The God Delusion
The other night welcomed the usual jaunt to St. Martin in the Fields, a church off Trafalgar Square where they play a seemingly unending series of Mozart. Love it. This time thirteen woodwind soloists gathered and stopped bickering for long enough to render a serenade with such lobotomising brilliance that, had the Virgin Mary appeared in the corner of the hall weeping blood, liquid platinum and the cure for fucking cancer, she would’ve been told “shh” and escorted outside for a severe drubbing.
But as much as I’d like to talk about music or beating up the mother of Christ, I won't anymore. No, I want to talk about the church, St. Martin in the Fields.
It’s very much a caricature of a church, designed to fulfil the standard state of worship in most religions. Awe-inspiring architecture, beautiful stained glass windows and idols slipped into their foreground. An overarching, spiraling staircase to the pulpit where a lukewarm myth-pimp can stand and deliver addresses which strike the love and fear of the Christian god – the most vindictive, schizoid character ever written – into the chanting, singing, goggle-eyed congregation, huddled in servile, penitent states on hard wooden pews.
A lot of houses for mainstream religion are designed like this, to aid their services – a recurrent mass-hypnotic session where states of euphoria, fear and zero personal intellect can be evoked across the board. It’s all very clever stuff. Or not so much clever, but evolved, with the ones that got it right spread across the world and still infecting.
Infecting? What’s so bad about people having a faith? Well, there’s always war. Having a docile and placid majority of a populous lapping up The Truth from a small controllable group of Metatronic preachers means that it’s not hard to move nations against each other. Nobel Prize-winner, Steven Weinberg, summed it up with disturbing correctness:
“With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”
But still; only in its most extreme and fundamentalist states, does faith evoke wars today. As we move into an evermore lopsided and MAD-blighted division of peoples, power and wealth, faith-evoked wars have almost stopped, leaving the simple legacy of having caused more bloodshed than anything else in the history of the world. Tut. But no, war isn’t the most problematic part anymore. As we move forward into a new era of enlightenment, the more fundamental and underlying problem has raised its fucked-up face: The God Delusion.
This is where faith, whilst not extreme to a societally damaging degree, is extreme enough to be damaging to oneself. The God Delusion occurs at the point where faith not only is blind, but also in denial of contradictory facts. More explanation? Put on your "fuck me, the world's insane" cap and read:
40% of Americans, near-half the world's current and only superpower, believe that the world has only existed for 10,000 years.
Yes, it’s fucked. Yet even though this was less time than it took to try OJ Simpson, these people will deny the facts with more fortitude than his lawyers, though the evidence is less subtle than someone murdering his own wife on a fucking doorstep. This piece of scientific bunkum is called Creationism, or Intelligent Design, and it's taught in many schools alongside science. And those children will also learn to disregard a sweeping section of logical fact and method, in favour of a delusion.
We have this, also disturbingly correct, quote from the esteemed Hippocrates:
“People think that epilepsy is divine simply because they don't have any idea what causes epilepsy. But I believe that someday we will understand what causes epilepsy, and at that moment, we will cease to believe that it's divine. And so it is with everything in the universe.”
And, to be honest, I would prefer cataclysmic religious war involving the horrific deaths of billions, rather than stupid people.
Even the astonishing ignorance and denial that faith creates isn’t the worst part. Another side-effect, is a massively cohesive set of society that convinces themselves they are candidates for an afterlife, rather than people living in a real world. People that justify their actions and motives based on an “actual life” after their life on Earth, and thus, squandering the last chance they have to fully live, understand and enjoy their only moment of reality. From the philosopher Feuerbach:
“My only wish…is to transform friends of God into friends of man, believers into thinkers, devotees of prayer into devotees of work, candidates for the hereafter into students of the world, Christians who, by their own admission, are ‘half animal, half angel’ into persons, into whole persons.”
But nothing that I'm saying makes a difference. This is because of the most sinister part - that the God Delusion is hardwired to not question itself. Questioning what you're told is called a "crisis of faith" and frowned on. Events that make you think twice are "tests". Leaving is synonymous with excommunication and breaking the rules requires penance. There is massive peer pressure within any religious body, echoed in its own theses, to subjugate and accept. And the goal is to remove all form of moral independence, such that the very acts of questioning or leaving are terrifying.
