Ssshh, it's a secret

To continue with this week's theme, which has mostly been about how completely baffling I find the behavior of my fellow humans a lot of the time, today we have: secret societies.

Which may be a misnomer.  Most of these societies are so extremely secret that you'd never ever find out about them unless you happened to read the Wikipedia page entitled "Secret Societies."  The problem is, if something was truly a secret society, we wouldn't know about it, kind of by definition.  But this would defeat the purpose, because then it would have a membership list consisting of one person (the founder), and it wouldn't be a "society" so much as "a single delusional wingnut."  So it's got to be secret (and also mystical and esoteric) enough to intrigue the absolute hell out of non-initiates, but also sufficiently well-advertised to attract a few select converts.

Which is a bit of a balancing act.

The Rose Cross symbol from the Order of the Golden Dawn [Image is in the Public Domain]

Anyhow, I did a little digging into what I could find out about the history of secret societies, and lord have mercy, there have been some doozies.  And to obviate the need of saying this over and over, I swear I'm not making any of this up.

Let's start with one that was operative in eighteenth-century Germany, but when you hear about it, you will really wish it was still around today.  It's called the Order of the Pug (German Mops-Orden), and seems to have been founded to circumvent a papal bull issued by Pope Clement XII in 1738 that forbade Catholics from being Freemasons.  So some folks got together and decided to come up with a different secret society, and they definitely pulled out all the stops.

Amongst their beliefs was an emphasis on loyalty, trustworthiness, and steadfastness, none of which I can find fault with.  But their rituals were... interesting.  During initiation, prospective candidates had to wear a dog collar and gain admittance by scratching at the door and barking.  At the climax of the ritual, the candidate had to kiss the ass of a porcelain pug statue.  After that, they were taught the society's slogans, gestures, and hand signals, at which point they were allowed to wear the group's medallion (which of course featured the face of a pug).

The whole thing was blown wide open in 1745 when a book was published in Amsterdam entitled L'Ordre des Franc-Maçons Trahi et le Secret des Mopses Révélé (The Order of the Freemasons Betrayed and the Secret of the Pugs Revealed), which resulted in most people responding with nothing more than a puzzled head-tilt.  After all, this wasn't the fifteenth century, when saying "I like pineapple on pizza" could get you burned as a witch.  So even after their secrets were exposed, no one was all that impressed.  The result was that the Pugs kind of fizzled, although apparently there was still an order practicing in Lyon in 1902.

Then we've got the Epsilon Team, which sounds like a Saturday morning superhero cartoon but isn't.  This one originated in Greece, and is a mixed-up mishmash of Greek mythology and UFOs and conspiracy theories, with a nasty streak of anti-Semitism thrown in for good measure.  The Epsilons were founded in the 1960s by a guy named George Lefkofrydis, who appears to have had a screw loose.  He claimed that there's a coded message in Aristotle's work on logic, the Organon, which reveals that Aristotle was an alien from the planet Mu in the constellation Lepus.  (The irony is not lost on me that a coded message that sounds like the result of heavy consumption of controlled substances was allegedly encrypted in a text on how to recognize fallacious arguments.)

Anyhow, Lefkofrydis's ideas somehow found favor with other Greeks who apparently spent their spare time doing sit-ups underneath parked cars, and their dogma expanded to include the following:

• the Olympian gods were going to come back and initiate a cosmic war against the Jews, who are actually also aliens
• ancient Peru was visited by the Greeks, who founded the Inca Empire
• the letter E is a symbol of the society and its goals, so wherever it appears in other languages, it was planted there as a subliminal text by the ancient Greeks

This prompts me to point out two things.

First, my wife is Jewish, and thus far I haven't seen any sign of her being an alien.  She has also yet to do battle with Zeus, Ares, Apollo, et al., but frankly, if it happens I'm putting my money on her.  She's kind of a take-no-shit type, which I suspect would still be the case if she were up against scantily-clad lightning-bolt-hurling ancient deities.

Second, the "E" thing is kind of implausible, and as a linguist, I can say this with some authority.  What, bfor th Grks wnt around and distributd thm to vrybody, did popl writ lik this?  Sms kind of inconvnint.

Conspiracy theory researcher Tao Makeef writes, showing admirable restraint, that "even amongst Greek neopagans, these beliefs are generally ridiculed."

Next there's A∴A∴, not to be confused with AA, which can stand for Alcoholics Anonymous, American Airlines, the Automobile Association, or a specific bra size.  A∴A∴ was founded by none other than Aleister Crowley, the self-styled "Wickedest Man on Earth," whose main interest seems to have been having sex with anyone of either gender who would hold still for long enough.  This is not the only secret society that Crowley founded; in fact, he started so many of them that for a while the number of Crowley's secret societies exceeded the number of actual members.  The meaning of A∴A∴ was deliberately left ambiguous -- it was said variously to stand for astrum argenteum (Latin for "silver star"), arcanum arcanorum (Latin for "secret of secrets"), Atlantean Adepts, or Angel and Abyss.  In Robert Anton Wilson's and Robert Shea's Illuminatus! trilogy, though, they say it doesn't stand for anything; that the true adepts somehow intuit what it means, so anyone making a claim about what it stands for is just illustrating that they're not really a member.

That's how esoteric and secret A∴A∴ is.

To move your way up through the A∴A∴ ranks, you have to do stuff like "acquire perfect control of the body of light on the astral plane" and "learn the formula of the Rose Cross" and "cross the great gulf or void between the phenomenal world of manifestation and its noumenal source, that great spiritual wilderness."  Which I think we can all agree sound impressive as hell.

