WHAT THE HELL?

HUMANISM

The Holy Bible is true. Because it says it is true, right in there. True? But it was originally just a collection of stories from many different Jewish tribes, cobbled together later by those who were not eyewitnesses nor had any relationship to events within. Then it was voted on by Catholics who culled out the bits they didn’t care much for, translated, re-translated, updated, and modernized before becoming “Holy.” Religious fanatics know they can handle poisonous snakes without coming to harm because God told them so. So why do they die? The fact that someone says God said something means nothing. The evidence is in, and it’s not favorable.

My personal brand of humanism I’d describe thus; I believe every religion started out as a profound personal experience of awe which was copied imperfectly and over time ultimately taken to such extremes that the meaning of the original experience has not only been lost, but been turned on its head, such that it now performs the reverse of the original intention.

Why am I a humanist? Long story….

Let me tell you about the dancing pigeons: The Skinner box is a device that was first developed by B. F. Skinner in his work on operant conditioning. A subject was placed in the box, and the mechanism gave small amounts of food each time the subject performed a particular action, such as depressing a lever or pecking a disk. With the operant conditioning chamber attached to a recording device, Skinner was able to discover schedules of reinforcement. These patterns are the basis for organismic interactions with the environment and are explored extensively in Schedules of Reinforcement and elsewhere.

But wait, here’s where it got really, really interesting: Skinner's research discovered many fascinating examples of animal behavior. One of the most interesting was Skinner's work on superstition. Instead of giving a reward for a specific action and training a specific behavior, Skinner would take a hungry pigeon and place it in a box that would release a food pellet at random.

What happened was the pigeon would receive the food pellet while it happened to be performing some action, and rather than attributing the food pellet reward to randomness, it would assume that the appearance of the food pellet had something to do with its behavior. So it started doing whatever that action was, over and over again, and sure enough, it was eventually rewarded with a food pellet again. The pigeons developed all kinds of complex behavioral responses such as bowing, scraping, dancing, and neck turns. Since the pigeon is increasing the amount of time spent performing a particular action, it is also increasing the number of times it is "rewarded" for that action, even though the reward is random.

When I was 28 years old, I had a girlfriend who was 32. She had crow’s feet from the corners of her eyes right up into her hairline. I thought, “Oh my god, when I’m 32, I’m going to have that?” I was horrified. As it turned out, she was from California and had the habit in her youth of sunbathing. It was a hobby she practiced daily. This accounts for the skin damage. When I was a teenager, I found a great soap from China; sandalwood. I loved the smell, and I’ve used that soap ever since. Now, is it a fact that because I use sandalwood soap, I never got crow’s feet? No! There are too many factors. There’s the fact that my grandmother told me when I was a child, “Don’t squint, it’ll give you wrinkles.” I was probably only 10 years old at the time, but I remembered. I learned not to squint. So is it that why I still have no crow’s feet, at 61 years old?

I have a good friend whose maiden aunt told her that the reason her hair had never gone gray was because she took brewer’s yeast every day. Now the girlfriend does the same. But it turns out that when you gray, even whether you gray at all, is determined by genetics alone. No yeast of any kind can change it.

The fact that I use sandalwood soap and have no crow’s feet is not necessarily cause and effect. Both are true, but neither has anything to do with the other. Superstition and sympathetic magic doesn’t work. It may be that food comes when you hold your head a certain way, but it doesn’t mean that you have to hold your head just that way to make food come. Stop spending your life with your head bent that way! Instead, try to figure out how that feeding mechanism works, and learn to operate it for yourself.

In the Dark Ages, they knew that their crops needed water. If rain didn’t come in time, they started sprinkling the crops with blood. This did not, in any way, affect whether it would rain. Yet they believed it did, because if they kept on doing it faithfully, eventually rain would come. And if the field you’ve been watering with blood has a better yield than the others, it’s probably because it got a lot of extra vitamins out of that blood. And so did the flies who came, attracted by the smell. Sprinkling the crops with blood DID have an effect, just not the effect they attributed to it. We often think that people then were stupid. They weren’t. And the same psychology drives people today to see causation and patterns where none exist. They were only as stupid as we are.

