Secular Religion

This is an increasingly secular age, the pundits often used to say. "We are living in a time of disbelief and cynicism" was a common cry from my youth. Was this really so? Some would argue that the situation has since reversed, that religion is making a comeback, that we are slouching back to the Dark Ages. I respectfully disagree. For one thing, religion and belief, while related, are not the same thing. While it is true that religion is a force in such insignificant cultural ghettos like Texas, Kansas, and the political circuit, this is probably more perception than anything. Religion never went away, it's just more in the open (if not in your face) than it was for a while.

Religion is still out there and doing well. You need only look at places like the Islamic areas of the Middle East and the tent-show revival part of the rural American South to see that. This may not be a golden age of religion, where a bishop's most minor utterances are ooh'ed and aah'ed over by all and sundry, but it takes a scandal like the one the Catholic Church endured earlier in the decade to make a true dent. Religion's cousin, belief, ie the acceptance of things unseen and unprovable, is as healthy and alive as ever, indeed it seems to flourish in spite of disproof. Take communism, a line of thinking that required belief and demanded blind acceptance as much as the harshest religion man has ever created. Indeed, communism had the hallmarks of a religion itself, and a harsh one: it made other religions illegal; it demanded complete faith and compliance from its followers, brooked no insolence; gave The People its saints and sinners, its temples and rituals. And like all religions, it was a house of cards, unable to stand up to empirical evidence. Worse, it was a complete failure in ways that seem almost unfathomable. For one thing, it made a nation of Germans lazy and dirty, which becomes more amazing the more you think of it. And given the speed with which peoples and nations abandoned it, you'd think the thing was made of radioactive maggots. (And you wouldn't be that wrong, actually.)

So obviously communism is dead, right? No, of course not. I have read that about one-third of mankind has an innate need to believe in something greater than themselves. I only question the seemingly low number, not the fact itself. There is a certain kind of believing mind that believes things will somehow get better if one just wishes hard enough for it; these are generally the most religious of people. Some, though, have rejected religion and believe that the best Santa Claus to fulfill this wishlist is The Government. This is pure poppycock, of course; the government couldn't even deliver the mail, with the addresses printed right on it, until they brought in a bunch of people from industry in the 90s. You may also notice how the government can't educate our kids, clean our streets, protect us from criminals, pave the streets, and stand up against corporate bribery ... all this according to the American mass media, who are not known as bastions of free market thinking and libertarianism. And yet, how do many believers propose we solve the problems in education? More government control. Crime? More government. Arabs who want to kill us faster than you can say "Allah Go Boom"? More government. Protect our children from Darwin and Chinese lead paint? More government interference.

Which naturally leads to the question: if government can't do any of this, why do we think it possesses magical, mystical powers that can change the weather? Although if it means we get to see Al Gore, Jr., do an authentic rain dance, I'm for it. I could use the laugh.