Last, we have the Temple of Black Light, also called the Misanthropic Luciferian Order, founded in 1995 in Sweden by a guy named Shahin Khoshnood as an offshoot of a group called the True Satanist Horde, apparently because the latter weren't batshit crazy enough.  The members of the Temple of Black Light believed in "Azerate," the extremely secret "hidden name of the eleven cosmic anti-gods," which became significantly less hidden when Khoshnood published a book about it.  The central tenet of the Temple is the worship of chaos, and the claim that God regretted having created the universe with all its laws and scientific principles and whatnot, and wished he'd left well enough alone and stuck with the whole formless and void thing of Genesis 1:1.  What we should all be doing, they say, is trying to get back to chaos, and I have to say that at the moment the Republican Party is doing a damn good job of it here in the United States.  

Anyhow, the appeal is that unlike our boring old three-spatial-dimensions-plus-time universe, chaos is supposedly "an infinidimensional and pandimensional plane of possibilities."  Whatever the fuck that means.

Ultimately, though, Khoshnood was discovered not only to be a wacko cult leader, but a homicidal maniac, and once he was arrested and charged with murder, very quickly the other members of the Temple noped their way right out of any association with him.  So I guess we're going to have to put up with our current orderly universe for a while longer, such as it is.

Anyhow, those are just four of hundreds.  I encourage you to peruse the Wikipedia page, especially if you want to significantly diminish your opinion of the intelligence of humanity as a whole.

Now, y'all'll have to excuse me, because I need to go work on my anatomically-correct ceramic statue of a pug.  Not for any reason in particular, mind you.  I just... um... wanted to make one.

Woof.

****************************************

The puppetmasters

Well, Tuesday came and went, and no one got Raptured.

Not that I was expecting to go myself.  If anything, it was more likely the ground would open up and swallow me, kind of like what happened in Numbers chapter 16, wherein three guys named Korah, Dathan, and Abiram told Moses they were sick and tired of wandering around in the desert, and where was the Land of Milk and Honey they'd been promised, and anyway, who the hell put Moses in charge?  So there was an earthquake or something and the ground swallowed up not only the three loudmouthed dudes but their wives and kids and friends and domestic animals, which seems like overkill.  Literally.  Not surprising, really, because the God of the Old Testament was pretty free with the "Smite" function.  By one estimate I saw, according to the Bible God killed over two million people to Satan's ten, so I'm thinking maybe we got the whole good vs. evil thing backwards.

In any case, even that didn't happen on Tuesday, because here I am, unswallowed, as well as my wife and three dogs.  I haven't heard from my sons in a couple of days, but I'm assuming they're okay, too.  So all in all, it was an uneventful Tuesday.

The batting-zero stats of Rapture predictions from the past didn't stop people from completely falling for it yet again.  One woman sold all her belongings because she was convinced she wouldn't need them any more.  Another gave away her house -- like, signed over the deed and everything -- and at the time of the article (immediately pre-Rapture) was looking for someone to give her car to.  Another one donated her life savings, quit her job, and confessed to her husband that she was having an affair with a member of her church so she could "get right with God" before the Rapture happened -- and now is devastated because she's broke, jobless, and her husband is divorcing her.

It's hard to work up a lot of sympathy for these people, but at the same time, I have to place some of the blame on the people who brainwashed them.  No one gets to this advanced stage of gullibility unaided, you know?  Somewhere along the line, they were convinced to cede their own understanding to others -- and after that happens, you are putty in the hands of the delusional, power-hungry, and unscrupulous.

Which brings us to Peter Thiel.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Peter Thiel by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0]

You probably know that Thiel is a wildly rich venture capitalist, the founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and was the first outside investor in Facebook.  His current net worth is over twenty billion dollars, but the current wealth inequity in the world is such that even so, he's still not in the top one hundred richest people.  But the fact remains that he's crazy wealthy, and has used that wealth to influence politics.

It will come as no shock that he's a big supporter of Donald Trump.  But what you might not know is that he is also a religious loony.

I'm not saying that just because Thiel is religious and I'm not.  I have lots of friends who belong to religions of various sorts, and we by and large respect each other and each other's beliefs.  Thiel, on the other hand, is in a different category altogether.  To give one example, just last week he gave a talk as part of his "ACTS 17 Collective" ("ACTS" stands for "Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society"), wherein he said that we can't regulate AI development and use because that's what Satan wants us to do -- "the Devil promises peace and safety by strangling technological progress with regulation."  Limiting AI, Thiel said, would "hasten the coming of the Antichrist."

Oh, and he's also said that environmental activist Greta Thunberg is the Antichrist.  Which is a little odd, because as far as I can tell she's already here, and has been for a while, and thus far hasn't done anything particularly Antichrist-ish.  But maybe there's some apocalyptic logic here that I'm not seeing.

Thiel is absolutely obsessed with one passage from the Bible, from 2 Thessalonians chapter 2:

Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way, for that day will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the man doomed to destruction.  He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.

Don’t you remember that when I was with you I used to tell you these things?  And now you know what is holding him back, so that he may be revealed at the proper time.  For the secret power of lawlessness is already at work; but the one who now holds it back will continue to do so till he is taken out of the way.  And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendor of his coming.  The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with how Satan works.  He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie, and all the ways that wickedness deceives those who are perishing.  They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved.  For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness.

So what is that mysterious force that "holds back" the evil one, what St. Paul called the "κατέχων"?

