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Faith = Illness: Why I’ve Had It With Religious Tolerance by Douglas Rushkoff, author of the
Testament comic books. The article is an excerpt from the book
Everything You Know About God Is Wrong.
Just look at the numbers. A Fox News poll (no doubt inflating these figures) claims that 92 percent of Americans say they believe in God, 85 percent believe in heaven, and 71 percent believe in the devil. (That's right—the guy with horns and a tail who presides over hell. The DeNiro character in Angel Heart, Pacino in The Devil's Advocate, and the one who tricks people into signing contracts on The Twilight Zone.) Given Fox News' accuracy, we can cut these numbers in half yet still be confronted with a deeply frightening prospect: Half the people amongst whom we walk and work everyday believe some really fucked-up shit. They've taken the metaphors of the Bible or Dante's Inferno and gone ahead and decided that these images and allegories are real.
What he's saying is...
That's because, for the Torah's first hearers (Torah is the first five books of the Bible), all those jokes really were jokes. They understood that Jacob's sons weren't really the fathers of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, but parodies—racist parodies, at that—of the qualities that had come to be associated with each of these existing groups. They understood that the "plagues" against Egypt were literary desecrations of the Egyptian gods. (Blood desecrates the Nile, which was a god. Locusts desecrate the corn, a god, and so on.)
That the Bible could be understood metaphorically helped people relate to its "God" metaphorically, as well. It's not that God is some character who really exists but, rather, a way of relating the events in the world as they unfold. No one can grasp this, however, if they're stuck believing.
Mmm... Metaphor. And Analogy, too!
It's analogous to the story of America, in fact, where a bunch of people leave religious oppression in order to write a Constitution as an evolutionary document—something that, instead of being believed in forever, is understood to be an ongoing process.
Sorry. I'll get off the religion kick soon. But when the meme surfaces you have to ride the walrus... or something like that.
9 comments:
For the record, this offended me.
Yes, I'm aware I have a thin skin (see my most recent post).
Thankfully, this is Repeated Expletives, a place where it's a-o-k to express challenging and potentially offensive thoughts. I wouldn't change that if I could.
Luckily, our friendship goes way back. It also doesn't hurt that the things that offended me weren't so much your words, but those you were quoting. So I won't hold it against you.
So I'm gonna quick express what my offense was at, and then be done with it.
And for the record, you DON'T owe me an apology. You have an opinion, you expressed it. That's a good thing. Hell, even if it were your words, I wouldn't hold it against you. This is Repeated Expletives after all. A dude can say what he fuckin' wants here.
Here's what pushes my god-damned buttons:
How incredibly hypocritical that this guy bemoans the manipulative polling practices of Fox News, and then immediately follows it with a fallacious and manipulative argument of his own.
I dare say I'm not the only person on this earth who identifies themselves as Christian, yet is smart enough to know there's metaphor and allegory in the bible!
Yet this article says I believe in "some really fucked up shit"!
71 percent of the people stupid enough to take part in polls on fox news may believe in the Devil. But I bet you that 10 percent or less believe in the personified, shows-up-and-makes-you-sign-a-contract version that this guy was poking holes in.
If assholes like this fella ever actually talked to a Christian about ideology in a non-condescending way, he'd know that.
In fact, no doubt he does know it. He was setting up a Straw Man.
He knows most people don't think the Devil looks like Pacino and hands out golden fiddles. That God isn't some personified force who looks like George Burns or Morgan Freeman. But by claiming they do, it gave him a flimsy target he could kick in the nuts to make himself look cool.
And yes, I understand the temptation to shut your mind, or be condescending when the "opposition" is also condescending or, worse, getting preachy and irrational. But it doesn't help.
Jake, I'd imagine with your O.T.O. experience, you're familiar with the concept of a Mystery Cult, yes?
That's what early Christianity was. Jesus spoke in parables for a reason. But even in Christ's day, only the inner circle was taught the meaning of those metaphors.
Now I can't speak to how (and how well) the "first hearers" of the Torah were instructed, but I imagine that even in the early days, a good deal of the laymen of the Jewish Faith were unaware of the meanings of the metaphors they were presented with.
That's no slight to them. I've read a lot of mythology and the old testament, and yet I never caught the bit about the Plagues being a metaphor for the saying the Jewish God pisses on the Egyptian Gods. I'd just figured it was a harsh couple a years in Egypt, and the Jews had claimed credit for it.
That, and it was cold-blooded freaky-shit I could say to a mother-fucker before I popped a cap in his ass. :)
So, while I'll agree with the guys point that most (all?) Christians, Jews, and Muslims don't really know the true meaning behind the words of their holy books...
...I gotta say that Douglas Rushkoff is a bigoted manipulative asshole. Or at least he sounds like one in the part you quoted.