There was a Pacific island where some planes landed during a world war, and the crews handed out free supplies. The islanders had never seen anything like these marvelous things; canned food (even the cans themselves!), exotic flavors, such amazing things. When the planes stopped coming, they cleared more runways, built plane-shaped objects out of sticks, prayed, worshipped, lit fires, and called upon the gods to come again. This strange occurrence in their lives had no natural explanation they could conceive of, and so it became their supernatural religion. They were correct to keep a runway clear, and even to light fires, but it didn’t cause anyone in a distant land to suddenly decide to send more supplies. They may have spent many years and a lot of resources trying to get the planes to come again – time and resources they could have used to their own advantage if they hadn’t been busy with these things. You’d think that after a while they’d give up, but they didn’t. It’s sad to think they spent so much effort in such a useless task, but even sadder to think they may judge and condemn each other for the failure.

I don’t know whether the Cargo Cult (as the islanders above are known) developed a priesthood, but most religions do so. Priests interpret the desires of supernatural being(s) and convey them to the populace, including how much of their wealth should be given to the priests themselves. The priests get a very good living out of this. Not only is their own occupational success guaranteed, but the careers of their children are also assured. They are not only wealthier, but considered much wiser and much holier than ordinary people. They have access to the best of everything, enjoy power and positions of importance all their lives, are respected, and have a guarantee their children for every future generation will have the same. Naturally, they will do anything – anything at all – to ensure that this remains the case. They’ll interpret things however needs be to ensure the continuation of their lucrative livelihood. They encourage people to pray (in other words, do nothing but wish very sincerely), to give tithes (percentages of their income), to make sacrifices (sometimes of their own children’s lives), and if the faithful postulant still doesn’t get what the priests have promised him, they declare that obviously the postulant’s faith was inadequate, or some kind of wealth was held back. Now, in addition to having given up his time, wealth, and maybe even his child, he is shamed and blamed for the failure. The priesthood is preserved, the fleecing continues. When a certain Nazarene came onto the scene in ancient Judea, why was he turned over to the courts and his execution requested? Surely a dirty, barefoot preacher who wasn’t even a member of the priesthood, wandering the countryside and performing little miracles was no threat, or not such a threat that he must die publically? But he WAS that threatening. He was telling people they didn’t need the priesthood; he was preaching an end to their way of life. It was the one thing no religion can tolerate.

The idea that I should take on “faith” such people’s opinion of my morals, my obligations to the universe, my outlook and the ultimate salvation of my eternal soul, I find laughable. I know right from wrong without any holy book (and we only know it’s holy due to its self-perpetuating sacredness). In fact it is provable to my satisfaction that every mammal on earth has a moral code, without benefit of any stone tablets.

By simple observation, one can see that the priesthood doesn’t practice the morals they drill into their postulants. Long-term observation will show them convicted of not only violating their own precepts, but fleecing their followers with a truly chilling greed. As tempting as it is to believe that someone with a terrible illness can be cured by the simple act of a priest laying a hand on them, or by strong enough belief, as magical and merciful and noble as it is, it’s simply not true.

When you hear that a certain preacher or guru is doing something you can’t possibly approve of (like faking miracles, or using their position to obtain sexual favors, for example), you shouldn’t be surprised. This has been going on since the beginning of civilization, and it’s very likely to continue. Just let it continue without any backing from you.

Like our Christmas traditions, religious rituals originated in the dawn of time and have been usurped, manipulated, and warped out of all possibility of recognition today. The custom of having an “eternal flame” lit on a Christian altar at all times, for example, began on alters to Venus. Study your traditions before buying, please.

But just because I don’t believe in a god doesn’t mean nothing is sacred to me. In fact, the complete opposite is true; I believe everything is sacred, and every being is equally divine. I don’t mind bowing in respect to a Hindu avatar just as I don’t mind bowing to show respect to an ancient tree, or stopping to listen to the song of a waterfall or applaud a flight of playful birds. And I can’t fathom how it can be otherwise! If someone believes in a god, then don’t they believe that creature has made everything out of him- or her-self, that all things are the one thing, that everything must be made of this god? And if that were so, how can anything be profane? But enough about that, I’m not trying to start an argument! Please simply accept that my particular brand of humanism is a belief that I am the universe (= Aham Bramhasmi), the universe is me, and the divine fire of spirit is present in all things equally, even in the multitudinous and multifarious gods and goddesses of Hinduism. I’m perfectly happy to have a sacred Hindu ceremony. The vows I take will be sacred to me no matter what statue they’re done in front of.