Well, Thiel is, of course.  He and the techo-nirvana he is trying to create.  "[When the] Antichrist system collapses into Armageddon," religious commentator Michael Christensen writes, "only the few survive.  A techno-libertarian, [Thiel] entertains a kind of secular rapture: off-grid bunkers, floating cities or even planetary colonies.  In his apocalyptic vision, these survivalist escape hatches offer a way out of both collapse and tyranny—but only for the wealthy and well-prepared."

What's kind of terrifying about all this is how influential people like Thiel are.  His ACTS 17 Collective gatherings play to sold-out audiences.  His message, and that of others like him, then filters down to people like Pastor Joshua Mhlakela (the one who got the whole Rapture-Is-On-Tuesday thing started), and they then pass along their "repent or else!" fear-mongering to their followers.  It's why my lack of sympathy for the folks who bankrupted themselves because they figured they'd be Sitting At The Feet Of Jesus by Wednesday morning is tempered by, "... but was it really their fault?"  Sure, they should have learned some critical thinking skills, and been taught to sift fact from fiction.

But they weren't, for whatever reason.  And afterward, they were immersed in scary apocalyptic terror-talk day in, day out.  Who can blame them for eventually swallowing it whole?

It's easy for me, outside the system, to say the people who fell for Mhlakela's nonsense are just a bunch of fools.  But the truth is more nuanced than that, and a hell of a lot scarier.  Because brainwashing doesn't happen in a vacuum.

The puppetmasters behind it are almost always the powerful and rich -- who all too often not only get away with it, but profit mightily from it.  A terrified, brainwashed populace is easier to manipulate and extort.

Which exactly where people like Peter Thiel want us.

****************************************

A glimpse of the surreal

Haruki Murakami's odd and atmospheric short story collection First Person Singular looks at those moments in our lives where something inexplicable happens that alters us forever.  Often it isn't the exact nature of the event that matters; it's that touch of weird surreality, the feeling that somehow we've just side-slipped into a place that is outside the realm of the ordinary.

All of the stories are good, but none hits the target quite so spot-on as "Cream."  In it, a young man gets a printed invitation to a piano recital from a woman he'd known a few years earlier when they were both students of the same music teacher.  The narrator wasn't nearly as good a musician as the woman was, and he'd always gotten the impression she didn't like him much, so the invitation was a complete surprise, especially since they'd had no contact during the intervening years.

He decides to go, and even buys her a bouquet of flowers.  He takes the train to the remote village where the recital hall is, but when he gets there, the recital hall is padlocked, and appears not to have been occupied for some time.  Odder still, he seems to be the only one around.  There's no one out in the village, no cars passing, nothing.  He goes to a nearby park and sits on a bench, and closes his eyes for a few moments.  Then he becomes aware of a change.  He opens his eyes to find an old man standing there.  The old man gives him some cryptic instructions -- "Look for a circle with many centers and no circumference" -- and after a brief discussion of what that could possibly mean, the old man, too, is gone without a trace.

Ultimately the narrator gets back on the train toward home.  There is no closure; he never finds out why the pianist had invited him to a non-existent recital, who the old man was, or what the odd message meant.  "Things like this happen sometimes in our lives," the narrator concludes.  "Inexplicable, illogical events that nevertheless are deeply disturbing.  I guess we need to not think about them, just close our eyes and get through them.  As if we were passing under a huge wave out on the ocean."

The entire collection, but especially "Cream," put me in mind of one of the weirdest experiences I've ever had.  Like the narrator in the story, I still don't have an explanation -- and on some level, it's been worrying at me ever since.

The events in question happened about forty years ago, when I lived in Olympia, Washington.  I was about twenty-five at the time, working a stupid desk job I hated, and to lighten the daily drudgery I decided on a lark to take an evening art class at Evergreen State College.  Now, I'll say up front that I'm not much of an artist. My attempt in my biology classes to draw an animal on the whiteboard led to its being christened by students as the "All-Purpose Quadruped" because no one could figure out if it was a cow, a dog, an armadillo, or whatever.  But even considering my lack of talent, I thought an art class could be fun, so I went for it.

One of the students in the class was Laura L______.  Laura was between thirty-five and forty, at a guess, and in very short order she kind of attached herself to me.  There was nothing remotely sexual about it; I never got the impression she was coming on to me, or anything.  It was more that she hung on my every word as if I was the smartest, most fascinating person she'd ever met.  We discovered a mutual interest in languages -- and it was off to the races.

Now, I hasten to state that at twenty-five, I simply wasn't that interesting.  I was a young, naive guy who had no idea what he wanted to do with his life, and at that point was just kind of flailing around trying to make enough money to pay for rent and groceries.  So as flattering as it was, even then I recognized that there was something weird and over-the-top about Laura's attentions.  Still, it was a sop to my ego, and I didn't do anything to discourage her.

About three weeks into the art course, I wrote a letter to a college friend of mine (remember, this is in the days before email and texting), and along with the usual newsy stuff, I mentioned the art class and "this weird woman named Laura."  "Next time we talk, I have to tell you more about her," I wrote.  Nothing more in detail than that -- a passing couple of sentences that didn't capture how peculiar she was, nor even in what way she was peculiar.

Around that time, Laura asked if my wife and I wanted to come over to her house, that she and her husband were throwing a party for a few friends, and that she'd love it if we came.  I said okay -- again, with a mild feeling of trepidation, but not enough to say "oh, hell no" -- and she seemed really excited that I'd agreed, and was bringing along my wife.

