Messiahs

It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all.

— William James

To empower them, our prehistoric ancestors anointed their leaders with fat from dead animals. When, thank goodness, animal sacrifice later became taboo, fat was replaced with olive oil.

For as long as there have been tribes, messiahs (Hebrew for "the anointed") have walked among us.

Some have been annointed; some, self-appointed.

As an example of the latter, take Cyrus Teed.

A medical corpsman in the Civil War, Teed earned a medical degree after the war and began to experiment with electricity, a hobby of his since childhood.

One experiment gave Teed such a jolt he was knocked unconscious. While out, he was visited by a shapely angel. She told Teed he was on a mission from God.

Once awake, Teed changed his name to Koresh and promptly announced to everyone he was the messiah. He also joined the Shakers.

Over the next two decades, Teed managed to persuade 4,000 people to join religious communes he had founded in New York, Chicago and San Francisco.

Not content with a far-flung flock, however, in 1893 Teed led 300 of his followers to Fort Myers, Florida, which he calculated to be the center of the universe. 

Outside Fort Myers, Teed directed his followers to build a tropical utopia he named "New Jerusalem." The small town soon had its own general store, bakery, restaurant, post office, saw mill, boat works, power plant, mattress factory, college, playhouse and newspaper, The Flaming Sword.

Like the Shakers, Teed's followers believed in celibacy. 

They also believed in reincarnation, alchemy, and "Cellular Cosmogony," a metaphysical system Teed had concocted based on his study of electricity. 

Cellular Cosmogony held that the universe exists within a gargantuan womb and that Earth is the "great cosmogonic egg.”

If that's not whacky enough for you, Teed's followers also believed in gender equality, socialism, and farm to table. 

Teed was said by a Chicago newspaper to have "a mesmerizing influence over his converts.” But he was also shrewd, raising money by claiming he was Christ reincarnated and starting his own political party to avoid paying Florida taxes.

When Teed died in 1908, his followers refused to bury his body, insisting he'd rise from the dead. The Fort Myers coroner finally ordered that the pungent body be removed from the bathtub it was being kept in and buried. 

Teed's failure to reappear led to the dwindling of his followers and the eventual abandonment of New Jerusalem. 

Today, the abandoned town is a state park.

If Cyrus Teed's chosen name sounds familiar, you might recall another self-appointed messiah, Teed-follower David Koresh.

But that's a story for another day.

Feast of Fools

It takes courage to make a fool of yourself.

— Charlie Chaplin

You can thank the French for April Fool’s Day.

They invented the Feast of Fools—the Festum Fatuorum—in the 12th century.

A one-day celebration, the Festum Fatuorum came about because the lower French clergy at the time—the curés, vicars, subdeacons, and choir masters—demanded their own feast day, separate from the ones already declared to honor priests and deacons; but the church refused to grant one.

Undaunted, the lower clergy created their own, a Christmastime celebration of buffoonery during which they played dice and gobbled sausages; dressed in mock robes and sang obscene hymns; and paraded the squares, drinking ale and performing burlesque acts. The church fathers were appalled: they condemned the yearly antics as "blasphemous" and "pagan" and, in the 15th century, banned them outright. But the antics continued until the Feast of Fools finally ceased to be seditious and became, more or less, a secular street festival, sometime during the 16th century.

Then, in that very same century, Pope Gregory shifted New Year's Day from April 1 to January 1. People who continued to celebrate New Year's on April 1—mostly county bumpkins—began to be called "April Fools" by the French. They were also made the butt of mean tricks, such as receiving an invitation to a nonexistent party, or having a donkey's tail secretly pinned on them. Pranking on April 1 soon became an annual ritual, reminiscent of the medieval lark, the Feast of Fools.

Pity the fool who never plays one. April 1st must drive him crazy.

Boulder to Bear

Violence is not completely fatal until it ceases to disturb us.

— Thomas Merton

This week, as we await word of the Boulder shooter's motive, millions of Christians will devote thought to the Passion of Christ.

Catholics, in particular, will recall the crucifixion, Christ's tortured body nailed to the cross.

Catholics have venerated that image for over 1,600 years, often to the point where—pun intended—it crosses with porn. (They weren't always so literal. For 400 years, Catholics simply interposed the Greek letters tau and rho to depict Christ's crucifixion.)

Catholics' intention has always been to display front and center Christ's self-sacrifice, believing it will sustain you on the hard road to glory.

"The crucifix reminds us that there is no resurrection without the cross, and that we are called to pick up our own crosses and follow after Jesus," says the contemporary theologian Philip Kosloski.

But the 20th century monk Thomas Merton warned against such a violent image. "You pray best when the mirror of your soul is empty of every image," he wrote.

