I am a lot blunter compared to two years ago. Back then, I was a lot more circumspect, and used a lot more euphemisms, when expressing my concerns and criticisms. In a way, I feel that trump has released me from that yoke. I can feel that new vibe in my responses to colleagues. I can feel that when I talk with students. I can certainly feel that if any trump-supporting friend ever approaches me.
Free at last!
The tone of the blog, too, has changed. Not wishy-washy anymore.
Yuval Noah Harari compared religions to video games. Remember that? If you play the game according to the rules a religion sets, only then do you see the angels and demons and hell and heaven that the game lays out.
Another way to think about all those rules and what the story is about is to think of religions as fake news!
This essay comments on the irony of the Pope decrying fake news:
The Pope writes, “Fake news is a sign of intolerant and hypersensitive attitudes, and leads only to the spread of arrogance and hatred. That is the end result of untruth.” True enough. And a message that should be broadcast far and wide. But it’s also hard to ignore the irony of the leader of the Catholic religion decrying intolerance and hypersensitivity, when heretics were regularly burned at the stake, and the spread of arrogance and hatred, to which Catholic dogma has contributed for centuries.The fake news worked out well for the Catholic church. Fake news works especially well with fear-mongering. The Church talked about hell and Lucifer. Which is what trump does, right, with his American Carnage and Hillary Clinton? I suppose evangelicals being solidly behind this President is an alignment of all kinds of fake news!
Religions have always tapped into this fear and fake news combination to make themselves rich and powoerful:
The Catholic Church also amassed much of its vast following and fortune, still held to this day, on the generation of fear. “Christianity is an eschatological faith,” Harper writes, and “apocalyptic notes run like a constant background music across the history of the church.” The “end times” tune, during the bubonic plague of the 6th and 7th centuries, proved lucrative, because “the plague was a last chance to turn from sin,” Harper writes, and conveniently for the church, “no sin weighed more heavily on the antique heart than greed.”And, of course:
In the end, what fake news breeds, like religion, is unnecessary uncertainty (“Am I going to Hell?”), a pernicious kind of epistemological gaslighting.Unnecessary uncertainty. I like that phrasing. Every one of trump's words and actions, and his rants about fake news, have seemingly generated unnecessary uncertainty. It is stormy, according to the book of Daniels ;)