There, I'm done with my rant, and feelin' much better now. I hope I didn't offend anyone with my own one-sided and manipulative diatribe.
Thank you for sharing your (and his) thoughts.
p.s.: Walrus riding is fun. Goo-goo-ga-joob.
With apologies in advance to r_b_b, cause this is only going to enhance the insult...
I maintain that a majority of Christians aren't. Not really.
Certainly the "non-practicing" folk. In my humble, these people don't muchly care who's behind the curtain. Most of the authorities they hear talking about it say it's God/Jesus (in America), and they're happy to nod and smile. (Or cower and kowtow, as the case may be.)
(Not to say r_b_b is one of these types: he falls into another camp, but I'm trying to be brief.)
I think if you sat these people down and ran them through a proper path explaining that it's okay to let go of their religion, they would. Perhaps Dawkin's God Delusion would suffice. I wouldn't know: I haven't read it. Don't need to.
...At least, I hope most people don't really believe it, cause otherwise my faith in reason is flawed. So to speak.
As I've said elsewhere, there is no modern evidence in support of Christianity. There is only the social support for it. It is very, very hard to go against the beliefs of one's peers.
Hell, it took me about a decade to fully embrace it.
I survive on the hope that things will improve. The number of people willing to openly support their atheism is growing.
What? Me, get offended? Naw, that was like hours ago. I get riled up, but it goes in stages.
Having now taken a brief side-trip to What Silence land, I suspect that I did not make my point clear here. Since he misinterpreted, I'm fearful Jake might have too.
I have no problem with Jake. I'm enjoying this ongoing blogversation, and hope Jake continues to post things like this - or more specifically like his post that pretended to be about The Golden Compass. That one was killer.
My objections (and the offense) have to do with the way Douglas Rushkoff presented his points. He was being a slippery bastard - carefully picking his words to make the opposing viewpoint look spurious.
For some reason, straw man arguments and ad hominem attacks just push my buttons. Douglas Rushkoff did both in back-to-back sentences. That set me off.
If you go read the whole article, he says some other fallacious things.
For example:
35 percent of Americans say they are "born again"—a particularly modern phenomenon that came only after the charlatan rabble-rousers during the Great Depression
Despite his general thesis that religion is an ancient concept that should be left in the past, he then switches to calling born-again-ism something "modern" so that he can get in a couple of cheap (ad hominem) shots at prohibition-era hysteria.
Yet that "born again" concept is exactly what John the Baptist did in the river. Wash away your sins so you can start over again.
It's not a new idea, just one that fell out of popularity in the middle ages because the damning the sinners was in vogue.
The level of thought / research Douglas Rushkoff put into this topic suggests that he'd likely know that basic fact, but he intentionally misrepresents it.
That intentional lie not only pisses me off, it casts shadows on his other, seemingly less duplicitous points.
The truly sad thing is that I agree with the germ of his central thesis (that most non-athiests take Faith-based shortcuts that prevent them from ever understanding the things they claim to believe) yet I feel he undermines that very position with the method of his arguments.
As far as the concept that "organized religion has largely done more harm than good" - while my anecdotal take on things largely supports that, we can't say for certain because we have no way of knowing exaclty how different the world would be sans organized religion.
It may be a utopia free of war, as John Lennon sang it. We'd have no Crusades, no Inquisition, no Al Queda, no bombing of abortion clinics. I'd happily vote for that.
It may also be barbaric chaos or spiritless oppression. One can hardly say that atrocities did not exist in syncretic/pantheistic Rome, fascistic Nazi germany, or under godless Communism. The evidence would seem to suggest that cruelty, bigotry and selfishness are a guaranteed part of human society, regardless of the presence or lack of any particular belief system.
In short, it's not Faith we need to get rid of, it's Nationalism and Xenophobia that are the enemy.
Undermining faith to eliminate suffering is kind of like outlawing birthday cake in the pursuit of immortality.
Sorry about the birthday cake thing.
Rather idiotic that I spend 24 hours venting about someone's straw men and manipulation, only to end with a ridiculous analogy of my own.
(Apparantly your riled-up stage has resurged.) :)
I haven't read the article, and don't plan to: it's blocked from work and I don't have enough interest to open it up from home. It would cut into my Oblivion time! ...So my only knowledge of the article is what you're posting here. Thus:
"organized religion has largely done more harm than good"
Whoa, whoa. I've gotta disagree with his assertion, there. As I've said before and will keep saying, religion is by and large a natural part of human behavior. Without organized religion, I doubt we would be doing much more than picking berries and hunting the occasional elk. At the VERY least, science is a product of organized religion! Sheesh!
My beef is that the time for organized religion is at its end. Served its purpose. Needs to be handed its hat and shown the door. Expired. Taken behind the shed and roughed up. It needs to take a long walk off a short pier.
...okay, I'm running out of analogies.
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