Faith Sausage

Self-Authoring

Efficacious Naivety

“For in much wisdom is much weariness, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.” — Bible, Ecclesiastes 1:18

Most faiths operate on a certain level of naivety. It’s implicit in the relationship and partly why pastors often refer to their flock as children and parishioners to their priest as “father.” But, even without such formalities, the ability of a religion to take root and move into a new place is often predicated on some degree of ignorance. Buddhism for example, embraced as it has been by so many disaffected Westerners, would’ve never gotten a foothold in the English-Speaking world if people had known what Buddhism was really like in practice.

Over here, far away in Europe or America, separated by Oceans and Language and Tradition, an entire mythos of naivety has been built up around the religion, depicting Buddhism as cool and progressive and detached and wise. You know, a bald man meditating in a rock garden while holding full lotus pose, his body miraculously hovering slightly above the ground… and maybe he also secretly knows kung-fu.

That kind of thing.

The truth of the matter is though that Buddhism in its native lands is every bit as kitsch and superstitious as the Christianity those Westerners were running away from. And, you know, often just as intolerant. The temples are full of people trying to pawn trinkets off on you and there are holy shysters just itching to take your money. Little old ladies in Tibet flail about with ridiculous prayers to try and cure momma of the dropsy and allegedly celibate monks preach holiness with their lips all day only to return to the monastery each night for a romp of gay sex. Far from being a religion of Peace and Serenity, Buddhism, like all the other major faiths, was spread by the sword and, even to this day, contains within it sects who talk about how they want to kill Muslims in a great conflagration of war.

As it turns out, the human condition is universal.

It’s absurdity and hypocrisy and irrationality… you can’t get away from it. Even the idea that we could was, like so many Californians converting to “Zen” in the 00s, always prefaced on erroneous and naive assumptions.

In general, people really are how Christ described them in The New Testament. Mankind, humanity…

Most of us genuinely are sheep.

Mos of mankind is nothing more than a confused herd animal. Going along to get along, often without any real reason for what they’re doing other than it’s what the rest of the herd is doing too.

Hey? How could it be otherwise?

Here we are, you and me, each of us with at best a hundred years of life (and probably a lot less) and we’re supposed to figure out The Universe in such a span of time? We’re supposed to figure out Life? The Meaning of Existence? All this stuff which has been here for eons and eons before our birth and which expands in all directions for all eternity filled with galaxy after galaxy and star after star?

… We’re supposed to figure out that?

Not possible.

Heck, it’s only barely possible to understand how we got here. I mean, how we got here in the most simplistic and materialistic, literal of terms. Just knowing what happened to get us where we are today is impossibly complicated, and most of us only get by by pretending that it’s not. Our ancestors, millions and millions of them, 99.999999% of whom we don’t even know their names, lived and fought and died and struggled with problems we don’t even remember, and all our histories are but fragmented fever dreams of that forgotten reality. Dreams which, in many cases, are themselves honestly no better than fiction.

Today as I sit here writing this for example it is December 7th, a day which will live in infamy. The 82nd anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Except it’s not.

That’s kind of a ret-con.

That’s kind of Pretend.

Even that… that very very important and covered in History Books day…

It’s just barely accurate. It’s the thinnest sliver of truth, the smallest piece that could possibly be remembered about the fullness of that day.

How much better then is everything else we think we know about our pasts?

The Philippine Occupation.

For in actuality on December 7, 1941, the Japanese did not simply attack one military base in Hawaii. Not at all. What they actually did instead was a full-scale invasion of all the U.S. and other Western holdings in the Pacific, which, at the time, included Guam, The Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaya. Scarcely remembered anymore, but in 1941 the Philippines were a U.S. territory, a colony of the United States empire. On that day, far, far away from Hawaii, millions of U.S. nationals were invaded, shot, enslaved, and killed…

And today the average American doesn’t even know about it.

To be honest… they barely even knew about it then.

For whatever reason the public consciousness became fixated solely on the attack in Hawaii (which wasn’t even a state at the time and so technically just as much “America” as the Philippines were) and public consciousness has remained there ever since. The rest of that day? The rest of those attacks?

Gone.

Vanished.

Washed away with our forgotten memories like tears in rain.

And the trouble is that all of history is like this. All of it. It’s not “not true” so much as it’s only the smallest piece of the smallest piece of what really happened, the vast majority of everything being lost to the sands of time.

It must be so.

There’s simply too much going on to ever possibly remember.

