The Importance of Knowing the Difference Between Fiction and Reality
When
I began the third grade, I started at a new school and became friends
with two boys who were caught up playing a game in which they pretended
to be chasing after some kind of comic-book style villain. The one who
had obviously invented this game wanted me to play
along with them, which I did at first. I don’t remember much, but
supposedly this villain had different colored motorcycles, one for each
day of the week. Every day he would invent new bad things this villain
had supposedly done or was about to do, and clues that he had supposedly
left behind that we could use to help us to stop him. After a few weeks
or so, I quit because it had never been very relevant or entertaining.
The whole thing struck me as being kind of stupid. After all, it was
totally obvious he didn’t exist, and the targets of his plots were just
as fictional. When I told him I wasn't interested in his imaginary
villain anymore, he insisted that he was NOT imaginary. After several
more weeks, he came around and finally admitted he had made it all up
and agreed to stop playing this game so that we could be friends again.
Either I was a little more mature than they were at the time, or else I
was just a big party pooper.
I’ve
never been into comic books myself, but I have been to see many of the
movies in recent years based on them. The difference is, whether they
are just colored drawings or extremely lifelike up on the big screen
with all the special effects, everybody knows that Batman and Joker are
just fictional characters. Although some may continue to read comic
books into adulthood, they don’t usually take time out of their day to
look for ways to help Batman foil any of his enemies. They also don’t go
to
Travelocity.com
and try to book a flight from their local airport to Gotham
International. Most people don’t run into problems from consuming
fictional stories because they have no problem distinguishing fiction
from reality.
I suppose the first religion developed in the same
way the motorcycle villain did, which is to say, some guy just invented
it one day. It gave people a certain sense of security to believe that
wild animals, the weather, and
natural disasters were controlled by various people with extraordinary
powers, and if you appeased them , they wouldn’t attack. It didn’t
matter that the whole thing was made up, it meant there was something
they could do to protect themselves. It gave people the feeling they
could understand why bad things happened and that they could have some
control over what would otherwise be random and uncontrollable
disasters. Using science and technology, today we understand our
environment so much better that we accept that natural disasters are
truly random, although insurance companies still refer to them as acts
of “god.” Polytheism has mostly outlived its usefulness, so most people
now think it’s about as stupid as our motorcycle villain.
Mostly,
but not completely. There are still many relics of these ancient
religions around us today. Friday 13th, Halloween, ghosts, zombies,
dowsing rods, astrology, palm reading, and other superstitions
still persist. After all, it’s probably safer to avoid the curse at the
bottom of that chain letter by forwarding it to ten of your friends,
just to be on the safe side.
Perhaps the most widespread
superstition to have persisted is called monotheism. Its success right
up to the present day can probably be attributed to the fact that it has
proved useful for giving believers a meaning and purpose for their
lives. It doesn’t matter that there is no evidence that this meaning and
purpose is not pure fiction, it still gives people the feeling that
they can understand what is really happening and why they exist.
Whether
it’s a villain imagined by a third-grader, ancient pagan gods, or else a
single, all powerful super hero in the sky and his evil archnemesis,
these are all “games” in which people either failed or refused to
distinguish between fiction and reality. I’m somewhat ashamed to admit
that I although I never fell for the
first two “games,” in the case of the third one, I played along for
decades before realizing that I had failed to distinguish between
fiction and reality.
So, what if the failure to distinguish
between fiction and reality means that adults engage in a little
immaturity, playing a few childish games? What’s the harm?
We
already have a human government that makes a tangled web of laws so
intricate that it is impossible for even a lawyer to know all of them
all, let alone obey them. Many of them are silly, others are even
contradictory. When adults are caught up playing the game of religion,
it includes having to support an entire second government of man as
well, except they call it, “the government of god.” Under the
administration of these men, it includes another impossible tangle of
often silly and contradictory laws, yet more taxes, and yet more
control. But since they tell you their religion has “set you free,” you
don’t notice that you’re twice the slave you were before. If religion
were something that was just between you and god, it wouldn’t be so bad.
Doesn’t
religion teach you the principles of how to live? Sure, but the big
principles of how to live are not unique to religion. The Golden Rule,
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” was ubiquitous
throughout the ancient world; it was even a part of Hammurabi’s civil
code.
If religion only contained such pithy and profound wisdom
as the Golden Rule, it wouldn’t seem so silly, but it doesn’t. It also
imposes many useless, irrelevant, and sometimes downright bizarre
practices, all of which are considered to be on the same level as the
Golden Rule in terms of appeasing the anger of the god. Sure, I admit
there’s some baby in there, but unfortunately, there’s an enormous
amount of “holy” bathwater too, and the superstitious nature of religion
makes it sacrilege
to throw any of it out.
Isn’t religion a force for good, giving
people the incentive to be moral people? German parents used to tell
their children that if they misbehaved, fairies would kidnap them. That
sure gave those children an incentive to behave too, but does anyone
think this is also a good idea? As an adult, are you so weak that you
need a “big brother” figure, spying on you 24-7 to guilt you into
civilized behavior? Are you so small-minded that you need a hobgoblin to
scare you into being a good person?
Also, whether morality is a
force for good or bad depends upon what your definition of morality is.
Islamist suicide bombers believe that murdering infidels is part of
being a good, moral person because of the specifics of their religion.
In response to such “morality,” Michael Shermer, the publisher of
Skeptic Magazine, cites the case of superstitious Iraqi officials who
bought 1,500 ADE 651 bomb detecting dowsing rods
(at a cost of $40,000 each) to screen for explosives at checkpoints.
Because the ADE 651 is as useful as a banana at detecting explosives,
Shermer makes the point that sometimes, being unable to distinguish
between fiction and reality costs lives. Religion is just another kind
of superstition, and sometimes it costs lives too.
When William
Miller, Herbert Armstrong, Harold Camping, Ron Weinland, and many others
besides predict that an invisible man in the sky will sweep down and
rapture the faithful away very soon, their followers don’t save for
retirement. This superstition leaves the faithful destitute in their old
age. Not only that, but seriously believing in such ideas is almost
like going online to try to buy an airline ticket to Gotham
International Airport.
Believing in an Armstrongist superstition
also means wasting a great portion of your life in devotion to an
imaginary man in the sky, week in, week out, year in, year out.
Religious leaders will tell you that you can’t get divorced when you’ve
made a mistake, and if you do, you can’t get remarried ever again. They
tell you it is sinful to see a doctor when you have a life-threatening
illness, so people die unnecessarily from treatable illnesses. All this
and more because people can’t distinguish between fiction and reality.
It’s
one thing if children want to play make believe games, but it’s
entirely another when adults play such games. When we grow up, we really
ought to put away such superstitions and concern ourselves with
reality. Not to do so is not only juvenile, it is dangerous. Fiction of
any kind is simply a bad foundation upon which to build a life or a
society.
Andrew
