Lamenting the lure of the madness (doctrine, preaching, bible, mission)
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I had a phone conversation Thanksgiving morning with my fundagelical brother that was deeply disturbing to me. This brother is #2 of 4 boys (#1 is no longer living, I am #4) and he has always been a little bit given to gullibility ... the sort of person who would listen to Art Bell's "Coast to Coast AM" radio broadcast about aliens among us, etc., half for entertainment and half believing it. So I am not putting this entirely at the feet of the cultish side of the religion I escaped from some thirty years ago, but ... yeah mostly I am.
Funny -- I used to listen to Art Bell when I was in my teens. I was fascinated by certain topics -- and I still am to some extent -- but most of the guests on that show are loony.
Anyway, I lost a cousin to this sort of thing you're talking about. He became one of those survivalists, believing that the End Times were right around the corner -- whatever "End Times" meant. He would latch on to every possible end of the world scenario he could get his hands on. Whether it was Nancy Lieder and her ridiculous Nibiru/Planet X theory (I really hate that woman because she told all of her followers to kill their pets because there wouldn't be enough food after the big disaster to feed them -- and many many people simply murdered their pets ...)
Or it was the Mayan 2012 end of the word scenarior. Or Reverend Idiot Camping who claimed Jesus was coming back one day in October. Every brushfire conflict was the "beginnng of the end" and blah blah blah. Couldn't talk to him about anything normal. Ever. At all. You could start a conversation about the mating habits of the Botswana Spotted Fruit Bat and, guaranteed, within 30 seconds, he'll be warning us about the end of the world and how we needed to build a bomb shelter and all the rest of that crap.
Not that I would particularly WANT to survive an end-of-the-world apocalyptic scenario. What's the point of surviving just to live another 20 or less years of starvation and extraordinary hardship and THEN die. Without a functioning society, there would be no access to health care or antibiotics or anything else, so life expentency would be horrendously low after such an event. I used to make that argument with him quite often and he'd launch into some equally pointless tirade about how it would be our responsibility to repopulate the world .... I just never gave a damn, to be honest.
But at least it wasn't religious fundamentalism -- though it manifested in more or less the same way.
Once these crazy ideas get into people's heads, they become obsessed with them. This cousin eventually died of something or another. I don't remember what it was that killed him since he and I hadn't spoken for some 15 or more years.
As both religious and political conservatism have become more and more fascistic, it is hard to be sure exactly how much of that is independent co-evolution and how much is intertwined.
One can step back and examine earlier, more fundamental attitudes that enabled this intertwining. Authoritarian religion has always functioned in a reactionary / exclusionary mode. If for example you don't want your people fornicating, you would not look at the reasons people actually do it and look for rational responses that would tend to actually counter it; you just become horrified, enter a state of absolutism and moral panic, and emphasize the "yuck factor", shame and gaslight those who fail to toe the line as much as possible, deploy various forms of shunning to make them miserable, etc. This doesn't help people be sexually responsible; it helps them to be sexually repressed. Ironically, it produces more, rather than less, fornication (although it's driven even deeper underground so that they can tell themselves that they accomplished something).
The willingness to use such self-defeating, unsustainable and ultimately arrogant, dishonest and hypocritical tactics, sets the groundwork for the morally bereft religio-political posturing of today.
They're basically the same thing by now. Maybe they always were.
Take Christianity down to its simplest concepts.
"Jesus Christ is here to save us from our sins so we don't burn in Hell for all eternity." OK - so then, the default condition of man is to burn in Hell for all eternity. Our default condition is supposedly bad out of the womb that we supposedly need saving from it.
There's no consideration of the totality of one's life, or even how a person might have reformed over the years. A truly loving, exceptional person, who just happened to never hear of the Gospel, is going to burn in Hell for all eternity. A Hitler type, should they earnestly repent on their deathbed, goes to Heaven for all eternity.
They're basically the same thing by now. Maybe they always were.
Take Christianity down to its simplest concepts.
"Jesus Christ is here to save us from our sins so we don't burn in Hell for all eternity." OK - so then, the default condition of man is to burn in Hell for all eternity. Our default condition is supposedly bad out of the womb that we supposedly need saving from it.
There's no consideration of the totality of one's life, or even how a person might have reformed over the years. A truly loving, exceptional person, who just happened to never hear of the Gospel, is going to burn in Hell for all eternity. A Hitler type, should they earnestly repent on their deathbed, goes to Heaven for all eternity.