There’s simply too much to ever know.

And that’s just History.

How much more unknown are the depths of Time and Space? Of Thought? Metaphysics? The Mind?

If you were actually aware of it… if you could actually even for a moment Know just how much You Did Not Know… you could never be certain of anything again. You’d just be lost. Drowning in chaos. Therefore, to keep from coming unmoored in this Sea of Unknowing, to try and tear a coherent story that we can tell ourselves about who we are and where we come from and what we’re doing here from that Morass of Confusion…

The sheep need Authority.

They need a person, or an institution, or a power, to come along and give them an “official” version of What Happened. Of What’s True. To set the record straight and lay down the facts. In the vast ocean of infinitely many things that one could choose to know, they need somebody to tell them what to focus on.

Ultimately, this is no different than saying that they need somebody to tell them what to believe.

That’s why religions happen. That’s why they’ll always happen. That’s why no amount of progress or scientific development or philosophical achievement will ever succeed in banishing the con-man in robes or the trinket seller with his totems or the crowds rushing hither and yon after this or that visionary who claims to have seen Mother Mary in the sky. Because fundamentally The World, The Cosmos… it is Unknowable.

Unknowable simply by virtue of being too complex.

There’s simply too much to try and know.

You get about 75 years to figure it out. Good luck.

So, we need shortcuts.

Summaries.

We need somebody we can trust to put the bare essentials of it all in a book for us. And preferably one that’s not too long. I’ve often said that the only reason Hinduism never took off in the West is because their holy books are so long and numerous. Makes the Bible look like a pamphlet in comparison. Because listen, even the Bible is too long a Summary of Everything for most people. Even that is still too ambiguous. Too confusing. Too open for interpretation. So in the end you have to distill it all down into just a few sentences, maybe even a catchphrase. Something like “Sola Fide”, or “Judge Not”, or some version of The Golden Rule.

That’s what we want.

That’s what we need.

People rush to Authority because The Cosmos is complicated and to just get on with the business of living they need someone to distill it down into something short and simple that makes sense.

And… this can work.

I’m not knocking it.

People need what they need and who am I to tell them otherwise? If, in order to get through life, they decide they need a guy in a cassock telling them where they can and can’t ejaculate then I’m not going to take that away from them. The New Atheists used to malign such behavior, saying that religion was nothing but a crutch. Maybe so. Either way, I’m not personally in the habit of kicking crutches out from beneath people who need them.

Unfortunately though… I haven’t really gotten to have a lot of say in the matter.

Gutenberg Event

The fact is that today, in the age of the internet, mostly those crutches have been removed. They’ve been kicked, violently, out from beneath all the cripples who most needed them. And you know the collapse of religion, of faith… the collapse of the traditional family and traditional morals… it’s been blamed on all kinds of things. On Feminism. On Social Justice. On Marxism or Capitalism or The Theory of Evolution or Democracy.

But, it’s probably none of those things.

In reality… it’s probably just The Internet. Or, rather, Technology more broadly.

We lose sight of this fact because we’re in it, but you and I dear reader are living through a time of great upheaval. A time future historians will probably study very intensely. A time when literally everything changed. If you’re over thirty you have lived through a Gutenberg Level Event of societal disruption, more than that even. Frankly, we’ve lived through an era of change totally unprecedented in all human history.

People rightly recognize The Printing Press as instrumental in the collapse of the Old Order, but somehow fail to see that The Internet is 1000x more potent.

Younger readers won’t understand this but when I was first learning to drive a car, when you got behind the wheel and drove away you were gone.

Like…

Completely unreachable.

Cellphones existed, yes, but not everyone had them and for a time I didn’t. When you weren’t at your house connected to the land-line… there was simply no way for anyone to know where you were.

Kind of unthinkable today.

Before that, in the time of my parents, television came along. I mean, right proper television. T.V. Culture. The era of the glowing box in every home. Before that, outside of radio, there really was no “mass communication.” Images from half-way around the world didn’t bombard you in your living room and the same two or three talking heads didn’t show up around dinner to tell everyone in the country what to think.

On the flip side of that my own children were born just after the advent of the smartphone and they’ll never know what it was like to not constantly have a camera in their pocket. They’ll never need to learn to use a physical map, they’ll never experience a time when the answer to any given question isn’t just a simple Siri prompt away…

And that’s the thing.

That’s it right there.

