Not sure where this is going. These posts, nearly 250 of them now in 16 months mostly start off with a new item of religious absurdity or repression, or alternatively when I get tired of religious nonsense, a science report, an inspiring video or comment from Neil De Grasse Tyson or Lawrence Krauss, stuff like that.
But not today.
It’s Sunday. I’m on youtube and facebook all morning getting more than merely mundane social info of my friends (allgood in its own right to be sure, a wonderful way to stay connected). I get a lot of news and science, videos and articles and links upon links to learn other new stuff. Prior to that earlier this AM I was finishing one of the best History of Science books I’ve come across (by accident, perusing the Community College library shelves where I work some months ago):
John Gribbins 2002 “The Scientists”
It chronicles not only nearly all of science’s key discoveries in 600+ pages but adds a little personal info on each scientist and their act of discovery that you normally don’t get from this sort of history book.
That’s how I spend much of Sunday morning when not cuddling with my darling wife or having breakfast with her and the fam. Learning. Getting exposed to new information.
New information.
If I was at Mass as I was often during my Catholic upbringing or down the street at one of the church services 1/2 block away…I’d be getting old information. Very old. 1,000+ year old interpretations of 2-3,000 year-old musings of primitive people who knew nothing of the science explored in Gribbins excellent volume…who knew so very little of how their world and our world really works.
Old information.
And much if not most of it wrong. Not to mention repressive and sometimes ludicrous.
Yup pretty near all of it dead nuts, fucktoothed, beetlebrained, retarded wrong.
But they teach it every Sunday all over the land. All over the world if you count all the other old books that make the basis for some sort of weekly worship, ritual, incantation, supplication and notedly: submission.
Submission to old ideas unquestioned.
That’s the scam, that’s the lie that all religion festers and foments on: that information in primitive men’s musings from ancient times is somehow beyond reproach and must guide our lives today no matter how cruel, absurd or obviously ignorant or fanciful it appears. You must believe it.
Some non-believers of a particularly wistful stripe that still yearn for the familiarity of religion, Greg Epstein the Harvard “secular chaplain” ( whatever the fuck that is) and the equally fawning Alain de Botton both think nonbelievers must have need to emulate aspects of religion, like services and rituals if nothing for the community of it all. They succumb I think to the Xian plaint in our culture that says non-believers must be lonely, nihilistic, empty and lost without religion.
bullshit. Fuck, I neglected the capital “B.”
Bullshit.
Old information belongs on the myth shelf. You needn’t believe a word of it. You don’t need it. No-one does. That’s the lie, that’s the scam.
You can learn new information and find community with your loved ones, neighbors, fellow citizens in a myriad of ways on a Sunday morning. Spend that phony ritual time a bazillion other ways. Check out some art, walk in the woods, experience a museum or some great architecture, paint something yourself, read a book, experience some new information instead of rehashing old, broken myths and phony calls to worship.
nuff said.
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