I‘d like to submit a possible candidate as explanation, how it is that in this age of impossible to miss scientific and social progress that such a great majority of Americans cling tenaciously to belief structures that are without a first element of objective evidence, or that even make sense, that hearken rearwards hundreds of years. My hypothesis is that it goes directly to the extraordinarily elevated anxiety over the impermanence of social location and economic insecurity that has increasingly been plaguing the country since the first Reagan inaugural.

Life has always been a fickle experience; since we roamed the sub-Saharan savanna through today. Religion has been both a means to explain the otherwise incomprehensible and a pled bargaining with a god or gods for some element of security against the fickleness of fate. Today we no longer fear the mysteries of death delivered silently, what we now know as disease, or loudly via predation from wild beasts.

Today, however, we fear loss of income and of identity through job dispossession due to technologies we simply cannot keep up with, understand, and hopefully master, or by decisions made in corporate back rooms that move the job overseas.

For a very brief period in our history, from the late 40s through most of the 70s, membership in a union and/or employment with a loyal company provided a sort of financial and emotional safe room. Today that is all gone. Pervasive insecurity has replaced what once sustained us, and now reigns over our conscious and subconscious.

On both the individual and the social level, we just cannot survive well in such an emotional and psychological vacuum. We need to be able to understand, or least feel that some notion of understanding can be grasped. That’s part of what defines “human,” what separates us from all other lower species. Give me the explanation and I’ll find a way to solve, or adjust to, make deals with something that perhaps will work as a salve to the problem.

It doesn’t have to be rational. All it has to do is work. Religion works. The conundrum, of course, is that religion is a call to something just short of that which defines us as superior to every creature below us on the ladder; we’re superior because, and only because, we have the capacity for genuine, independent, rational thought. But if we refuse to use that capacity . . . for “genuine, independent, rational thought . . .?”  Are we indeed “superior”? And, to what extent?

Some to many argue that the net of religion — and never, ever forget that all non-Christian religions are also religions — is, as it has been, good. But is, or has been, the product of religion good? Does society, or the greater human condition, improve as a consequence of religion? Or is the good weighed on a scale that balances it with the bad? My request here is that, before anyone rushes to judge the balance as being overall to the good, the Crusades, the treatment of North, Central, and South American native Americans by the European explorers, missionaries and settlers, the intolerance of the Puritans (once settled in North America), the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans by Christian American citizens, the effort by German Protestants to eliminate all traces of the Jews, and that of today’s Moslem extremists be studiously brought into the matrix.

I won’t recommend a position on a spot along the good-bad continuum, only ask that the span of the question be honestly considered.

To this end, one additional observation seems to leap so to the front that it never fails to perplex me that so few seem to brought it into the discussion.

“Prima facie” is a Latin phrase referring to the status of some evidence as composing an actionable element because it appears initially to be so on its face. Not merely a little, overwhelmingly a lot, the religious affiliation the individual reflect that of one’s grandparents and parents and social group; not the specific denomination perhaps, Catholic, Lutheran, whatever, but Christian, or Jew, or Moslem, Hindu, etc. In other words, the statistical probability one will identify him- or herself as belonging to a particular umbrella religion are exponentially tied to the family and community to which they were born into. In yet additional other words, the prima facie evidence suggests that very little, if any, thought or research over which faith they’d associate themselves with was undertaken prior to concluding the decision. In other words, it was a thought-less enterprise; something no more consequent than I’m that because my mom and dad were.

That one might claim to be a Christian, or a Jew, or a Moslem, or almost any other, in essence, depends not at all on the particular merits behind a religious selection, from among equally investigated alternatives, but almost exclusively on the capricious accident of birth. That, in and of itself, indicts claims concerning the inherent and spiritual merits of the faith as being virtually and absolutely specious; silly; foolish.

Cursory review of the calamities America and the world have suffered the past seven years strongly argues on behalf of adopting, to the extent it is individually possible, greater courage for integrity of thought and judgment. When you take a stand for your faith, do not pretend that you’re doing so because you put more thought into it than does the smallest bird choosing a branch to land on. The evidence says you didn’t. Evidence says that zero thought was involved and that you know next to nothing about options that, odds are, are equal to or better than what you identify yourself with. Do not contest with this proposal, because, the truth is, you do not know, you’ve never given it the first hard, challenging thought — not even as much as that little bird.

And in some irrational effort to condemn the messenger because neither the logic nor truth of the message can be condemned, do not seek salvation via some weak presumption that I am anti-Christian. Like Pilot, “I find no fault in the man.” Unlike Pilot, I find everything to admire in the man. Nope, it’s the phony, unthinking hypocrites I fault, the phony, non-thinkers who are all too eager to swallow and follow, the unthinking swallowers and followers who have led us to the sorry state in which we now find ourselves. And the cost has been so damned high.

Whether it’s to send young men and women to kill and mutilate, to be killed and mutilated, or to eviscerate the common weal, thus obviating precious treasure from being put to more productive uses, stand up, declare some independence of thought, show some spine, demand proof of the necessity. You’ve a brain. Use it!

 1  |  2