In the Sea of Unknowing, suddenly, really only within the last twenty to thirty years, a lot more, became knowable. Granted, there’s still an infinite amount of stuff we don’t know, and that will always be the case, but our sonar systems, our ability to scan that Sea and pick out items within it and categorize and label them… increased exponentially. And when it did…

When it did all The Narratives of our former Authorities started to fall down.

That certain level of naivety I mentioned at the beginning, that thing which all religions have to operate under? It was moved. People were no longer naive enough to believe.

Textual criticisms, historical inaccuracies, scientific incongruities… in the age of The Internet these things which only specialists used to grapple with were now front and center in the face of every believer. As the dial-up modems sang their familiar and now forgotten song across the lands, questions men and women were not prepared to answer suddenly reared their heads.

For example, did you know that The Story of the Adulterous Woman, the one with the famous line in it where Jesus says to let him who is without sin cast the first stone, actually wasn’t in the original gospels?

Neither did almost anyone else. But, suddenly, with The Internet… they did.

And what did that mean? Was the Bible still inerrant? All those sermons about that passage… were they valid?

Suddenly, any Tom, Dick, or Harry could make an hour-long video explaining to the common man that, indeed, originally there were not even just four gospels at all, but actually dozens, and that the ones we eventually got were the results of centuries of edits and re-writes and compromises between conflicting texts.

Okay. See… Mamma Jean in Kansas was simply not ready for that information.

As America went online suddenly anyone, anywhere, could look up the historical account and see that, contra the insistings of their priest, Peter was not actually the first pope. Indeed, he couldn’t have been, as such an office would not exist for a few hundred years after his death. Anyone could, with the click of a mouse, learn moreover that it’s doubtful if Peter was ever a bishop of Rome at all, in fact there’s not even any hard evidence that he set foot inside the city, much less that the apostle died there.

How does one continue being a good Catholic knowing that?

Do you see the problem?

All of a sudden, thanks to The Internet… it all starting feeling a little fake.

With the coming of technology, a bit of our naivety died. The scales fell from our eyes and we all got to see just how The Sausage of Religion got made.

…

And we didn’t like it.

Death of the Father

“No one can be a Man unless his Father has died.” - Sigmund Freud (paraphrasing)

When we’re young we ask our parents for everything. Not only for material needs like food and shelter but for answers to existential questions as well. “Mommy? What is God like?” or “Daddy, what happens after we die?” This is right and good and every parent does their best to field such questions because children have no choice but to accept the answers given.

After all, what else could happen? The gulf of naivety between parent and child is so vast that it only makes sense.

But.

At some point we grow up.

At some point there comes a time in every man’s (or woman’s) life when they’re faced with the indisputable fact that Mom and Dad actually don’t have all the answers. They actually don’t know any better than you…

Scary.

What could be more awful than the sudden realization that there’s simply no one to ask?

The realization that you have to figure it out for yourself, or, more likely, not figure out anything at all and just learn to be okay with that Uncertainty.

Avoiding this realization, refusing to acknowledge that this is true, well… that’s often how dysfunctional parent-child relationships are created, and how they persist into adulthood. In some respects, the child has refused to “leave the nest”, so to speak. Even if he or she is no longer physically under the same roof. He’s still always deferring to his parents and looking for their approval, incapable of making any of his own decisions, refusing to take up the mantel of Authority for himself. This keeps the child in a dependent state for years beyond what is appropriate but…

Well, the trade-off is that the child never has to confront any of The Big Questions.

• What should I do with my life?

• Am I being a good person?

• What do I believe?

• Whom should I marry?

• What is right?

• What is wrong?

If you refuse to grow up you never have to answer any of those things. Mommy and Daddy already answered them for you. Therefore, in the event that any of them go poorly, in the event that you mess any of those aspects of your life up…

You get to say it wasn’t your fault.

You were misled. Misguided.

You can shunt all the blame for your failures off on your parents and feel a kind of satisfied justification in the fact that you’re a loser. Because now, instead of being an adult with agency who made a bad choice…

You get to be a victim.

You get sympathy.

You know… at least from yourself. A pity-party is always well attended.

Inevitably of course a certain amount of resentment starts to accrue in the parents of such children. The parents, gradually growing older and weaker, ever increasingly needing care themselves instead of to continue in their role as caregivers, will come, even subconsciously, to think of such children as weak. As disappointments. As baby birds which never learned to fly.

I’ve known such families. Probably we all have. Families where the parents have grown bitter and perhaps a bit tyrannically due to their continued rule over their child’s psyche.

