When I was a kid, my mom was shopping around for a church. For a few weeks, we’d try different ones, some we literally couldn’t stop laughing and making fun of as we sat in the pews, one that felt like a YMCA with the different activity rooms and mega-church-wanna-be vibes. I wandered into what was a kids playroom and those vegetable cartoons were playing on the TV. “We are the pirates, that don’t do anything.” I’m 36 years old, and that line still bugs the fuck out of me. It feels like a summary of the several books I’d need to write explaining my problems with “religious” thinking.
Whatever one wants to accept in regarding the modern era as having a “meaning crisis,” I think words still mean things. I think pirate means something. A pirate was my school mascot. Pirates of the Caribbean is a franchise so popular it can be bled for attention and money indefinitely. You can get a grounded and historical view of pirates and how Thomas Jefferson handled them. What pirates aren’t, are shitty lyric-singing entities that “don’t do anything.”
Religion is a process that is designed to turn Truth, into truth. It gives you a personal truth. It let’s you invert words. It lets you empower your feelings and create substructures of reality that do the heavy lifting where you’re unwilling or unable to find the personal responsibility. A pirate is a rapist, murdering, thief who has no business in being associated with children. The caricature and theft of the word “pirate,” can go anywhere at any time for any reason, like becoming my school mascot.
Now, I’m someone who understands and does not have some kind of visceral emotive reaction every time a concept is seemingly misappropriated. I don’t care in some kind of aggrieved nerd way about protecting IP or cannon when it comes to cultural expression broadly. I care about the ability to recognize what’s happening when you do so as a matter of habit across different contexts. I care when you get stuck in a “religious mindset” about something, oh, I don’t know, like one that wants to obliterate the word “genocide.” Or one that habitually downplays the spirit and nature of fascism.
I’ve heard a lot recently, from debates between Richard Dawkins and Jordan Peterson to discussions with Peter Boghossian and what sounded like a brilliant and articulate scholar and yet horrifying Christian apologist Wael Taji Miller. It’s the notion that we’re “all Christian,” in the broadest sense of Western values. You’ll get soundbites of someone like Dawkins “agreeing” even as he’s trying, hopelessly, to keep the conversation grounded in “yes” or “no” answers to things like “Was Jesus born of a virgin?” No one should have trouble answering that question, yet, in the obfuscating equating substructure of religious apologetics, “was” “Jesus” “born” “of” “a” and “virgin” all mean something so convoluted and contradictory to match the mores of his individual sense of self, Jordan has to pause, answer with a another question, belabor the mythology, etc.
This is something I think is most damaging and painful to think about when it’s literal scientists who practice the same behavior. You won’t find a better explainer for some highly complicated topic like gene expression or chemical bonds, and then they’ll wedge some sentiment about god in there for …antagonistic effect?
There’s a lot of problems when it comes to how you market and teach information. They don’t get easier when your motivating principle is the one like social media has adopted of “engagement.” How you engage, for how long, what content, what it’s doing to you, none of that matters. Religious thinking was our first attempt at creating a social media company. *Have you heard the good news? Now you can connect with anyone, anywhere, and be united forever if you just sign up and follow these rules that violate your autonomy, privacy, and capacity to think freely beyond emotional manipulation.
I think, literally, you can’t even recognize what I’m talking about unless you’re someone hyper-concerned about things like “rhetoric” and “apologetics. For your average person, I don’t think those are words they’ve ever used, let alone can define. Unless I’d fallen down the “new atheist” rabbit hole as a teenager, I doubt I’d have many occasions to use them in spite of my academically-inclined disposition. You don’t go to church to hear about the “reasoning” behind “love thy neighbor,” it’s just more or less demanded of you, in spite of your actual, practical, ability to do so.
And here’s the most confusing and insidious layer, because actual, practical, abilities of money, group-think, and cultural influence manifest explicitly for people. When “the church” helps you rebuilt after a fire, you give zero fucks how many little boys they want to rape when you’re back in your bed and so thankful. When “the church” runs the food bank, it may as well be Jesus personally stuffing the nearly-expired food down your family’s throats. The cultural zeitgeist and landscape, therefore, gets considered “Christian.” You’d think we were the only species to share food.
