“When you can laugh at yourself, no one can ever make a fool
of you.” – Joan Rivers
A few months ago, I acquired a Facebook friend who was a real
character. A Satanist who owned horses, jousted, did the whole black knight
thing, called himself a Templar. I learned a lot about Satanism through his posts and
conversations. Most Satanists don’t worship Satan. They don’t even believe in
Satan as a real thing, as Christians define him. They are humanists who wrap
their secular philosophy in the mantle of darkness to mock and confuse the
fundamentalist and the evangelical. It works quite well, if the frothing panic of
the religious response to Satanism is any indication.
Sadly, however, I unfriended this interesting Satanist this
week. He just got too deep into his dark knight persona. He had begun to
believe in his heroic posturing, in a “might makes right” world, a world where
carrying a lance atop a draft horse was much more than entertaining cosplay or
a farcical nose-thumbing in the direction of Rome.
There’s a reason that I, a life-long skeptic, have avoided engaging
with any religious tradition. I have attended Wiccan rituals, but they seem
kind of silly to me. I might meditate for a few minutes after a spot of yoga,
but I’m not chanting mantras or trying to tap into whatever that kundalini
thing is supposed to be. Humans, it seems, have a natural craving for ritual
and structure and tribe. But all forms of religion scare me. They seem
parasitical, designed to consume their human hosts and smother independent intellect.
Some spiritualists argue that science is just another
religion. “Science is just one way of looking at the world, but it’s not the
only way,” the astrologist argues. “I just don’t believe in evolution,” the evangelical
declares. But science is the only philosophy that contains, in fact is defined
by, the very mechanism which constrains it. At every step in the process,
reality is injected, hubris is swept away, and truth is revealed. After years
of research, the scientist publishes a paper: “Here is my theory. I have no idea
if it’s true and I don’t know how to test it and I don’t completely understand
it, but hey, see what you can make of it!” How many religious leaders, or
business or political leaders for that matter, say such a thing as that?
It is said that people desire certainty. They want the world
to be explainable, understandable, predictable. They thought science would give
them that, but science is no respecter of human desires. Middle school science
with learning the periodic table, memorizing chemical formulas, calculating velocity,
and examining the entrails of an earthworm on a black lab table, gives way to
the radical uncertainties of quantum physics and a universe that seems to be
mostly made of stuff we can’t detect, described by math that most of us can’t
do. We see researchers who spend their entire lives pursuing a single theory
and dying before we can figure out how to test its validity. In a world where
our success is measured in well defined, short increments (a grade report, a
quarterly earning statement, an election, a season), embracing the uncertain
and endless quest of science is unthinkable for most people. So we bifurcate.
The minority who embrace uncertainty and
doubt and the majority who reject it. The intellectual honesty of the scientific
approach is not promoted or elected. The majority demands an ROI; they require
their stories to have a good guy and a bad guy, a beginning and a middle and an
end and not too many pages, thank you.
My friend the black knight, in his protest against the
corruption and excesses of religion, embraced an identity that, in the end, was
just as consuming and illogical as the doctrine he rejected. He had to tell a
story with his persona as the heroic protagonist. Like the fundamentalists he
mocked, he constructed a reality that fit his internal narrative and by doing
so, betrayed his goal. But then, how many of us can turn the scientific principles
of skepticism, experimentation, and unflinching honesty on ourselves?
