"[Charles Manson's psychic powers] were believed by people with at least a primary public school education in the enlightenment of the space age, and these beliefs were repeated about a man who is still alive today. So if this had all happened two thousand years ago? With every exaggeration or alteration accepted as gospel by people who are determined to believe whatever they're told without reservation? Then I could see an alternate timeline where my now-Mormon family might instead be attending the Church of Charles Manson, of Latter-Day-Saints"
Witness Yuletide ritual among the Nacirema.
So, yesterday was Christmas, that most magical children's holiday when a fat old livestock rustler in an unregistered vehicle squeezes his toy collection up and down your hot dark chute. (If I die before I wake, give it hard and fast to my brother Jake.) So noble and respectable an occasion prompts one to reflect upon... just how the mountains of bullshit we call religion spring up.
While faith in general is both stupid and insane, I do find the more recent faiths more perplexingly so, due to the abundance of countervailing evidence. Take two of the more quintessentially American inventions, Mormonism and Scientology for example. Most religions' founders sit comfortably shrouded in conveniently unverifiable, multimillennial folklore. We know little to nothing about their deeds and character except that proclaimed by their own adherents. No wonder Christ is such a Christ-like figure! In the cases of Joe Smith and the bard, Elron Hu, on the other hand, we have endless sources both outsider and lapsed from among the faithful to provide context. We know that one was a dime-a-dozen confidence artist who tried scam after scam in town after town until one of them (the faith scam) stuck. We know the other was a struggling scribbler who bragged that the best way to make money would be to start his own religion, and eventually did exactly that, in as cold-bloodedly profiteering a fashion as possible.
This knowledge has not been passed down by some folkloric telephone game reiterated through the centuries, but in dry, dull, extant stenography. No indescribable states of heavenly bliss and inspiration here, no alien spirits or deities conveniently unreachable for comment or unreplicated miracles or oneiric whispers atop clouded mountain peaks. No, these men's lives are chronicled via the most mundane historical data imaginable. We have court records and sales receipts and the first-hand kvetching of contemporaries who saw nothing Messianic in either case, who merely got ripped off trying to find gold on their property or happened to attend the same fabulists' social club. Man oh man, wouldn't historians give their right hands for a glimpse at the same kind of information about the older religious founders? Wouldn't they love to sit down for dinner with Jesus' old drinking buddy or see Lao Tzu get sued over a bar-room brawl in stentorious courtroom officiousness, or Siddhartha or Mohammed get their mules pulled over on a routine hashish possession charge, or Moses losing his copyright to the ten commandments on a technicality?
For all the social damage they can do, these latest but far from last rising religions offer invaluable in vivo observations of human gullibility and the transition from roadside shrine cult to megachurch. If any of their claims stand up to scrutiny, it is this: they are as worthy of the title "religion" as any other creed in history. Their demonstrable weirdness appears to us outsiders as a caricature of ritual and mythology... but then caricatures by definition over-emphasize features. They do not invent them. The new faiths use old tactics, from sotto voce promises of betterment and community spirit used in proselytism, to fabricating an invisible spiritual poison and withholding the imaginary antidote in some form of salvation attainable only by adherence to the one true faith, to the gradual monopolization of their subjects' lives to wring more and more service out of them, to the social isolation and threat of disconnection and all too mundane ostracism to limit heresy and apostasy, to banding together against outside critics in tactics of intimidation and outright violence.
We can laugh at an E-meter and "auditing" but are they any different from rosary beads and confession, save for being invented within a society with a much higher baseline for technobabble and psychobabble? Laugh at Mormons' magic undies all you like, but that figurine of a zombie rabbi around your neck isn't warding off any more demons than their cushier talismans. We can watch, in real time, the deformation of these cults' folkore, from self-help book to vague spiritualism to supernatural doctrine, or watch them drop practices like polygamy which cause friction with society at large, then remember mainstream Christians used to toss bags of cats into bonfires under suspicion of being witches' familiars. (Next time Mittens pukes in your shoes, remind her of that.) Read just a Wikipedia-grade smattering of the myriad bits of folklore condensed into modern Christmas rituals, from giving pointless Saturnalia gifts for the sheer pointlessness, to chimney-delivered sweets, to wooden clogs to 19th century cartoons and 20th century advertisements, and realize how many of these elements would look just as insane as planet Kolob if viewed at the resolution provided by the lens of modern mass-media sensationalism.
Most importantly, the newer religions can illustrate the shift from merely proselytizing to outright breeding second an third-generation adherents, as apostates' testimonies demonstrate. When the answer to how you came to believe such things is more often than not "was born into it" you have to realize that the venerable patina of Saturnalia, mangers and Sinterklaas itself lies in the clouded eye of the beholder. The seeming immutability of more mainstream religions comes from indoctrination performed on us when were were at our most defenseless, before the time we even formed permanent memories. "Give me the child until seven and I'll give you the man" quipped Ignatius in a display of cynicism that would make King Lycaon look like an amateur - but it would mean nothing if so many mammals did not prove utterly willing to hand over their infants to memetic predators spewing the infectious miasmas of mindless belief.
We are all born into some strain or another of endemic mental disease.
Immunize your children instead.
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edit 2023/06/26: few typo fixes
edit 2024/04/08: As the phrase appears in the process of being purged from search engines (at least it's still up on Wikipedia... for now) "a temperate zone voodoo, in its inelasticity, unexplainable procedures, and mindless group euphoria" was the apt descriptor used by Dianetics leader Helen O'Brien in 1966 for Hubbard's shift in '53 from Dianetics' origin as a quack cure-all to openly supernatural claims or "the religion angle" in Hubbard's classicly crass scheister wording. O'Brien herself quit after being beaten and robbed as part of Hubbard's push to establish totalitarian control over Dianetics, as confessed by Hubbard's son in 1982.
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