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More and more, Americans may be turning to magical reasoning, rather than logical and scientific thought, as a framework to navigate their daily lives. Evolution has long been under assault, and the construction of multiple "Creationist" theme parks around the country, depicting humans and dinosaurs in Edenic coexistence, hammers home the point ; magical explanations are big business, as if 70 million-odd books sold from Tim LaHaye's and Jerry Jenkin's "Left Behind" book series didn't make the point bluntly clear enough. But lately, new permutations of unreason have sprouted up to confront the view that we should first look to empirically based, causal explanations of our experience. Should we turn to prayer, rather than media reports, for information on defective consumer goods ?
Video shorts, of prominent Evangelical preacher Chuck Missler claiming to rebut the Theory of Evolution with a jar of peanut butter, and actor Kirk Cameron arguing that bananas were specifically fashioned by God to exactly fit the human hand, have proved popular to the Christian right and adherents of Evolution alike, though for different reasons. Now, in an audacious shove of the Overton Window of public thought well along towards magical explanation, a new video to be found on YouTube, and GodTube ( Tube for God ? God-In-A-Tube ? ) warns us of the danger inherent to ignoring that little voice in our heads warning us : "The new blender is evil" ; If that voice is from God, woe to those who pay it little heed !
As the Christian right has grown ever more media savvy, a new generation of young auteurs is springing up to advance the cultural and religious precepts they have been raised amidst, growing up in Christian right enclaves walled off from secular American culture and buttressed against a mainstream culture felt to be under the sway of Satan. That this portion of America has long been drifting towards views which could be termed "a-rational" can be gleaned from video clips found on the new YouTube for the American religious right, GodTube, where competently produced video shorts aggressively attack the presumption that modern life and the natural world are best explained and coped with via logic, and reason. Is the Theory of Evolution akin to a soggy computer moniter in a pond ? Does God broadcast consumer product warnings on defective blenders straight into the heads of pious Christian wives ? Whether those are rational suppositions or not GodTube, to adopt the quasi-immortal words of "Jean Luc-Piccard", makes it so.
"Interestingly, the word ‘dragon’ is used a number of times in the Old Testament. In most instances, the word dinosaur could substitute for dragon and it would fit very nicely. Creation scientists believe that dinosaurs were called dragons before the word dinosaur was invented in the 1800s. We would not expect to find the word dinosaur in Bibles like the Authorized Version (1611), as it was translated well before the word dinosaur was ever used... Also, there are many very old history books in various libraries around the world that have detailed records of dragons and their encounters with people. Surprisingly (or not so surprisingly for creationists), many of these descriptions of dragons fit with how modern scientists would describe dinosaurs, even Tyrannosaurus. Unfortunately, this evidence is not considered valid by evolutionists. Why? Only because their belief is that man and dinosaurs did not live at the same time!" [Ken Ham, from Answers In Genesis]
A Meditation On Talking To God About Blenders, Media, PR, and Ideology, Global Warming and Apocalypse
As an entire segment of American culture, that might be called "the Christian right" has been drifting away from religiously heterogenous America, from the tiny percentage of Americans who call themselves atheists and agnostics, and from 'secular' Americans who don't express their religious belief in terms of regular church attendance or easily defined formulations.... that process has gone on for several decades now...
The Christian right has also been involved in a more directed modification of American culture and politics:
Over the course of the last several decades, the movement has sought to quietly take over, attack, and destroy existing societal institutions, including political ones, while at the same time also constructing almost an entire parallel nation, an alternate reality, with dedicated broadcastmedia, businesses, working partnerships with powerful corporate interests, educational institutions, its own fake history and even Christian pet services, as a prophylactic against unseemly commerce with Americans defined as "secular" or simply damned: a movement knit together, besides through shared perceived struggle, "spiritual warfare" even, against enemies, by common, long term aspirations for massive societal change and eventually, some would claim, authoritarian rule, but in any case far less tolerance for religious and philosophical diversity of any sort to the point of religious supremacy.
