Demythologizing Religion March 6, 2020 Dr. Roger Ray
About five years ago, college student and internet troll, Peter McIndoe, saw a protest going on and he decided to join it in the most disruptive way possible. He pulled a poster down off of a utility pole, turned it to the blank back side and wrote on it in big black letters the most off the wall thing that came to him in the moment . . . just three words . . . “Birds Aren’t Real.” He carried the sign around in the protest, to make fun of conspiracy theorists and radical lunatics but his participation was filmed, and he got onto the news and on the internet and a number of young people liked the idea and it went viral.
A couple of years later, McIndoe dropped out of college to run his absurd conspiracy theory full time, selling merchandise, and making media appearances, insisting that in the 1950’s, the government started to kill off all of the bird population and replaced them with spy drones that are constantly watching us and gathering our information. Some pigeons, he claims, have been upgraded so that they can get your Social Security number and your credit card information, just by looking at you.
It was an obvious ruse, or, I should say, it should be an obvious ruse, but so many people have taken up the cry that “birds aren’t real” that, last month, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission felt it was necessary for them to launch a campaign assuring the public that birds are real and that they are not, in fact, spy drones. Or, I suppose, at least most of them are not.
It seems that we have come to live in a rampantly anti-science, era in which conspiracy theories flourish amidst a population that seems to be willing to believe any nonsense that suits their personal preferences. None other than MSNBC’s Joy Reid took time in her evening program last month to assure viewers that the conservative conspiracy theory that was spreading on the internet, claiming that the Biden administration was spending hundreds of millions of dollars on free crack pipes that they were giving away, was, in fact, not true. . . as if anyone who would believe that Biden was giving away millions of crack pipes would be convinced by the black woman on TV telling them that it just isn’t so.
People believe what they want to believe, sometimes what they have an emotional or an ideological need to believe, but most often they will believe what it seems like other people believe. Most of the people who are a part of Peter McIndoe’s spoof conspiracy, claiming that Birds Aren’t Real, are in on the joke, but not everyone is. Some people are paranoid enough about government surveillance to jump on the band wagon and they are wearing the tee-shirts and carrying the signs in public because they actually believe that pigeons and crows are disguised drones taking their credit card numbers straight out of their wallets.
As Mark Twain said, “A lie told and stuck to is as good as the truth.” If you can get enough people to repeat a lie often enough, it slips, almost unconsciously, into the belief system of the people. Republicans have been claiming that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election for so long that three-fourths of Republican voters actually believe it. There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud and most of the isolated incidents of voter fraud that have been found were Trump voters, casting votes for their deceased relatives, and yet, bankers, doctors, lawyers, will tell you that the Democrats pulled off an ingenious plan and secretly stole the election.
Which is amazing since anyone who looks around and considers the facts could realize that the Democratic Party couldn’t organize a picnic. Especially not here in Missouri and even more in our district…. Could Billy Long beat anyone for our congressional seat if the Democrats could run a campaign? He has won 6 times! There is no one here who would hire him mow your lawn, but he has represented us in Congress for 12 years. Thank God Congress members from Colorado and Georgia are slightly more embarrassing which is the only thing that keeps Billy Long out of the national media. Thank you, Marjorie Taylor Green, for talking about Nancy Pelosi’s gazpacho police!
But, seriously folks, we don’t have to talk about anti-vaxers or covid deniers to come up with examples for how gullible people can be. I have asked David to join me in a series of messages in which we will try to demythologize modern religious beliefs. For the next few weeks, we will talk about many of the world’s major religions, considering both their absurd devotion to outrageous and obviously not true beliefs, as well as their more applicable and useful iterations in the 21st century.
But first let me talk about the concept as a whole. I don’t know if Rudolph Bultmann coined the phrase but he was the one who made the concept of demythologizing famous when he delivered a series of lectures at Vanderbilt Divinity School in 1940 which he later published under the title Demythologizing the New Testament. When I started seminary there nearly 40 years later, it was still required reading for every entering student.
Not all, but certainly most new seminary students begin their training in a time of personal religious zeal and certainty, and almost all of us would have taken most of the religious myths we had heard growing up as being real, honest, historical accounts told by reliable, trustworthy writers, who were all eye witnesses of the events they described.
Some of those accounts had been cleaned up a little bit . . . it wasn’t as it says in Genesis, that Adam and Eve actually talked to a real live talking snake, but rather it was Satan disguised as a snake! That makes a big difference, don’t you know?!
A lot of students begin to drop out when they learned, if they were lucky enough to go to an honest grad school, that none of the Bible was written by eye witnesses and most of the stories were total fabrications, not based on history or real events at all, but they were useful myths, told to teach a moral lesson, more akin to Aesop’s fables than like an Ancient Near Eastern version of the New York Times.
Clearly, God did not write the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament, or any of the writings sacred to Muslims, Hindus, or Buddhists. All of these were written by people, most of whom were sincere and who, I believe, had the best of intentions in a pre-modern world where being factual and literal were not highly prized.
