I tried watching Faith Like Potatoes on that thing, but it showed Carl Sagan’s Cosmos instead.

Until he made a realisation, which is the reason I mention him here: (note, the text below is my own paraphrase of his words in English)

Religion works like a good advertisement. It offers you a product and makes you feel you just NEED to have it to survive…

Religion misinterprets common human desires and feelings – the search for meaning, feelings of guilt, the urge to certainty, fear of the unknown, the need for truth, the urge to live, etc. Then it convinces yout these are all symptoms of unbelief, and that religion would make them all disappear…

When WC lost faith, he could not cope with his new life as unbeliever because he still had all of the aforementioned feelings, and still thought them to be something that ought to be fulfilled.

Religion  is a trojan virus that modifies your entire worldview, and makes you believe:

• You must believe in something to cope.

This idea is a pet peeve of mine. You often see it in “Godless” Hollywood: the main character whose character arc consist of “learning to believe” as if believing in something, heck, just anything is superior, regardless of the truth of that which is believed in.

• You must have something to worship in order to have sense in life.
• You must have supernatural support to survive.
• You must have answers to mysteries in order to go on.
• You must have rules from above to motivate you to be good.
• You must know exactly who you are, where you come from, and where you’re going to, to be able to look life in the eye.

In other words, you later falsely believe:

• Sense is something that is discovered of given, not something that you create
• Without belief in something supernatural, everything is bleak
• It is terrible if death were to be the end of everything.
• Life, as it is, is not enough – something is missing.

How often does one hear people say: “But there has to be something more!”

• It is impossible to get out of bed without absolute truths.
• It is senseless to be good if all morality is man-made.
• Happiness is something you must seek, and doesn’t just happen by itself.
• We have access to more than mere human opinions.

Problem is, there’s quite a few people on this earth who are firmly convinced that they have mainline access to super-human opinions. Mutually incompatible ones.

• You’ll go crazy if there is no one looking out for you.
• Everything has to be part of a larger plan, must happen for a reason, and must eventually be justified, otherwise there is no reason to go on.

And here’s the clincher. WC says, even after deconversion, he (and many others) still believe that:

• You have the duty to ask deep questions.
• There is an answer to all our deepest thoughts.
• There is only one answer for every question.
• We can find that answer.
• We’ll recognize it when we find it.
• If we recognize it, we’ll understand it.
• The answer is good news.
• Only by knowing the answer is happiness and sense possible.
• Ignorance about the answer makes life unbearable and is wrong.

Now aren’t those notions commonplace.

I think I can honestly say that I don’t really feel strongly about the last batch of assertions anymore, but it’s hard to say when it comes to controlling beliefs. WC says he only found peace when he let go of those notions.

And I believe there’s a lot of truth to that. Who’s to say there actually is an Answer? Who’s to say it will even be relevant to us?

Maybe we should just let go.

Saint Che?

Interesting, since I recently read that Ernesto “Che” Guevara is already considered a saint in parts of Bolivia. And, to be honest, Stalin I could  do without – a Saint Che would be  more my cup of tea.

Just think of the possibilities: whenever I run into one of those annoying rich spoilt brats wearing a T-shirt of “that dude” like he’s some arbitrary Andy Warhol creation, I can now tell them that they’re mocking my religion, ahem, and would they please remove it?

And then, as soon as the twits have forgotten all about him, I could maybe finally get a Che T-shirt of my own without anyone knowing I’m a copycat.

Seriously, though: whether the notion of “Saint Stalin” remains fringe or not remains to be seen. What’s creepy about it, of course, is that Stalin was anything but a saint.

Or was he? Maybe what we’re witnissing here is that the way people are remembered by history has little to do with their real character. Who knows what bastards the “real” saints were – or not? If we could go back in time and tell one of his contemporaries that Francis of Assissi has been sainted, would they snicker, stand slack-jawed, or cheer?

Somewhat the opposite seems to be occurring with Mother Teresa. During her lifetime she was mostly perceived as saintly; only now after her death are the allegations about child abuse by the “Ghoul of Calcutta” surfacing more widely:

In brief, the report said that handicapped children were maltreated in the orphanage… Untold millions of dollars flowed into her coffers. The money was not used to build even one small hospital anywhere. In her homes, it was even forbidden to hand out simple painkillers. She, in the meanwhile, got jetted around to hospitals in the US whenever she was suffering some illness.

Perhaps the safest thing to conclude from all this is that people are really, really, desperately willing to believe in unsullied heroes.