Fair Game

It's very fashionable to claim that ideology can be separated from people, and that attacking one doesn't mean attacking the other. This is not only wrong, but a fatally flawed method of thinking.

There is an insidious capitulation occurring among unbelievers who lack the capacity for critical thinking that seeks to soothe the hurt feelings of theocratic zealots, a pitiful and feeble attempt to distance the claimant from the reactions that occur when religion and its practitioners are rightly brought under scrutiny. “Ideology is separate from people,” the claim goes, “and we don't attack all Christians when we attack Christianity.” What off-brand excuse for simple-minded casuistry is this?

This argument, always presented in pictorial meme form because its proponents still aren't capable of holding up their end of an argument without one finger firmly on the caps lock, makes the following (paraphrased) proposition: attacking capitalism is not attacking westerners, attacking nazis is not attacking germans, and attacking religions is not attacking their adherents. To begin with, this argument completely ignores the differences between political and economic practices and religious ideology. Capitalism has no book of doctrine or spiritual figurehead, and “the west” is more than a little difficult to nail down. Do they mean the Dutch, or the kind people of Estonia (I promise, you guys, that statue was dressed like Dr. Frankenfurter when I got there)? No, they mean America, where capitalism may be the general order of the land, but it is not doctrine. No one is killed or made a pariah due to their unwillingness to value money and trade, though they may be viciously mocked as I drive past the farmer's market.

Agrarian culture does not allow for iPhone repair, just so you know.

Similarly, the eight million or so members of the Nazi party at its height in 1945 was a fraction of the roughly 65 million people composing the nation of Germany. The majority of people there saw no necessary connection between their nationality and required affiliation with a national socialist group, and rightly so. Being born in Germany doesn't make one a nazi, any more than being born in a taxi cab makes you a member of the transportation union. Choosing to join the nazi party, however, means that your nationality becomes incidental to the argument. You can be a Swede and a nazi, or an American for that matter, and many were.

You can't tell, but they're wearing Hugo Boss.

Turning to the meat of my argument, the problem that has arisen is this weak-spined, almost ecumenical position that followers of a religion are not to be attacked for their ideology because they are somehow absolved or detached from the horrific consequences visited upon us by their faith. The ideas and doctrines can be attacked, so the argument goes, but it is unfair to include the clergy in that attack because people are only people, or some such neo-hippie bullshit. This position is just a half-hearted secular redressing of the nonsensical “love the sinner, hate the sin” philosophy espoused by the more nauseating evangelists who walk among us, and not a very clever one.

Which is odd, because they usually make so much sense.

To reiterate, plenty of Germans were not affiliated with the nazis, an equally large amount of westerners do not appear to consider themselves capitalists, but no religious person considers themselves separate from their faith. One exception might be an allowance for their angst-ridden dark night of the soul, but that strikes me as the same kind of self-aggrandizing pity play seen in overly-dramatic teenagers. Belief in ideology involves you in same, because without people reading it and attempting to live their lives by the rules set out therein, the bible or Qur'an is another book gathering dust on a forgotten shelf of our collective library.

It's in there, as meaningless as the rest without a person to believe it.

To oppose comes the argument that criticism of any book, Huckleberry Finn as an example, doesn't extend to the people who enjoy reading the book or find value in it. The critique of the literary work is separated from its readers, it is argued, because arguments against the book are not arguments against the people. With the exception of the light fluff we all consume for mindless entertainment, I find two significant problems with this approach.

Aside from the selection of one of Twain's dullest works.

First, we do make judgements about people based on what they read and write. Criticism of whatever softcore porn leads the Times Bestseller list is a direct criticism of the tastes of people buying that book, in this case their literary standards and ability to walk upright without dragging their knuckles too terribly. Reading Mein Kampf doesn't make one a nazi, but if that's all one reads, your friends have the right to question your thinking process. We use literary scope as a metric to base our perception of an individual's intelligence in many cases, and rightly so. Someone who has shelves full of a broad range of titles has a different kind of mind and way of thinking than someone who has one shelf full of Danielle Steel. Pretending otherwise is an exercise in self-deception.

Secondly, the main significant difference between popular fiction and religious texts is that very rarely do people become so enamored with fiction that they endeavor to enforce the content of the text on others. One reasonable exception might be the pitiable Randians of today, who are so taken with Galt's message that their way of thinking and interacting with the world changes fundamentally instead of gradually. But even they do not come to my door in the morning to make sure I've heard the good word, they do not introduce legislation in our nation's capital in the name of Rand, and they do not say I should be killed for disagreeing with them. People who believe in religious texts do all of those things, which is why it is improper to level an equivalent accusation at common popular fiction.

