America [5]

I am quite sure that there are a small number of very clever Christians and a large number of very stupid ones who honestly and sincerely believe in Young Earth Creationism; who have honestly and sincerely built themselves a world in which Scripture Sola overrides the empirical world or who have just never considered the possibility that God didn’t create the universe in exactly six days in the late spring of 4004 BCE. And I am quite sure that many of them are beautiful lovely people, baking the chickens and feeding the bread and taking hot dinners to the needy or just working at the factory and having a few beers with their mates on a Saturday night and harming no-one. But I am equally sure that the prevalence of Young Earth Creationism—the use of “evolution” as an evangelical and Republican swearword—does not always represent any actual, deeply held belief. I don’t think that the person who fills my Facebook Feed with questions like “If Jesus isn’t the son of God, why are all the demons so scared of him?” thinks he is putting forward anything approaching an argument. Nor do I think that the equally infuriating atheists who endlessly talk about sky wizards have the slightest knowledge of or interest in the thing they think they are denouncing. I think that we are dealing with shibboleths.

Start out saying that God made the world in six days because it’s in the Bible. Proceed to saying that the world is flat because the round earth myth is believed by the same people who propagate the great evolution delusion. Assert that vaccines cause polio and covid was a scam because you are not prepared to take the knee to the new high priesthood of science. Connect that with the utterly discredited and debunked theory (which is only a theory) that if you went high enough you would reach something the liberals call “space” and that the moon exists and Americans walked on it. End up posting slogans saying “You can’t be a Christian and believe in the moon landings. Period.”

Either you are consciously twisting your mind into an absurdity: not just saying that 2+2 = 5 but believing it, so that reality melts away and there is no love but the love of Big Brother. Or else you are like the King who wears a green robe and insists that everyone praises it for its redness; and executes the first person who says that the green thing is green.

The world is flat. Science is a myth. Covid was a scam. If humans evolved from apes, how come there are still apes? Ukraine invaded itself. They aren’t beliefs. They are masonic handshakes. Anyone who hasn’t learned them is a radical Marxist lunatic.

Prevailing orthodoxies define an in-group, and an in-group is defined by the prevailing orthodoxies of its members. “Woke” beliefs are the beliefs of people designated “woke”; and “woke” people are the people with “woke” beliefs. And yes, equally, “fascist” beliefs are the beliefs of people we have already decided to call “fascists” on other grounds. Some of us on the Left may stay seated in the National Anthem or take the knee at football matches or pretend that we don’t know who King Charles is because of sincere and deeply held anti-monarchist convictions. But very many of us do so because it really pisses off the Tories. The overwhelming impetus behind the Brexit and MAGA cult is, in the jargon, to Own The Libs.

But these are not innocent toddlers who have not yet learned the social norms. We are not talking about an incredibly rich pop star who is trying to find out what he can get away with. We are not talking about children shouting words they don’t quite know the meaning of, or silly left wing students putting up posters of Mrs Thatcher’s head in a guillotine or silly right wing students threatening to go to Highgate and desecrate Karl Marx’s remains. We are not even talking about an all-licensed fool defecating on the stage because the snowflakes have banned humour. We are talking about a man who controls enough weapons to destroy the whole world. And another man who is rich enough to buy it. 

I remember a story about a young Christian who was experiencing serious Doubts about God and the Bible and Jesus and who Cain married and whether those kids really deserved to be eaten by that bear. And a Pastor, well meaning in the anecdote, reminded her that Jesus said that if your eye offends you, pluck it out and if your hand offends you, chop it off, so if in this case it is your mind which is offending you, stop thinking, stop questioning, and just allow the wonderful emotional love of God to overwhelm you.

I remember a book about Calvinist evangelism. Maybe someone can identify it for me. You will understand that “evangelism” is about persuading people to make a conscious choice to follow Jesus—the whole point of evangelicalism is that being in a church and following a liturgy and confessing your sins and trying to live the best life you possibly can does not make you a Christian. You have to make a positive decision to have faith. But the whole point of Calvinism is that God is so much in charge of everything that he knew who was going to heaven and who was going to hell before he even created the universe, and to suggest that the choice of a human can have the slightest effect on what God has already decided would be to utterly deny his God-ness. The book said that presenting rational arguments about God, or answering sensible objections to faith meant fighting on the devil’s territory, denying divine sovereignty, and, moreover, never worked. But what you were permitted to do was to explain that human beings had turned away from God in the garden of Eden, and that therefore their whole nature, including their brains, was totally depraved, and that therefore no objection to or argument about God could possibly be either rational or irrational; and that when the sinner was in a state of not-trusting-their-depraved-mind, the evangelist could jump in and tell them to put their faith in God.

Which seems to be a lot of trouble to go to if they were already predestined to do that anyway. And might God not have predestined the evangelist to explain Aquinas’s five proofs and predestined the skeptic to agree with them? 

I think you have to believe in free will: you’ve got no choice.

As long as we are talking spiritual truths you might think that both the Pastor and the Calvinist had a point. You can’t think yourself into faith. If you want to get in touch with the Great Wossit In The Sky, then by all means, turn off your mind, relax and float down stream. Jesus may literally want you for a zombie. The first step to quitting the booze is, according to some people, putting yourself in the hands of a higher power. Even if you don’t believe that there actually is a higher power. Trust the Force.

But are you still a functioning human being when you come down from the mountain top? Once you have accepted that Human Nature Is Totally Corrupt, can you continue with your engineering degree? Or are you going to proceed on the assumption that Pi R Squared is—or may possibly be—a lie of the devil to lead you astray? Is geology possibly woke propaganda put in place by Radical Right Wing Lunatics?

Let go of your conscious self and act on instinct. Let wave after wave of non-rationality flood through you. Keep clinging to the belief which isn’t a belief. If you ever doubt just remind yourself that scientists lie about evolution, scientists lie about climate change, scientists lied about covid, scientists lied about the moon landings, scientists lie about the shape of the earth, the liberals stole the election, the earth is a few thousand years old, space does not exist, there is no sun no moon and definitely no Finland. 

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