What a Show, Here We Go

"And where do we feature?"

"Just listen to teacher."

 

The Lion King (Be Prepared)

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"Any priest or shaman must be presumed guilty until proved innocent."

- from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long

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"Your attitude is simply a hold-over of your religious training. That you have a DUTY toward the dull human race--which probably enjoys being bullied by Windrip and getting bread and circuses-- except for the bread!"

"Of course it's religious, a revolutionary loyalty! Why not?  It's one of the few real religious feelings.  A rational, unsentimental Stalin is still kind of a priest.  No wonder most preachers hate the Reds and preach against 'em!  They're jealous of their religious power."

 

Sinclair Lewis - It Can't Happen Here 

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"In the horizon of the infinite.
- We have left the land and have embarked. We have burned our bridges behind us -- indeed, we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind us. Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you will realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now strikes the walls of this cage! Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom -- and there is no longer any "land.""

 

Friedrich Nietzsche - The Gay Science #124

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Where to start? I guess we can ease into this with a game anecdote. It was only recently while re-skimming something I'd said about Rogue Trader "I started as a preacher for lack of bookish origins" that I realized that's probably more true than I'd like it to be, not just in a galaxy far, far away but to mine own self. If living in ye olden days, deprived of other fonts of learning, I probably would've joined a monastery just for the books - then, let's be realistic, gotten myself burned at the stake a couple years later as a heretic. While it maintained its Dark Age stranglehold on intellectual pursuit, Christianity also maintained a de facto prison for intellectual pursuers.

 

Another recent RPG campaign brought my attention to a phrase I had not even heard before: the so-called Black Legend of defamation against the Spanish crown at its peak of global influence. Amusing because it doesn't seem in question that Spaniards were committing atrocities, but apologists would like to point out other-people-did-bad-things-too! - or at most that the bad things were done in a slightly different location or a year or two earlier. Of course it only takes a little perspective to figure a secondary motivation behind this umbrage, beyond Spanish honor, in religious apologism, as imperialist Spain is nearly synonymous with Catholicism. It goes hand-in-hand with those heavily funded Vatican biopics Hollywood has been cranking out the past decade or so, or another trend sneaking its way through various websites of supposedly unaffiliated commentators "spontaneously"arguing the Dark Ages did not quite destroy all knowledge or that later "not all inquisitors" (#NotAllInquisitors) were raving torturers and witch-hunters. Right, sure.

 

While we're at it, let's remember a term which truly has been misrepresented over the centuries: decimation. In modern popular parlance understood to mean "completely wiped out" its original meaning was much milder, the execution of every tenth soldier of a military unit guilty of some form or another of treason, to make the other nine soldiers fall back in line. It never seems to have worked very well within a military unit whose loyalty to each other can easily be wrecked by such internal punishment, but the same psychological torture can serve much better for an outside force deliberately attempting to break the loyalty of families, villages or looser social associations and turn them against each other to make them more susceptible to brainwashing.

 

If a true believer insists "most" inquisitors were merely sent out to "teach" the ignorant masses official doctrine, take it with a fistful of salt rubbed into your wounds. Yes, half or even 9/10 inquisitors may have busied themselves just spewing chapter and verse, yet behind their every word you would see nothing but the afterimage of your parents, their limbs torn and crushed by the tenth inquisitor's torture implements, their minds utterly shattered, choking as they struggled to beg for mercy before finally expiring.

 

Ohh, yeah. You'll listen to teacher.

 

Speaking of teaching, more than a decade ago, having gone back for a university degree, I found myself listening to some classroom chatter about a particular professor's stupid views on an easily-verified and politically combustible fact. Was it global warming, vaccines, animal rights, trickle-down economics? I forget. Something outside his official specialty at any rate, so he was not speaking ex cathedra on the touchy topic. But I do remember a student indignantly exclaiming "can't we get him fired or something?" It gave me an eerie feeling I only later identified with the rise in politically correct insanity in following years. My side wasn't supposed to talk like this. It was the other guys that wrote up blacklists against political subversives. It was those church ladies, not on campus but out in churches, doing church things, they were the busybodies hounding deviants just for shits and giggles.

