A recent post and its comments, A Book and A Belief, got me thinking again about the voraciousness of my secular evangelism. As I say in a comment on the post, I believe everything I say on my blog and it’s stuff I feel absolutely passionate about, but I don’t like the person it presents on here. The passionate secular evangelist I present to the world is a jerk. Which is why I resolved recently to work, both online in in real life, to be more positive and less critical. More accepting.
Of course because I’m an obsessive jerkwad I’ve backslid pretty bad. So, the only way I think I’m going to be able to do this is if I go cold-turkey. Just totally stop discussing religion on here. Completely change the focus on my blog and avoid issues of religion.
It’s going to be nearly impossible, but probably easier than if I try to post neutrally or even positive religion posts. Better nothing at all rather than things that will make it easy for me to justify sarcasm, sardonic and ironic comments, then full-fledged disgust and negativity. I’ll probably make one final posting of thoughts and opinions and make it a “page” on the blog that will just stay there for anyone interested.
But boy is it going to be tough. James Randi is on the latest Penn Radio Show. He focuses his education and debunking on psychics. He states how people don’t just want to believe, but need to believe, which prompted Penn to ask if these people need to believe in psychics then isn’t trying to reveal psychics for the cons they are are convince people not to believe in psychics…a bad thing? Randi explains, if you saw someone get hit by a car, would you just walk away? No, you’d go and help the person out of the street into safety, give them comfort, and help however you can. When he was younger, as a carny and a magician, he encountered self-professed psychics all the time con’ing people left and right. And out of compassion for the people that these psychics have bilked and tricked, he vowed that one day if he had the means he would do whatever he could to help keep people from being suckered by people who make it their lives to trick and con them.
I feel the same way. Well, I’m certain every evangelist for their cause feels that way. We all want to help people get out of the middle of the street. I come off as wallowing in my self-righteousness seemingly for its own glory, and that’s an unfortunate side-effect of my passion…and lack of ability to DO anything real about what I’m passionate about. I see anti-science all around, I see dangerous credulity, lack of critical thinking, beliefs that are counter to reality, and I want to do something about it! But I’m impotent to do anything except rant on a blog. And so I rant and go crazy and my gut turns at needing to enact change for the betterment of humanity (sounds like hyperbole, but I’m serious,) and all I can do is send words out into the ether.
Do I think I’m right? In what I believe? Yes. Is that arrogant? I don’t think so. We don’t feel we need to hide when we know 2+2=4, or that we know there are seven continents, or what the capital of Maine is. When I know that homeopathy is bunk and the Bible is no more inerrant than “The Lord of the Rings” why should I hide that? It’s knowledge, not belief.
“The definition of an ‘intellectual‘ is someone who can change their mind when presented with facts.” — Lawrence O’Donnell
I used to be hardcore Christian until around 18, when I read the Bible and started learning facts about the history of the Bible and the Christians and the Hebrews. I used to believe in ghosts and alien visitations until I learned facts about astrophysics and space travel and the history of “ghost hunting” and the circumstances of ghost “encounters” and the science behind the various phenomena that lead people to believe in ghosts. I used to believe in the possibility of magic, New Age stuff. I changed my mind when I learned facts. I used to be hardcore Capitalist until I learned about Anarcho-Libertarianism, and I started altering my opinions of economy and politics. Now I’m leaning toward Marxist-Libertarian as I learn more about different things. I don’t believe in ideologies, I believe in facts. I don’t believe in -isms, I believe in reality. The fact that over the last 20 years I’ve given up so many beliefs and have moved toward what is called “naturalism” and “humanism” and freethinking, isn’t because of the ideologies of these concepts, but because my learning about the alternatives have put me into these camps as the natural realm of learning about the world we live in.
For some time I looked for a label. Even just a couple of years ago in some of my blog postings I’ve expressed a need to identify with a label. Deist. Universalist. Buddhist. Libertarian. Whatever. It’s a human drive to want to fit, belong to a group. And people will hang onto an -ism and make its tenets and dogma and belief system theirs because of that need to belong to a group. Us and them. I’ve slowly learned that I can call myself a “secular humanist” not because I found that label and decided to latch onto it, but because that’s what’s left of the -isms after I’ve learned all -isms that rely on supernatural or mythological or pseudoscientific concepts are false.
