BEYOND BELIEF

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Belief as an addiction, Religion as a drug, Toad of Toad Hall, Vegetarianism

Vegans and all vegetarians know that we are better off not eating meat.  Some of us carnivores put such people in the category of Wet-blankets, Wowsers and Puritans, who seem to suggest that everything we like is bad for us.  Single Malts, barbecued T-bones and Ben and Jerry’s are among the gastronomical and gustative delights from which we are expected to abstain.  Recently I discovered that even toast (seriously !) is bad for you.  Before long we’ll be reduced to eating insects.

We’re already there.  Firms like Chirp-Farms, BittyFoods and TinyFarms are following FAO recommendations by producing a flour made from … crickets, and energy-bars composed of insects.  There is even a company called “Beyond Meat” which produces “meat” based on vegetable protein.

The message is that we don’t need meat but we do need what its substitutes can provide, whatever about the challenge of making them palatable.  There are perfectly good economic and ecological reasons behind all this, including the exorbitant expense of breeding and feeding animals destined to become our food, as well as certain dietary and health advantages in avoiding consumption of animal products.

If only we could wean people off belief and find a substitute for its addictive attraction in people who can’t face life thinking that death is its definitive end.  Life surely is not meant to be a perpetual Lent : no alcohol (or so little, there’s no point in imbibing), no fatty foods, no desserts, no jam, no butter, on forbidden toast.  By the same logic we can’t be expected to give up the comfort, the reassurance, the hopes, the “certitudes” of pie (WITH salt AND sugar) in the sky when we die.  That is the challenge militant atheists like me face.  No one wants to listen to a kill-joy nutritionist, and even less to some loony inviting them to live a life without the fuel which is faith.  We have “Beyond Meat”.  Is there any way we can package a substitute, “Beyond Belief” ?

I believe we can .  But it won’t be everybody’s cuppa.  This Blog tries to invite Believers on the Brink to burn that security-blanket, to accept that the comforting illusions and mirages of belief are a debilitating drug that may enable us to stifle our anguish, helplessness and fear of death, but remain pipe-dreams.  I try to make atheism attractive as a liberation, but many will continue to prefer the equivalent of Big Macs and MacFlurries, 75% sugar breakfast cereals and, as Toad found in “Wind in the Willows”, “very hot buttered toast, cut thick, very brown on both sides, with the butter running through the holes in it in great golden drops, like honey from the honeycomb”.  Tough competition.  I’ve been off alcohol for four straight years and an atheist for forty.  But I’m no vegan, just a pagan.  And I like my toast.

RIDENDA   RELIGIO

 

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ADDICTIONS AND CONVICTIONS

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Alcoholism, Believers on the Brink, Conversion, Religious Experience

If you have never experienced the initial, relaxing euphoria that follows two shots of a mature, exquisite Single Malt, you have missed one of the essential pleasures of life, which, for some addicts at least, give it meaning.   If you don’t know how to stop after just the two, you know what it is like to be an alcoholic.

If you have never known the quasi-ecstatic joy of a genuine religious experience, you cannot understand why some believers have an unshakeable faith.  If you yourself have had such an experience, you may find it difficult to understand why anyone would refuse to believe, or worse, abandon their faith.

There is an unbridgeable gap between believing and not believing.  On both sides there are people so convinced of their stance on religious faith, that they find the unfortunates on the other side incomprehensible if not demented.  For those over there it is obvious that not only does religion make sense to them, but that life and death would be meaningless without it.  Similarly, people on my side of the gap wonder why the others cannot see how unfounded and ridiculous religion is.