Saturday came, and we showed up at Laura's house.  And... Laura's husband, and the other guests, were all the same kind of way-too-bright-eyed intellectual that she was.  The topics were all over the place.  Science, linguistics, art, history, philosophy, you name it.  And just like conversations with Laura, everything I said was met with "that's fascinating!" and "wow, that is so cool!"  Looking at it from the outside, you'd have sworn that I was Neil deGrasse Tyson or something.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons David Shankbone creator QS:P170,Q12899557, House party in Denver Colorado, CC BY 3.0]

After about forty-five minutes of this, both my wife and I got freaked out enough that we decided to leave.  We invented some kind of excuse -- I forget exactly what -- and told Laura we had to go.

"Oh, I'm so sorry you can't stay," she said, her forehead creasing with dismay.  "Are you sure?"

I said I was sure, was "so sorry, too," and told her I'd see her next class.  She didn't argue more, but definitely looked disappointed.  Way more disappointed, in fact, that the circumstance seemed to warrant.  My wife and I talked all the way home about how bizarre the evening had been, and how relieved we both were to leave -- even though nothing happened.

Two postscripts are what make this story even creepier.

About three or four days after the party, I got a letter from my college friend.  Best I can recall, the relevant passage went something like this:

I know you'll probably think this is ridiculous, but I felt like I had to say something.  When I read what you said in your letter about your classmate Laura, I got a real premonition of evil.  There was immediately a feeling that she meant you harm.  I know how skeptical you are about this sort of thing, so you'll probably laugh and then throw this letter in the trash, but I felt like I couldn't simply not tell you.

The second thing is that Laura never came back to the art class.

The first time she missed, I just figured she was sick or something (and was actually a little relieved, because I didn't want to get into it with her about why we'd left her party).  But then another class came, and another, and she never showed up.

I never saw her again.

My wife said, "Maybe she realized that she'd missed her chance to get you, and you weren't going to trust her enough to give her another opportunity."

I actually thought, several times, about driving past her house, just to see what I could see (I had no inclination to knock on her door).  But each time, the idea that she might see my car driving past gave me such a chill up my backbone that I didn't do it.  Where she lived wasn't on my way to work or anything, it was quite a bit out of the way, so I never did go back.

To this day, I don't have a good explanation for this.  Were they just weird, over-enthusiastic intellectual types, and it was all just innocent overcompensation for social awkwardness?  Was it a cult?  Were they planning on drugging our drinks or something?  If we'd stayed longer, were they going to drag out a display of Amway products?

I honestly have no idea.  But even though nothing happened that evening -- "strange, extremely happy smart people freak out young couple," is really about the extent of it -- I still can't think of this incident without shuddering.  What happened afterward (the letter from my friend, and Laura's odd disappearance) only add to the mystery.  Even though my rational brain balks at the idea, it's left me with the sense of having had a momentary glimpse into a surreal and dangerous world of which I'm usually unaware.  I've many times considered turning it into a short story or novel, but I have never been able to come up with a convincing ending.

Life can be strange sometimes, and I suppose not everything has to have an explanation, at least not in the larger scheme of things.  I'm just as happy that most days, my life is refreshingly ordinary.  It reminds me of another quote from a favorite author -- this one from Umberto Eco, from his masterful labyrinth of a novel Foucault's Pendulum, which seems a fitting place to end: "Life is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is only made terrible by our determination to treat it as though it had any underlying meaning."

****************************************

All rights reversed

In his book Nothing's Sacred: The Truth About Judaism, media scholar Douglas Rushkoff discusses his concept of "open-source religion," which he contrasts to the more traditional, handed-down-from-on-high types:

An open-source religion would work the same way as open-source software development: it is not kept secret or mysterious at all.  Everyone contributes to the codes we use to comprehend our place in the universe.  We allow our religion to evolve based on the active participation of its people...  An open-source relationship to religion would likewise take advantage of the individual points of view of its many active participants to develop its more resolved picture of the world and our place within it...  [R]eligion is not a pre-existing truth but an ongoing project.  It may be divinely inspired, but it is a creation of human beings working together.  A collaboration.

Which all sounds lovely and democratic and ecumenical, but it brings up the problem of how exactly you can tell if the "codes" contributed by people are correct or not.  In science, there's a standard protocol -- alignment of a model with the known data, and the use of the model to make predictions that then agree with subsequent observations -- but here, I'm not sure how you could apply anything like that.  The fact that religion seems, at its heart, to be an intensely individual experience, varying greatly from one person to another, suggests that reconciling each person's contributions may not be so easy.  Wars have been fought and lives lost over people's notions about the nature of God; saying "let's all collaborate" is a little disingenuous.

This is problematic not only between the world's major religions, but within them.  How, for example, could you bring together my Unitarian Universalist friend, who is more or less a pantheist; another friend who is a devout and very traditional Roman Catholic; and someone who is an evangelical biblical literalist who thinks everyone who doesn't believe that way is headed to the Fiery Furnace for all eternity?  All three call themselves Christian, but they all mean something very different by it.

The Discordians' clever labeling of their own founding doctrine as "All Rights Reversed" -- quote, reprint, or jigger around anything you want, it's all yours to do with as you please -- sounds good, but in practice, it relies on an undeserved trust in the minds of fallible humans of varying backgrounds and educational levels, who sometimes can't even agree on what the evidence itself means.

It's not that I'm certain that my own "there's probably no all-powerful deity in charge" is correct, mind you.  It's more that -- as eminent astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson put it -- "humans are rife with all sorts of ways of getting it wrong," and that assessment very much includes me.  I'm wary of other people's biases, and far more wary of my own.  Physicist Richard Feynman said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."  Even C. S. Lewis saw the danger in the "everyone's voice counts" approach.  He wrote, "A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government.  The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true."

George Carlin put it another way.  He said, "Think of a guy you know who has 'average intelligence.'  Then keep in mind that half of humanity is stupider than that guy."

