The Curse Of Pell

I never liked the Australian Cardinal George Pell, ex Archbishop and Vatican senior whose pious visage is currently (27/02/2019) splashed across every major news outlet. It seemed to me that he was little more than a belligerent protectionist, quite prepared to let any of the 'flock' be sacrificed in order that the One True Faith live on intact. I was convinced that he did what many people do - aid and abet crime (pedophilia to be exact about the type of corruption and moral degradation) simply through being indifferent to it, in order to defend the faith. He was like the Nazi Eichmann, the necessary and pathetic bureaucrat of a regime which espouses a totalitarian doctrine, a Utopian salvation of some description. Humans seem adept at allowing young men (priests in this case), male animals with distinct and powerful biological urges, to have no effectively healthy outlet or relationship. Such systems as religious traditions seem to self select for credulity and predation. They value the intellectually immature young adult who still carries with them the need for imaginary companions. And moreover not only is their closest relationship not with another human (celibacy), the invisible companion is also a master at surveillance, particularly with respect to sexual activity. So we have, in supernatural (fictional) devotion, the perfect paranoid formula for the supercharging of delusion and deviance (The rules are written by the same emotionally retarded gentlemen so what can we expect?). To add to the rank absurdity of it all, women, who are treated as inferiors, compose the majority of the congregation. For this reason alone I have little reason to admire anyone, let alone a woman, who could rationalize both a child's physical sacrifice and their intellectual and moral one. It seems we're all quite prepared to let a few little ones 'go' in order to maintain the peace of the tribe (I don't see waves of the astonished either abandoning or demanding it all end now).

Pell isn't an isolated case at all. He is just a demonstration of the intellectual and moral incapacity that such doctrines demand of the religious and secular. After all, if I can maintain a childish explanation not for something, say an occasional belief such as the quite natural and reasonable metaphysical possibility of 'something after death', but well, everything (Big Daddy did/wants/ordered it) there is simply no need for the devout to ever think, doubt or question anything ever again. In these traditions doubt becomes dangerous. The solution? One need only become more infatuated with ignorance itself. The bliss of it all. We now have every good reason to believe that everyone else should subject themselves to the same credulous domination myth or at the very least pay 'respect' to it and shut the fuck up. One needn't lobotomize a population to stop them from being able to critically examine anything, it just takes the application of the spectacularly absurd mixed with zeal, piety and threats, a very popular faith thinking. It's quite remarkable that the greatest of all sins, the most compelling attraction of faith is, wait for it, not accepting that an idea is true; thinking for yourself. The best explanation of course is also the most despised or interfered with scientific theory - natural selection. Once an animal is trained to respond in fear, it takes very little (certainly it doesn't take any reason), to trigger that response again. So faiths are always constructed around the double edged sword - reward and punishment, the push me-pull you or circularity of philosophy, the psychologists cognitive dissonance, illustrated in the myth of Janus, all driven by our own naturally selected biology. Ironic.

(As a note, the Vatican claims that it accepts evolution. Yay. But evolution is not the theory, not the mechanism or driver. That is the role of natural selection and traditions do not like it to be taught as it replaces myth, as it should, as being remotely explanatory. The unsaid implication (like the indulgences) is that no one puts Big Daddy in the corner. The result is that theory is replaced by fiction and epistemology by feelings. This is only slightly less problematic than biblical (or any scriptural) literalism. At least they are up front about their 'science'. They admit that they believe evolution to be a lie and aim to have it replaced with creationism or the much more fraudulent term (because it certainly isn't based upon a scientific method) Intelligent Design. As it is religious traditions just like the authority (and valor) that can be stolen from legitimate sources of knowledge.)

The 'good' and 'nice' people who are members of such traditions (I once was as well), aren't any better or worse in principle than any other human being. And that's the point. We are all born selfish so should never be given further reason to be so. Here's the reasoning level of such traditions - take a grenade. If you pull the pin it, some say, will explode causing injury, death and great suffering. We say that's one way of looking it, a materialistic way. In our tradition we can pull pins out of grenades but due to our extra special beliefs it can just as likely be the cause of salvation. This is actually what has gone through the minds of extremists, the only the logical extension of all faiths - I can never die. Mother Teresa for example did no good whatsoever because hers was supernatural. This life, she explained, was suffering and it was good. The only real 'life' was death. Good and nice people make excellent apologists, rationalists, idiots and cowards. You can, as I believe Christopher Hitchens once saying 'make intelligent people think and say stupid things and good people do immoral things' with a little application of it. Pell needn't have become the epitome of 'evil' that he has (and be let loose on unsuspecting children (or their docile and sycophantic parents)). Australian conservative commentator Andrew Bolt's insistence that Pell is innocent and Prime Minister Morrison's feeling "deeply shocked" (more likely bewildered) make no difference. Pell held the gate open to rape and people have been convicted of such crimes merely by 'watching' and not 'actually' doing the rapey bit. He's more than guilty. Tradition just fosters the very thing it claims to abhor. This is how stupid humans can become when we merely insist they retain, and then fear, fictional friends into adulthood. So simple to see, so easy to ignore.

Quite the saddest thing is that when people feel inspired by an ideal 'larger' than themselves it is possible for us to create the wonderful. I personally wish that every horrible office building in this small city would magically turn into an ocean of spires, that all architecture was that inspiring. This is, of course, why we build stirring structures and who isn't stirred by the prospect of impressing a god (or terrified that you won't)?!). It is also why we generally build rubbish, strip malls, housing estates and global warming, when the only bottom line is short term survival (faith is just desperation as well by the way, the hope that you'll escape the inevitable). Far more compelling is the invitation to create structures and philosophies that inspire thought, compassion, a love of wisdom and I think we can do that without the added expectation that we allow others to spread insane hyperbole and overtly dangerous bullshit as if it were the pinnacle of poetry and civilization. It's also worth recalling history which is laborious I know... Half of the great buildings of Rome were financed via 'Indulgences'. That is 'If you pay up we will make sure that you get a VIP pass when you get to heaven. Deal?' The unspoken part of the already ludicrous deal is the fact that indulgences are a kind of supernatural 'protection money'. 'It'd be a shame to have to burn for eternity. Wouldn't it?!!' Some morality. Think about it. Most people will respond to this most recent episode (there were and will be others) by pretending it's due to a range of imagined causes whereas only one exists - biology and behaviour. Treating ourselves as if we were the children of magical beings (we have hundreds of tribes all screaming that their Big Daddy is the right one) doesn't placate natural uncertainties and fears, it magnifies them and prevents any progress. It awards stupidity and deceit. It increases the risk of what we say we hate - war, rape and plunder. The current Pope contradicts himself every day because faith thinking replaced actual reasoning decades before and reduced him to the level of a simpleton. Ultimately, because these traditions are geared to place the intellectually and/or morally stunted and immature in gatekeeper roles it manufactures Pells.

DS