“PRAY, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy.”
Ambrose Bierce
“PRAYER, n. Hour upon hour of brown-nosing to nobody.”
Nom dePlume
"When my way grows drear, precious Lord linger near/When my light is almost gone, Hear my cry, hear my call."
Gospel lyrics
I continue to marvel at how religion gets such a wide berth of undeserved respect in the media. It's like politics in the old Soviet Union, which I visited in the 60s: we're all SO happy, and we LOVE the Party. That's all you would see in the media. It's the same with religion. It’s so good for you!
A photo in the newspaper (Chicago Tribune, 12/2/07) shows a gospel choir of Black people getting into the Christmas spirit, praising Jesus in song. I just absorbed the picture for a while, trying to figure out what was happening. And without reading the article, I got the message.
The power of ecstasy
Looking at the innocent enthusiasm in their faces (at least one person has his eyes closed in ecstasy), I couldn’t help but think….Wow!
I read what Dawkins has to say on this subject, and I still can't claim to understand how religion maintains such a hold on people (don't we have equally inspiring music on humanistic themes?). After all, the USSR also had concentration camps and mental hospitals to discourage and punish dissenters.
Certainly there's a hypnotic element, facilitated by music, prayer, and chanting, that encourages outright abandonment of the critical faculty and generates all kinds of feel-good brain chemicals and even such bizarre behaviors as glossolalia (speaking in tongues).
Mesmerism and light trance
I recently read that high-maintenance cults -- no surprise -- require a continuous intellectual and emotional enmeshing with the ideology, via restrictions on language; song/chant; ritual repetition, as with five-times-a-day prayer (which can keep people in a constant "light trance"); and other means. So there is, to me, strong evidence of a real, externally-induced change in the higher brain functions, brain chemistry, and neurology of religious believers.
Crappy lives, retreat into fantasy
It seems that the worse a people's lives have been, the more they seek happiness in religious fantasy and ecstasy -- and the more tenaciously they cling to them. Look at how Jews with hellish lives created the phantasmagorical Kabbalah and, later, Hasidism.
I’m not impressed with mysticism. Direct experience of the deity? Who cares? It’s one more way to retreat from the real world and consort with imaginary beings.
Blacks and Jews have suffered grievously at the hands of white Christians, so their retreat into passivity and fantasy is understandable.
Giving up on human power
This is unfortunate, because God and Jesus have not done a damn thing for us. They didn’t rescue Blacks from slavery or Jews from Hitler. Everything we have done, we’ve accomplished ourselves and in cooperation with each other.
To the extent that people embrace religion, they have actively given up on salvation through human action in this world. They show that they've given up on themselves and other people by putting things in God's hands, praying/begging God for favors, and preparing for an afterlife, with or without apocalypse.
Well, people do have limited power over events. But they have more than they think. If every minute spent praising Jesus (and killing unbelievers) were devoted to social and personal improvement, we would have a much better world.
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Alan M. Perlman has a PhD in linguistics. He is a secular humanist speaker and author -- most recently, of An Atheist Reads the Torah: Secular Humanistic Perspectives on the Five Books of Moses. For information, go to www.trafford.com/06-0056.
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