I think everything good and contributing to our survival is derived from evolutionary, reactive, processes, and as our intelligence grew to protect us from deadly consequences, we’ve let narrative arcs supplant harsher forms of natural selection. You want a girl basically pledged to you since birth? Stay in your religion. “Women’s rights” aren’t really a thing, because “rights” aren’t a thing, because “your right” is whatever “you are right about” within the confines of irrational-yet-(co-opted concept)rational religious behavior.
Religious thinking always wants it both ways. They want the excuse, but to claim the responsibility. They want the reason, but the infinite sea of irrationality that justifies. They want the power while claiming victimhood. They want to be of consequences at all costs while maintaining they’re just following the rules.
“With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion.”
― Steven Weinberg
The section below I wrote a week or so ago and never completed. It was what was bubbling for me to arrive at the above.
If there’s one thing I wish “we” as a “culture” would learn how to do, it’s quantify.
I think about how much gets lost in the weeds of rhetoric and emotional appeals. Why, ever, in a modern environment would we be so compelled by a “strong man” or any narrative that is explicitly disinterested in context? Personally, I’m so rarely moved by emotion just as a probably-autistic person that I’ve watched my entire life situations compound and explode utterly baffled by why no one was willing to even nod in the direction of the greater reality or circumstances.
I do think this is an outgrowth of the psychological apologetics we engage in to protect religious thinking. When your faith claims come in the form of “absolute truth” instead of “practical necessity,” to my mind, literally anything goes. Up means down, wrong means right, just like an animal reacting in any instinctive way to circumstances it doesn’t understand. I see nothing more reliably consistent than this across environments. “Smart” people do it. “Rich” people circle their wagons. Any time you get two people together who desire to feed off the other’s excuse-making energy, we default to our basest animal that justifies compounding deadly sin.
This is where things that aren’t complicated get to be played at indefinitely as though they are complicated.
I’m not a thought or word police person. I do think, fundamentally, comedians like Tony Hinchcliffe get to say bad jokes as often as their career can handle. I don’t think jokes, in and of themselves, and especially coming from professional comedians, are the thing that “pollutes” the public discourse or “harms” and “endangers” people. That’s not what a joke is nor the function of a comedian.
The massive, under-stated and under-appreciated problem, is when you adopt fascism. Fascism is religious fervor played out in more directly and practically implicated ways against a particular group. Fascism empowers an individual to double down on deadly sinful behavior. When you “just do you” next to or in service to fascism, you’re no longer what you were the moment before you made that choice. Every one of a fascist’s generals were otherwise “normal” people with held-harmless jobs and lives until they started playing into and normalizing the depravity. The ones that survived immediately tried to return to that normalcy, some being tried at The Hague decades after because…you don’t get to.
We entertain an endless stream of disingenuous and completely vacuous conversation around what is or isn’t “dangerous” and “harmful” that doesn’t count things. We even pretend to count! In forming a narrative around our particular oppression, when in context, tells the exactly opposite story. We just don’t count the money and what it does. We don’t count the people getting directly negatively affected by a policy. We don’t count the time it does or does not take to engage someone and persuade or inform them. We don’t break it down into a cold and useful calculation like an assembly line does for man-hours-to-parts anticipated.
I don’t think we even barely grasp the conditions from which we’re starting, and we have no idea where we want to go, so we don’t even entertain the idea there’s something to be counted or approached in a more deliberate and methodical way.
The broader view that can approximate how many people are dispositionally fascist is about as close as we can get. The one that shows us how often we’d rather disengage and isolate is on full display with the amount of people who don’t vote. The long-term impacts of legislation and cultural narratives get hijacked to every end and supplant the graphs that depict republicans bankrupting institutions and enriching friends in spite of children. Before we had any data, we had what used to be compelling stories about the nature of greed, gluttony, and pride.
In fact, we don’t need religious dogma to witness “sinful” behavior in nature, but you’d think it was all invented wholesale by religion. A series of chronic inescapable conditions for which we all must be constantly redeemed. That’s convenient.