The ancient writers of all religious texts perpetuated the primitive tendency of early humans to personify nature. We experience the world through our emotions, acting and reacting to events with love, anger, indifference, greed, jealousy; and so ancients projected these human emotions onto the weather, the oceans, forests and rivers.
We progressives may have mostly intellectually dismissed all personifications of nature, but I see it slipping into our language at times. And it can be seductive. If you have never watched the Conservation International series of ecology films
in which Julia Roberts gives voice to Mother Nature, Penelope Cruz is water, Harrison Ford speaks as the oceans, and Robert Redford speaks for the giant Redwoods, you really should take a few minutes on YouTube to watch them. There are several and many of them absolutely send chills up and down my spine. I’m a terribly over educated and painfully cynical old man, but I am not inured to the effectiveness of thinking of aspects of nature as being somehow human . . . it makes the earth more approachable, more loveable and, I’ll pretty much believe anything Julia Roberts tells me. . . and I don’t think that is just me.
It can actually be helpful in some ways, but it can also mire us in myth. I think that attempting to demythologize religion is a major part of what I have been doing for the past two generations but I am asking David to work with me on this short series because, organized religion, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and even modern feminist theologies, can serve to perpetuate racial prejudice, homophobia, and misogyny as well as teaching people to believe in magic and superstition.
In many ways, the anti-vax and covid denial we have witnessed over the past two years is a failure of our public school science classes but it is also a failure of organized religion teaching people to adamantly believe what is clearly not true.
I cannot tell you how many families I had in counseling in the 1980’s when the AIDS scare had religious parents tragically disowning their gay sons, many of whom insisted that their son was actually demon possessed. Hard to believe that anyone who had the sense to learn how to read and write would still believe in demon possession in the late 20th century, but such beliefs allow you to blame an invisible spirit for what you cannot accept in your own son.
Regular listeners will have heard me say that you can be very accepting of what other people’s religious beliefs are as long as there is not a casualty count. Sadly, however, many people’s primitive religious beliefs lead to breaking up families, trap gay people in straight marriages, it can be traced to suicides, and self-medication with alcohol and harder drugs.
I would not be talking about demythologizing world religions if they were all mere matters of opinion and preference. They are not. There are healthy ways to be spiritual and there are unhealthy ways of being religious and some of those are extremely unhealthy, encouraging domestic violence, substance abuse, and, over the centuries, literally millions of suicides.
What we want from a religious life is a dedication to the truth, not a perpetuation of a bunch of ancient myths. It is ironic to me that so many traditional religious people never seem to question the fact that the Virgin Mary only seems to appear to Catholics, the Buddha only appears to Buddhists, and Jesus only appears to Christians. It is especially telling that no one has the slightest idea what Jesus, Buddha or Mary actually looked like, but they have visions anyway and they always seem to know who the characters in their visions are.
People with sketchy relationships with reality tend to be quite narcissistic. They will assert that something is true because they experienced it. Their proof that Jesus is God or at least a heavenly son of God, is because they have seen and heard Jesus personally, usually when they were being given morphine following surgery but, still, they saw him.
Beliefs in religion should be more like beliefs in a science lab. We only believe in things that can be repeated and tested. There have been about 1700 people, mostly in America, who claim to have been abducted by aliens, most of whom report being subjected to examinations of their private parts. . . we don’t really need Freud to sort through the repressed sexual issues behind that hallucination. But even with nearly 2000 people reporting being abducted, we still don’t find these personal accounts to be persuasive. And, thankfully, with the advent of cell phones with cameras in them, the incidents of alien abduction have nearly come to a complete halt.
You may have had a profound and life changing experience and, most of the time, people report religious visions or sightings of ghosts or long lost relatives in times of great stress or grief, but if you can’t repeat the experience, if you can’t examine it or let others see it or test it, then what possible reason would anyone have to take that as evidence, any more than one of the hundreds of alien abduction accounts?
Most people in the modern world have given up on religion entirely, finding that, in balance, there is way too much harm done to justify being involved, in spite of the good things. If there is to be a future for organized religion, there is going to have to be a radical reformation to all of the world’s major faiths.
I grew up in a small town in southern Kentucky. My family was very involved in the local Christian Church. My first pastor was fired when I was only six or seven years old but he wasn’t fired for his public advocacy to integrating our segregated schools, or for campaigning against the death penalty, both of which he did very forcefully. He was fired for helping to organize a labor union in a sewing factory in town. My mother worked there, however, the owners were also elders in our church. It was a horrible and unjust situation but, my point is, in the late 50’s and early 60’s, even in a small town in southern Kentucky where the zip code was E-I-E-I-O, even there and then, there was a religious community working on social justice rather than teaching prejudice, sexual discrimination, and superstition.
What I am proposing is that we become churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples that are more reflective of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi, than they are like televangelists and purveyors of hatred. That is my modest proposal and I hope that you either approve of what we are going to be teaching or that you will be able to open your mind enough to consider our discussions of the world’s largest religions.