Then there are those not too sure of their belief, or of their unbelief.  These are the Believers on the Brink, whom both believers and unbelievers would like to convert.  I once wasted my time as a former believer become an atheist, trying to get convinced Catholics to recognize the illusions I used to have and they still had.  I realize now the pointlessness if not the impossibility of such a project.  Full-blown alcoholics can be led to go on the wagon; gung-ho Christians can be brought to recognize the blind folly of their blind faith.  But on both sides of the Great Divide, proselytizers would be advised to concentrate their efforts where there is the best chance of success.  If dyed-in-the-wool believers bother to browze this blog and find that it creates some minor tremors in their supposedly rock-solid convictions, so much the better.  But that would be a collateral benefit, a consummation devoutly to be wished certainly, but icing on the cake.  Believers who have already discovered reasons to doubt and disbelieve much of the nonsense, will, I hope, soon reject the whole ball of wax.  Meantime I will continue to use my blog as a blowtorch.

                                               RIDENDA   RELIGIO

 

 

 

“GIMME THAT OLE-TIME RELIGION !”

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"Repent !", Catholic Conservatism and Liberalism, Pope Francis

Francesco, Papa simpatico.  He really seems to be a nice guy, this Jesuit, almost Franciscan, breath of fresh air in the Vatican.  He makes the job of his minders and P.R. staff a breeze.  He’s doing everything right.  They didn’t have to invent, and they don’t have to polish, his image : he brought it with him, along with his simple pectoral cross, his sensible, non-designer black shoes and his blue Ford Focus (mine is metal-grey; we drive the same car, are the same age, and are both as Frank as they come).  It’s hard to fault this living saint on whom many Catholics are pinning their hopes for a surge in popularity not just of the Papacy but of the clergy and the Church as a whole.  The Faithful are confident that he will be as tough on unworthy conduct as Jesus was in whipping the money-lenders out of the Temple.  There will be no more shady deals or money-laundering in the Bank of the Holy Spirit, Bishops of bling will be made to toe the line and the cover-up and simple transfer of pedophiliac priests will be a thing of the past.

But don’t expect this popular Pope to pussyfoot with the innovations if not laxity of a certain Liberalism.  Conservatives will be delighted to see him reestablish a Tridentine Church rather than promote a Vatican 2 one.  He will not denounce, denigrate or deny any of the most recent Council’s official teaching, but he will restore the old-time Catholicism we knew before his about-to-be-canonized predecessor, John XXIII, let Vatican 2’s fresh air fill the Church, blowing away, some would say, much of traditional piety in the pews and preaching in the pulpit.  Instance his March 21 annual vigil for victims of organized crime, when he begged members of the Mafia to change their lives : “Repent”, he said; “there’s still time to not end up in Hell”.  Pure 1950’s Catholicism, the stuff of the old Redemptorist Parish Missions, without the fire and brimstone.  It’s the sort of thing many frustrated Catholics have been waiting to hear.  And perhaps the sort of thing that will get our Believers on the Brink to make for the exit, before the Church brings back the Golden Book of Indulgences, holy cards, perpetual novenas and the rest of the nonsense they have long abandoned.  “Carpe diem”, my friends.  There’s still time to not end up the way we were.  Easter would be a good time to let the light in.

                                          RIDENDA   RELIGIO                                               

MIRACLES FOR SALE

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Credulity, Miracles, Miraculous Medal, Superstitions

In 1517 Father (Doctor) Martin Luther launched his Protest against, and Reformation of, the Catholic Church, by attacking the sale of indulgences.  Five centuries later, another priest, an almost-Doctor of Theology (A.B.T.), who like Luther left his religious Order and the Catholic priesthood, launched another Protest with the intention not of reforming but of ridiculing the same Church, which approves not only indulgences but the sale of miracles.  Luther posted his condemnation on the door of Wittenberg’s cathedral.  Mine is posted here on this blog.

I recently received, among my junk-mail, a four-page letter accompanied by a colored brochure to which was glued a medal – and a suggestion that if I wanted to benefit from a miracle, I had only to send a check, of as little as ten euros or whatever I thought my miracle was worth.  (There must be people who actually do send money.  What have they got to lose ?  Blaise Pascal would agree that it’s worth the wager …).