And…

I submit to you that’s us.

That, dear readers, is “The West”.

It’s even the church.

Another Daddy Figure people wanted to “save” them.

Everywhere, all the time, in everything, people are always looking for approval. “Can I do this?” “Is it allowed?” “Is X against the rules?” Looking always to an external authority, be it our employer, a corporation, the government, or the church, and asking them for permission before any action in our lives… well… like disgruntled parents those institutions have come to hate us. So long have the people acted like children, like slaves, that "Authority” has only naturally begun to regard them as such.

The reality is that “Daddy” kind of hates us.

You see this most clearly in my opinion in the case of so called “Trads.” Traditionalists. Christian Conservatives. Those who want to pretend that we in fact never saw Daddy get drunk. That we never realized that he was a babbling idiot. That the sex abuse scandals and the war crimes and the rape islands in the Caribbean never happened and that we should all just LARP like we’re still little kids and everything is a-ok and Daddy knows best and we just need to trust the hierarchy.

Yeah. Well what do they get for that?

What does all that fierce loyalty to The Flag or The Magisterium or The Country get them?

I’ll tell you.

It gets their beloved “Traditional Latin Mass” banned. It gets their jobs shipped off over-seas. It gets their kids shipped off to the middle east to get blown up for Raytheon’s bottom line.

And why shouldn’t it?

Truly.

I mean, imagine it. Imagine being a politician today, in 2023, with everything that’s come out about how sordid and evil so many of our politician’s lives can be… and still people want you to tell them what to do?

Still.

Or Imaging being a bishop in Germany or something, a guy who like raped ten choir boys and “the faithful” still gather round and want to kiss your ring.

Imaging being the CEO of a corporation, working your employees to the bone and taking away their healthcare, only to have them defend your interests like loyal peasants at the Republican National Convention.

…Wouldn’t you kind of hate them?

Could you even help yourself from doing so?

How beggarly they would seem. How weak.

See, nobody likes and adult baby. Nobody respects a man who won’t grow up.

And so, like children exposed too early to violence and porn, today we find that our collective naivety has been shattered by the on-rushing of technology and we see ever more clearly that everything we’ve doing for the past fifty years has simply been cope for that fact. Trying to avoid it. Trying to pretend it didn’t happen. As mentioned, the trads deny it hardest of all but really all of us have failed to grapple with the collapse of Authority in different ways. Many of us simply spun out of control. Like college kids finally out on their own our culture has embraced hedonism and debauchery and sacrificed any concern for Tomorrow on the altar of Pleasure in the Present.

And why not?

Daddy’s Dead. Tradition, Church, Christianity… all our Institutions… all that Stuff…

We saw them naked beneath their robes. All that fancy dress and pomp and circumstance covering a fat flabby body with stick thin limbs covered in old-man white body hair. Nietzsche claimed we were living through the death of God and maybe that’s true, but it’s more than that. It’s the death of all our father figures more broadly. All our Authorities. They can’t hide their nakedness any longer. Thanks to The Internet… to technology… they can’t hide their sins.

The Founding Fathers? Racists. Slave owners.

The Pilgrims? Colonists. Killers of the Native Americans.

The Church Fathers? Misogynists. Apologists for Empire.

The Vatican? Sex abusers. Liars. Men who cover up crimes.

The U.S. Government? Facilitators of ethnic cleansings and genocides and doesn’t even think twice.

In the past, when “The Narrative” and “The Message” could only come to you by newspaper or by a single talking head on T.V. in the living room, all that stuff could be ignored, papered over, covered.

Now it can’t.

And if you don’t want to go the Trad route and play pretend that we never saw any of it then you’re faced with the fact that everyone who for centuries told us Right from Wrong can no longer be trusted.

The fact that now we have to figure it out on our own.

Not an easy task.

But… maybe that’s what always had to happen. What always had to happen eventually. Maybe… just maybe… that’s part of why God had to go away again even after he’d risen from the dead. Maybe we had to learn to walk on our own. Maybe the handholding had to stop. Maybe after millennia of bowing down to statues in temples and rocks in the forest and kissing the rings of kings and popes…

Maybe we had to be kicked out of the nest.

Maybe… at last… it’s time to grow up.

And maybe God’s not coming back until we do.

Maybe he’s waiting to see if the kids who got their crutches kicked out from under them will ever get strong enough to stand on their own two feet.

Amor Vincit Omnia.