Religious Fundamentalism - Why John might be right.

Fundamentalism is tossed around like a dirty word these days. It is associated with the western world's heightened awareness of radical Muslim fundamentalists, a.k.a. terrorists. Fundamentalism, however, is something seemingly much more benign. Simply put, fundamentalism is a belief that all knowledge, particularly scripture, anointed by your particular brand of religion be taken by the word. In other words, whatever your good book says should be taken completely literally, without exception. As crazy as this sounds, christian fundamentalism permeates far deeper into the mainstream of life here in America than many may think. Although sanity still usually prevails in a free society, vigilance must be kept to ensure the sanctity of free thought and opinion for future generations.

This whole thing started for me when I came across a succession of quotes from people in positions of influence and power in this country who swore by the idea that the earth is only 6000 years old. This was stunning to me. Sure, if my dear old grandmother told me this, I can accept it. She grew up in an entirely different world than I did. However, these people make decisions for the masses. This scared the shit out of me. I couldn't fathom how educated, intelligent and savvy politicians could come to the conclusions that they were coming to. What is it that can make an otherwise intelligent and educated person come to an outlandish conclusion? The answers I came up with don't bode well for our future.

Fundamentalists have staked their very souls on the literal word of people from an ancient time. This makes their worldview completely rigid. By their sworn belief, they cannot accept any new knowledge that contradicts the words that they have staked their lives on. Regardless of the amount or veracity of any new data supporting a theory that contradicts the Bible, fundamentalists must refute it at all costs. If they don't, then the literalism upon which their faith is built is instantly and irreparably destroyed.

I can't emphasize this idea enough. No matter what treasures are revealed to us in the future from great minds, they will all be refuted by fundamentalists if the knowledge steps on the toes of the gospel. If Einstein's theory of special or general relativity directly contradicted what the Bible says, we may indeed live in a very different world today. The repercussions of this idea as applied to our world's past, present, and future cannot be overstated.

So, where does this idea leave the fundamentalists? At the least, it leaves a culture suspicious of accepting change, and in the case of change that contradicts the good book, it leaves a culture that will vehemently fight intellectual progress to the death. To the death you say? Take a good look at Islamic fundamentalists. While the ideas of cleansing infidels through jihad may seem far fetched for your local fundamentalist Christian congregation, there are striking similarities on how these two groups view the outside world. The constructs are the same. The difference is in the extremism of the implementation. Take away some of the comforts of a life in the western world, back it by a few dozen generations of resentment and hate, and I'd bet my life that the two groups would be indiscernible from each other.

The truth is religious fundamentalism, no matter what brand, breeds blind faith, intellectual incuriosity, and a thought process that is inextricably immersed in religious partiality. Let me try to expound on that point. People seem to be losing the ability to separate their own personal beliefs and experiences from their thought process. This eradicates the idea of objectivity. Compounding the problem is a consistent inability by the partial thinker to finger this obvious problem. This leads to a massive persecution complex when the conclusions they've come to differ so greatly from the conclusions gained through truly objective processes.

The bottom line is that fundamentalists don't see any problems with their lines of rationality and reasoning because they know that they're right. Not in regard to any particular argument, but in regard to the keys of our very existence. This approach to the world, in their minds, gives them every right to influence policy and culture with fundamentalist beliefs without a tinge of doubt or care towards those that may think differently. After all, they're right. Which by default, means you're wrong if you don't agree. A good fundamentalist would NEVER admit to that last sentence, perhaps because they're incapable of introspection, but it's the truth. It has to be. It's based on logic.

A large faction of narrow minded people who have staked their lives on a static worldview, who believe they have the answer for salvation and a persecution complex to boot? Sounds like Armageddon to me.

Is the human brain an evolutionary dead end?

I often think about human beings' journey to the top of the evolutionary heap. How did we get to this point in natural history? Certainly the single largest factor in this rise to prominence has been the evolutionary path of the human brain. Sure, it's an elegant answer. In digging a little deeper, I have come to the conclusion that what makes humans so successful as a species is our ability to adapt. Give most species lemons and they'll die a horrible death. Give humans lemons and we'll figure out a way to profiteer off the manipulation of a pristine ecosystem and it's indigenous peoples to create a conglomerate of lemonade stands leveraging slave wages for illegal aliens to incrementally increase profit share for our stock holders and, what the heck, maybe give ourselves a few bonuses and raises along the way. Our brains are certainly what gives us this ability to adapt. It harnesses fire when we needed to cook our meat to free it of bacteria, it learned how to use animal skins for warmth when the weather turns cold, it learned how strength and safety can be gained through complex social matrices. Unfortunately, it also learned that much can be gained through the pain, suffering and manipulation of others.