As we can see from the Missler and Cameron videos, lots of common foods and consumer products seem to militate against Evolution. It's easy to laugh at and marginalize such argumentation. But, when powerful US Senators posit Global Warming as a plot to create a "One World Government" through the United Nations [ US Sen. James Inhofe ] or meet with influential Christian pastors who allege similar conspiratorial views and organize national lobbies to bring on the Apocalypse, advocate for preemptive war, and muse on how such a war may lead to the nuclear destruction of much of the United States [ US Sen. John McCain, House GOP Minority Whip Roy Blunt Jr. ], perhaps we should turn away a bit from aspects of long term ideological drift that we find funny and towards possibly catastrophic possibilities that could arise from such views.
[ excerpted from Science & Cargo Cults, Global Warming, The Devil, and Democracy ]
Last October, I listened to United States Senator James Inhofe as he described, before an audience of perhaps one thousand people, his belief that Global Warming was a hoax foisted on Americans by a conspiracy to create a satanic one-world order....
In the end, faith in science is just that - faith. Have you ever seen a nuclear blast ? I haven't, so how do we know nuclear weapons exist ? We take that on faith in the same way we assume that there's a scientific reason our microwave ovens heat up our cups of coffee ; how do we know microwave ovens aren't driven by magic, from elaborate incantations laid on microwave ovens at the factory in which they are made ? How do we know there's a factory at all ?
Thousands of years ago, the Greek Skeptics demonstrated that it was impossible to really "prove" anything at all due to the facility of the human mind at generating alternative hypotheses for phenomenon. How do we know that there's a world outside of our doors, really ? Can we prove we're not brains in a vat ? How do we know we're not living in The Matrix ? Or, how can we distinguish magical explanations for phenomenon from scientific explanations ? And, what happens to democracy when magical explanations, mystery cults in essence, supplant materialistic explanations of reality ? What does it mean when powerful politicians and religious leaders say scientific warnings about an alleged disaster of unprecedented scale bearing down on humanity and the Earth is really a satanic plot ?
With sufficient saturation bombing of America by Christian media pop-culture products pushing friendly, cheerful, and glib pseudoscience it's all but inevitable that, sooner or later, people holding such views will pop up running huge government agencies that dispense hundreds of millions of dollars annually in federal funding. In fact, they already have.
In the face of the brusque crudity of one GodTube video short attacking evolution, William Dembski's "Intelligent Design theory" is a Lexus to GodTube's Yugo, but that hardly matters ; images, and human presence, breathe life to the notion, once upon a time thought dispatched by the Enlightenment, that humans should turn to magical, theological explanations for the working of the natural world rather than to reason and logic.
[ continued, from Science & Cargo Cults, Global Warming, The Devil, and Democracy ]
So millions of Americans believe the Earth was created 6,000 years ago, so what ? Does it matter ? Well, both yes and no. Such beliefs aren't any great hindrance to getting along in modern life unless one happens to be a paleontologist, geologist, or perhaps a public school teacher. But the widespread acceptance of such ideas feeds a conspiratorial cultural miasma in which large swaths of Americans feel they are being deceived. It is not unreasonable, given the well documented existence of a huge "black budget" area of federal spending that's not open to democratic scrutiny or even the scrutiny of most of the US Congress, for Americans to assume a certain level of government deception. But skeptical and conspiratorial thinking has polluted American belief in science itself and in what scientists tell us. Americans in the 1950's probably had far greater respect for, and empathy with, scientists and the scientific venture. But over the course of the latter 20th Century many seem to have drifted away from or trust in science. Where do beliefs such as belief in Geocentrism or the notion that Global Warming is an elaborate conspiracy to advance a 'satanic', secular humanist "one world order" come from ?
One answer to that question is that in the intervening decades since the 1950's, Christian fundamentalists who felt threatened by secularism and the Enlightenment itself turned methods of modern PR towards the problem of undermining the ethos of the Enlightenment that, some historians would assert, underlay the foundation of America as a nation. The project has been a startling success too : ideas that once circulated on the fringe of the American far right have now moved into the mainstream such that prominent US senators such as John McCain now court the political endorsement of rising Christian right leaders, such as John Hagee, who posit vast, shadowy, satanic conspiracies of "Illuminati" and "international banking groups" to foist a "one world government" on America through the United Nations.