The following excerpts may reveal, to the embarrassment of many sincere Catholics, just how pathetic is the exploitation of religious credulity and superstition in promoting the “Miraculous Medal”.  I hope they will draw the obvious conclusions.

The outfit – or the fanatic – behind the scam begins its/his long letter with a quotation from a lady in 1830 who, though she had died some 1800 years earlier, told a French nun that the medal she (Mary, the Mother of Jesus, a.k.a. the “Immaculate Conception”) had herself designed (!) would bring “great graces to everyone who wore it around his/her neck” and that “graces will be abundant for everyone who wears it with confidence”.  She went on to warn that “the whole world will be thrown into turmoil by misfortunes of every kind”, but added consolingly that “I will be there with you”.  The Church in 1836 declared these “apparitions” – better described as mystico-psychotic ravings – to be “genuine” (see my book “From Illusions to Illumination”, p.167).

The promoter of the campaign says that he needs exactly 109,763 euros to be able to distribute some 120,000 medals like the one I was lucky enough to receive without even asking for it.  He insists that this is “an enterprise of lay-Catholics engaged in the apostolate in conformity with the prescriptions of Canon Law and ecclesiastical discipline”.  Naturally I sent him a hefty donation.

P.S.   I am ashamed to admit that as an adolescent at Marist Brothers School in Kogarah, N.S.W., I actually wore the medal day and night around my neck.  The miracle is I became an atheist.

RIDENDA   RELIGIO

 

 

” ELEMENTARY, MY DEAR CRICK ! “

Tags

Credulity, First Cause, Immaculate Conception, The Assumption

Boy meets girl.  One thing leads to another.  That’s the way it often is in science.  Sometimes, however, by sheer good fortune, it happens that a scientist trying to invent a new glue, finds that his product just won’t stick things together permanently : the Post-It is born !  Or another stumbles on penicillin.  But more often than not, scientific advances depend on a logical process of deduction.  If x produces y, then we can deduce that y can produce z.  It turns out that it does.  Hence the genetics-shaking discovery of DNA and its double helix.  Thank you, Mr Watson.  Thank you, Mr Crick.

This blog recently waited patiently for a reader to produce his promised theological deductions from the premise which he and Aristotle call the First Cause.  If we accept – a very big “if” – that there was a Superior Intelligence behind the existence of the Universe, then, he said, he could deduce, in six easy steps, the veracity of current Catholic doctrine (for example, the defined “infallible” dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption).  I gave up waiting for Godot and the famous Six Steps when their revelation became the subject of a kind of blackmail, in the form of previously unannounced conditions.  It turns out that I have procured the promised precious prize without accepting any conditions or terms of blackmail.  Here they are, verbatim :

“Once it is accepted that an intelligence greater-than-human intelligence is involved in creation of the universe and humanity, the sequence of some half dozen ensuing logical D E D U C T I O N S leads to orthodox Catholicism, independent of any shortcomings of its human representatives.

1.   There is a greater intelligence than human intelligence involved with the universe.

2.   That intelligence has, necessarily, the attributes which orthodox Catholic teaching attributes to God.

3.   Jesus briefly took on humanity and claimed to be one with God and has backed up His claim in a multitude of ways.

4.   Jesus established a Church, personally assured of His infallible guidance  through the ages, to uphold the truth.

5.   The Catholic Church is the one and only church that fulfills that promise.

I did say some half a dozen, but that appears superfluous, as 5 seems sufficient.”

Any similarity between these Six become Five Steps and the six I predicted (“The Six Steps”, March 15, 2014)  – six of one, half a dozen, or even five, of the other – is (need it be underlined ?) not a feat of fantastic foresight, but the result of my having once shared the credulity which produced them.  It is however remarkable that they were the hyper-Holmesian deductions of an engineer-scientist, blinded by his need to believe.

P.S.   That this should be posted on April Fool’s Day is, of course, like the Big Bang which occurred against admittedly astronomical odds, a pure fluke  . . .

RIDENDA   RELIGIO