The problem is that just about every religious person in the world (1) believes what they do because they were told about it by someone else, and (2) believes they've got it one hundred percent right and everyone else is wrong.  And, as Richard Dawkins troublingly points out, what people do believe is often a matter of nothing more than geography.  I was raised Roman Catholic because I grew up in a French-speaking part of southern Louisiana.  If I'd been born to Saudi parents in Riyadh I'd have been Muslim; to Thai parents in Bangkok, I'd likely be Buddhist; to Israeli parents in Tel Aviv, I'd be Jewish; and so on.  I'm suspicious of the whole enterprise because, even given the same universe to look at, people all come up with different answers.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Sowlos, Religious symbols-4x4, CC BY-SA 3.0]

And not only are there the ones with lots of adherents, there are countless fringe groups that have spun their own wild takes on how the world works.  Some, like the guy in Tennessee who believed that God told him to build the world's biggest treehouse church, are more amusing than dangerous.  (For what it's worth, the treehouse church was shut down because it was a poorly-constructed safety hazard, and a month later burned to the ground under mysterious circumstances.)  Others, like Jim Jones's People's Temple and the mystical cult that grew up around Carlos Castaneda, are downright deadly.  I have to admit the "open-source religion" idea is good at least from the standpoint of throwing the question back on your own intellect rather than saying, "Just believe what the priest/minister/imam/holy man is telling you," but it does leave the possibility open of getting it very, very wrong. 

As Susan B. Anthony put it, "I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires."

Again, as I said earlier, it's not that I'm sure myself.  Part of my hesitancy is because I'm so aware of my own capacity for error.  Even though I left Catholicism in my twenties and, for the most part, haven't looked back, I have to admit that there's still an attraction there, something about the mystery and ritual of the church of my childhood that keeps me fascinated.

All the baggage that comes with it -- the patriarchalism and sectarianism and misogyny and homophobia -- not so much.

So right now I'll remain a de facto atheist, although in some ways a reluctant one.  The idea that the universe has some deeper meaning, that things happen because there's a Grand Plan (even if it is, in Aziraphale's words, "Ineffable"), has undeniable appeal.  But if there's one thing I've learned in my sixty-four years, it's that the universe is under no compulsion to arrange itself so as to make me happy.

Or, as my beloved grandma used to say, "Wishin' don't make it so."

****************************************

A tangle of beliefs

I hold two strong opinions that sometimes come into conflict with one another.

The first is that everyone comes to understand the universe in their own way.  Most of the time, we're all just muddling along trying to figure things out and simultaneously keep our heads above water, so who am I to criticize if you draw a different set of conclusions from this weird and chaotic place than I do?  Honestly, as long as you don't push your beliefs on me or use them to discriminate against people who think differently than you do, I don't have any quarrel with you.

On the other hand, there's no requirement that I "respect your beliefs," in the sense that because you call them sacred or religious or whatnot, I'm somehow not allowed to criticize them (or point out that they make no sense).  No beliefs -- and that includes mine -- are immune to critique.

So, respect people?  Of course, always.  But respect claims?  Only if they make sense and follow some basic principles like honoring the rights of others.  My support of "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" is tempered by, "... but if thou appearest to be a wingnut, thou shouldst not expect me not to point that out."

This is the thought that kept occurring to me as I perused a Wikipedia page I stumbled across, titled, "List of New Religious Movements."  By "new" they mean "after 1800," and the point is made rather forcefully that it's an incomplete list -- and that "scholars have estimated that the number of new religious movements now number in the tens of thousands worldwide."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons ReligijneSymbole.svg: Dariusofthedark]

I find this kind of mind-boggling.  I'm so uncertain about most of the Big-Question type beliefs that I'd never presume to say, "Hey, I know what's true!  Here's what everyone else should believe!"  Yeah, I come on pretty strong about things like "science works" and "we should respect hard evidence," but stuff like, "is there a Higher Power at work?" and "is there an afterlife?" and "is there any absolute truth?" -- I'm not going to claim my answers are any better than anyone else's.

But apparently there are a great many people who don't share that attitude.  And a lot of answers they've come up with -- and feel strongly enough about that they try to convert others -- are, to put not too fine a point on it, really fucking bizarre.  You have to wonder how many of the leaders of these groups were motivated by true belief, and how many by desire for power, wealth, fame, and adulation, but even so some of the "new religious movements" on this list are so strange that I find it astonishing they attracted any followers at all.  Here's a sampler of some of the more peculiar ones:

