Confession with the Vampire

"Let me say that when he'd finished speaking, no other decision was possible for me, and I pursued my course without a backward glance."

- Interview with the Vampire

 

Apparently yet another of my old childhood friends has degenerated into a full-on raving bible-thumper. This case in particular has no excuse, having benefited from the finest education money can buy. Well, no excuse but grief-induced brain damage. The background involves a death in the family, during the long-agonizing preamble of which they all tried everything... and when that failed, tried the utter nothing that is the supernatural. Post-mortem, my friend is now blaming everyone (inclusively) for having failed to do NOTHING hard enough. Not enough prayer sessions, not enough church visits, not enough faith, not enough monetary donations to the filthy parasitic charlatans selling false hope. Pretty sure even the deceased is catching some flak. Then again, scapegoating is a fine, time-honored religious tradition.

I won't even bother complaining that prayer didn't work. That was a given. Religion could do absolutely nothing to help illness, since by definition it offers nothing real. What the church can do though, and quite expertly, is torture a grieving family with pointless recrimination and a false sense of failure, and foment gratuitous strife when they're most desperate for stability and support. That, and bilk the bereaved for an extra donation here and there while they're at it.

Anne Rice went fame-crazy pretty fast, but that first Interview with the Vampire was nonetheless a memorably insightful read into superlative villainy, not least for its opening depiction of predation on grief, of Lestat ambushing Louis in a moment of weakness with false promises of a cure-all pig in a poke. You see it all the time, whether it's social movements promising you'll need never fear walking the streets again once you've eradicated/enslaved that other, hated demographic guilty of all the world's ills, or palmists and astrologers promising foresight in an uncertain universe when you feel most helplessly adrift, or bankers promising that losing your house is no big deal so long as you take out yet another loan. Have faith in their providence.

 

Pouncing on misery great and small is a hallmark of those peddling the unverifiable. Can't find love? Let Madam FakeAccent's crystal ball reassure you for the low-low price of... how much you got in your pocket again? Yeah, that. Lost a relative in a shooting? Join a(n) (anti?)racist group even if the villain and victim were the same race. Sad and nervous? Realign your chakras! Life plan derailed? Sever all social ties and let us tell you how to unlock your secret alien superpowers! Fat? Try a no-carb diet fad. Still fat? Try an all-carb diet fad. Raped? Go to war against The Patriarchy. Flunked basic arithmetic? Major in diversity studies.

 

But all the charlatans, hucksters, mountebanks, confidence artists and good old-fashioned liars the world over aspire to the apex ambush predator status of the big religions. They are always there. Eternal, unchanging, sheltered from the light of reason. Always there, a steeple on every street corner, more branches than Starbucks, more served than McDonalds, more takeovers than Microsoft. ALWAYS there, waiting to pounce. Not ticket scalpers, not used car dealers, not communism or capitalism, not opium, not even cigarettes at their foggiest peak, not even alcohol in its global spread since antiquity have ever sold so many false promises of comfort as religion, and so irreparably. A cirrhosis patient may rue the odd dram, but jihadists die adulating their lethal poison. And looking at that system, you have to realize the gratuitous strife it engenders is not a bug, it's a feature.

They'll get you. Exploiting any weakness, any tragedy. If they can't get you happy, they'll get you sad. If they can't get you and all your family and friends all at once with free picnics, they'll sniff you out when you're weakened, like leopards splitting the sickly off from the herd. And if your increasingly fanatical ramblings increasingly isolate you from saner minds, well, all the better, until all you have left is your all-important faith, and the church, and the church ladies to keep you in line, and the priest always smiling, always friendly, always standing next to the collection box, promising you a false eternity of unlife.