Just Smoke and Mirrors: Religion, Fear and Superstition in Our Modern World

All Rights Reserved © 2003 by W. Sumner Davis, Th.D

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Contents

introduction

ABOUT THIS BOOK

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

introduction

As a child growing up in the 1960s, I recall hearing my grandmother telling one of our elderly neighbors that she believed in ghosts. As did my mother, who swears her own grandmother, to whom she was very close, came to her the night she died. No amount of needling by me or any suggestion that it was perhaps the dream of a frightened and heartbroken little girl would convince my mother. She believed. Perhaps she needed to believe that her nana was not dead, but rather had just gone to a better place. Perhaps it was just as well. These ideas are passed on from adults, to young (and not so young) impressionable minds. It is a part of our society. Our culture seems to need—or perhaps demand these beliefs where thinking uncritically is easiest. This allows others; those we deem more worthy and are more educated, to speak for us to become a norm in our culture. It is also very dangerous. As a teenager I did not like school very much, and was surely a constant aggravation to my parents who only wished me to get an education. I think perhaps that it was my father who not so much demanded excellence, but at least accountability. He felt, or perhaps he knew, that to be accountable, a person must be able to think. Thinking independently seems to be sadly lacking in our culture of 15-second sound bites, status symbols and brand name identification. My father was right for we must learn to think for ourselves if we are to be accountable. Once we are accountable to ourselves, we then can be accountable to society.

History has showed repeatedly that whenever we stop thinking for ourselves, or whenever we stop questioning, or whenever we stop examining the acceptable concepts, the snake oil salesmen begin to show up. Just as my mother needed to believe in life after death, so, too, do we feel a need to believe in a great many things that science has shown to be little more than wishful thinking on our parts. In addition, many of us go to great lengths to find that truth. As a clergyman, I often spoke with parishioners about aspects of the Bible where God works mysteriously, I would explain that these writings were handed down by a very different society, one that looked at the world very differently than we do. It was in a world that was awash in superstition and cultural identity. I remember the looks on the faces of these people. I knew afterward that they would have preferred the pat answer. It was clear—I was supposed to do the thinking not they. I had been to the seminary and had learned to read Greek, Hebrew, and Latin. I had studied the Bible from Genesis, to Revelation, and back. I had read all the commentaries, and the analyses. I was supposed to have it all figured out, but I did not. I could not accept what was placed before me without asking questions, and questions were frowned upon. I recall being told by one of my colleagues that an association member (we had local associations who licensed us as clergy) had said; I would never make a good minister because I simply did not adhere to accepted dogma. He was right.

After nearly twelve years of study, four college degrees, two majoring in theology and divinity, I came to see that I was expected to forget inquiry and minister to my flock. I was not to explain anything in a real, fact based, scientifically proven way. Instead, I was to simply pat them on the head, talk to them as if they were children, and spew out the accepted answers to life’s most difficult questions since it was believed that this was what they really wanted. They did not want nor could they comprehend the reasoning behind my answers, or so I had been told. Their worldview was one of faith. If I answered their questions, as I felt I must, I would weaken their faith. I put forward that any faith so easily shaken was hardly worth having. An associate once asked me, Which side are you on? I decided I was on the side of truth—where it was to be found. It was at that moment, I realized fully

where I was, and what I had become—an instrument of ignorance, or if you will a guide of the gullible. Nevertheless, how had this happened?

I was raised to believe in God, not any specific idea of God, just God in general—a kind of generic God. I went to church on Sundays, but often skipped the sermon all together; instead, I would wander around hiding in the many rooms of the big church building with friends. I was expected to, and did attend Sunday school. Much later in life, I heard a brilliant theological scholar state, Sunday school teachers have brought more ignorance into the church than anyone. I am sure he was right. I would ask questions to the ladies that taught the school. Where did Mrs. Cain come from? Where did Noah put the dinosaurs? It did not take many questions like these for the teachers to find a different place for me—at home. This was a great disappointment to my parents, whom I have little doubt enjoyed the hours my brothers and me were at church. My questions concerning the world and how things worked became a general annoyance to my grandfather. I would constantly question him about everyday things, as he was the smartest person I then knew. Eventually he would ask me, What does it matter? I cannot remember if I ever answered. I guess it did not matter really—I was just curious. I often see that same curiosity in school children. If I give a talk, or do a demonstration on space travel or discoveries in science, I see all eyes focusing on what I am doing. Minds actively engaged hands going up to ask questions—often very good questions. Nevertheless, something happens to them. By the time they reach junior high school that inquisitiveness seems to be, at least for most kids I speak with, long gone. No more are they concerned with how the universe works, or where it came from. I often think we should send our kids to college after fifth grade—before they lose their ability to think actively. They still dream they still question, and they still want to know.

