Something has been bothering me for several years. Actually a lot of things have been bothering me, but this “thing,” perhaps more than any other, because this “thing” is generative, a precursor underlying all the rest.

The European Enlightenment took us out of the Dark Ages of superstition and myth. Why is America hell-bent-for-leather headed back?

According to my unabridged Thorndike-Barnhart dictionary, the (a.) definition of “intelligence” is “the ability to learn, and know; understanding; intellect; mind.” By that same source, “intellect” is “the power of knowing; understanding.” Both derive from the Latin, intellectus. 

My abridged American Heritage dictionary provides the same definitions, by the way. I’d be interested if anyone has a dictionary that provides widely disparate definitions, like for example: “unable or unwilling to look for solutions or answers using reason and logic.”

The “scientific method,” first promulgate by Isaac Newton as “rules for the study of natural philosophy,” (Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Third edition), is a logically reasoned and structured way to get from a question to its answer. It does not promise that the answer will be found, only that the scientific method is the most promising route, and it relies absolutely on the human intellect. It consists on the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation through testing of hypotheses. It may be that the easiest, clear example of the scientific method at work was Edison’s indomitable search for a suitable filament for his incandescent light bulb.

Prior to Newton and the Enlightenment in Europe, the western model had largely been Socratic-Pythagorum-gnostic, that is, a thing was inherently knowable via some interior plumbing of the mind and spirit, as contrasted with the accumulation of observable evidence and the harsh testing of that evidence. It may be that two of the most observable examples how the above are unreliable, at best, is the Church’s claim to infallibility when it condemned Galileo for his amplified support of Copernicus’ heliocentric theory; the earth revolves about the sun, and almost everything George Bush and his administration have claimed since he entered the Oval Office.

An absolute means there are no exceptions whatsoever for whatever is the subject wherein “absolute” might apply. “None” means none, mada, zip, zero. “All” means everything. “Infallible” is an absolute. It cannot mean most of the time, in most circumstances, the one who is esteemed infallible is correct. “Infallible” means the one who is esteemed correct is correct 100% of the time, in every circumstance.

Early on, the Pope, as the direct spiritual descendent of Peter, the head of the Church, was esteemed infallible in all things. Yes! Yes! Yes he was, to all who would now attempt to squirm from the truth. It was that presumption of infallibility that justified the Inquisition and condemnation of a frail old astronomer who posited the astronomical contradiction of the Church.

And, under the scientific method, as with Edison’s pre-success failures, once an assertion has been busted as false, it’s been busted absolutely. 

But I wondered, why, in the face of all the evidence that demonstrates how far we have come from the days where myth and superstition — that rats and insects spring from rags, and that bleeding the ill-humors from the afflicted was efficacious, for instance — held sway, have so many Americans, almost of a sudden, retreated to myth and superstition for so many of the answers to their life questions? Why have so many today abandoned a fully free (enlightened) use of the intellect, their intelligence, and fallen backward into religious doctrines, doctrines that lack the first necessary element: observable evidence a tenet or claimed anecdote may be demonstrated as factually premised? 

And why this matters so much today is because reference to religion presupposes some religious authority, the key predicate here being “reference,” and the key noun being “authority.” As we have been so tragic a witness to a surfeit of wholly unnecessary, human wrought tragedies, it might be reasonably and logically correct to presume the underlying social subservience to those authorities would be subject to widespread examination. But they are not. Quite the contrary, references to religious doctrine and authority, anecdotally, seem undisturbed.

It is, yet is not the referencing religious doctrine and authority that has made all the calumnies we’ve observed possible. It is a philosophical and/or emotional inclination to sublimate one’s natural inclination to challenge, to question, to wonder why . . . the imagination . . . to an authority — any authority — that is at the heart of the matter.

In 1978, the world wondered what kind of perceived “authority” could lead 913 men, women and children to commit mass suicide in a confected community in Guyana. I have been asking for as long as the Evangelical and vocal conservative so-called Christian elements in the country have been gaining influence, what kind of demeanor can lead anyone to believe anything that is, on its face, rather absurd, rather incredible; “incredible” taken to mean lacking rational credibility? Because, the inclination to believe anything that is absurd or incredible, certainly can, and has, led folks to commit, or enable the commission of, the most heinous atrocities.

For a possible answer — the overarching and rather intractable reference to an authority that has no credible evidence behind it — we have to examine the functions religion performs. Among the number are two. 

One concerns social control, behaviors established and maintained behind widespread social sanctions; whether pre-Hammurabi, 1810 – 1750 BC, where the laws governing social behavior were transmitted, one generation to the next, orally, or those since codified in written religious doctrine; the commandments in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, for example. Efficiency of control is enhanced proportionally in direct relation as the laws are inculcated in the individual’s conscious as a set of beliefs that are beyond even questioning, most especially as they cannot even be questioned in one’s private thoughts.

Another function enables a believer to presume simplistic answers that may or may not be evidentially apposite to complicated matters at hand. The sun rises in the East and sets in the West, or appears to, and an authority says that it does (the Catholic Church circa 1600 and before), therefore the sun must circle the earth. Yet another function of religion provides its believers some solace in a life filled with confounding events and experiences. Regardless the level of acute emotional or psychological pain suffered and however protracted the misery is endured, “It’s all a part of God’s plan,” and if you truly do believe, and conduct your life accordingly, you will be rewarded with a life in paradise after you die.