In the 1950's John Birchers who proposed such ideas mingled, out on the political fringe, with members of the American Nazi Party. In February 2007, an advocate for such crypto-antisemitic conspiracy theory, Pastor John Hagee, delivered a Washington DC keynote address before close to half of the US Congress. Fringe ideas of the 1950's have been mainstreamed, and that is not just a problem for American Democracy simply because the the voting electorate is splitting into opposing camps holding different and clashing explanations of reality but because the rise of fringe, conspiricist ideology now threatens the world itself ; enough Americans, their views amplified by PR disinformation bought with petrochemical interest dollars, believe Global Warming is at base a "satanic" conspiracy that action to confront the problem has been thwarted, possibly for an entire decade later than action might otherwise have been taken. That's the ugly reality for much of the core ideological opposition to action on Global Warming coming from the American evangelical right - Global Warming is seen as a ruse to advance the diabolical plans of the Antichrist.
Early scientists saw their work to unlock the working of nature as glorifying God's creation but now the modern American Christian right, which seems to take a dim view on that outlook, could in the end prevail through advertising and so construct, or "reconstruct" some would say, a world in which Christian wives get consumer warnings on defective blenders not from government consumer product warnings released on TV or from consumer watchdog groups but, rather, directly from God, as voices in their heads.
In his 1976 book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind", Julian Jaynes advanced a highly contentious theory, called "Bicameralism", which "argues that the human brain once assumed a state known as a bicameral mind in which cognitive functions are divided between one part of the brain which appears to be "speaking," and a second part which listens and obeys." When humans believe they "talk to God", how do they know they aren't talking to spirits, other deities, demons, the Devil, or themselves ? How can they rule out schizophrenia, telepathy or, for that matter, secret US government mind control projects some allege to exist ?
If Christians hear, in their heads, warnings about blenders or warnings about the impending apocalypse, to whom or what do they attribute those voices ? Religious authority in Protestantism has always been an issue, but these days it may be growing quite extreme and one question for would-be Christian theocrats is this ; as posed by Talk To Action contributor Jonathan Hutson, Come The Theocracy, Whose Bible Will Rule, and how will sects, cults, movements, tendencies, and religions that now comprise the wider religious right and Christian right come to terms if they manage to successfully vanquish secularism ? What's to prevent a Hobbesian war of all against all ? Whose voice of God is the real, true voice ? With many different religious factions, the end-game in the push for theocracy could look like the current internecine, sectarian battle for Baghdad albeit in a nation armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. Or, the problem might possibly be averted if a fuzzy, sloppy, and ultimately relativistic global ecumenical Christianity came to reign over Earth so that husbands and wives, everywhere, could each talk to God about their consumer product choices and everyone would be right: or themselves, at least.
Does Evolution even deserve the lofty title of a "theory" ? No, argues one GodTube video which tars believing in Evolution as being childish at the level of the expectation that bits of plastic and metal can self-assemble into a complex consumer product. Life is much more complex - obviously, Evolution is absurd. The video isn't even presented as a parody but, rather, as a mini-documentary. "Darwin's Great, Great, Great, Great Grandson" recounts his "proof" of Charles Darwin's original theory; metal and plastic dreck chucked into a pond coalesces, a day later, into a soggy computer monitor.
There's a mystery to a road not taken by the Intelligent Design movement, which appears oblivious to the rise of research into self-emergent systems, a field that was pioneered by Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigogine and has been furthered since in the rise of "Chaos Theory" ; why didn't William Dembski, and other architects of the "Intelligent Design" concept, opt to tie their ideas to recent scientific research on self-emergent systems, work that actually seems to validate ID in a powerful way ? The problem might have been that self-emergence is also consistent with and even supports Evolutionary Theory. In other words, the decision couldt have been tactical, or teleological, if the actual intent was to support Fundamentalist assumptions on Biblical inerrancy. Otherwise, Dembski's path makes little sense, and I expect, sooner or later, to see a Papal statement on how self-emergence reveals the built-in hand of God.
But the Catholic Church, as an institution, has been grappling with modernity longer than has Protestant Christianity and Catholicism, or the Vatican at least, seems content with accommodations to scientific modes of explanation that could be variously described as uneasybegrudging but also flexible and creative. What doesn't bend, breaks goes the saying. American Protestant fundamentalism seems ever more in the spirit of another dictum ; what doesn't bend conquers . or
There's a powerfully New-Age, postmodernist component to the new American fundamentalist spirit as well, and perhaps this is not at all new save to the range of the belief, it's spread, and the intensity with which its held ; prophets, by definition, presume to speak for God with the force of Biblical scripture. That goes with the job of being a prophet, and America has had no lack of prophets. Indeed, prophetic waves have washed over some parts of America so often that one area of New York State came to be defined as "burnt over". Mormons, Shakers and Quakers, Christian Scientists and Scientologists.... the dislocated cultural ferment of American has been fertile ground for prophetic revelation giving birth to new sects and even whole new religions....
