>>54026
Here. Let me copy and paste a rant I posted as a comment on a "New Age Christian Therapy" blog a while back. The blog owner was having what they call in the business a "crisis of faith" and asking rhetorical questions about what it meant. Because I've got a touch of the 'tism I began to tire of watching him begging the question, so I answered him. It got taken down almost instantly, of course.
It means you grasp that the Sky Daddy stories are nonsense but this makes you uncomfurtable, whereas these fantasies of life having a divine purpose, of the universe being created just fur you, are comfurting. What you are feeling is called cognitive dissonance.
Now, I will stipulate that fur the vast majority of the population in our culture, the vast mass of IQ-90 normies, the organized religions of our traditions, as they existed prior to the Second World War, served a useful purpose. Humans have an instinct to seek out patterns, which can be useful, or which can be pareidolia. Humans naturally create memes to explain the world around them, and some of the memes, like grey-bearded God the Father, who wants the best fur us, who wants us to treat one another kindly, sitting on his throne on Mount Olympus, staring down lovingly at us all, are societally useful even when there is, objectively, empirically, nothing there. And though one of the narratives of the postwar era in the West is that science, learning, and knowledge have vanquished ignorance and superstition, I cannot help but notice that every print newspaper, back when there were such things, had horoscopes right up until the end. Take away Jesusism and the vast majority of people trip over their own feet running to embrace every sort of corrosive nonsense, every preposterous cult, every bizarre self-destructive meme.
People leap upon them, fight over them, and cling to them, from imported fureign cults like Islam and the Hare Krishnas, to overwrought apocalyptic envirofascism (there is no God but Malthus and Greta is His prophet), to UFO cults that commit mass suicide. None of them promotes any kind of sustainable social stability. None of them gives anyone any sense of a connection to prior generations. None of them promotes societal trust. None of them promotes sobriety, productivity, and deferring gratification. All of them, rather, create balkanization, cultural fault lines, by their very presence. They separate us, render us anomic, atomized, deracinated. They destroy cultural capital and bring with them instability and division by their very nature.
Mencken, whose beliefs about organized religion are well known, said “I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.” And while I have the greatest respect fur him as a writer, and as a jack-philosopher, I think that these things aren't universally true. Not many people are tough enough, mentally speaking, to face the idea that our lives are essentially accidents, that there’s no spirit in the sky to bargain with when things go wrong, that there’s no one driving the bus, that entropy increases, that death is the end. Not every truth is happy. Some truths, many truths, are terrifying and depressing. If you’ve read Lovecraft, this is the core idea of “cosmic horror,” the concept hiding under the purple prose and tentacled monstrosities from another planet. It is difficult and unpleasant to think about the universe and our place in it without all the comfurting just-so stories about Sky Daddy and his angelic helpers that 99.9% of the population accepted without question a century ago.
The normies, the vast faceless army of interchangeable and fungible IQ-90 NPCs, instinctively seek out belief systems that let them think they’re making sense of the world. It’s a coping mechanism without which they cannot function from day to day. People need a belief system that encourages them to start families and provide fur them, to think of the future instead of sticking a needle in their arms and self-destructing this afternoon. The common belief system of the West a century ago was stable, though those who look closely at newspapers and pulp novels of that era can see the cracks already beginning to furm in its foundations. Christianity is risible nonsense from top to bottom and end to end, but it had developed into a stable furm over fifteen or sixteen centuries, a furm that did not immediately tear down nations that accepted it. Fur that vast majority of humanity who are uncurious sorts, disinclined to think about very much (“my brain hurts!”), it encouraged them to trust one another, deal justly with one another. It discouraged theft, murder over imagined slights, laziness, and habitual drunkenness. This week’s fashionable flavor of flyingsaucerism or globalwarmenism or warmed-over 1970s New Age twaddle is equally lacking in empirical support fur its claims, while failing to promote anything whatsoever that is either good fur a nation, a family, or a man in the long run. It was a shabby, dirty rug, but when we pulled it out from under everyone, everyone fell into a bottomless pit that was hidden beneath it, and we’re all still falling.