Humankind’s useful capacity for reason and its acquired respect for empirical knowledge, are the cornerstones of his remarkable development and sustainability. This creature, gifted by evolution with a sensibility, given agency by an advanced brain, has effected intellectual and mechanical advances from crude stone tools to micro-chip and echo-robotics. As he has progressed, over the eons, intellectually and technically, Man has, experientially, confirmed the existential value of learning and advancement by means of enlightened reason as opposed to atavistic, and irrational tribal myth. The Sun God turned out to be a secular, planetary, source of heat and light, lightning and thunder, the meteorological response to the combined presence of certain atmospheric stimuli, and not an angry God, and fire, an existential, controllable and creative tool in the capable hands of Homo sapiens.
Notwithstanding its ever-developing enlightenment and continuing successes in empirical knowledge and consequent material advances, humankind, in general, seems to persist in its non-rational, ancient belief in the obligation to render homage to a higher being or, Deity and generally, adhere to his traditional folkloric practices, inclusive of the instilled religious system and dogma.
Biblical myths include such accounts as the tale of Adam and Eve, the serpent and the “Tree of Knowledge,” Moses, parting the seas with his wooden staff, Jonah and the Whale, the trope that the (omnipotent) God made the World in 6 days (presently estimated at more than four billion years), was tired, (contrary to the Biblical, warranty of his omnipotence) and “rested,” conveniently, on the 7th day (Sabbath Sunday) as well as the recounting of the “immaculate conception,” as underlying and motivating the later religious stories of Christmas and Easter.
Following the unpredictable and bizarre election of Donald Trump to the American Presidency, a perceivable, general decline in the implicit virtues of factual truth and objective empiricism, was discernable. Trump sought to please his populist supporters by declaring an all-out war on factual truth, in favor of the more convenient and subjective, “alternate facts,” and derided educational and societal enlightenment. There, unfortunately, developed a discernable, wide-spread populist distaste for truth, in favor of tactically useful, paranoid ideation, viz., “conspiracy theories.”
The most, democratically, injurious of Trump’s false conspiracy theories, termed “The Big Lie,” aping the orthodox falsity of the Fascists, was his assertion (without a scintilla of proof) that the election was “stolen” from him. His cultish acolytes were only too happy to sign in to Trump’s alleged bugbear, consisting of a false ideation of conspiracy by the “deep government,” to deprive him of “his win.” Trump followers, thereupon, entered into a program to perpetrate the most outrageous and false, conspiracy claims, second only in National impact to his “Big Lie” (“stolen” election).
Typical of the most outrageous of the false paranoid ideations perpetrated by the deluded, Trump cultists, was that the “liberal elites,” were child abusers and traffickers, that George Soros was financing Black Lives Matter riots, that Jews are plotting to control the world, that Israel is shooting rockets down to Earth from outer space, that there exists a sub-rosa Socialist-Communist (?) plot to take over America, that, homosexuality can be taught and young children are being “groomed” to be gay, that Covid was a liberal conspiracy, that 9/11 was a CIA false flag operation, and on and on, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
It is an eerie fact that so many, ostensibly, rational citizens, unexplainably, seem to be believers in such paranoid ideation. Our thematic question notably, concerns the possible bizarre potential of the human brain to actually, “believe” such exercises in irrationality? Can there be some primitive area of the human brain that, given the appropriate motivation or atavistic stimulus, is capable of enabling such exotic stimuli to devolve into actual belief?
Of contextual interest and salient importance, is the related, secular query: does this identical feature or, flaw, in the human brain, analogously, explain the widespread, human agency for (irrational) belief in religious miracles? To be clear, we do not attribute tactical or purposeful motivation to those of religious belief, we merely pose the question, as to the extent of propensity of the human brain to replace, empirical truth and enlightened experience, with, non-rational, cultural tradition.
-p.
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