"Civilization will not attain its perfection, until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest."
Emile Zola
The title of the post is a hypothetical headline from an alternate universe. Here in the pious Midwest, the restoration of Chicago's cavernous Holy Name Cathedral is front-page news (Chicago Tribune, July 30, 2009) and clearly a cause for rejoicing. "This is what the church is supposed to look like," according to pastor Dan Mayall.
Magicalizing
Indeed. Religious people are very big on magicalizing earthly things. Their deities never actually appear, so they magicalize a long list of real items. Magic rituals, magic texts, magic appearances of religious figures in food or the knots of a door, magic artifacts, and especially magic places. All of Saudi Arabia considers itself a magic place upon which unbelievers cannot tread. It has two super-magic cities.
No, it's just a pile of sand, sitting, unfortunately, on an ocean of oil.
The Israeli tourist industry is driven by what was "supposed to have" happened (right, like they have the actual slab that Jesus was laid out on -- how gullible can people be?)...as the so-called Holy Land, despite the perpetual violence and threat of violence, is annually inundated with pilgrims in search of the magical places associated with their stories -- where Christ was buried, where Abraham did this or that.
When the same place is magic to different belief systems (Dome of the Rock) watch out (it's the place from which Mohammed flew to heaven -- HOW can people buy this stuff?). Conflict guaranteed. In fact, all of Jerusalem, as Dawkins makes clear in one of his documentaries, is saturated with religious belief and politico-religious conflict. It's a multi-religious theme park, with violence.
Focus of magic
The house of worship is a common but very special magic place. It is where believers gather to reinforce each other's belief with, in the words of Richard Sosis (American Scientist, March-April 2004), "behavior too costly to fake." Of course, any Christian or Jewish (and, less likely, Muslim) service will have a sprinkling of hypocrites and go-alongers. But at least some of them, perhaps most, really believe it and are there to profess their belief in public, whether by davening, ass-in-the-air prostration, or other mutually agreeable supplicatory behavior.
Meaning of Tisha B'Av
Ancient Jews in the Torah story had a movable holy place -- the Tent of Meeting (see Exodus, Ch. 40). The establishment of synagogues (surely an original experiment in franchising) represented a vast increase in the number of holy places. True magic wasn't focused only in the Temple any more.
Jews are now preparing to mourn the destruction of two of those precious Temples (by a culture that for all its awful excesses had contributed far more to the good of humanity), a holiday called Tisha B'Av, which occasionally falls on my birthday. I challenge them to take a good hard look at what those Temples represented: primitive, pre-scientific, fantasy-based, priest- and rule-dominated, misogynistic, xenophobic Judaism. Something no modern person would identify with.
Concentrating the mojo
In addition to enabling group demonstration of loyalty to fantasy, the other function of the house of worship is to concentrate the power of the deity, so if people want impetus for their religious imaginings, they have a place to go, a place where they can imagine the power of their deity to be SUPER-STRONG. With Jews, the presence of the Torah magicalizes the place. You should see them parading around with the scroll and kissing it with their prayer shawls. Feh!
So now Holy Name looks the way it's supposed to look. Its magical power is fully restored. And it's front-page news. Good news!
Magic power restored
Now Christians can get the full-bore experience. Cathedrals are built to intimidate, with their vast ceilings and realistic statuary. Disgusting, bloody Jesus on the cross. The stained glass was dazzling, the mediaeval equivalent of virtual reality. The chants, music, incense...all help put the willing believer in a light trance or highly suggestible state, such that the nutty fantasies of prient, rabbi or imam seem more and more real.
What goes on in this magical place makes it easy to set aside reason (especially if one were programmed from childhood to do so). In addition, the emotionalism of some African-American services bespeaks a people who have suffered greatly and who long for a joyous connection to their Imaginary Friend...and for imaginary redemption, no matter how improbable.
History of Religion
In the 1960s I visited what was then the USSR. In Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) I toured the Kazansky Sobor, a church that had been converted into a Museum of the History of Religion.
Got it (partly) right
There one could view torture machines, as well as visuals and exhibits of centuries of religion's atrocities. The godlessness was the one thing I thought the Soviets got right (it drove Americans nuts and may have been one of the driving forces of our aggressiveness in the Cold War). Of course, they substituted the state for god, but they did build that museum.
What a great museum Holy Name would make (in that other universe). For here (the guide would be saying) were committed violence against humanity and reason, humiliating prostration and prayer before nonexistent deities (they actually knelt on these carpeted things here), repetition of fantasy-stories [I went to a Catholic funeral mass and heard about the blood of Christ so often that I felt sick and had to take a break], magicalization of objects and images, and symbolic ritual cannibalism (which they called "communion" and specifically identified with eating the body of their demigod). This is a place where humanity was abandoned, science denied, and hours upon hours devoted to obsessing over a demi-god who sacrificed himself in a sort of divine deal, so that he, in another form, would forgive humanity. People once believed that all this happened, ladies and gentlemen.
Tax-free BS
Sorry, wrong universe again. In ours, all this is regarded as true through repetition, say-so, and hearsay. Holy Name is one more (though very impressive) magical place where ordinary reality is suspended, humans indulge in the behaviors of their primitive ancestors...and oh, yes, taxes are never paid, out of public (not my) respect for all this primitive rubbish. I would like to have seen the place dismantled, with all the restoration effort and expense directed instead toward improving people's lives on earth.
The article quotes several who are happy about the restoration. Unbelievers are 16% of the population, but not one quote from a humanist authority, because of the immense, unquestioning social acceptance of religion. Not one quote from a humanist authority who decries churches as islands of ignorance, sores on the face of the modern world, barriers to reason and truth, magic places that remain living, tax-free relics of our primitive past.
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