Essentially, it’s all a case of “Don’t ask — just do as you’re told;” the same behaviors demanded of those in the military.  

I‘d like to submit a possible candidate as explanation, how it is that in this age of impossible to miss scientific and social progress that such a great majority of Americans cling tenaciously to belief structures that are without a first element of objective evidence, or that even make sense, that hearken rearwards hundreds of years. My hypothesis is that it goes directly to the extraordinarily elevated anxiety over the impermanence of social location and economic insecurity that has increasingly been plaguing the country since the first Reagan inaugural.

Life has always been a fickle experience; since we roamed the sub-Saharan savanna through today. Religion has been both a means to explain the otherwise incomprehensible and a pled bargaining with a god or gods for some element of security against the fickleness of fate. Today we no longer fear the mysteries of death delivered silently, what we now know as disease, or loudly via predation from wild beasts.

Today, however, we fear loss of income and of identity through job dispossession due to technologies we simply cannot keep up with, understand, and hopefully master, or by decisions made in corporate back rooms that move the job overseas.

For a very brief period in our history, from the late 40s through most of the 70s, membership in a union and/or employment with a loyal company provided a sort of financial and emotional safe room. Today that is all gone. Pervasive insecurity has replaced what once sustained us, and now reigns over our conscious and subconscious.

On both the individual and the social level, we just cannot survive well in such an emotional and psychological vacuum. We need to be able to understand, or least feel that some notion of understanding can be grasped. That’s part of what defines “human,” what separates us from all other lower species. Give me the explanation and I’ll find a way to solve, or adjust to, make deals with something that perhaps will work as a salve to the problem.

It doesn’t have to be rational. All it has to do is work. Religion works. The conundrum, of course, is that religion is a call to something just short of that which defines us as superior to every creature below us on the ladder; we’re superior because, and only because, we have the capacity for genuine, independent, rational thought. But if we refuse to use that capacity . . . for “genuine, independent, rational thought . . .?”  Are we indeed “superior”? And, to what extent?

Some to many argue that the net of religion — and never, ever forget that all non-Christian religions are also religions — is, as it has been, good. But is, or has been, the product of religion good? Does society, or the greater human condition, improve as a consequence of religion? Or is the good weighed on a scale that balances it with the bad? My request here is that, before anyone rushes to judge the balance as being overall to the good, the Crusades, the treatment of North, Central, and South American native Americans by the European explorers, missionaries and settlers, the intolerance of the Puritans (once settled in North America), the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans by Christian American citizens, the effort by German Protestants to eliminate all traces of the Jews, and that of today’s Moslem extremists be studiously brought into the matrix.

I won’t recommend a position on a spot along the good-bad continuum, only ask that the span of the question be honestly considered.

To this end, one additional observation seems to leap so to the front that it never fails to perplex me that so few seem to brought it into the discussion.

“Prima facie” is a Latin phrase referring to the status of some evidence as composing an actionable element because it appears initially to be so on its face. Not merely a little, overwhelmingly a lot, the religious affiliation the individual reflect that of one’s grandparents and parents and social group; not the specific denomination perhaps, Catholic, Lutheran, whatever, but Christian, or Jew, or Moslem, Hindu, etc. In other words, the statistical probability one will identify him- or herself as belonging to a particular umbrella religion are exponentially tied to the family and community to which they were born into. In yet additional other words, the prima facie evidence suggests that very little, if any, thought or research over which faith they’d associate themselves with was undertaken prior to concluding the decision. In other words, it was a thought-less enterprise; something no more consequent than I’m that because my mom and dad were.

That one might claim to be a Christian, or a Jew, or a Moslem, or almost any other, in essence, depends not at all on the particular merits behind a religious selection, from among equally investigated alternatives, but almost exclusively on the capricious accident of birth. That, in and of itself, indicts claims concerning the inherent and spiritual merits of the faith as being virtually and absolutely specious; silly; foolish.

Cursory review of the calamities America and the world have suffered the past seven years strongly argues on behalf of adopting, to the extent it is individually possible, greater courage for integrity of thought and judgment. When you take a stand for your faith, do not pretend that you’re doing so because you put more thought into it than does the smallest bird choosing a branch to land on. The evidence says you didn’t. Evidence says that zero thought was involved and that you know next to nothing about options that, odds are, are equal to or better than what you identify yourself with. Do not contest with this proposal, because, the truth is, you do not know, you’ve never given it the first hard, challenging thought — not even as much as that little bird.

And in some irrational effort to condemn the messenger because neither the logic nor truth of the message can be condemned, do not seek salvation via some weak presumption that I am anti-Christian. Like Pilot, “I find no fault in the man.” Unlike Pilot, I find everything to admire in the man. Nope, it’s the phony, unthinking hypocrites I fault, the phony, non-thinkers who are all too eager to swallow and follow, the unthinking swallowers and followers who have led us to the sorry state in which we now find ourselves. And the cost has been so damned high.

Whether it’s to send young men and women to kill and mutilate, to be killed and mutilated, or to eviscerate the common weal, thus obviating precious treasure from being put to more productive uses, stand up, declare some independence of thought, show some spine, demand proof of the necessity. You’ve a brain. Use it!