Does any of this sound reasonable?
NONE of it ever sounded reasonable and it still astounds me that it has endured for over two millennia and counting.
They're basically the same thing by now. Maybe they always were.
To an extent perhaps, but I distinctly remember being taught in my childhood in evangelicalism that political involvements were beneath us and a mistake. That it was a manifestation of the "social gospel", the notion that anything but believing in Jesus is helpful to the human condition.
Back then it was basically unthinkable that Christians (us) would be involved in politics in any way.
On the other hand as far back as the 1950s, Billy Graham was cavorting with Presidents, giving them "spiritual" advice ... a form of political influence but not directly running for office or that sort of thing. Since the early 1960s there were groups who dreamt of a more theocratic state, even one that would toss out English common law in favor of Mosaic law. But they were fringe.
I regard Jerry Falwell as the guy who changed the collective mind of evangelicalism with his Moral Majority in the 1970s. It was definitely a sea change.
I think you are right in this sense: the seeds of what we have today were always present. Fundamentalist Christians were always conservative, even if not always clear on what exactly they were trying to conserve, and not nearly so full of themselves as they have since become. And they were always fascistic in their thinking, and therefore always were dangerous.
NONE of it ever sounded reasonable and it still astounds me that it has endured for over two millennia and counting.
It seems to depend on the marketing. Looking back, any religion no matter how whacky, seems to be able to sell its' claims and myths to the Believers, who just seem to accept it on the belief that somehow they are earning some brownie points with the powers that control their lives, and they crazier the belief, they more points it earns, whether it's Marduk tearing Tiamat in half or Narasimhan ripping up a demon, or Isis reassembling her husband from a kit of parts or the Minotaur being engendered by an ingenious if improbable method[ and from Buddha turning himself int a score of clones to Jesus feeding 5000 (to say nothing of the women and children - Matthew) from his disciples' take - away fish dinner.
One feels that the Believers will cherry - pick credibility from 'it is not what Actually happened' to it didn't happen but is 'metaphorically true', whatever that means. But any excuse will do, or none and 'Ya gotta have a little Faith'. No - you gotta have a little logical reasoning.
There again, there is this equally ancient idea that we can do a deal with the powers that roll us about on the earth by bribing them with sacrifice and grovelling.
In the Bronze age, people thought they could bribe the weather, fate and the gods by chucking valuables into the pond. And the Maya seemed to have the same idea, too. Curious coincidence. That has to be the Universal messaging of the Actual Realo Trulo Cosmic Mind, hey?
I have a theory....... that the reason people feel so relieved and cleansed after they have come out of church with the feeling of finally having done the washing up is because they have sacrificed a couple of hours they'd rather have spent doing anything else....which makes me wonder that Churches trying to make Church more popular by turning it into a rock concert is rather missing the point. Casanova (or so I remember it was claimed) was put on trial, not for profligacy, but for going to church just to listen to the music.
"Dammit, you blasphemer - you're not supposed to enjoy it!!"
My father was a gainfully employed chemist until he almost drowned while swimming in the ocean in the late 1980's. Then he decided to become a pastor...which flushed the quality of life of his whole family right down the crapper. He also flushed my mother's mental health (and mine) right down the crapper. He never really cared. It's what God wanted. Who are we to question God?
So I can relate to the OP. It is interesting how smart/educated people are not immune to believing crazy stuff. Even chemists and electrical engineers.
Unfortunately, The Onion has really gone downhill since 2016. Trump kind of made them obsolete. The Onion couldn't do any better than the orange man himself.
Maybe someone else will pick up the baton. Anyone know of any other satire websites?
It is interesting how smart/educated people are not immune to believing crazy stuff. Even chemists and electrical engineers.
I don't deny the profound sway that authoritarian religion can hold over some folks. My brother's wife is actually Jewish. Orthodox mother, and her Dad was a non-practicing cultural Jew. She left her faith to become an evangelical Christian through the influence of on-campus Messianic Jews (Jews for Jesus, I think). I think she was looking for something to tether herself to, as her mother had died young. That's a common theme for evangelical converts of any stripe really; preaching salvation to the lost works best with people who actually FEEL lost and adrift. It was how my oldest brother felt before he converted. It's almost a panicked need to be told what is true, in very black-and-white terms, and then holding fast to that not only becomes your identity but your lifeline. Your Dad probably was frightened by his brush with death and becoming a preacher was his way of coping, and unfortunately he dragged your mom and you along.
