Sermonette

The difficulty with most con games is that you have to promise people something in return for their money, and when they don't get it, the suckers are disappointed and call the cops and so on. All Bernie Madoff had to do was promise 10-12% a year in returns, no matter what was happening to the markets, and the money rolled in. But then some of the people wanted to cash in their profits so he's going to lose his mansions and yachts, and pretty soon he'll be eating shit on a shingle while wearing an orange jump suit and deeply lamenting that he cannot join either the crips or the Aryan Nation.

If Bernie were smarter he would have become a preacher. Promising the rewards after the people are dead eliminates the disadvantages of other confidence games. Nobody has ever come back from the dead to report that the Kingdom of Heaven is a lot of hooey. And, to the extent people need a little bit of more immediate gratification to keep the tithes flowing, you've got that covered too. When things go well, God gets the credit; when they go badly, your faith sustains you. If you fuck up, you're forgiven, and you may even get a magic cracker to make sure of it.

L. Ron Hubbard said it straight out -- the way to really make a lot of money is to start a religion, and by golly, he went out and did it. That Scientology is highly successful at raking in the dough for its leaders in spite of their transparent venality and L. Ron's on-the-record declaration is testament to the ineluctable gullibility of the human spirit.

I was about to say, and in spite of the utter absurdity of Scientological beliefs, but come to think of it, they are no more absurd than any other religion. A virgin gave birth to a guy who walked on water, raised the dead and drove some demons who were possessing a dude into a herd of pigs who then ran over a cliff, who walked around for a month after he himself was dead and then soared up into the sky -- right, you betcha.

You might argue that all this is just harmless fun and makes people feel better, but there are several reasons why I disagree. In the first place, that's an awful lot of society's scarce resources going for the Pope's silk slippers, the building and maintenance of non-productive edifices, clerical salaries, and magic crackers. In the second place, and this is most important, if you believe one thing on faith, you can believe anything -- and a lot of what the preachers tell people to believe is truly, profoundly damaging -- whether to individuals such as homosexuals and atheists who they teach their followers to despise, or to effective problem solving when they deny scientific facts and tell children that the world is run by magic and fantasy.

And it does real political damage as well, and stops people from standing up for their own best interests and the interest of the community. Joe Hill said it best:

You will eat bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky.
Work and pray, (work and pray),
Live on hay, (live on hay),
You'll get Pie in the Sky,
When you die, (that's a lie!)

And the starvation army they play,
They sing and they dance and they pray,
Till they get all your coin on the drum,
Then they tell you when you're on the bum:
You will eat bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky.
Work and pray, (work and pray),
Live on hay, (live on hay),
You'll get Pie in the Sky,
When you die, (that's a lie!)

If you fight hard for the good things in life,
They will tell you to stop all the strife,
Be a sheep for the bosses they say
Or to hell you are surely on the way!

Sure, religious institutions do some good works, but so do secular institutions, and without the ulterior motive of trying to convert people to superstition. I know what sorts of things religious apologists will say in response, and if any of them read this and care to leave a comment, bring 'em on. I'm not afraid to discuss this.

And yes, it has a lot to do with public health. Religious leaders have done immense harm to public health, in such fields as HIV prevention and the science education that produces the medical and public health work force of tomorrow. It's my responsibility to confront damaging superstitions, and it's long past time that more of us did it.