Posthuman Blues

Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff has written a great essay on the absurdity of belief, pointedly titled Faith = Illness: Why I've had it with religious tolerance.

Here are some excerpts I especially liked:

Maybe I'm just getting old, but I no longer see the real value in being tolerant of other people's beliefs. Sure, when beliefs are relegated to the realm of pure entertainment, they pose no real danger. So, a kid believes U2 is really a supergroup on par with The Beatles or The Who. That's *his* problem, and it doesn't really do a lot of harm to anyone except those of us who still stop by MTV occasionally to see what might be playing.

Actually, I think pretty highly of U2 . . . But carry on!

Like any other public health crisis, the belief in religion must now be treated as a sickness. It is an epidemic, paralyzing our nation's ability to behave in a rational way, and - given our weapons capabilities - posing an increasingly grave threat to the rest of the world.

Finally someone just fucking says it: Belief is a disease that is killing us. No meticulously qualified apologies, no lukewarm caveats, no backtracking. Thank you.

Add to that the more reliable polls finding that 35% of Americans say they are "born again" - a particularly modern phenomenon that came only after the charlatan rabble-rousers during the Great Depression - and you get a picture of a nation hoodwinked into a passive, childlike, yet dogmatic relationship to the myths that were originally written to sustain them, spur their motivation to social justice, and encourage continuing evolution.

[. . .]

But true believers don't have this freedom. Whether it's because they need the Bible to prove a real estate claim in the Middle East, because they don't know how to relate something that didn't really happen, or because they require the threat of an angry super-being who sees all in order behave like good children, true believers - what we now call fundamentalists - are not in a position to appreciate the truth and beauty of the Holy Scriptures. No, the multi-dimensional document we call the Bible is not available to them because, for them, all those stories have to be accepted as historical truth.

Go, Doug!

(Found at Boing Boing.)