Come to Think of It, Maybe We Are Living in the New Babylon
Our religious myths will define us whether we like it or not
Our religious myths will define us whether we like it or not
“Do you know that the Babylonians believed a pig ate the moon?”
I was talking to my college-aged daughter while we were out walking the dog. The conversation had turned to the history of science and how people had been trying to figure out how the cosmos worked. That night’s moon provided a handy example about how people eventually honed myths into theories. Or so I thought.
She stopped and looked at me.
“A pig?”
“Something. Maybe a snake or a cow, but lots of ancient cultures believed a version of that,” I said. “How haven’t you heard this before?”
She ignored the question.
“But it doesn’t look like a pig,” she said, emphatic and a little insulted. “You can see there’s no pig up there eating.”
This had never occurred to me before. Or maybe it’s best to say that I hadn’t thought about it. The myth was just a part of primitive belief trivia for me.
“Maybe it was an invisible pig,” I suggested.
“You can still see the rest of the moon,” she said. “Look!”
Standing there with her in the early days of the quarantine I was dumbstruck, shocked I ever believed anyone thought the moon disappeared. I remembered it being described that way, the moon disappearing as it was eaten.
No one has ever looked at the moon, day or night, and thought part of it was missing.
I don’t live near a city, so the light pollution isn’t awful, but I know I’m not seeing a third as many stars as I would, say, at the beach or in the desert. I tried to imagine how many stars were out on a clear night 3,000 years ago.
Then I looked at how much detail I could see on that night’s clear, if hazy, waning moon. The bright side glowed blue, and by its strong light I could see charcoal imperfections on the dark half’s lifeless gray surface.
I tried to engage my imagination, to inhabit a primitive mind that denied its senses. I almost convinced myself that I couldn’t see it through their eyes because I grew up understanding how the moon waxed and waned, but the more I looked the clearer the fact: No adult has ever looked at the moon, day or night, and thought part of it was missing.
Simple Explanations for Simple People
It was the Egyptians, by the way, who allegedly believed that a pig ate the moon. Ancient Egypt is not known for having primitive minds when it came to how the stars and planets crossed the sky. They could predict eclipses and alignments pretty much as well as we can today.
It makes more sense that they (like all the astronomers that followed them) had multiple, competing explanations about why the moon grew dark, but Egyptian astronomers were also priests. They were expected to explain things in terms of gods. Adding superstition to regular science also made it more palatable and easier to remember.
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Maybe, though, they also understood that people who lived in ignorance about how research worked wouldn’t take, “We’re not sure, but this is what we think” as an explanation. Small minds need simple facts.
All of a sudden I pictured a future where a reasonably-educated father makes some discursive comment about beliefs ancient Americans clung to. I began to obsess over it and had this creeping, existential dread that superstition and willful ignorance will define our times.
“Most ancient Americans didn’t believe the germ theory of disease,” I heard this future father saying.
Once people decide to ignore their experience in favor of their belief, the rest is a sliding scale of active denial.
I’ve been interviewing conspiracy theory people and researching conspiracy cults for a few years. These are individuals who believe in the Reptilian conspiracy or that Paul the Apostle was really working for Satan all along.
It didn’t take me long to recognize that the only way to do a thorough job when it comes to describing other people’s beliefs is to accept that they genuinely believe them against all sense and evidence.
The work undermined my already threadbare acceptance of religious belief. Seeing how easily people slide between ways they think their god wants them to be makes it hard to see some as sane and others as crazy. Once people decide to ignore their experience in favor of their belief, the rest is a sliding scale of active denial.
As with many of the conspiracy theory enthusiasts I’ve spoken with, the man who blew himself up in Nashville Christmas morning believed in the New World Order and reptilian possession. So did the guy who killed his children.
Something that doesn’t get mentioned a lot is that reptilian possession is a kind of demonic possession. That is, from the devil.
It isn’t an accident. We are wary of talking about Christians as having crazy beliefs. As a result, we hedge, so as not to offend the “normal” Christians in our social circles. Our moms and grandmothers, for example.
Still, you’d have to go through a lot of Christians to find one who doesn’t accept that demonic possession is possible. Not only do the Catholics still offer exorcism classes, but they’ve opened them up to non-Catholic clergy to help the Protestants expel demons when necessary.
This is the sliding scale. Pick a “fringe” belief and you’ll find its cousin among “mainstream” beliefs.
It’s a convenient way of dismissing reptilians and Deep State cabals as a “fringe” while clinging to public policies imposing Christian sexual, economic, and social repression.
I don’t want to argue whether it’s crazier to blow yourself up in your RV or to force reproductive prohibitions on women, but it’s long past time to stop pretending they come from separate world views.
There’s this myth that “real” religion only benefits people. In my experience, that is right up there with a pig eating the moon, something we claim to believe more out of cultural habit than out of observation.
An Intellectual Weapon of Mass Destruction
Religious belief, for me, is kind of like weaponizing your intellect. Occasionally it’s used for entertainment, sometimes it’s used for protection or even for good, but the instances where it is used to tear down, sublimate, and destroy are so much more common and do so much more damage.
I grew up in a Catholic/Protestant household in the 1970s and 80s, which was not nearly as fraught in Central New Jersey as it was in, say, Belfast.
I learned from both Catholic and Protestant teachers that we all kind of believed the same thing. There were just small differences in practices and dogmas, i.e. Protestants just thought Mary had kids after Jesus and believed Communion was symbolic rather than a literal miracle where people drank blood and ate flesh.
I don’t know what parents in Northern Ireland told their kids, but they almost certainly didn’t describe the Troubles as a minor theological difference of opinion.
Historically, it ends with violence and people dying over manufactured ideologies about what it means to be a good person.
If we want to have a shot at being moral, we all have to justify the way we live our lives and keep trying to make them what we would like them to be.
It seems wrong-headed to lock on a course and continue to try and force it onto reality long after it stops making sense. It is absolutely bananas to get mad at people who are on a different locked-in course when you’re locked in to a course of your own.
That’s the hardest part about trying to talk about what you believe. I don’t think it’s outrageous to say, “We should just all try to be kind,” but some people do. For many of us, the only way to live is to follow a list of strict, immutable, convoluted rules without question or deviation.
Sometimes I fantasize that the easiest way to get along is to go ahead and say, “Sure, it’s a pig eating the moon.” It seems such a petty thing to fight about.
The trouble is that it doesn’t end with some people just believing stories that are counter to our history, to our experience, and to our reason. Historically, it ends with violence and people killing and dying over manufactured ideologies about what it means to be a good person.
It doesn’t have to be that way, but I think we have to take seriously that people are committed to religion and do a better job of asking them what attracts them to this idea that they’re supposed to be mean to other people on God’s behalf.
I know from experience that there’s plenty of stuff in the Bible about punishment for heretics, but I wonder if we asked people to explain why God was so insistent about hurting others or making them feel excluded and worthless, they might begin to wonder that for themselves.
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Tony Russo is a journalist and author of “Dragged Into the Light: Truthers, Reptilians, Super Soldiers, and Death Inside an Online Cult.” Subscribe to his Bagel Manifesto here.