House of Eratosthenes

Panda’s Thumb has an interesting theory for which support has been gleaned from the Larry Craig mess: that scandals disproportionately afflict creationists. Into the supporting data sets waltzes Sen. Craig, who in 1989…

…co-sponsored a constitutional amendment, the “Community Life Amendment,” to authorize teaching “the creation of the earth as accepted in Judeo-Christian tradition.”

I think Panda’s Thumb’s theory might have been in better shape if Sen. Craig’s name had been left unmentioned. It’s not too extravagant to suppose the Senator is innocent of the charges. True, he did plead guilty to a lesser charge, and there are other problems with the supposition — who the hell picks up toilet paper on the floor of bathroom stalls, how can you take it so calmly when a cop calls you a liar, and so forth — but it’s a little strange that so much legal hot water can be churned up out of so little evidence. This is bothersome to quite a few folks, some of whom hate Sen. Craig’s guts and think he’s guilty as hell. A prostitution sting can’t work this way. A lot of other things can’t work this way. A cop can’t bust you for fidgeting, making gestures, gesturing in manners anecdotally associated with…ripping off a stereo system out of a jeep. Pressing chewing gum against a bus seat. Jaywalking. Tearing the tag off a mattress.

And then there’s the thing loyal gentlemen Craig-haters club members refuse to discuss: Do you want to take a crap in a stall next to a cop? A cop who can’t leave his own crapper until he busts someone? Are you in control of where your feet are going and how they’re moving? Really?

So to include Sen. Craig, strikes me as a little bit of a grasping-at-straws exercise. If we’re counting scandals, and measuring them on any sort of a scientific basis, the Craig thing hardly emerges as a creme de la creme specimen, does it? No, if the Craig mess is statistically representative of any phenomenon, it is a phenomenon of people talking about things, and officials being forced to resign over those things — but not of those things actually being done.

And in this respect, Panda is quite correct. Just not in the way Panda thinks.

At this point, we have to confess to an ugly truth about religion. It is more than a belief in one or several deities. It always has been much more than that. It is a system which empowers the few to dictate behavior to many, and avoid any intra-societal debate about whether such behavior would be beneficial or not, or whether there might be alternatives. This is the stigma the secularists continue to slap on religion, and they are quite correct about this. Religion is an ancient method of keeping the riff-raff in line. This is what has kept it around for so long, at least throughout the middle ages. It’s undeniable.

Saying so doesn’t make you a godless heathen. You can admit this truism and still have a healthy belief in and respect for God. This confession has to do with the affairs of men, which is an enclave altogether separate from the dominion of God.

The thing is, though, religion works best when people struggle away in substandard lifestyles. Actually, when people have no lifestyles. This is easy to substantiate. Here we are in 2007, we have an unprecedented surge of atheism…oh, look how popular it is! Can’t swing a dead cat around without hitting an atheist, haughtily lecturing at you that the cat evolved from a ladybug, now there is no cat, and you’re such a drooling idiot if you dare to question his wisdom. Atheist book after atheist book after atheist book hits the best-seller list — there are even “A for Atheism” tee shirts. It’s a big business, one that looks more and more, ironically enough, like evangelism.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what’s going on here. People, we see fairly easily once we really start to pay attention to them and how they do things, aren’t so ready, willing and able to soar above the level of an easily-led zombie as they prefer to believe they are. They like someone else telling them what to do. They might not like the idea of it, and sometimes they’re less welcoming of it than other times. But over the long haul, they certainly can’t be counted on to nurse a viscerally-independent rebellious acrimony toward arbitrary and excessive authority.

Over the long haul, they’ll always make a place for it. For the “natural-born leader” who steps in and starts slinging around commandments…benevolent commandments, malicious ones, duplicitous ones, or just-plain poorly-thought-out ones.

And you can take it to the bank that someone will always be willing to step up and do exactly that. Blame God or blame Darwin — somehow, we have been hard-wired to live in tribes. Tribes with hierarchical command structures. Leaders…followers…neither class with a monopoly on survival-related genetic attributes, since after hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, both classes are still here. Goin’ STRONG. No end in sight. Anyone who seeks to assert leading-and-following is learned behavior, only has to hang around groups of people while they do the leading-and-following for awhile. Watch the group put someone in charge. See how much sense it makes. Repeat the experiment a few times…the “learned behavior” theory will be quietly withdrawn in sheepish disgrace. It isn’t learned behavior. It’s genetic coding.

