pinkfloydpsw's Blog

The pope is the weakest, most scared of all men on earth. That’s a bold accusation but I intend to tell you why I have come to that conclusion. As usual I’ll be criticising religion, but also the person psychologically. Bear in mind I don’t dislike the guy, nor do I dislike his policies, I just dislike his primary motivation. If you go back in history and remove all the religion from MLK it does not diminish him or his words in any way, as a moral man he transcended his religion, and maybe Leo is the same I can only speculate. The point I make is that religion may provide strength where there is none, or it may pretend it is the source, but it is not necessary to have one to have the other.

Sartre wrote of how a person that had no guiding religious ideology would have to then take responsibility for themselves in a moral sense, and that could be too much for some people. I think what he meant was that it is easier when there is a set of unquestionable rules to abide by. This is, for me, why I consider people that follow ideologies which make attractive bargains with the person where they definitely will be rewarded after they have lived, for adherence within this life to a set of life parameters as dictated by an institution that claims to have existential answers, as more hopeful than acting by the product of observations and intelligent reasoning.

Hope would not be necessary of there was no fear, hope is a product of fear, but not the trembling kind, not the kind that wakes you in the middle of the night either, the kind that is deep in the psyche, almost buried but always in the background working at each one of us. Existential fear of not existing at all or ever again, of this being all that we have. I suffer this too, as do you, it’s in every one of us in the quiet moments of introspection. The difference between myself and the pope is that I am scared but I welcome truth rather than falsehood to shape my reality, I accept the dread that comes with accepting that I am insignificant to the universe. Of course I do not want to be nothing to the universe, I would have it another way if I could, but my wishes have the same impact on reality as my corporeal being, virtually nothing. Your life is the inches around you, the people you know, the lives you touch. When I am gone I will leave no legacy other than these words if anyone reads them.

My Grandfather John has 2 great grandchildren that he never knew because he passed before they were born. I remember him, they may hear his name or see his picture, but he will be to them as my great grandfather is was to me, only a story. The impact he had on my life is significant and cannot likely be quantified, he will have a minuscule influence on the lives of his great grandchildren I suspect. This does not mean the efforts he made and the decisions he took have not prepared the ground for them, it just means that the noticing of this diminishes over time. The same is true for your ancestors recent and long gone, you are made out of their genetics. In this way they gain their immortality, but since most genetic strands die out or are so heavily diluted over time, this is not the same for all persons, most do not get immortality.

Weakness is not fear, it is a reaction to fear. As fear drives us into the church, or toward the powerful actor to be a surf, we diminish our potential. Fear to resist makes peasants of us all. What restrains me is my need for money, if I had the resources that ensured I did not have to adhere silently to other people’s nonsense then I just wouldn’t. I’d like a world where hope wasn’t needed, even the presence of hope is an indicator of its necessity. “Envy the country that has heroes, I say pity the country that needs them” – Van Zan, a movie quote from Reign of Fire. This is the point I am making, that the pope in Rome, and many other religious leaders, provide hope to the masses, and by doing so they, those preachers, retard the actions those people might otherwise take actions to make things actually better.

When Marx stated that “religion was the opium of the people” he meant a sedating force that prevents revolutionary actions. Our preachers harness our fear and weakness so as to act as sedative on behalf of powerful masters, and I’m not sure they even realise they are doing so. In this way they are a counter-revolutionary force. This opium does not merely make us drone actors politically, it deeply penetrates the psychology so as to shut down intellectual conversations with the self before they even begin, because why think about something when you think you already have all the answers? Religion makes you dumber, I take that as an indisputable fact, it makes you not explore the areas it still covers, it makes you not question the historical institutional objects that it supports, it makes you non-critical of what should most be criticised, it makes you falsely tolerant of the intolerable, it makes you curb your intellect when in the presence of adherents. It is a pain killer for the spirit.

The pope has fears too, but his grasp at immortality through faith cannot be undone unless it were to be proved to his psychology that it was in error. There is a problem with religion since it is in contradiction to rational, in fact Sam Harris states that there is no argument that is rational that can be made to change the mind of a person who isn’t using rational thinking (a believer). To this end his faith must not stand alone as the reason and the explanation because no belief of a single person can be held deeply by a single person without that person suspecting madness of themselves. We are naturally doubtful animals. If we are to truly believe we must convince a body of others, recruit to our faith so that it can seem more reasonable to us because it seems sufficiently reasonable to many others. Faith against reason is a mass delusion, and necessarily so…

Paul S Wilson