Perhaps it's because lately I've been inundated with more religious-themed books and media, or perhaps I just can't sleep because my dinner was 7000 calories of delicious carbs, but here we are.
I consider myself a reasonable person. Why? I remain aware of how limited reason can be. I don't “believe” I'm a reasonable person. I think I'm a reasonable person. For me, there's a huge gap between thinking and believing. I struggle to conceive of things I believe in. I have an endless array of ideas which I either can or can't reason my way towards some kind of relative conclusion.
When I'm angry, down, or incredibly confused, I turn to reason. I don't pray the pain away. I don't deny what I feel or the words I wish to use to express it. I don't try to act like things are okay. I don't lust for someone to make excuses for me nor whisper in my ear that everything will be okay. Reason, for me, is nothing if not a tool first. I find meaning in attempting to be reasonable as I allow my thoughts to act through my fingers in searching for what I have to say.
I understand why people don't want to be reasonable. Reason is, at least theoretically, dispassionate. A story told boringly or series of facts aligned don't necessitate your opinion. A reason might be cold, flat, and weighing you down, while an excuse comes out hot and ready to protect you or float into as many ears as will take it. Reason gives us a path to often just as cold and heavy conclusions as the facts required to get us there.
I watched a short documentary from Braver Angels using marriage counseling sessions between democrats and republicans. I listened to Chris Hedges' book American Fascists. I watched What's the Matter with Kansas? In some ways, I don't know how to refrain from rehashing what I feel exists in one tenth of my writing about religious thinking, conservatives, or the inevitable consequences of forgoing your agency in service to things with less evidence than farts in the wind. There's still something I'm missing.
I think I understand religious belief. I think I understand it as a series of forces, not some ardently defined moment or act of “belief.” I see it as a kind of parallel mind where the only thing that matters is remaining alive as a character in some kind of story. I take it for granted that people are incredibly psychologically fragile. The fine line of remote sanity, in sheer practical terms, bolstered by religious myth or interpersonal cult feels almost reflexively mandatory. I think people who bemoan the amount of alleged believers often ignore the series of myths you're required to adopt even as an otherwise “reasonable person” just to function.
As such, I've come to understand the strategy of poking fun, getting angry, or otherwise attempting to belittle someone's faith as futile. It doesn't mean it can't be fun or justified, but it does mean if I'm to maintain that I want to change culture, my pitch is going to have to be more comprehensive. I'm positive I've stated this years ago, and it's manifested as a generalized disinterest in engaging with anyone remotely religious about anything religious more than any kind of advocacy specifically.
What's important to understand about my change in position is that it didn't come from anymore respect for religion or any one religious person. In fact, I still hate staunch ideologues and think religion is the best tool they use to destroy most of what I care about, including the practice and teaching of reason. Reason allowed me to take in more information and adopt a broader view. I could further contextualize not just my antagonizers, but myself and how I feel about them. No religious person was persuasive. No religious argument just shook my feeble atheistic mind. I just kept working to understand the problem broader.
A lot of my anger for religious people is for a perceived intellectual laziness and dishonesty. Fear I can at least basically respect insofar as it's a complicated emotion at the basest level of our brain, and when you're afraid, you're bound to be unreasonable. Once you've removed the fear, or poor excuses to pretend you're afraid, I think it's a direct flight to dishonesty and laziness. Flying right over facts, questions, “I don't know,” or any one of a thousand things that might chip away at the catch-all answers of “faith.”
Religion is often referred to as something very personal. Whether or not you even want to use the word religion, people flock to “spiritual” or some such “mystical” realm of communing with forces “beyond” or “greater.” I've done drugs that made me feel that way. They did not result in religious conversion. Before I did those drugs, I did a lot of reading about the ways people achieve those states and what happens in our brains when they're going on. I sucked the magic out. I didn't let the question linger like no answer could possibly exist and moved on with my life.
We act like there's any real separation of church and state. This intimate, deeply personal, often rallying cry to go out and convert others, global phenomenon about how to characterize your place and organize the world is treated as though it's an incidental afterthought when you go to the ballot box. A lazy economist might say you've got “perfect information” from which to decide who's going to represent your best interests and disregard your “personal values.”
