FURIOUS nads! by The One True b!X

While searching Amazon for theatrical works written by my Dad (so I can build some Amazon Associates links for his website, which we never got around to using), I discovered that I am mentioned in Blogwars by David D Perlmutter. Either I at some point knew that I would be mentioned in this book but forgot, or this is the first I’m hearing of it. Go figure. The mention, of course, relates to Portland Communique, and is on pages 124 and 125, if anyone’s interested.

When difficulties confront him he no longer blames them upon the inscrutable enmity of remote and ineffable powers; he blames them upon his own ignorance and incompetence. And when he sets out to remedy that ignorance and to remove that incompetence he does not look to any such powers for light and leading; he puts his whole trust in his own enterprise and ingenuity. Not infrequently he overestimates his capacities and comes to grief, but his failures, at worst, are much fewer than the failures of his fathers. Does pestilence, on occasion, still baffle his medicine? Then it is surely less often than the pestilences of old baffled sacrifice and prayer. Does war remain to shame him before the bees, and wasteful and witless government to make him blush when he contemplates the ants? Then war at its most furious is still less cruel than Hell, and the harshest statutes ever devised by man have more equity and benevolence in them than the irrational and appalling jurisprudence of the Christian God.

Today every such man knows that the laws which prevail in the universe, whatever their origin in some remote and incomprehensible First Purpose, manifest themselves in complete impersonality, and that no representation to any superhuman Power, however imagined, can change their operation in the slightest. He knows that when they seem arbitrary and irrational it is not because omnipotent and inscrutable Presences are playing with them, as a child might play with building blocks; but because the human race is yet too ignorant to penetrate to their true workings. The whole history of progress, as the modern mind sees it, is a history of such penetrations. … Each in its turn has narrowed the dominion and prerogative of the gods.

Thanks to this Art Scatter post, I now know that Richard Powers (mentioned here frequently) will be appearing at the Portland Art Museum next Thursday evening. Now, I know I re-read Galatea 2.2 and The Gold Bug Variations on a regular basis, but did they have to schedule this on Lost night?

One may be sure that the first priest to manacle a god was not slow to see the advantages in his new situation. He became, at one stroke, infinitely more powerful than he had ever been before. Hitherto, despite the steady advances in his art, there had remained something equivocal and uncomfortable about his position: he had been, when he succeeded, almost a god himself, and when he failed, no more than a poor charlatan, laughed at by the very children. But now, with a god in his service, and then another, and then a whole hierarchy, he was securely somebody and what he had to say was attended to. When he let it be known that there were certain things, done by the people, that would gratify the gods and insure their aid, these things began to be regarded as virtuous, upright, moral. When he announced that other things were frowned upon, they straightaway became sins. The two categories were carefully marked off by the priest. The acts in the first he commanded, and those in the second he forbade. Religion ceased to be a mere trembling before unsearchable enmities, and became a way of life. The priest found himself a law-giver.

True enough, there were still failures, but they were no longer dangerous to him, His day of taking the blame had passed; he could now throw it upon the people. Did fires rage and the sky remain dry? Then it was because the faithful had forgotten their plain duties. They had done something that they ought not to have done, or left undone something that they ought to have done. They had neglected some act of obligation, bungled some formula of devotion, yielded to some sin. Above all, they had failed in their obedience to the priest. At great pains he had taught them what would please the gods, but in their days of ease they had gone gadding after false lures. Now, with calamity upon them, they were paying for it. It was not the priest’s fault. He was not only innocent; he was actually injured, for they had rewarded all his trouble with ingratitude. This ingratitude itself soon became a sin. It was just as bad, it appeared, to flout the priest as it was to flout the gods. It remains so to this day, and in the fact lies the chief dignity of the sacerdotal office. The priest, as such, cannot err, for his mandates are the mandates of the gods, and, being unable to err, he cannot really fail. When the gods blast the faithful it is not a sign that the priest’s ministrations have gone for naught; it is a sign that the people have not been worthy of them.

What the … contention amounts to, at bottom, is simply the doctrine that a man engaged in combat with superstition should be very polite to superstition. This, I fear, is nonsense. The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous. Is it, perchance, cherished by persons who should know better? Then their folly should be brought into the light of day, and exhibited there in all its hideousness until they flee from it, hiding their heads in shame.

True enough, even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights. He has a right to harbor and indulge his imbecilities as long as he pleases, provided only he does not try to inflict them upon other men by force. He has a right to argue for them as eloquently as he can, in season and out of season. He has a right to teach them to his children. But certainly he has no right to be protected against the free criticism of those who do not hold them. He has no right to demand that they be treated as sacred. He has no right to preach them without challenge.

…

The meaning of religious freedom, I fear, is sometimes greatly misapprehended. It is taken to be a sort of immunity, not merely from governmental control but also from public opinion. … Is it to pass unchallenged? If so, then what we have is not religious freedom at all, but the most intolerable and outrageous variety of religious despotism. Any fool, once he is admitted to holy orders, becomes infallible. Any half-wit, by the simple device of ascribing his delusions to revelation, takes on an authority that is denied to all the rest of us.