The methodology of communication between these two classes, the “network topology,” if you will, by which the leaders tell the followers what to do — this is the only thing that changes. It changes with technology. In an agricultural society, religion just seems like a natural fit. Try living as a farmer for a year without praying. Try doing it when you have fifteen kids, fifteen kids you need in order to get enough help with the spring planting or the fall harvest. Try it when, at best, you might be able to hope for ten of those fifteen to live long enough to have kids of their own, and only five of the fifteen to live to bury you.

Just try not praying then.

Once you realize that, you realize how cowardly atheism is. There is the factual cowardice of it; it is “right,” because and only because God is an entity whose existence cannot be proven. This means atheism cannot be debunked, and since it cannot be debunked it insists on being awarded the status of “proven,” when all it has achieved is non-debunkery, and a logical assurance of everlasting non-debunkery. No further proof than that. “I must be right, for you cannot say that I am wrong,” is what it tells us.

But there is also the fair-weather cowardice. Atheism pops up to accept accolades and embraces from our society, when it can. Once the starvation and pestilence and Great Depressions and Nazis and under-electrified rural areas and racial oppression have been relegated to the dustbin of history, with the lid of the dustbin riveted and welded in place — up pops atheism! We can afford to be atheists now, although our grandparents could not have. Nevermind that, we can be atheists now, so let’s have at it.

In the end, Panda’s Thumb’s error is to associate the word “scandal” with some kind of honest and even-handed delivery of hard fact. This is why I think so little of Panda’s example, since the Craig Scandal is based on postulation and not fact.

The Thumb has accidentally proven something problematic to the theory it intends to promote; it has stuck a rake handle into it’s own bicycle spokes. Scandals, as we know them today, are not about guilt. They are about control. They are about telling the “little people” what to think and what to do…exactly the task religion was achieving for the powerful, hundreds of years ago.

This is a process that has been repeated countless times in human history, each time a new sovereign has displaced an old one through a revolution. The difference now is that the new emperor, and the former one, are harder to identify. Neither one wore a crown, neither one was an individual, but rather they were & are aggregates of individuals. But now, as in revolutions past, our new ruler has to sweep away the remnants of government wielded by the old one. This is an essential last-phase of any successful revolution — the parliament and the councils and the census-taking establishments of the displaced king, must be broken down, then rooted out, then swept away, and the residue sterilized.

That’s what the new ruler is doing now, and that’s what atheism is all about. Godless people are much easier to control. They don’t think they were put here by a Higher Power for any glorious purpose…of necessity, they must think the whole point to their existence is to eat and poop and inhale and exhale, plus whatever ancillary purpose some employer somewhere might see fit for them to do. An employer which, of further necessity, they must think of as some kind of fool, or a big meanie, or both.

This is why atheists don’t often have too many nice things to say about other people, unless those other people are also atheists. I can pretty much promise you if an atheist happens to trip across this post, he or she will prove this point nicely. Better than even odds the adjective “stupid” will be embedded somewhere in the response, and will compliment yours truly.

Anyway, that’s what scandals are now. Pretty much. They are drummed up artificially, tossed out to us like T-bone steaks to hungry tigers, at times deemed convenient to interested parties. This is not to say everyone afflicted with scandal is innocent. But we might as well admit that scandals are being used as devices, since they doubtlessly are. The scandal is a new Layer 2 network topology — it displaces religion exactly the same way Ethernet displaced Token-Ring. It is a new mechanism to keep the proles and plebes in line, now that the technology is available to sustain a communication medium that relies on rhythm, and there is a pressing need for such a medium that does what the old one did, while eschewing any notion of a deity. Demand…supply.

So I think Panda’s Thumb is right: Scandals disproportionately afflict those failing to demonstrate an inimicable attitude toward religion, failing to embrace secularism. Scandals will continue to be pointed in that direction, toward those targets. The theory is correct, just not for the reasons thought.

Thing I Know #85. As the standard of living improves, people slowly lose their need for a Supreme Being, while their need for a spiritual leader remains.

Thing I Know #175. Atheists are supposed to value their independence, and be determined to live out their lives to appeal to no one, and at the pleasure of no one. But when they’re around other atheists they don’t act like this.

[…] Jackasses Ride It Out, Pachyderms Fall And Stay Down On Thompson Creationist Scandals I’m Fifty-Four Percent Addicted… Repeal theSeventeenth Munn Yikes! VI Nonsensical Rules…It Must Mean Bush Instant Karma It’s a Dry Heat Jewell Down John Edwards in Lead I’m a Slithering Reptile […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 09/02/2007 @ 20:16
I somehow missed this one during my hiatus from reading stuff.

It’s [atheism] a big business, one that looks more and more, ironically enough, like evangelism.

I’ve noticed this as well — especially that evangelism part.

Atheism has become a religion.
- philmon | 09/21/2007 @ 14:43

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Saturday, September 1st, 2007