I’m compelled to share that experience with others. I don’t want to “be right.” I don’t want to lead a charge or shove my beliefs down throats or convert people…I want to help remove scales from eyes. I want to help people see through the mirror clearly. I want to help people out of the middle of the road! I see Sylvia Browne on Montel Williams tell parents of missing children the kid is dead and buried by a boulder when she’s lying and it tears me up inside. I feel so desperately bad for those parents, so angry at people who use others’ grief and weakness for their gain. I see people who struggle with “God must not have wanted me to do that” to justify when bad things happen to good people or rationalize why prayers don’t get answered, and I want to help them realize you are in control of your life! And those times when you’re not, because of natural disasters or other people who are evil or incompetent and their actions negatively affect your life, that’s not God, that’s just life. Random events, other people, life happens. Empower yourself to make your life better! When I see people who want to slap “only a theory” stickers on science books, refuse medical attention for their children because of a belief, fight against potentially life saving sex education, preach condom use is a sin in AIDS stricken Africa, I get mad not because of some arrogant “I’m right and you’re wrong” ideology, but because belief is hurting people! False beliefs hurt people! It has real-world consequences!
I used to want to join Greenpeace and help change the world. I used to want to join Amnesty International. When I was a kid and a teen, I wanted to become a minister! I have always wanted to make the world a better place. I’ve never had the, what, perseverance I guess to actually get on a boat and stop oil dumping or protest someplace violating human rights. I don’t have the particular passion that drives people, both religious and secular, to travel to a foreign country and live among poverty and disease to give food and aid to the disenfranchised of the human race. I’m an ivory tower world-changer. I use words to try to enact change, and all it amounts to yelling into a hurricane.
I hate what America is becoming. I hate the fact that ideology is affecting our education, who we put into politics, how we act in the world. I hate that people prey on credulity and lack of critical thinking to either con them or make them a follower for their twisted cause. I hate that humanity is at the hight (thus far) in technology and is only getting more advanced, but we’re socially heading back to the dark ages. Religion, consumerism, commodification, extremism in nationalism, is hurting humanity! We could, as a species, be so much better! We could eradicate poverty and wars and hatred if we got rid of ideologies and beliefs that are rooted in arrogant certainty of cultural elitism. My God is more powerful than your God. My ideology is more right than your ideology. I weep for humanity, and I just want to make a difference, making the human condition better. There is no utopia, but there can be a better, rational world than it is now. Even if I don’t get to live in it, at least my daughter could. Instead, she has to fight for reality in the midst of magical herbs and psychics and alien abductions and gods who want to punish her for eternity if she believes the wrong set of rules. Isn’t it enough that we as a species have to deal with eking out existence on a planet that wants to kill us without having to fight about which surveillance camera in the sky’s book, scroll, tablet, prophet has all the right and exclusive answers to who to condemn as wrong?!
So that’s why I crusade. That’s why I evangelize. I’m sick of the world ideology and belief have created. I don’t want to be right, I don’t want to be a loud-mouthed arrogant bastard. I want a world that reasons, searches for answers, discovers and still questions, always reaching for greater heights and improvements and discoveries! I want a world that doesn’t kill each other because one’s interpretation of an ancient scroll is different from another’s. I want a world that sees the value of life here and now! That realizes that the world will still be here tomorrow and the next day, and humanity needs to be improved if we’re to thrive and not rape the Earth because hey, God gave it to us to do whatever we want with it until we’re raptured any day now. It’s really hard for me to keep from crying right now as I think of the world my daughter is inheriting. I hide my fear and sadness in bombast and rage. Sunni killing Shiite. Muslims killing Jews. Christians killing education and medical advancements. An elderly woman being told that her illness hasn’t been cured by Benny Hinn because even though she’s followed him around and given all her money, she still hasn’t given everything. A government stripping human rights, torturing, starting wars, sending thousands to die, stealing money, because they believe they are on God’s side.
What can I possibly do? What should I do? When the answer for so much of it is sitting right there in the open plain as day?! How can I not yell and scream and jump up and down and cry “Stop with the supernatural bullshit! People are dying here, and for what?! For a Bronze Age myth of paradise born from the human fear of death?! Stop killing in the name of your god! Use your brain. Stop giving your money to psychics! Stop giving your money and health to pseudoscience! Use your brain. Stop falling on your knees before charismatic preachers, stop pleading to psychics to give you solace, stop hoping the latest herb is going to cure your illness!” It hurts to see my fellow humans dance and weep and collapse around frauds and con men. Crying in obvious pain on TV to psychics. Avoiding medicine in favor of dried leaves in a capsule. I see the damage and hurt and pain and suffering from false beliefs, and the wasted potential to be better humans, and I scream into the hurricane for it to stop.
I am sound in fury and I signify nothing.
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