Believe it or not, this has nothing to do with whitewashing fences.

But, for example, it isn't hard to imagine an economist or broker so convinced of the truth of capitalism that they would enact its principles on everyone, regardless of compassion or consequence. In that instance, is there anyone who would argue that in criticizing capitalism you are not criticizing the person carrying out the doctrine? Without people to enact these ridiculous and archaic ideas brought to us by religion, they would be harmless relics of our ancestors and soon forgotten, just like Beanie and Cecil. This is where these conciliatory apologists fail in their argument, by imagining that the holy texts have some kind of agency on their own. They think that faith in a religion doesn't mean you're affiliated with that group, or somehow that you do not share in the responsibility for the damage done to our society. Instead, argument against a faith necessarily includes arguments against the followers, and rightly so. To pretend otherwise merely extends the time the rest of us are forced to let these addle-minded fakers and the willfully ignorant dictate our lives.

Detrimentally Open-Minded

While it is foolish to dismiss any hypothesis out-of-hand, it is equally foolish to continue believing a thing to be true after it has been shown to be demonstrably false.

The greatest advancements in human understanding of our objective world are perhaps always prefaced by the dismissal and ostracization of the few people to catch on first. Consider the skeptical treatment of Pasteur or Jenner, and try to imagine for yourself how outlandish and impossible it must have sounded, however fascinated your intellect may have been. Consider the public shaming, charges of heresy, and punishments inflicted upon Galileo by the church for writing a book on what he observed through his telescope. It was detrimental in the extreme for a scientist of that era to publicly proclaim things that we teach without a second thought to our very young children today, and it should not be forgotten that the church did not publicly admit Galileo to be correct until 1992. This attitude varies from one pope to another, it would seem, as the most sinister pope in recent memory didn't accept this concession from the church and instead sided with church leaders of Galileo's time. Pope Quitter Nazi Benedict invoked the position that the church was just in punishing Galileo because of the church's adherence to reason, ethics, and social consequences, and revision of the verdict could only be politically motivated, a statement made while he was still a Cardinal responsible for the concealment of unconscionable rape and torture of 200 deaf children to protect the reputation of the church.

It's entirely possible PR was never his strong suit.

I am not above acknowledging how ridiculous someone claiming knowledge of a round Earth would have sounded to the general public pre-Pythagoras or, if you prefer, before the time of Augustus of Hippo. The only physical evidence in favor that could be provided was the mysterious way a ship's mast appeared on the horizon before its hull did, and the spherical shadow which fell on the moon during an eclipse. It would have been the ravings of a madman, an ill-founded conclusion absolutely contrary to what were the best explanations for the natural world that were available to us. Except those ravings actually were the better explanation, they simply sounded so contrary to traditional common knowledge and were inflammatory to church doctrine (admittedly not difficult to accomplish), making them something of a social poison.

Not pictured: logic or reason.

The upshot of all this is that there are many hypotheses advanced by our peers that sound laughably simple-minded and deserving of our scorn. While the history of scientific advancement is nothing if not littered with pipe dreams and crazy ideas or explanations for things, the fact remains that a handful of those insane propositions happened to be true. We take combustion reactions completely for granted, but what did the first layperson think when Joseph Priestley explained and demonstrated that oxygen made things burn, not phlogiston? There is undoubtably some idea being knocked around right now that couldn't sound more disconnected or feverish which may prove to have a kernel of understanding beyond what we now collectively possess. The benefit of our current method of scientific discipline allows for these outliers to become separated from and raised above their undeserving contemporaries in order to become well-understood accepted knowledge, rather than killing or making outcasts of their proponents, provided they fulfill the dirt simple requirements of the scientific method.

Not everyone makes it through the process.

Unfortunately, an unpleasant counterpart to our powerful drive to discover more about the world around us is the stubborn insistence on holding on to antiquated ideas after they have been proven false because of a personal affinity for them based on comfort or, even worse, routine. Every specific point illustrated in holy texts and claimed as factual has been dismantled in short order by honest investigation, in many instances by scientists and historians who claim a religious faith. Artifacts, events, and locations have, time and again, completely escaped discovery or been demonstrated to be non-existent by highly-trained investigative professionals who were specifically looking for evidence. This fact has not escaped the religious community entirely, but it has done nothing to convince them that their ideas are incorrect and better off discarded. Mystical shrouds, forty years spent wandering the desert, settlements and figures, all debunked in no uncertain terms.

