Just an observation:
Obviously the end-times whackos proclaiming that God is going to destroy the earth this weekend because of some crazed interpretation of an equally-crazed prophecy from their Bible are ludicrous. They deserve all the ridicule they are reaping, and all that is to come when their prophecy fails. But their beliefs are almost exactly identical to the beliefs of millions of “ordinary” fundamentalists who also expect the “Rapture” to suck them up to heaven because they’re so special, while God smites the rest of us because we’re not; the only difference being that they named a particular date for it to occur. And further, while (as many people don’t realize) the “Rapture” is actually a minority belief among mainstream Christians*, it too is merely an overly-literal version of the general expectation of pie in the sky by and by for “the elect”, and pitchforks and sulfur for everyone not like them, that defines the religion.
In other words, the only difference between the nuts preparing for the end this weekend and the nuts preparing for the end at an unspecified date is that this week’s nuts were prepared to put their beliefs in empirically testable form. And they’ll be wrong, of course, but so will the others. The mainstreamers, however, will be able to retain their smug certainty in exactly the same crazy beliefs simply because they refuse to state test conditions under which those beliefs could be seen to be right or wrong. Or, to put that another way: mainstream Christians are less rational than the craziest people in the country right now.
* There are also bizarrely complicated in-fights over whether Jesus is going to save all the fundies and smite all the rest, or smite all the rest and then save all the fundies, as well as over exactly how long the smiting will go on, so not all Rapturizers have identical beliefs, but they’re equally crazy.
Judd
Kevin
Kevin T. Keith
leanleft
tgirsch
Right, right. I forget though, have you taken the last step with me?
Scientologists, too, are no more crazy than mainstream fundamental Christians.
I believe I’ve discussed this with TG, and he holds out on me because he sees an important enough distinction when the guy who wrote your rule book of crazy was born in 1911 and lived long enough to see things like the launch of Super Mario Brothers. Where do you stand?
Clearly, the content of Scientology is no more crazy than that of Christianity (and arguably less so, inasmuch as – as far as I understand it – it does not in fact include any supernatural events, but merely a story about ostensibly natural historical and psychological facts that is batshit insane*).
As for whether it’s crazier to endorse those beliefs or not is hard to say. As you imply, the hard part for a really crazy religion is when it’s just getting started. People have a tendency to identify people who tell crazy stories as crazy, and then ignore them. Getting past the phase where people remember that you’re just a nutcase telling crazy stories is the big hurdle. After a couple hundred years or so, specific details are forgotten, the rough edges get smoothed off, and you can pick and choose which versions of the story make you sound more impressive and less weird, and then claim God told you those were the right ones.
Christianity did all that in its first few hundred years, and only then did it really start to take off. Mormons went through the same process in their first few generations, starting off with some obviously crazy bullshit about an angel with magic disappearing gold tablets, then revising that story a couple of times and throwing in a couple of helpful and conveniently timely revelations repudiating some of their most offensive central and inviolable teachings at exactly the moment they became a liability; now they’re mainstream.
Scientology is still in the obviously-crazy phase. The religion is only a couple of generations old, and in fact there are people still alive who knew the prophet personally and can attest to the fact that he was full of shit. But before long they’ll be gone and there will be no way to confirm the embarrassing stories, and plenty of time to invent better ones. Scientology is subject to a couple of unique factors that change things a bit: they have deliberately targeted the opinion-making and storytelling community, which is to their advantage; on the other hand, because they do not claim supernatural revelation, it is harder for them to easily change their story and demand uncritically gullible acceptance. In fact, as the world gradually becomes more scientific, or at least divides into starkly incompatible scientific and supernatural belief systems, it becomes harder for the supposedly “scientific” religion to straddle the divide. But it’s not inevitable that they can’t; the bullshit brigade is nothing if not creative in finding ways to delude itself.
Remember that Christianity itself hardly existed at all for almost a hundred years after the supposed events involving its founders. The first of the canonical Christian scriptures was written something like 70 years after that time, by people who never met the principal characters; others were written over 100 years after the founding, at a time when the cult still had just handfuls of followers. Mormonism has barely reached that same age now but is vastly largely than Christianity was even after the Roman conversion. Scientology, which has already gone through a couple of major revisions to scriptures and creed, is still only at an age where Christianity lacked any formal creed or written scriptures and again is much larger. (Mormonism and Scientology both jump-started themselves by beginning with scriptures before developing a cult, which probably helped them seem more real and grow faster.) So, from certain points of view perhaps, it may be more understandable that people adhere to Mormonism or Scientology, now, than that they previously adhered to Christianity at a similar stage of its development.
* OK – not entirely sure about how your psychic memories fly around the universe and get stuck in your soul, or whatever. But at least they don’t have a big sky-fairy who occasionally performs supernatural feats that just happen to be indistinguishable from totally natural events and then threatens to torture you forever if you’re not impressed. So that’s a plus.