Читать книгу The Needletoe Letters - Robert M. Price - Страница 4

My dear Wiltwing,

I am so pleased to see that your new charge has “become a Christian.” You be sure he speaks of it that way whenever he tells others of his conversion: how sweet it is, that scent of arrogance when Evangelical Protestants imagine they hold the copyright on the word “Christian.” To anyone outside the fold (including him until just now), it would seem the most outrageous so to eliminate from the ranks of the true faith whole populations of Catholics, Orthodox, and other tribes he has never even heard of. And the irony of it is equally rich! Your “born again Christian” is quite content to consider his flavor of the faith to be the one and only “apostolic” Christianity, the only truly biblical Christianity—despite the fact that no one ever heard of the whole “Jesus as personal savior” business until the aftermath of Luther’s Reformation, when the German Pietists dreamed it up! How it tickles me to see them hand out whole Bibles on street corners, as if they were bloated evangelistic tracts—when their “personal savior” gospel never occurs once in its pages! You will do well not to allow him ever to notice how neither Jesus nor Paul or any other biblical writer ever speaks in such terms.

What a brilliant invention, this “personal relationship with Christ”! I believe it was the work of Roodweb, the famous Seraph. At a single stroke it mires the believer in a morass of childish suggestibility, making him heed neurotic whims from his imaginary playmate named “Jesus.” And it redoubles his evangelistic zeal, since now it is not only pagans, Jews, Hindus, etc., who “need” his gospel, but huge portions of the world’s avowed Christians as well. Oh they may devoutly receive the communion wafer every week and believe in a long creed of stipulated contradictions, but if they don’t have a daily chat with “Jesus,” they are not to be considered Christians at all! It is rich, I say!

All the more so since your “born-again” believers somehow fail to recognize their own mirror images in other sects and cults, which, if they know of them, they happily rail against. Suppose your man is a Baptist or a Presbyterian, and he hears of those Pentecostals whom we have taught that one must “speak in tongues” or one is not “saved.” He will (they do) condemn the belief as heresy, failing all the while to see how close he is to the very same belief: only one particular flavor of spirituality marks genuine Christianity! Ah, me! One might as well ridicule the belief of Flying Saucer cultists (you know, that’s our Exidor division) that the Mother Ship will beam them up, all the while believing in one’s own Rapture when Jesus returns! It is called “selective perception,” and it is one of our most effective tools.

But let me not seem to neglect the forest for the trees. In general you will find that Christians like to imagine themselves as open-minded, as indeed they may be when it comes to questions of politics, the claims of advertisers, and personal tastes and preferences. It is a virtue, to be sure. But remember: cultivating virtue is not our business. Our concern is rather to exploit virtue. And that means hiding from our charges how narrow-minded they are in the case of faith. They think nothing (take that phrase however you want to) of simply shutting down whenever a friend ventures a dissenting opinion on religion. They have merely to hear a rival creed stated to know they must reject and refute it. The portcullis slams down, and it is war, albeit with good manners. It is their duty (to us, if they only knew!) not to give ear to such heresy lest “Satan” use it as a seed, a foothold, a camel’s intruding nose. When they behold another behaving in this manner in an exchange over political candidates or issues, they will sadly shake their heads in regret over such bull-headedness, such bigotry—without realizing that they themselves have elevated it to a virtue in religion.

One of the most effective blinders we have used to steer the poor souls like the blinkers on a horse is a subtle confusion between humility and arrogance, two attitudes one might not think to be easily confused. But, happily, they are quite easily substituted one for the other. The convert, the believer, has been coached to think that, insisting upon his own beliefs, he is not arrogantly bragging on behalf of his own opinions. Heaven forbid! He is merely “humbly” acceding to the opinions of Almighty God. Little does he realize that, in that moment, he is pretending to be Almighty God.

Wiltwing, if you will bear with my opinion, and I think it is backed by some respectable centuries of expertise, all this glorious hypocrisy stems from a fundamental misstep we long ago taught them to take. In religion, they are quite accustomed to substituting emotion for reason. One of the gems of our propaganda effort is Pascal’s dictum that the heart has its reasons of which the mind remains ignorant. It is so effective an excuse for intellectual abdication because it does ring true, just not in the case for which it is invoked. It would be manifestly absurd for a human to choose another as his mate based on statistical data and the like. That is where “reasons of the heart” properly come into play. But how foolish to choose a brand of automobile because the television advertisement for it gives him an excited feeling! No, the prospective buyer ought to be applying his mind to the reasons appropriate to it: what sort of mileage will this or that brand of automobile get him? Does it offer a smooth ride? But advertisers know they can count on emotional manipulation, as long as no one points out to the gullible customer just what he is doing. If someone does, then the customer will feel like the fool he is and pick up a copy of Consumer Reports for the facts. We have the same interest and the same strategy as that dealer: we want the shopper for a faith to pay no heed whatever to the factual basis or lack of it. We want him listening to his emotions.

Let us apply this to your man. You say he is embarking on the final year of study in an American university. That does not surprise me. We like to swoop on individuals who are either starting college studies or at the beginning of the end of them, freshmen and seniors, I believe they are called. The freshmen have entered a strange world of new perspectives, new acquaintances, new challenges. It is all quite bewildering to them, and they welcome any port in the storm. Conversion to a campus church group seems to resolve, to simplify, to reassure. The burden of freedom and decision, of choosing one’s life’s way is just too disconcerting for many a student, and we are happy enough to remove that burden from their shoulders. The new religious commitment upon which they are embarking creates a surrogate parental authority, and they are greatly relieved to retreat to the values and beliefs they were taught as young children.

The senior’s situation is a bit different. He has learned to swim in the ocean of choices that college offered him, with the result that the campus has become a comfortable home, and he is anxious about leaving this cocoon to risk success or failure in the adult world of self-reliance and competing vocational paths. Again, we are there, our representatives offering him solace and direction. It would do the mortal good to endure the struggle and discover what is best for him. That way he will know himself and gain greater confidence. But, Wiltwing, that does you and me no good at all. We feast upon his wretched prayers of self-abnegation, his disavowal of wisdom and of the ability to acquire it. It is a dependent, childlike soul who gives us what we need. Right now, your protégé is no doubt proudly grateful to have what he perceives as the life preserver of his faith securely about him, and he will not easily be willing to surrender it. Bravo: that is just where we want him.

Your affable uncle,

Needletoe