Right?

...r-right?

Well, "cancel culture" and the wider wokeysition has in the interval amply demonstrated humans' propensity to crusade on any nonsense. And given how many have been fired and blacklisted based on absolutist propositions like the moral supremacy of women or transsexuals, I'm unwilling to pretend this more modern McCarthyism poses any less threat than the version from seventy years ago. When you start job-firing on pretense, how far could the firing squads be? Academics have not fought back against postmodern insanity. Did it even take a tenth of their number fired to ensure the rest bent knee? I suppose the real question of recovery hinges on whether academia has been destroyed or merely decimated, and the cowards who adopted gender Lysenkoism or the false equivalences of 'multiple intelligences' or cultural relativism might find their spines once some of the pressure to conform eases off.

 

Or maybe the pressure's just switching directions. I'm seeing entirely too many TV comedians pretending they love Lent and are looking forward to the sadomasochistic spectacle of Easter. I viewed a presentation recently by a scientist who at the end thanked God among her peers and funders. Bill Maher hasn't dared so much as squeak against religion for years. Sam Harris is willing to make common cause with the religious fanatics in Israel. So there's a distinction everyone has apparently decided to forget between tolerating isolated personal derangement in individuals, and the far more destructive kow-towing to pervasive superstition to placate the mob.

 

Can atheists hold irrational views? Oh, hell yes. I refer you to Portlandia. Better yet I refer you to a series of video lectures put out by the James Randi Educational Foundation on various pseudoscience and quackery posing as official medical research. The most charismatic speaker she ain't, but do note she can rattle off five hours of (quite entertaining in themselves) references to insanity like homeopathy or energy healing, not even venturing outside the field of medicine, yet still barely scratch the surface.*

 

The relevant distinction was never between theist and atheist, but between reason and unreason, and it is very much a matter of degrees. A professor holding one kooky view is far less harmful than a department firing him for that view, especially if not passed off as authoritative. Demanding absolute orthodoxy does not produce reason; it produces a priesthood reciting cant instead of an intelligentsia seeking truth. As you have continually enforced adherence to the dogma of political lobbies like feminism as a prerequisite for participation in academia, you have inevitably regressed to pre-modern academic precursors, to monastic strictures on thought. So perhaps in that light it was inevitable for the entire intelligentsia to collapse into primitive superstition. When biologists become willing to deny biological sex for their thirty pieces of silver, they're only a skip away from averring the legitimacy of supernumerary nipples as witch-sign.

 

But such doublethink already abounds outside academia. There's something particularly perverse in the sympathetic church services held after the U.S. government's murders of civilians in Minneapolis last month, conveniently ignoring that Trump was elected under Christian ideals by Christian propaganda with the express purpose of establishing a Christian theocratic dictatorship. It was Christianity that murdered them, and it is Christianity sending military helicopters to drag children out of their beds in the middle of the night and it is Christianity driving by in unmarked vans disappearing people off the streets of American cities. And there you have another crucial difference between reason and unreason, unbelief and belief. Atheism is nothing in itself. It is a blank, a default. It mandates no action. But the civilizational decline, the destruction of intellect and beauty, the heretic burnings and other atrocities perpetrated by the faithful have throughout history been a direct result of official doctrine, of superstitious piety, meekness, obedience, proselytism, 'purification' and surrender of this world for the illusory hereafter. Of power-mongering in the name of the all-powerful.

Of all the various brands of insanity which have gripped the left wing over the past decades, the final nail in its coffin will be this. Forgetting the most virulent and debilitating mental infection in human history. Forgetting where the left wing got its name, and that the First Estate sits together with the aristocracy in opposition to and oppression of the Third.

 

 

 

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* If James Randi himself never focused on religion, do remember it's not because it was any less bullshit than his usual targets of clairvoyants or psychics (for instance one of his most famous cases was against the Christian faith healer Peter Popoff) but because the topic was too broad for him to tackle with the resources at his disposal.