I will always see myself as the more rational individual, the more cognitively sound human despite my mental health problems. I may be seeing what I want to see in the matter, but at least I have the scientific method to back me up, the principles of sound rational inquiry to help me get to the bottom of any complex conundrum which drifts across my transom. And I will never trust the word of any person making a claim when it’s clear they aren’t thinking deeply enough about the issue at hand. I’ve turned up too many bad pennies in my 40+ years of life for it to be any other way.
Adieu Mes Amies.
Feel free to read more of my observations of matters of a religious nature by following this link.