If hypnotists carried out stage acts where the subject is forced to assume he's a zebra and to never want himself to be deprogrammed, the hypnotist would have seventeen moles of ammonia funneled into his stomach for being a fucking lunatic hobgoblin. Yet there are hundreds of thousands of people doing this, every day. And they are respected for it.
NOW...
Why am I banging on about religion? Well, mainly, because it needs a good chainsaw to the hamstrings. But also, because I've noticed disturbing parallels between love and religion. At their simple and healthy levels - I think - both love and religion require a certain degree of faith. Nothing is certain. That's normal. But when this faith becomes so strong as to be deluded, where it becomes heartfelt expectation rather than rationalised faith - well, the effects are near-identical in both religion (see above) and love (see below).
You will recognise one or some or all of the following symptoms.
The Love Delusion
It hardwires itself into you and removes all need to question it from that point on. It precludes the need to understand, or try to understand it. It strengthens this trait in its own churches, which are candlelit dinners and bedrooms, the dumbed-down hypnotic states of romance and carnality. It will deconstruct and remove the need for other components of your life, replacing them instead with agendas that strengthen or further its own. It will destroy your faculties for enjoying the real world without its rose-tinted filter. Your entire life folds into a prayer, hope and dream. You want it to last forever, no matter the vast, ignored cracks in its fundaments. All evidence that it’s failing, finishing or doesn’t exist, no matter how damning, is pushed aside. Evidence it exists or could exist, however small, is magnified a thousandfold. You’re in a constant, simultaneous state of euphoria and fear. In extreme and fundamentalist states, when far removed from the real essence of love, it can evoke wars. Personal, bitter wars against the people that threaten it. And when it ends, it's not just a sadness, it's the celestial fucking apocalypse. And this is what it's like every... single... time...
Of course, the God Delusion - although almost exactly equivalent - is the more worrying psychosis. There is no cure. With the Love Delusion, you eventually get the Fucked-Up Reality and the road to recovery. Yay.
Stay safe; restrict your dealings in love and religion to music and the provision of acoustical magnificence for it.
[ DISCLAIMER: Not every religious person / sect is as demented as I've described. But I've learned the hard way that people will say "but I'm not like this!" and I'll want to slash their cheeks; because, amazingly obviously, I'm covering majority cases. ]
[ CREDIT: "The God Delusion", a TV documentary (prob. C4) which made me angry with everybody. ]
But as much as I’d like to talk about music or beating up the mother of Christ, I won't anymore. No, I want to talk about the church, St. Martin in the Fields.
It’s very much a caricature of a church, designed to fulfil the standard state of worship in most religions. Awe-inspiring architecture, beautiful stained glass windows and idols slipped into their foreground. An overarching, spiraling staircase to the pulpit where a lukewarm myth-pimp can stand and deliver addresses which strike the love and fear of the Christian god – the most vindictive, schizoid character ever written – into the chanting, singing, goggle-eyed congregation, huddled in servile, penitent states on hard wooden pews.
A lot of houses for mainstream religion are designed like this, to aid their services – a recurrent mass-hypnotic session where states of euphoria, fear and zero personal intellect can be evoked across the board. It’s all very clever stuff. Or not so much clever, but evolved, with the ones that got it right spread across the world and still infecting.
Infecting? What’s so bad about people having a faith? Well, there’s always war. Having a docile and placid majority of a populous lapping up The Truth from a small controllable group of Metatronic preachers means that it’s not hard to move nations against each other. Nobel Prize-winner, Steven Weinberg, summed it up with disturbing correctness:
“With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”
But still; only in its most extreme and fundamentalist states, does faith evoke wars today. As we move into an evermore lopsided and MAD-blighted division of peoples, power and wealth, faith-evoked wars have almost stopped, leaving the simple legacy of having caused more bloodshed than anything else in the history of the world. Tut. But no, war isn’t the most problematic part anymore. As we move forward into a new era of enlightenment, the more fundamental and underlying problem has raised its fucked-up face: The God Delusion.
This is where faith, whilst not extreme to a societally damaging degree, is extreme enough to be damaging to oneself. The God Delusion occurs at the point where faith not only is blind, but also in denial of contradictory facts. More explanation? Put on your "fuck me, the world's insane" cap and read:
40% of Americans, near-half the world's current and only superpower, believe that the world has only existed for 10,000 years.