Emptying your mind of images is a noble, but "vain task," Merton said. "Only pure love can empty the soul perfectly of the images of created things." And pure love is impossible.

Nonetheless, you must try—and violent images like that of the crucifixion are good ones to start with. 

"The delicate action of grace in the soul is profoundly disturbed by all human violence," Merton said. "The most dangerous violence is that in which we seem to find peace."

If you can't empty your mind of images this week—and who can?—forget the crucified Nazarene's suffering and think about Boulder, lest we forget and find peace in violence.

Christ sculpture courtesy of John Sheridan. The artist donates half his online sales proceeds to Oakland, California's Ceasefire.

Pleasant Valley Sunday

Another Pleasant Valley Sunday, charcoal burning everywhere.

— Gerry Goffin

Facing a $1.3 billion defamation suit, Donald Trump's wormy shyster Sidney Powell now says "no reasonable person would conclude" her claims of election-rigging "were truly statements of fact."

Yet, thanks in part to Powell, 64,829,709 adult Americans believe Trump won and are backing bills in 33 states designed to suppress Democrats' votes in the future.

What's wrong with them? How can they be—to borrow Powell's defense—so unreasonable?

A logician would say they're guilty of the fallacy known as the argument from incredulity.

These 65 million adult Americans claim that, since they can't believe Trump lost, to say he did is simply false. 

Their flawed reasoning looks like this:

1. We can’t explain or imagine how this thing—Trump's loss—can be true.
   
   
2. If we can't explain or imagine how the thing is true, then it must be false.
   
   
3. Therefore, this thing is false.

Their second premise is clearly unsound. (I can't explain or imagine, for example, how a paper cut can be worse than a knife cut; but I don't therefore deny that it is.)

Why 65 million adult Americans can be so patently illogical is mystifying—until you consider the Pleasant Valley pseudo-reality in which they live.

As conceived by philosopher Josef Pieper, a pseudo-reality is a deliberately maintained "fiction," a pathological interpretation of reality. 

A pseudo-reality allows anyone who lives in it to shape the world to suit his biases, and to accommodate others who, like himself, can't accept the world as it is.

A pseudo-reality is, in effect, a playground for psychopaths. It can persist, Pieper says, only as long as the kids outside the playground—in other words, the normal kids—don't challenge it.

Writing in the 1970s, Pieper's prime example of a pseudo-reality was Nazism. 

Today's prime example is the GOP. 

Its members are all delusional psychopaths, water-carriers for a destructive lie. As such, they cannot be logical. 

Because logic only applies to the real world.

No Time for Fascists

Nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge

from an association between us.

— Bertrand Russell

Social media provides no sanctuary from fascists. They lurk behind every rock.

An example.

I'm a new member of "Steven Wright Quotes," a Facebook group that recycles the "best of" the quirky standup's material.

Fascists have joined the group for the countless opportunities it offers to comment on Wright's old gags—even though they're apolitical.

Lines like, "I planted some bird seed; a bird came up," and "I’d kill for a Nobel Peace Prize."

Facebook is funny 24/7; but I don't have that much time.

And I have less time for fascists.

In 1962, the head of the British Union of Fascists, Sir Oswald Mosley, invited the philosopher Bertrand Russell to debate. Russell declined by letter:

Dear Sir Oswald,

I have given some thought to our recent correspondence. It is always difficult to decide on how to respond to people whose ethos is so alien and, in fact, repellent to one’s own. 

It is not that I take exception to the general points made by you but that every ounce of my energy has been devoted to an active opposition to cruel bigotry, compulsive violence, and the sadistic persecution which has characterized the philosophy and practice of fascism.

I feel obliged to say that the emotional universes we inhabit are so distinct, and in deepest ways opposed, that nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from an association between us.

I should like you to understand the intensity of this conviction on my part. It is not out of any attempt to be rude that I say this but because of all that I value in human experience and human achievement.

Yours sincerely,

Bertrand Russell

So, you might ask, how do you spot a fascist?

It's easy.

Based on the work of historian Robert Paxton, a fascist is:

• Obsessed with community decline and his own victimhood
  
  
• Obsessed with the need for "cleansing" lower social groups
  
  
• Obsessed with plots and the need for redemptive violence
  
  
• Obsessed with the tropes, metaphors, code-words, and jargon he learns from fascist propagandists
  
  
• Obsessed with the need for a national chieftain, who alone can incarnate the nation's historical destiny
  

When you encounter a fascist, do not engage; because, as Russell said, "nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge."

UPDATE: Since publishing this post, I have dropped out of "Steven Wright Quotes." The administrators cannot keep up with the fascists who leave their Troglodytic comments there.