And, it's worth remembering, too, that this is not at all a uniquely American phenomenon, that fin-de-siecle Russian culture was permeated with millennial, apocalyptic cultism, and the syncretism of South American culture has given rise to periodic outbreaks of religious revelatory fervor such as described by Euclides Da Cunha, in Os Suertos ( "Rebellion In The Backlands" ), about a 19th Century apocalyptic Brazilian cult that in effect succeeded from the Brazilian nation and was subsequently besieged, in what amounted to a minor war rather than a mere skirmish, closer to the Roman seige of Masada than to the US government siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas but ending worse than the seige of the Branch Davidians, in total destruction of the apocalyptic cult down to the last man, woman, and child.
What is without precedent, in World history as far as we know, is the rise, within a global imperial power, as some would characterize the United States at present, of an irrationalist, or pre-rational, cultic sensibility that disdains the very technological basis that gave rise to American global hegemony in the first place. Never before has a nation such as the US, whose political culture has become besieged by apocalyptic and cultic, a-rational religious forces, been armed with such terrible and even World-ending weaponry. A similar fate might befallen the Roman Empire, but that empire was not equipped with thousands of ICBM's.
Incestuous amplification is propaganda gone awry, PR amok. Many on the American left fancy that leaders of the religious right do not really hold religious beliefs because they are very wealthy, or corrupt, or become disgraced in sex scandals. But, those are perennial temptations of the human condition and, even if such scandals are more common among Evangelical leaders, that does not disprove such leaders' religious beliefs.
A more likely explanation for the rise of the new religious right, as a movement, runs something like this ; business tycoons and other wealthy benefactors who sought to stamp certain ideologies on the American landscape, laissez faire ideology advocating minimal government intrusion on business for example, found religious leaders, perhaps marginally initially on the American political landscape, who already held such ideologies. In other words, American elite funders may not have so much corrupted religious leaders as promoted leaders who held, as a part of their religious views, already advocated business-friendly ideas.
In reality, such an approach is far, far more effective. It advances leaders who, at first anyway, really do believe ; true belief has the force of conviction, a powerful force indeed.
But now, those leaders who have been so advanced, artificially through large infusions of capital, have in turn been promoting for decades now their own views. In other words, leaders of the American religious right who have been promoted to positions of great power and influence may now be less than fully controllable. Of course ; all humans have their own, unique agendas.
The assumption, a very common one on the American left, that the leaders of the religious right do not hold authentic beliefs, the assumption that they are mainly putting on a very cynical act, is a very dangerous one, because it risks a basic misunderstanding of what may, in act, be going on. Straussian manipulation is not such a clear science, and humans can be wildly unpredictable. Does James Dobson, in opposing all recognition of, let alone action on, Global Warming do so on a rational basis ? Does John Hagee lobby for Apocalypse and expanded war in the Middle East simply for personal, venal benefit alone ? Has the Bush Administration packed the federal bureaucracy with Christian conservative ideologues merely as a sop to the religious right ? And, can we afford the complacency of such assumptions, which presume that we're dealing with something that's basically, if mercenary, at least rational ? What if it's not rational ?
So, in conclusion, contemplate this ; there are young, energetic Christian filmmakers, now showcasing their wares on GodTube, who believe that it makes sense for Christians to talk to God about their consumer product choices. In a few years, such young Christian media professionals will be putting out movies and some of those might be very good, a few brilliant even. I might even watch some of those movies, and, on the underlying ideology packed in, I'll be somewhat forewarned. But most American probably won't, and it may not matter in any case ; by then it may well seem fully rational, to many people, to hear God's voice, in their heads, informing them that their blenders are evil.
[blender image, above, courtesy of Rick Geary's Rubber Stamps]
Tagged as: evil, blenders, creationism, evolution, media, culture, science
Bruce Wilson writes for Talk To Action, a blog specializing in faith and politics.
1 comment:
Some interesting ideas... BTW did you know there's a new book out on Jaynes's theory? - "Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness: Julian Jaynes's Bicameral Mind Theory Revisited"
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