It was a beach towel the whole time.

This is fine for the false biblical declarations of physical things which would leave evidence we could locate, but a more difficult argument takes place concerning the phenomenally silly tale told by believers concerning what awaits us upon our death. Specifically, some people with belief structures ranging from devoutly religious to limp-wristed spiritualism claim that they have died and witnessed another aspect of consciousness disconnected from the experiences common to the rest of us. Their claims vary, from tunnels to dreamlike hallucinations to visions of the biblical ideas of the afterlife, but they are all exactly alike in the sense that there is no proof whatsoever. There is a general consistency of experience from person to person, but there is no sufficient sample group of people accurately reporting any information they could not have gleaned normally, and there is concrete evidence that these experiences are due to stresses on the brain. This is proven by the documented ability to induce an identical response when subjecting a pilot to high gravitational forces in a centrifuge, such as the one formerly operated by the aerospace physiology department of the now-private Brooks Air Force base in San Antonio, Texas. The only difference found is the spiritual significance some people choose to attach because they underwent the experience during a medical emergency instead of inside a training facility. These reports are thematically familiar to all of us, and I argue they are just another extension of the innate fear we have of no longer existing. I completely understand why this trepidation results in reassuring and comforting imagery regarding our disposition, but that imagery offers no benefit over the understanding that our terror is a direct result of being the only species capable of contemplating its own death when not under immediate threat.

Not like this adorable little fucker. Look at him. Contemplate your demise, you bastard!

People should look on reports of near-death experiences as only what they are, the cacophonous chemical experiences of a panicked and terrified brain related through a filter of the storyteller's mythos and paper-thin understanding. The disgusting practice of inculcating religious ideology with an entirely threat-based reward and punishment system in children and then, if something unthinkable should happen to one of them and they regurgitate this nonsense to their parents and doctors upon reviving, trotting them out on a national stage as some kind of ghoulish poster child for the harp-and-halo afterlife story is perhaps the most shameful thing a person can do to a child without being ordained. The phenomenon is predictable and consistently reproducible, but that fact along with the dearth of scientific and biological information provided by the resulting studies have done nothing to even slightly quiet the shrill ignorance of the believers. One more thing bears mentioning, as the arrogance of claiming scientific proof while not even beginning to understand high school biology infuriates me to no end: if your brain is dead, the hippocampus and associated sections of the brain which are associated with the formation and retention of memories have no function. No function, as I don't have to explain to you, means no memory formation and no ability to report back to us what color the angel's hair was or what kind of pony your dead relative was riding through a cloud.

Or whomever they should happen to see.

Open-mindedness is a term used to describe a willingness to listen to and try to understand ideas one had not been previously exposed to, but the meaning of this term has been skewed through misuse in two ways I wish to mention. Firstly, it is entirely common now to hear people who argue from the secular or skeptical side of the aisle labeled as not being open-minded, by which the accuser means the individual is convinced against the proposition and will not accept the points made in favor. This is a misuse because the appropriate word is the one I have chosen: convinced. The skeptic had an open mind to the idea, originally, but the subsequent investigation and critical thinking caused them to become convinced it was false. For example, it is possible that a video recording showing an erratically-moving light in the sky could be documentation of an alien spacecraft, but evidence presented in the form of weather reports, flight histories, and technical understanding of the field of view captured by the lens is convincing proof that the video documented a perfectly normal passenger aircraft. Similarly, lack of religious faith (or even soft spirituality) earns one the accusation. In this instance, it is not the evidence against that convinces the non-believer, it is the deafening vacuum of evidence in favor.

The second misuse is when open-mindedness is used as some kind of defense by people who cling to baseless methods of thinking. The proof has been presented, the debate has been won. However, no matter how much argument is leveled against them, they contort through amazing mental acrobatics to explain why they still believe. “At least I'm open-minded,” they say, despite the fact that they have methodically refused to accept new information precisely because it threatens their favored view. This is not intellectual honesty, nor is it admirable persistence. It's wasted energy and, when allowed to influence society, an incredible waste of resources. When school districts, for example, allow the waste of money, time, and human talent and potential by allowing children to be lied to during class time in the name of open-minded fairness the component of examining new ideas concerning critical thinking is intentionally abandoned. When people with legitimate illness – or, more commonly, those surrounding them – turn to faith healers and quack remedies, the shield of open-mindedness is thrown up to deflect the accusations of negligent care. No amount of belief or faith will enable a crystal to cure cancer. This kind of behavior is more accurately described as being mindlessly stubborn, or if one is less inclined to generosity as willful ignorance.