Magical Thinking
Anyone who knows me knows that I don’t have much patience for magical explanations of anything (in technology or in life). The recent brouhaha surrounding the abduction and later desecration of a Host wafer from a Catholic communion put a smile on my face. Not so much for the act itself (I’m indifferent to the fate of the cracker), but rather to the frothing reaction some people had to the event. For those who didn’t follow the action, a professor of biology at the University of Minnesota participated in this desperate act of cracker desecration and has since received death threats from (presumably) otherwise normal people.
It’s amazing to me that people seem willing to put up with the most atrocious abrogations of liberty (warrantless wiretapping, warrantless searches of their persons and belongings upon entering the country, Guantanamo Bay, elimination of Habeas Corpus, etc.), but break a cracker and they go fucking gnuts!
I believe this is all part of the continuing move to the stoopid we seem to be experiencing in our society. We champion ignorance. We admire the idiotic (Jackass, American Gladiators) and we elevate the most banal and tiresome people to the ranks of the famous (Paris Hilton, Donald Trump, etc.). Why does this matter, you ask? Well, let me sort it out for you.
Lest we forget, ours is a country built soundly upon the foundations of Enlightenment thinking and not upon the blind faith exhibited by the religious “right” we see today. When Mike Huckabee says things like
I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution. But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that’s what we need to do — to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view.
I feel the icy chill of theocracy down my spine. Got that? Our Constitution, founded on the principals of rational Enlightenment thought, needs to be amended to make sure that we all practice the same fundamentalist non-thinking religion as Mike. As Thomas Jefferson so rightly put it
…The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter. But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of human errors.
-Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823
When will that day come? Will it ever come? Certainly when Jefferson wrote this, people were hopeful that the day would come when our magical thinking would become a thing of the past. But alas, that day has not yet come. In fact, that day seems further off in the distance than it ever did.
Let’s face it folks, religion makes you stoopid. It excuses you from having to think or reason your way out of situations. You can simply throw your hands up in the air and say “God’s will” or “Allah’s will” or “Flying Spaghetti Monster’s Will.” Religion is a roadblock to rational thought and discourse. And it makes us a nation of stoopids. But worse, it makes us a nation of stoopids who are easy to control and manipulate. And this, my friends, is the crux of the problem.
Stoopid people are easy to control. They have already accepted the ideas behind some form of magical thinking (be it from Christianity, Islam or Judiasm) so it becomes a simple matter of injecting what you want done into the magical stream and voila! You too can create suicide bombers or planned parenthood bombers. Or Republicans! Or any other flock of sheeple you want to create and they will do what you tell them to do.
September 11th has also been used to increase the flock of Republican sheeple through the use and manipulation of fear. Guess what, folks? Fear (in this context) is magical thinking. Those wolves lurking in the woods aren’t really there, but if you’re predisposed to magical thinking, when we tell you they’re there, then you’ll believe us.
So what does all this mean? It means that we, as Progressives, Democrats and Free Thinkers have a lot of work to do. It’s much harder to be someone who questions the nature of things than one who simply follows dogma handed down generation to generation. I’m afraid that, in the long run, we’re headed back to the dark ages where fear, uncertainty and doubt replace reason and rational thought. It’s a grim prospect, but it’s hard to see how we’re going to get out of the magical thinking rut we’ve wandered into.
Peace.
Filed under culture, education, politics : Comments (4) : Aug 6th, 2008 by muttmutt
August 6th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
I’m not an extremist — I don’t get intolerant and go apeshit over silly dogma or wafers; but I also don’t go to the other extreme and dismiss that there isn’t some sort of “God” out there. I do blieve there is some sort of God that is beyond our human understanding, outside of space, time and nature. If the “Big Bang” is true, it could have been God who started it. I have no qualms with that idea. At the same time, I don’t get into the religious dogma either.
August 7th, 2008 at 7:58 am
I guess in many ways I am an extremist when it comes to magical thinking. I reread my post and realised that I’m more opposed to theism than I am to religion in general. This belief that there is some magic big-dude (or dudette) in the sky who is watching us and judging us. Maybe some people need to feel that they’re under close supervision (and by extension, don’t mind that the government is peeking over their shoulders and listening to their phone calls and reading their e-mails). But to me, that is the antithesis of Liberty. True Liberty eschews the shackles of magical thought and imposes the demands of Enlightement reason. Much like science itself, Liberty demands constant, unflagging attention to detail so that no crack can appear in the rights we hold dear. Magical thinking (and theism in particular) create huge cracks in the shield of Liberty by allowing people to abrogate their responsibilities as free citizens to think, to argue and to reason.
August 7th, 2008 at 10:25 am
muttmutt,
OK I understand where you are coming from here.
Trouble starts as soon as people start thinking that they know the “will of God” and become intolerant for anyone who they feel is not following the will of the “true God”.
Our country’s founding fathers seemed to have understood the importance of separating church from state–even though many of them were quite religious themselves.
August 7th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
I guess I’m between Puant and Muttmutt on this one. I dream of the day when religion and theism are a thing of the past and Enlightenment rules the day. But at the same time, I honor each individuals choice in whether they choose to employ ‘magical thinking’ in their own lives–just as long as they don’t try to force it on me!
We’ve clearly gone into dangerous territory with blending so much Christianity into all levels of government, and hopefully the pendulum will begin to swing the other way soon.
I suspect it’s a generational thing so we might just have to wait it out. (Or move to [much of] Europe where they’ve already evolved past the need for said magical thinking).