Yes, it’s fucked. Yet even though this was less time than it took to try OJ Simpson, these people will deny the facts with more fortitude than his lawyers, though the evidence is less subtle than someone murdering his own wife on a fucking doorstep. This piece of scientific bunkum is called Creationism, or Intelligent Design, and it's taught in many schools alongside science. And those children will also learn to disregard a sweeping section of logical fact and method, in favour of a delusion.
We have this, also disturbingly correct, quote from the esteemed Hippocrates:
“People think that epilepsy is divine simply because they don't have any idea what causes epilepsy. But I believe that someday we will understand what causes epilepsy, and at that moment, we will cease to believe that it's divine. And so it is with everything in the universe.”
And, to be honest, I would prefer cataclysmic religious war involving the horrific deaths of billions, rather than stupid people.
Even the astonishing ignorance and denial that faith creates isn’t the worst part. Another side-effect, is a massively cohesive set of society that convinces themselves they are candidates for an afterlife, rather than people living in a real world. People that justify their actions and motives based on an “actual life” after their life on Earth, and thus, squandering the last chance they have to fully live, understand and enjoy their only moment of reality. From the philosopher Feuerbach:
“My only wish…is to transform friends of God into friends of man, believers into thinkers, devotees of prayer into devotees of work, candidates for the hereafter into students of the world, Christians who, by their own admission, are ‘half animal, half angel’ into persons, into whole persons.”
But nothing that I'm saying makes a difference. This is because of the most sinister part - that the God Delusion is hardwired to not question itself. Questioning what you're told is called a "crisis of faith" and frowned on. Events that make you think twice are "tests". Leaving is synonymous with excommunication and breaking the rules requires penance. There is massive peer pressure within any religious body, echoed in its own theses, to subjugate and accept. And the goal is to remove all form of moral independence, such that the very acts of questioning or leaving are terrifying.
If hypnotists carried out stage acts where the subject is forced to assume he's a zebra and to never want himself to be deprogrammed, the hypnotist would have seventeen moles of ammonia funneled into his stomach for being a fucking lunatic hobgoblin. Yet there are hundreds of thousands of people doing this, every day. And they are respected for it.
NOW...
Why am I banging on about religion? Well, mainly, because it needs a good chainsaw to the hamstrings. But also, because I've noticed disturbing parallels between love and religion. At their simple and healthy levels - I think - both love and religion require a certain degree of faith. Nothing is certain. That's normal. But when this faith becomes so strong as to be deluded, where it becomes heartfelt expectation rather than rationalised faith - well, the effects are near-identical in both religion (see above) and love (see below).
You will recognise one or some or all of the following symptoms.
The Love Delusion
It hardwires itself into you and removes all need to question it from that point on. It precludes the need to understand, or try to understand it. It strengthens this trait in its own churches, which are candlelit dinners and bedrooms, the dumbed-down hypnotic states of romance and carnality. It will deconstruct and remove the need for other components of your life, replacing them instead with agendas that strengthen or further its own. It will destroy your faculties for enjoying the real world without its rose-tinted filter. Your entire life folds into a prayer, hope and dream. You want it to last forever, no matter the vast, ignored cracks in its fundaments. All evidence that it’s failing, finishing or doesn’t exist, no matter how damning, is pushed aside. Evidence it exists or could exist, however small, is magnified a thousandfold. You’re in a constant, simultaneous state of euphoria and fear. In extreme and fundamentalist states, when far removed from the real essence of love, it can evoke wars. Personal, bitter wars against the people that threaten it. And when it ends, it's not just a sadness, it's the celestial fucking apocalypse. And this is what it's like every... single... time...
Of course, the God Delusion - although almost exactly equivalent - is the more worrying psychosis. There is no cure. With the Love Delusion, you eventually get the Fucked-Up Reality and the road to recovery. Yay.
Stay safe; restrict your dealings in love and religion to music and the provision of acoustical magnificence for it.
