'Believers'...

 

"I believe what I believe cuz I believe it!"

“Let’s just say; that if and if and if and if and if…”

The Monkee’s hit song plays in my mind; ‘I’m a Believer’. It’s occurred to me that Believers believe in the utter nonsense of the ‘Wholly Bobble’ because to do otherwise would destroy their world view entirely. To admit that the whole purpose of the godly, gallant and gory sacrifice of Jesus to his ‘father’ was a bust, a fiction, a devious bit of subterfuge and crafty marketing, all for naught and unsubstantiated by single scrap of evidence would be devastating to the ‘Believer’. 

The kinder rationale by which I try to understand the Believers’ position is this: they are fearful. They generally feel untethered from their mistaken understanding of life, the universe and everything if they perceive that they are approaching disbelief. They glimpse the abyss and shudder back in fear. Their ties with their social group are also at risk by their investigating the verisimilitude of their ill-held and ill-defined belief in god and their adherence to a religion.

The less sympathetic take on Believers is that they are ignorant. Their ignorance may be willful or it may be for lack of education or for the lack of mental ability to internalize the necessary information. For example, the inability to understand the most rudimentary, foundational precepts of evolution or the Big Bang or abiogenesis. 

In the intellectual, colloquial understanding of ‘believe’, it is a choice, based on a presentation of sufficient evidence whether or not one believes in the Bible, but if one commits to holding on to ‘Belief’ in the Bible as an emotional anchor, the choice is then one that is forced upon the ‘Believer’. This state of ‘forced Belief’ is the feet of clay of the state of Faith.

“Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.” - Saint Augustine

 

I find it preposterous that Believers claim to receive messages from god. They might cite a pithy Snapple cap or a poignant fortune cookie as a message from ‘god’. Often they’ll claim to have a message from god to pass on to non-Believers. The message often is simply, ‘god loves you very much.’ That strikes me as being right out of a junior high school study-hall when a love note is passed along on through a Miles Standish stand-in. As an all-powerful god, how is it that he/it must rely on feeble, mundane messages passed on by go-betweens? 

To address a more salient point; how can Believers actually take on Faith that being a human is intrinsically sinful and worthy of eternal damnation? Even if one were to take the ‘word of god’ as true that god made man in his/its image, then why the fuck would that resultant being, made in the likeness of god, be inherently sinful and an abomination in the sight of the ‘Lord’? 

 

‘Sin’ is the answer to that, btw, for those keeping score.

 

So, we come to crux of the biscuit for Christians; ‘Salvation’ from the curse of the ‘original sin’, the fall of humanity into eternal perdition and damnation, etc. Something I will call ‘he ‘Battered Believer Syndrome’; ‘God loves me even though I’m wicked. I deserve to be punished for my transgressions against him/it because he/it loves me. After all, I hurt him/it, too, by being a sinful, wicked human believer. But if I pledge to love and serve him/it then I will be rewarded in heaven after I die!’ Talk about sleeping with the enemy. Some serious psychiatric counseling is in order here.

 

The ‘Battered Believer Syndrome’ might be rephrased as ‘Yes, he’s a monster but he’s my monster and I believe in him ‘cuz I was so bad to him that he had to suffer and die for me so that he could forgive me of the horrible things that mythical characters did to him in a fictional, mythical past.’

 

What a load of sh!te!

 

In her book, ‘The Battered Woman Syndrome’, Lenore E. Walker says most women who are battered exhibit four characteristics:

 

1.   They believe the violence is their fault.

2.   They can't place the blame for the violence on anyone else.

3.   They fear for their lives and their children's lives.

4.   They believe their abuser is everywhere and sees everything.

(my emphasis, btw…)

 

How is this any different from being a ‘Believer’ in a god which is a monster? A Batterer of Believers, of humans, a destroyer of humans?

The short answer is, it’s NOT. 

 

1.A Believer accepts punishment from god because they believe that they are sinners.

2. Believers place the blame on themselves and believe that they deserve it.

3. Believers fear for themselves and their loved ones in the eternal torment and eternal punishment in Hell.

4. Believers believe that their abuse (god) is everywhere and sees everything.

It’s cognitive dissonance all the way down for ‘Believers’. When a Christian Believer is backed into a corner to provide some bit of evidence for any single part of the Jesus story, they deflect and change direction. They might squirm and blurt out ‘Well, Socrates (or Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar, etc.) isn’t very well documented either.’ 

Spoiler Alert: yes, they are. 

If one challenges a ‘Believer’ to produce any evidence that supports the ‘resurrection’ as fact, their heads explode; gibberish and obfuscation are the ejectamenta. One can bank on preposterous nonsense ensues such as; ‘There are lots of scientists who say that the Bible account is historically accurate’ 

Evidence, please…

Those ‘Believers’ who don’t claim sheepishly that the story of Adam & Eve is metaphor will offer to refute Darwinian evolution with a long-winded statement based on an embarrassing lack of understanding of the basis of biology. 

Another typical, misguided effort to sidle out of the corner a ‘Believer’ has painted themselves into is to dismiss the Theory of Evolution as being wholly unverifiable and, moreover, unable to prove the beginning of life. 

A ‘Believer’ would crow, ‘Nothing can come from nothing!’ as if that deepitie offered an astounding insight. Such pithy twaddle doesn’t pass the ‘Embroidered Silk Pillow Test’. IMHO.