The challenge, and I think so few people understand or agree with this, is to understand how totalizing and threatening it is to have a perspective subsumed by a religious mindset. Maybe Jesus isn't your brand, but something in how we respond to story-telling and club-affiliation is speaking to you. It's no better to be emotionally hijacked by a political party than it is a sky daddy.
We know as well much about how and why people pick these fascist feelings and tendencies over reason. They're desperate. They're alone. They're exhausted and ashamed. They're angry, perhaps even as angry as me, and they don't know what to do about it besides burn things down. Could you have asked for a more lame coup? It played out like a bad TV episode of a TNT show. Faith without acts is dead? The hollowness of faith is clearly alive and well.
I think I semi-consciously decided that the psychosis was too large and the numbers too few to really combat it. I started praising the idea of so much to eat and watch as forms of a stop-gap to any kind of genuine movement towards destruction. There' no more fat, hopeless, and addicted than the ones who vote in service to their fascist values. Fight the next Civil War from the top of any flight of steps and you'll be done by the afternoon.
The word “reason,” like all words in double-speak land, gets tossed around to mean its opposite. “The reason I vote is to save the unborn!” Of course, you don't need a concept of “save” “the unborn” or “reason” to form those words into a sentence. You don't need science. You don't need statistics or analogies implicating your god in significantly more natural abortions than are ever sought medically. A reasonable person knows you're tribal. Your morals are shaped by a story, not morality. Your feelings dictate instead of inform. You feel the story in a way that facts don't concern themselves with.
Reason, devoid of context, gets you into as much or more trouble than being merely faithful. Now, you've functionally broken all the rules. Nothing weaves your thoughts into a context. Psychotic breaks put this on display. Even when you're perhaps technically saying a series of true things, they're anchored to nothing, and you, not anchored, can't tell. Our fundamental need for a story now becomes the game of people marketing their “family atmosphere” at a slave-labor job. It's a story of manifesting destiny and entitlements. It's class warfare. It's righteous slaughter of the threat just over the hill or those guilty of thought-crime in not believing your origin or orientation story.
Where does the individual, or just the capacity to reason, go? If we must have a story, and I think we must, which one do we choose? Here, the apologists for various faiths point to the generally large number of people not blowing themselves up or stoning gay people and consider that reason enough to pat themselves on the back for their club membership. I reject this, and say you should be choosing your story.
Your story is anchored by choice. Refined choices are dictated the larger you make your perspective. If you're a child and you choose milk and cereal for breakfast, because that's all you've ever had or known, or perhaps all your parents could afford, you have little choice. Your story is small, predictable, and speaking to a universal story perhaps about poverty or simplicity. Now you're grown. You can eat literally anything, food or otherwise, and you pick a piece of fruit for books and books of reasons that still may tell a story about poverty or simplicity, but now with your agency and intention. You can recognize your choice now in the broader context. You can reflect on your “choice” as a child as primarily a series of circumstances and ignorance.
It appears many people struggle with this kind of exercise, not because it's hard, but because it begs a lot of questions they start afraid, and then end lazy and dishonest, about answering. How much of your day are you really choosing? Are you still practically a child? What horrible terrible things are you choosing? What might've happened to you as a child that you have no choice but to relive the terror of each time you think of it? What if the people you care most about in the world were actually choosing to do things that would hurt or kill you and the people or things you care about? What if you don't know or aren't confident you can, in fact, ever choose to do anything about anything? (Just double-dog dare these people to lick a toilet seat and then ask them how helpless they feel because they know the rules.)
Much more polite, simple, and “safe” to step right over all that and, god forbid, anyone remark how banal some Jewish snobs regard evil or remark on how it triumphs.
This is what will kill us, in my estimation. It won't be bloody Trump nuts hanging like balls from a neutered nation. It won't be nuclear war or mishap. I don't even think it will be climate change. It will just be the silence of business as usual. It'll be on the wind between the pages of a trillion memes. It will come like a virus. It will come straight-up, nicely dressed, and telling you, exceptionally reasonably, what it's doing and intends to do to you in the future, and you'll usher it inside, introduce it to your kids, and pray it's only joking.
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