To shift gears a bit, it can be said that the human brain is primarily responsible for the current state of political and socio-economic affairs in today's world.

Hmmmmm.

I don't think the current state of the human condition in today's world is a particularly good one. Even worse, I think the outlook for the future even poorer. If that's the case, then can it be argued that our current state of affairs is the result of a less than ideal evolutionary path of the human brain? Is there a yet undiscovered genetic mutation that has occurred somewhere along the way? I've spent some time thinking about just such a scenario and here's what I've come up with.

Human rationalization is an evolutionary dead end.

I believe that the human brain has gotten so good at rationalization that it's hardly a conscious act anymore. I believe that the human mind can find a pretty damned good reason to justify just about anything. I believe that human rationalization is the culprit for everything from greed, to murder, to religous fanaticism (which is just a combination of greed and murder). With the onset of human rationalization not only has the brain learned to cope with morally corrupt situations, it has learned to thrive in them. Personal conquest has become the human game of prey. Manipulation of the weak and ignorant is its weapon.

As I watch the global financial meltdown occur in front of my eyes does it not become blatantly obvious that executive compensation is a product of human rationalization?

How were CEO's able to accept gargantuan financial compensation packages in the face of massive workforces that hadn't gotten a whiff of a raise in years? How were they able to do this while they were driving their corporations and the thousands that slaved in their trenches into the proverbial shitter? Are these men psychopaths, no different from Hitler, Amin and Kim? Somehow I think not. These men and women were able to operate because rationalization told them and their crony boards that they were only getting what was fair in an open market. After all, their competitors were doing the same. Their job was a tough one, especially in such difficult economic times. All in all, the gratuitous compensation was all relative. In relation to what all the other crooks were doing, this really wasn't stealing. In other words . . .human rationalization.


The brain also uses rationalization to our detriment on a much smaller scale. Humans have this history of not being able to visualize the big picture or sense how an incremental change fits into the larger construct. The extra 10 seconds that they tacked onto that red light on my commute home. The extra 2 minutes it takes my computer to boot because everything has to be scanned because of rationalized human predation. The extra 10 minutes it takes me to get through my mail because now I have to fill out 2 pages of insurance forms to go to the doctor, or renew an insurance policy. All in all none of these individual things is a big deal. However, taken in-whole, maybe I have an hour less a day than I did 5 years ago. Chart this out over dozens of generations and we're already allocated well into negative time. No wonder we're all so tired. Most people don't even realize why. They just accept incremental change because their brain has rationalized it before it even became a wisp of a thought. Things like spam aren't right or wrong, they just ..... ARE......like eating and breathing my friends. Eat your heart out Orwell.

Rationalization makes all of these new-age inconveniences livable to most people. These changes are not so readily accepted into my world. Is my brain different than those that can rationalize fatwa as easily as my lungs can process oxygen? My hope is that the answer is yes, and my hope is that the evolutionary dead end that is human rationalization becomes extinct before it brings the entire planet along with it.

The human brain, one hell of an organ.

The Me Generation ...

I'm angry. If the entirety of my generation didn't need to hook up to the IV of XBox, Reality TV and whatever other form of voyeuristic escapism you can think of (and some I'm sure you haven't), they'd be pissed too. Unfortunately, NBC told all of them that it's "Must See TV!!!" tonight so they're all a little busy right now. I'll kindly speak on their behalf:

A huge source of frustration is that the problem is so all intrusive, so vast, so incomprehensible, that there is no single thing to blame. There is no specific person or event from which to trace the origins of our decline as a world society.

I'm here to change all that. I'm blaming it squarely on the Baby Boomers.

The Baby Boomer evolution is an interesting one. From America’s Golden Children, to Hippies, to cokehead corporate culture, to repentant tofu sucking, double espresso latte enema having gym rats, everything that they have done has been to extreme excess. By their very numbers, they are incapable of moderation. Baby Boomers truly are the giant mongo playing with the delicate toy and smashing it to pieces, not because they’re inherently evil, but because they’re too stupid to know any better.

Let’s take a closer look………….

Golden Children

Mutantly spawned from post war American celebration and hope, the Boomers are America's golden children. Little did they know that such benign beginnings would lead to an all out assault on future generations.

Hippies
The hippie movement is an interesting stitch in time. It was a paradigm shift in social consciousness. "Peace and Love, man." From a birds eye view, it all looked pretty damn good. They were going to change the world. That is, until they discovered one simple truth about man. He'll fuck it up. It doesn't matter what it is. Humanity en masse has zero intelligence and zero control.

This became painfully apparent when the love, peace and experimentation of the hippie generation spawned countless informal cultural experiments. Here they learned a valuable lesson. Any social situation with more than 4 or 5 participants could not be held together via a common value system for any length of time.

