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Thursday, June 18th, 2009

"Say what?"

We live in the Information and Communication age, so we twitter, blog and newsletter increasingly inaccurate and incomplete information to each other in increasingly meaningless and offensive slogans and sound bites. And the written word gets even better if you, as Stephen Colbert*) suggests in Newsweek, "imagine it being yelled at you by a person you admire."

What got me started was the dish soap. "Ivory contains biodegradable anionic surfactants and no phosphate." Notice that it doesn't say "contains only" bladibla, or 100% or whatever. It's impossible to find out what the ingredients really are. I did find out that it is manufactured by Procter and Gamble, a company known for its commitment to sustainability and healthy living: SIPs, "sustainable innovation products", another great example of disinformation!

So I was considering giving this blog a title, enlightening the world one stupidity at a time, but I thought better of it. There simply isn't enough time...

I had also promised myself to be done with discussing religious stupidity after my previous blog, but then I read this column on the back of our local Valley News, reprints of articles from about five years ago, by pastor Bob Morgan - just down the street from us, in fact. He quotes Lennon's famous song Imagine, calling it a "hymn for the secularist faith" - whatever that means.

First of all, I think there's something I need to clarify for Pastor Bob about pop music. Its main objective usually is to convey a feeling, not theological discussion, or to drive an argument to its logical conclusion. I don't think Lennon actually threatens to take away your precious Christianity, or even your heaven and hell if you find great comfort in those; I think he's singing about how good it feels to, you know, hang out peacefully with a whole bunch of people, where it doesn't matter what you wear, what you believe in, or what the color of your skin is. But let's, for the sake of argument, say that he's dead serious about doing away with religion, and specifically the Christian faith. Here is Pastor Bob's concerned response:

"Now while there's certainly nothing wrong with peace, love and understanding (sic!), the evidence suggests that Lennon's dream world would in fact turn out to be a nightmare. (...) Two of America's leading scholars (...) have both found that the animating features that have made the West great - modern science, medicine, democracy and its attending freedoms - were the products of irreducibly Christian thinking derived from central biblical traditions." He goes on to argue that it was good Protestant values that attracted immigrants to the United States - not exactly true in my case - and that Christianity is single-handedly responsible for abolishing slavery, concluding that "a world without the Bible, without Christians, and without God (...) would mean more slavery, far fewer freedoms, and unchecked disease."

Of course I could ask if he considers the fact that Galilei was silenced by a mere lifelong house arrest - instead of being burned at the stake - one of those great contributions of the church to modern science. Of course I could point out that the first democracy was instituted in Athens in 508 B.C. I could make a slant remark about how helpful current church doctrines are in our fight against AIDS. All of these are just cheap shots, just adding to this confused controversy between atheists and agnostics on one side, and the devout fill-in-the-blanks on the other. But with respect to confessed Christians who read my blog (I wonder how many?), I want to give you this to consider: "A form of spiritual cowardice leads many worldly people to believe comfortably that only one man was the Son of God. 'Christ was uniquely created,' they reason, 'so how can I, a mere mortal, emulate Him?' But all men have been divinely created, and must someday obey Christ's command (Matt. 5:48): 'Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.' (...) The truth is that man reincarnates on earth until he has consciously regained his status as a son of God." [Paramahansa Yogananda]

Anyway. Another quote from Yogananda brings me back to the subject: "The Aum vibration has three manifestations or gunas, those of creation, preservation, and destruction. Each time a man utters a word he puts into operation one of these three qualities." A nice incentive to think before you speak, right? In the West we have also created some rules to make our communication more truthful and meaningful - with maybe a bit more of an intellectual edge. Just check out these Rules for a critical discussion from Pragma-dialectics, as developed by Van Eemeren and Grootendorst at the University of Amsterdam. And then have some fun applying it to this post by a concerned Texan, which I found doing research for my previous blog:

"When are all of you going to learn. If you don't think or agree with what the democrats thinks that you should think. Then you are wrong. This is just another display of how the state of TEXAS is turning into another California with all the population from around the country moving here and taking a great state and tearing it down little by little to be like everyone else."

Here's my evaluation: "Let me make one thing clear: I am right, and you are wrong, but I do grant you the freedom to change your mind and see things my way. You are not the first one to think that I'm wrong. There have been many, I call them Democrats. They live in places like California, where most people are that way, and other parts of the country where I wouldn't go if my life depended on it. I plan to stay here, in beautiful Texas, and I wish they would all just stay there and leave us Texans alone. Instead, they move here and actually dare to challenge my viewpoint and my identity? The world is clearly going to hell." But, somehow, it never seems to get there...

It seems the lack of time for real discussion and the overwhelming amount of out-of-context information that's available has made us regress to some pre-pubescent mode of communication. "Batter up, batter up ⁄ Our team's sure to win!" Team Republicans against team Democrats, team Christ vs. team Muhammad, team God and team Science, team America fighting team Terrorists - or even better: team Terror. I guess it's good for a laugh when your discussion partner jokes, 'Obama bin Laden' - har, har. Not only does it insinuate a tie between president Obama and al-Qa'ida that has no basis in reality, it closes the door on a more urgent discussion of ties between the Bush and Bin Laden families, for which unfortunately there is very real evidence. And so instead of having a real open-minded exchange, we just hit each other on the head with slogans and one-liners, and sometimes worse than that. Some of our leaders and writers who have more influence than my blog will ever have, are reduced to cheerleaders, hockey coaches and soccer moms rather than being the facilitators, mediators and emancipators that they could be.

*) Stephen Colbert said it brilliantly also on The O'Reilly Factor: "You know what I hate about people who criticize you? They - they criticize what you say but they never give you credit for how loud you say it."

-- Tehuti

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