At any rate and for some crazy reason my SIL is still head over heels for my bro after all these years ... but I had to laugh the first time my wife met my brother's wife because she was shocked that his wife is Jewish and yet here she is, a fundie, and completely absorbed into the fundamentalist subculture too. My wife thought, "oh, this will be an interesting person to get to know", but she just turned out to be this dull little "church lady". My wife still struggles with the cognitive dissonance of it all, lol. She had literally never met such a naive, parochial person in a Jewish body.
Come to think of it, that sort of dull, pinched, aggressively incurious affect is really common with these folks. I still get alumni propaganda from refugees of my now-defunct alma mater, Grand Rapids School of Bible and Music, and it's really sad. I remember them in their prime -- fresh-faced, idealistic, ready to Change The World for Jesus, and now they are the most plodding, dour people you can imagine, as if the ideology sucked all the personality and curiosity and optimism out of them and left them kind of like pod people. They are just "holding on until the end", suffering for Jesus, enduring a world they don't really belong in, to hear them tell it. Every hope, dream and aspiration displaced into their imagined afterlife. The only mercy for them is that when they die they will never realize it was all BS and will not have to regret their life choices. It would probably be not only futile, but a disservice, to try to talk sense to people like that.
I probably escaped the belief-system just in the nick of time (my mid 30s).
Unfortunately, The Onion has really gone downhill since 2016. Trump kind of made them obsolete. The Onion couldn't do any better than the orange man himself.
Maybe someone else will pick up the baton. Anyone know of any other satire websites?
Wikipedia says: "The Babylon Bee is a conservative Christian news satire website that publishes satirical articles on topics including religion, politics, current events, and public figures. It has been referred to as a Christian or conservative version of The Onion."
Getting out at 30 years old was in the nick of time, Mordant. Although questions started forming around 25 years old over here, the real push to expel the after-effects of my family's belief in God and Catholicism was at 30 years old after the birth of my daughter. While strangers get the most credit for instigating this expulsion, their statements that caused me to disbelieve have no bearing on their religious faith. So it is understandable that non-believers wonder why STEM majors continue to believe. The friends I have made after these changes are more reasonable regarding their faith - God or the church is not the third person in the relationship. They care about their relationship with me and are unconcerned about my relationship with God because that is regarded as my responsibility to develop.
Science deals with causes and effects so it requires a bit of investigating and then testing to see if the relationships hold in the future or other situations. The natural world has no choice but to do its natural thing. Humans, on the other hand, are often seen as having a choice. While it is easy to think that a scientist should only rely on what they can see, we know very well that our relationships are affected by what's going on in the brain - something we don't have access to. If there is a lack of time to investigate, then it is easier to believe in the idea that humans have a choice regardless of what happened in the past, but the past formed the thoughts of today. If a scientist can ignore what happened in the past or what is currently in the mind, then it is not surprising that belief in God or religion is a possibility.
In my family, there was no time spent investigating human behavior. There was no time to check the reliability or validity of one's conclusions. My family worked too much (I was the first person to graduate from college). The easiest thing to believe in was that, for the most part, people know right and wrong. Conveniently, when a person does wrong, they understand their reasons for making their choice. But when another does wrong, they can't comprehend it.
The lure here was saving their time. Just do as I say, do as God's says, do as the Catholic church says, and you'll be fine. Here, read this book and you'll be fine. I know the OP is not asking for deus ex machina and I certainly don't have one. Spending time investigating my claims and conclusions took a lot of time and feels the opposite of a fast solution, but it has led to a different goal which is to learn something so that I can understand. This is different than what I did in the past which is to learn about something to teach or "help" others. This change has allowed me to give people time which was an important goal after the birth of my daughter.
If there has been a deus ex machina in my life, then it has been the idea of having no regrets for my interactions, but at the same time, not allowing others to ignore my wants and needs. Sometimes, people regret interacting with me. LOL. It is not a true "fix" because it has taken at least 2 decades to develop and who really knows what other changes I may make.
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... that the reason people feel so relieved and cleansed after they have come out of church with the feeling of finally having done the washing up is because they have sacrificed a couple of hours they'd rather have spent doing anything else....which makes me wonder that Churches trying to make Church more popular by turning it into a rock concert is rather missing the point. Casanova (or so I remember it was claimed) was put on trial, not for profligacy, but for going to church just to listen to the music. 