"Hey man if we can't hold this shit together with just me, Moonbeam, Star, Joe and Rhanivishnu, then how the hell is it going to work for 4 billion of us?"

Even the enlightened hippies couldn't figure this one out.

So what did the beautiful people do? They sold out. They got a clue, got jobs, got responsibility, got a piece of the American pie. On the surface there is nothing wrong with this. It would be a fine route for any other American generation. But....................

Sellouts
You see Baby Boomers don’t really know the concept of moderation too well. Everything they do is to extreme excess. So they took this remnant of the hippie hangover with them to their Wall Street offices and 5th Avenue penthouses. Same mindset, different forum.

Excess in the days of the hippies spawned experimentation, broadening horizons and cursing the man.

Excess in the days of the hippie sellout brought shattered lives, cocaine induced fashion, fast cars, big boats, junk bonds and bad credit.

The dark side of this generation's culture brought pounding headaches and the occasional overdose. For their encore, they turned this into insatiable greed and the beginning of the end for a civilization.

Let's look at the numbers as the ex-hippies came through the corporate ranks.

Nothing much happened through the 1970's as it takes a good decade for the mush-brained generation to recover and make any kind of a dent on the national economy. In striving for credibility they did, however, get their voter registration cards and elected two "winners" of American Presidential history.

The 1980's saw the explosion of pent up hippie excess. During this time, all the socialists became Capitalists and spent their money faster than the treasury could print it. Torpedoes be damned, they didn't care about any of the long term effects of their actions on future generations. The Baby Boomers by default aren't wired to give a shit about you or me. The overwhelming numbers of the baby boomer generation alone makes the concept of moderation a moot point.

Thank you smog, thank you gridlock, thank you dirty oceans, thank you acid rain, thank you faltering social security, thank you no pension, thank you no job security, thank you bloated real estate prices, thank you S+L bailout and thank you for a 13% rate of inflation the likes of which the world has never known. Tread lightly you fucks.

Respectable Sellouts
As the 1990's came and went, the Baby Boomers got exercise and religion. The sales meetings with pink noses and numb faces were traded for support meetings with haughty noses and faces begging for forgiveness from a 20th century God that has as much meaning to them as the ozone they just punched a hole through. Gyms chocked full of scheming husbands and unfulfilled wives popped up on every street corner. Every parking lot became overfilled with 9000 pound gas guzzling SUV’s, because they were "safe". TV changed from syndication to 24 hour a day infomercials for five minute flabby ass fixers. It’s all so typical, it would be quite funny if it weren’t so nauseating and all intrusive. Mongo no wanna work so Mongo escape reality, Mongo no like living on bus so Mongo go get money, Mongo no feel good, so Mongo get healthy. What a sick joke.

During their climb they did many great things. They introduced the concept of double income, so single men and women can no longer afford such luxuries as a roof over their head. As they became high executives and CEO's they increased their own pay by over 300% in a ten year span. The average wage earner's pay increased by about 49% (not a bad number itself) for the same 8 year boom. By the end, the CEO's of major American corporations were earning an average of 400 times that of the American working man. A far more ridiculous notion than that which these hypocrites were rebelling about 25 years prior. They created a disposable world and spawned a disposable latch-key generation raised by strangers. This is their legacy.

In their all consuming greed, we've become a gadget dependent, technology enslaved society. This along with the bloated salaries of executives skew the numbers for the Consumer Price Index and Inflation. The truth is my generation is deeper in debt, can't afford as much, and has countless other legacy issues levied by the sellouts.

I often hear Baby Boomers speaking poorly of their children. They say it's because my generation is lazy. In reality my generation is reeling in the wake of the Boomer’s disgusting display of human excess. I've got more kick than mescaline, more brains than you and more heart than any sellout could dream of. So tell me that being smart and giving 110% will bear untold fortune, just as it has for you. It will only increase my already respectable indignation. Your cluelessness knows no bounds. Your viewpoint is easily skewed from your lifelong relationship with having it your way. You've mercilessly beaten the American dream to it's death. All that's left for my generation is the burial.

Speaking of death, that will be the Baby Boomer's last fuck you to the world. The aging of the bloated generation will tax our already poorly managed (by the Baby Boomers) healthcare system forcing trillion dollar emergency government intervention, which of course, I'll have to repay. Then when they die, countless sectors of the economy will risk collapse due to rapid deflation. Healthcare, and real-estate come to mind, but I'm sure there are myriads of others.

The Baby Boomers really did change the world, just as they said they would. Now it's my generation's responsibility to pick up the pieces for their arrogance, selfishness and gluttonous stupidity.