• Chen Tao, founded in 1993 in Taiwan by Hon-Ming Chen.  He later upped stakes and moved his community to Garland, Texas, because "Garland" sounds a little like "God's land."  This one mixes Buddhism, Christian End-Times stuff, and... UFOs.  Chen became infamous for stating that on March 31, 1998, God would be visible nationwide on Channel 18, and would have an important message for us (because, of course, what other kind of message could God have?).  When God failed to show, Chen (showing remarkable contrition for a cult leader) said, "I must have misunderstood," and offered to be crucified or stoned as penance, but no one took him up on it.
• The Ásatrú Folk Assembly, founded in northern California in the 1970s by Stephen McNallen, which combines Norse mythology with ancestor worship and a nasty streak of white supremacy.
• The Genesis II Church of Health and Healing, founded in 2009 by Jim Humble and self-styled "QAnon prophet" Jordan Sather, which seems to have been mostly a way of selling something called "Miracle Mineral Supplement" as a cure for everything from COVID-19 to cancer, but which turned out to be a solution of chlorine dioxide (bleach).  The "miracle" is that anyone survives after drinking it.  Some people, unfortunately, did not.
• The Church of Light, founded in 1932 by C. C. Zain, which melds astrology, occultism, hermeticism, and Christianity.  This one, though, has been torn apart by internal schisms and rifts, to the point that there now seem to be more sects and sub-sects of the Church of Light than there are actual members.
• The Amica Temple of Radiance, founded in 1959 by Roland Hunt and Dorothy Bailey, based on the teachings of spiritualist Ivah Bergh Whitten.  The idea here is apparently that colors have a sacred significance, and you can heal yourself (both physically and spiritually) by figuring out what your color is and then exposing yourself to that frequency of light.  Seems to me that "... but this doesn't actually work" would pretty much puncture a hole in the claim, but I guess the placebo effect can be awfully powerful.
• The Divine Order of the Royal Arms of the Great Eleven, founded in 1922 by May Otis Blackburn, who told her devotees she was charged by the archangel Gabriel to reveal the secrets of heaven and earth to the masses.  Some of her "secrets" had to do with resurrecting the dead, once again resulting in the objection "... but this doesn't actually work" (as you'll see, this will become a recurring theme here).  The whole thing fell apart when Blackburn was imprisoned for stealing forty thousand dollars from one of her followers.
• Adonism, a neo-pagan religion founded in 1925 by German esotericist Franz Sättler.  The Adonists worshipped a few of the Assyrian gods such as Bel, but their main deity was the Greek mythological figure Adonis, the worship of whom involved having lots of sex with whatever gender(s) you like.  So I guess I can understand why devotees thought Adonism was pretty cool.  Sättler, though, ran afoul of the anti-decadency drive of the Nazis, ended up in jail, and is thought to have died in Mauthausen concentration camp.
• People Unlimited, founded in 1982 by Charles Paul Brown, which teaches that humans can be immortal.  The claim ran into an unfortunate snag in 2014 when Brown died, but (astonishingly) the group didn't lose members, who transferred their allegiance (and hopes of eternal life) to Brown's widow Bernadeane.
• The Missionary Church of Kopimism, founded in Uppsala, Sweden in 2010 by Isak Gerson and Gustav Nipe.  The main tenet of this movement is that information is sacred, and therefore copyright law is inherently immoral.  The internet is "holy," they say, because it is a conduit of communication, and file sharing is a sacrament.  Their logo -- I swear I am not making this up -- is a yin-yang kind of thing containing "ctrl-C" and "ctrl-V."
• "Love Has Won," founded by Amy Carlson, who claimed to be a nineteen-billion-year-old being who had birthed all of creation.  Not content with that, she was reincarnated 534 times, including incarnations as Jesus, Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, and Marilyn Monroe, finally ending up as a 32-year-old manager of a Dallas, Texas McDonalds before founding her cult in 2007.  Among her odder claims were that Donald Trump had been her father in a previous incarnation, Robin Williams was an archangel, and the remnants of the inhabitants of the lost continent of Lemuria live beneath Mount Shasta.  She said that she was going to "lead 144,000 souls into the fifth dimension," but died in 2021 under mysterious circumstances before she had the chance.

And this is just a very short sampler from a very long list.

It's not that I'm perplexed about the founders, for the most part.  Some (like Humble and Sather, the ones hawking the Miracle Mineral Supplement) are almost certainly in it for the money.  Others are motivated by having power and influence over their followers, or (like Franz Sättler) because free sex with whoever you want is a nifty perk.  Yet others (like Amy Carlson) probably are just mentally ill.

But what honestly puzzles me is how so many people can look at these sorts of cults and say, "Yes!  Of course!  That makes perfect sense!"  And, even stranger, continue to believe even after circumstances (or hard evidence) show that what the leaders are claiming can't be true.

To return to my initial point -- it's hardly that I'm sure of everything myself, or am somehow convinced I have a direct pipeline to the Eternal Truths.  But to fall for some of these (tens of thousands!) of "new religious movements," you have to entangle yourself in belief systems that honestly make no sense whatsoever.

In conclusion -- if you belong to any of these groups, please don't come after me with a machete.  I'm not saying you can't belong to the Missionary Church of Kopimism and do a Gregorian chant every time you cut-and-paste, or immerse yourself in a beam of orange light to try to cure your acne. 

But at least allow me my incredulity, okay?

****************************************

Crossing the line

I'm probably pasting a big-ass bullseye right on my chest even asking this, but I have to: Trump supporters, what would it take for you to admit you were wrong about him?

During the election campaign, he mocked a reporter's disability, doing a grotesque parody of his flailing movements for a laughing, jeering crowd.  But you still voted for him.

It came out during the campaign that during a radio interview, Trump had bragged about sexual assault -- stating that when you're rich and famous you can do anything to women without their consent, including "grab(bing) them by the pussy."  But you still voted for him.

While married, he had an affair with porn star Stormy Daniels, then paid her not to make it public.  But you still call him moral.

Despite his constant screeching about "witch hunts," the investigations into wrongdoing by members of his administration -- led by Republican Robert Mueller -- resulted in thirty indictments and a score more credible allegations.  But you still support him.

His disdain for other ethnic groups is blatant, from his responding to the hurricane damage in Puerto Rico by throwing rolls of paper towels into the crowd to calling Third-World countries "shitholes."   He fully supports policies keeping children from those "shithole countries" in cages on our borders, cages in which some of them have died.  But you still support him.

"Disdain" is probably too mild a word.  He shows every sign of being a racist, judging from his refusal to stand down from his call for the death penalty for the Central Park Five after they were all completely exonerated.  He has a history of racist and racially-insensitive statements going back into the 1970s, including a statement that "laziness is a trait in blacks."  But you still support him.