Perhaps the political centrists are correct in believing that education in America is being dummied down. It seems that by the time our children reach their teenage years, the schools (at least those I have worked with) are too busy trying to stem violence, drug use, and worrying about guns and knives. There is little time left for teaching. Perhaps this is why so many college freshmen are devoid of even the most basic math and science skills. Reading and comprehension in the United States are among the lowest in the industrialized world (I have friends who teach high school who tell me that many of their students cannot find their own state on a map of the Unites States!). Where does that leave us? With a population unable to think rationally and skeptically for themselves, they will be forced to depend more and more on others for their news, their ideologies, and eventually, their truths.

Enter the astrologers, the tarot readers, and all the other pseudoscientists waiting to manipulate the gullible. The religious extremists to combat the pseudoscientists are even worse preaching hatred, racism, sexism, and other acts deemed immoral. The Good Book they hold high is full of stories depicting rape, murder, incest, infanticide, patricide and even genocide. If this is where they glean their information, is it any wonder they are as they are? And as more and more religions in the main stream (those with long established histories) continue to lead not by example, but by political correctness, then citizens searching for concrete answers to life’s problems will filter away to groups which offer answers, despite the fact that the answers are wrong. People, it would seem, yearn for answers. They search for them in earnest, but usually search in the wrong places. No church or pseudoscience group will give you any real answers. No modern day prophet shuffling his or her tarot cards will be able to tell you anything you do not already know. No medium will really be able to prove he or she can communicate with the dead—despite the popularity of their televised specials. People desire answers; however, they are not very cautious from where those answers come. They cast aside scientific facts, mathematical certainties, and biological absolutes in favor of something that can tell them what they wish to hear. One such provider of truth was the Reverend Wilbur Voliva.

In his hometown of Zion, Illinois, Voliva passed some of the strictest blue laws in the country, outlawing cigarettes, short pants, even whistling on Sundays. He also outlawed the ownership of globes. These religious fanatics and pseudoscientists realize that their answers to life’s questions are dubious. This is why they denounce free thought or any questioning of their facts as sin, blasphemy, or heresy. It is easy to see how such ideas get started.

The creationists and parapsychologists of this century look very similar to the flat Earthers and spiritualists of the past. Pseudoscientists still appeal to the same anti-elitism of their nineteenth century counterparts by using ignorance, fears, and suspicions to prey upon an uneasy social sub system. Advancements in modern science have left much less room for the mystic and spiritual beliefs that once claimed hundreds of millions of adherents. Yet, the obvious contradictions between science and religion anger many of the latter, which seek simpler, less demanding answers. Usually in the form of a mythological universe governed by some Supreme Being, they are willing to accept them regardless of their behavior, their thoughts, or their deeds. Many of these same people still insist the earth is flat because the Bible tells them so. Rather than question a 3,000-year-old mythological text, they question their common sense and experience. So it is that we will continue to contend with those too frightened by the idea of being alone to realize they are absolutely alone. Any ancient voices speaking for them in some magnificent heaven are like saints and angels—mere reality avoiding illusions.

Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.

~Carl Sagan

ABOUT THIS BOOK

When I set about to write this book, I was faced with an obstacle almost Immediately—how to organize it. No one pseudoscience interested me more than any other did. I considered doing the listing alphabetically, but that seemed to be more confusing than to list them by date or by period. I finally settled on grouping them into categories. These categories, of my own manufacture, may or may not be the best way to present this material to you, the reader, but I needed to be able to keep some