[ DISCLAIMER: Not every religious person / sect is as demented as I've described. But I've learned the hard way that people will say "but I'm not like this!" and I'll want to slash their cheeks; because, amazingly obviously, I'm covering majority cases. ]
[ CREDIT: "The God Delusion", a TV documentary (prob. C4) which made me angry with everybody. ]
posted by Juliet is Bleeding... | 3:15 pm
Love is pretty fucked up as is without the added element of delusion. Psychotic delusion is the worse though. Just hide the knives and hope that other person's never heard about crimes of passion, otherwise you might be a victim of a delusion-based homicide. Think "If you can't be with me, you won't be with anyone else!" while slicing your body up into pretty shapes.
I don't get it! In order for love to delude you, you still must harbor some belief in it, yes?
Let's not call it "love" you're worried about, because love is there. It's stupid romance that ruins everything, and the expectation that without it, you're a worthless piece of crap. I don't believe so. Self-absorbed happiness is the best revenge!
(BTW, I'm American, and I don't believe in that crap they teach kids nowadays ... )
To nail it down, it's a bit like when people say "it's better to think with the heart than the head" (or vice versa). The Love Delusion is where you are thinking with 100% heart and your head is floating on a marshmallow in cloud cuckoo land with a syringe of neat heroin sticking out of one eyeball.
I morph into psycho mode about love. Sometimes I think that the Western notion of love conveniently fits into the capitalistic method of profiteering. Sure, there is love in other cultures that aren't in the 'Capo' realm but love in the modern age or the new millennium is like a new mall: shop for it on online dating sites, if someone doesn't suit one's personal idea of 'divinity' (their looks fade etc) then it's easy to find someone else that is branded the 'soulmate', there's another fallacious notion, the 'soulmate', like there is only 'one' person only, a bit like a twisted version of Highlander except that luckily people do die in the end but the question is when they do reach the final junction, do they look back in dissapointment, over an ideal or paradigm that is essentially an artificial construct, just like religion and many religious stories that aren't even archaelogically supported by physical evidence.
Correct.
Further, your whole idea re: Capo-love in the Western world, is so spot on. This is *exactly* the reason that love is so much more of a cunt these days. As it becomes easier to "pick" people, we all become more expendable. Like small firms in an internet-enabled market.
And, as they say, the rich get richer, i.e. the playboys/girls/investment banks get to fuck over evermore hapless victims to their own benefit, but at the expense of their soul.
I'm not so down on love, now that I lived past the age of 30 and to tell the tale of three relationships under my belt.
But I do believe you're right on the money, no pun intended! The whole marketing of love, as if we have no excuse NOT to date, is disgusting to me now. I have signed a contract with myself to NEVER look for love. Let it come to me, damn it!
Yes, why do we lose our thinking caps when we fall in love? But think about it: how else on earth to put up with that beloved being, warts, farts and all. I know I was deluded in my last relationship -- nay, it wasn't a relationship, but a travesty! -- and the good thing is that he taught me everything I don't want.
Anyway, the Arabs invented love poetry and when the colonized Spain eventually the French got to liking it and became troubadors singing silly songs to unavailable royal women. (Sound familiar?) But in truth, marriage was always a social arrangment between two families that stood to benefit from each other's connection financially. Love was secondary. You grew to love your spouse, not loved your spouse in order to grow.
Don't give up, my pretties across the pond ... ! The "right" love is the one that doesn't leave you deluded.
XOX
Juliet, Manola, hear hear!
You know at one stage I thought I was going mad, but it was only in 1999 that I first noticed it. I'd date people and they'd be distracted, then the whole internet-capo thing really took off. I busted many a person cheating. With whom? Someone they'd met in a chat room. Or I'd be 'side-lined' because of virtual people.
Juliet, expendable is the word I was searching for earlier.
Manola, yep, I'm like that now, 'let it look for me'.
I'm waiting to see footage of someone jumping on a couch over religion. I'm sure it's happened; but I've yet to see.
The arse jumping on a couch because of love, however (don't we all know who), has taken the word and redefined it for himself into a twisted, fucked up caricature.
A moral to your story? People are sheep.
Caricature is about right.
And yep, the whole online cheating thing. Virtual people can be even more appealing than real life people, because people can mask their foibles and appear how they wish online, whilst in reality you get to see all the flaws. So it's also easier to caricature love, online.
Obviously it's harder to fuck each other's brains out, but we're talking about the mental/emotional component here.
Manola, if men said, "Let love come to ME", the human race would die out. You make a pose about how you're not going to seek out love - but it's meaningless, you never did. Women never do.