He lies continuously, to the point that there is an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to cataloguing them.  The Washington Post numbered them at over sixteen thousand.  And you still believe him.

He has repeatedly sided with Russia over our own policymakers and foreign policy experts, including stating publicly that Russia was right to be in Afghanistan and that there was no way Russia meddled in the 2016 election because Putin told him so.  But you still support him.

He has repeatedly weakened standards for pollution, most recently when his hand-picked EPA advisers ended a review of safe ozone levels with a statement that there "was no justification for continuing."  These advisors, by the way, are virtually all representatives of fossil fuel interests or the tobacco lobby.  Earlier this year, he rolled back water pollution standards, freeing up industry to dump pollutants into rivers and lakes without fear of prosecution.  Trump's own words about his environmental policies?  He "cares very deeply about the environment" and because of him "we'll have the cleanest air and water in the world."  And you still believe him.

His litany of blatantly fumbling, inarticulate, or outright ignorant comments are far too many to list, because there are new ones just about every time he opens his mouth.  But you still believe he is a "very stable genius."

And now, just two days ago, he pardoned Michael "Junk Bond" Milken and Rod Blagojevich from prison -- Milken from a ten-year sentence for insider trading, Blagojevich in the middle of a fourteen-year sentence for corruption and fraud -- for no reason except that he apparently thought of them as comrades-in-arms.  He said that Blagojevich's sentence in particular was a travesty, and that the ex-governor was railroaded by the "same people" who were responsible for his impeachment -- "Comey, Fitzpatrick, the same group."  This despite the fact that Comey had nothing to do with Blagojevich's trial, and the second man he was apparently referring to -- Patrick Fitzgerald -- was involved with Blagojevich's conviction but had nothing to do with the impeachment.

But you still trust him.

Wiser heads than mine have asked the question "what would it take?", and it keeps coming back to something Trump himself said during the campaign -- that he could shoot a man in full view on 5th Avenue and not lose a single supporter.  This seems to have little to do with conservatism per se: prominent conservative voices like Joe Walsh and Bill Kristol have come out stridently against the graft, corruption, and duplicity that have swamped the Republican Party, but despite their articulate criticisms of Trump and his cronies in Congress -- people like Lindsay Graham, Mitch McConnell, Matt Gaetz, and Jim Jordan -- Trump's support hasn't declined appreciably.

Look, I'm no party ideologue myself.  I tend to sit something left of center, but I have many conservative friends with whom I've had interesting, eye-opening, and productive discussions.  My father was a staunch conservative, to my knowledge voting Republican in every election, and I had great respect for his integrity and his views.  And when Democrats have been caught in criminal and/or immoral activity -- Elliot Spitzer, Anthony Weiner, and Blagojevich himself come to mind -- I, and most of the other Democrats I know, have not hesitated to call them out on it, and been glad for them to receive whatever consequences are appropriate.

So this is more than ideology.  This is a cult of personality.  And... if that doesn't frighten you, or seems an unfair designation... ask yourself why.  If you still support this man, after all of the above (and all the other egregious acts I don't have space to list), why?  What would he have to do, in your opinion, to go over the line?  Do you truly disbelieve everything I've listed, despite the video and audio evidence, and his own words in interviews and on Twitter?  Is it really all "fake news?"  Is a man who cheated on his wife with a porn star, who has currently standing 23 rape and sexual misconduct allegations, and who cannot recall a single Bible verse, really "the most godly, biblical president ever elected?"

If this isn't a cult, what the hell is it?  Go ahead, convince me.

And is this -- a culture of divisiveness, dishonesty, and corruption -- really what you had in mind when you voted for him?

*******************************

This week's book recommendation is a fascinating journey into a topic we've visited often here at Skeptophilia -- the question of how science advances.

In The Second Kind of Impossible, Princeton University physicist Paul Steinhardt describes his thirty-year-long quest to prove the existence of a radically new form of matter, something he terms quasicrystals, materials that are ordered but non-periodic.  Faced for years with scoffing from other scientists, who pronounced the whole concept impossible, Steinhardt persisted, ultimately demonstrating that an aluminum-manganese alloy he and fellow physicists Luca Bindi created had all the characteristics of a quasicrystal -- a discovery that earned them the 2018 Aspen Institute Prize for Collaboration and Scientific Research.

Steinhardt's book, however, doesn't bog down in technical details.  It reads like a detective story -- a scientist's search for evidence to support his explanation for a piece of how the world works.  It's a fascinating tale of persistence, creativity, and ingenuity -- one that ultimately led to a reshaping of our understanding of matter itself.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

A tale of a bizarre cocktail party

Today is Halloween, and in honor of that spookiest day of the year, I'm going to tell you a story.

It's a story about something that happened to me about thirty-five years ago, when I lived in Olympia, Washington, and it's definitely in the top five creepiest things I've ever experienced.  I still don't have a particularly good explanation for it, and it still makes me shudder to remember.

I was about twenty-five at the time, working a stupid desk job I hated, and to lighten the daily drudgery I decided on a lark to take an art class at Evergreen State College.  Now, I'll say up front that I'm not much of an artist.  My attempt in my biology classes to draw an animal on the whiteboard led to its being christened by students as the "All-Purpose Quadruped" because no one could figure out if it was a cow, a dog, an armadillo, or whatever.  But even considering my lack of talent, I thought an art class could be fun, so I went for it.

One of the students in the class was Laura L______.  Laura was between thirty-five and forty, at a guess, and in very short order she kind of attached herself to me.  There was nothing remotely sexual about it; I never got the impression she was coming on to me, or anything.  It was more that she hung on my every word as if I was the smartest, most interesting person she'd ever met.  We discovered a mutual interest in languages -- and it was off to the races.

Now, I hasten to state that at twenty-five, I simply wasn't that interesting.  I was a young, naive guy who had no idea what he wanted to do with his life, and at that point was just kind of flailing around trying to make enough money to pay for rent and groceries.  So as flattering as it was, even then I recognized that there was something weird and over-the-top about Laura's attentions.  Still, it was a sop to my ego, and I didn't do anything to discourage her.

About three weeks into the art course, I wrote a letter to a college friend of mine (remember, this is in the days before email and texting), and along with the usual newsy stuff, I mentioned the art class and "this weird woman named Laura."  "Next time we talk, I have to tell you more about her," I wrote.  Nothing more in detail than that -- a passing couple of sentences that didn't capture how peculiar she was, nor even in what way she was peculiar.

Around that time, Laura asked if my wife and I wanted to come over to her house, that she and her husband were throwing a party for a few friends, and that she'd love it if we came.  I said okay -- again, with a mild feeling of trepidation, but not enough to say "oh, hell no" -- and she seemed really excited that I'd agreed, and was bringing along my wife.

Saturday came, and we showed up at Laura's house.  And... Laura's husband, and the other guests, were all the same kind of way-too-bright-eyed intellectual that she was.  The topics were all over the place -- science, linguistics, art, history, philosophy, you name it.  And just like conversations with Laura, everything I said was met with "that's fascinating!" and "wow, that is so cool!"  Looking at it from the outside, you'd have sworn that I was Stephen Hawking or something.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons David Shankbone creator QS:P170,Q12899557, House party in Denver Colorado, CC BY 3.0]

After about forty-five minutes of this, both my wife and I got freaked out enough that we decided to leave.  We invented some kind of excuse -- I forget exactly what -- and told Laura we had to go.

"Oh, I'm so sorry you can't stay," she said, her forehead creasing with dismay.  "Are you sure?"

I said I was sure, was "so sorry, too," and told her I'd see her next class.  She didn't argue more, but definitely looked disappointed.  My wife and I talked all the way home about how bizarre the evening had been, and how relieved we both were to leave -- even though nothing happened.

Two postscripts are what make this story even creepier.

About three or four days after the party, I got a letter from my college friend.  Best I can recall, the relevant passage went something like this:

I know you'll probably think this is ridiculous, but I felt like I had to say something.  When I read what you said in your letter about your classmate Laura, I got a real premonition of evil.  There was immediately a feeling that she meant you harm.  I know how skeptical you are about this sort of thing, so you'll probably laugh and then throw this letter in the trash, but I felt like I couldn't simply not tell you.

The second thing is that Laura never came back to the art class.

The first time she missed, I just figured she was sick or something (and was actually a little relieved, because I didn't want to get into it with her about why we'd left her party).  But then another class came, and another, and she never showed up.

I never saw her again.

My wife said, "Maybe she realized that she'd missed her chance to get you, and you weren't going to trust her enough to give her another opportunity."

I actually thought, several times, about driving past her house, just to see what I could see (I had no inclination to knock on her door).  But each time, the idea that she might see my car driving past gave me such a chill up my backbone that I didn't do it.  Where she lived wasn't on my way to work or anything, it was quite a bit out of the way, so I never did go back.

To this day, I don't have a good explanation for this.  Were they just weird, over-enthusiastic intellectual types, and it was all just innocent overcompensation for social awkwardness?  Was it a cult?  Were they planning on drugging our drinks or something?  If we'd stayed longer, were they going to drag out a display of Amway products?

I honestly have no idea.  But even though nothing happened -- "strange, extremely happy smart people freak out young couple," is really about the extent of it -- I still can't think of this incident without shuddering.  I've many times considered turning it into a short story or novel, but I have never been able to come up with a convincing ending.

And on that note, I'll end by wishing you a spooky, scary, and fun-filled Halloween.  Just be careful about befriending odd middle-aged women in your art classes.

************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a really cool one: Andrew H. Knoll's Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth.

Knoll starts out with an objection to the fact that most books on prehistoric life focus on the big, flashy, charismatic megafauna popular in children's books -- dinosaurs such as Brachiosaurus, Allosaurus, and Quetzalcoatlus, and impressive mammals like Baluchitherium and Brontops.  As fascinating as those are, Knoll points out that this approach misses a huge part of evolutionary history -- so he set out to chronicle the parts that are often overlooked or relegated to a few quick sentences.  His entire book looks at the Pre-Cambrian Period, which encompasses 7/8 of Earth's history, and ends with the Cambrian Explosion, the event that generated nearly all the animal body plans we currently have, and which is still (very) incompletely understood.

Knoll's book is fun reading, requires no particular scientific background, and will be eye-opening for almost everyone who reads it.  So prepare yourself to dive into a time period that's gone largely ignored since such matters were considered -- the first three billion years.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

A governmental cult

Cult (n.) -- a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object, often involving a misplaced or excessive admiration for a particular person or thing; a relatively small group of people having religious beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange or sinister.

I bring this up so that we can have a working definition right at the outset, because it's a term that has been misused (and in some places overused) to the point that it's lost a lot of its punch.  But two news stories in the past week have brought the word to mind -- apropos of the veneration with which the extreme wing of Trump voters treat the president and his cronies.

Let's start with the less egregious of the two -- an Alabama pastor, Earl Wise, who said in an interview with The Boston Globe that he would vote for accused sexual predator Roy Moore for Senate, even if the allegations against Moore were proven true beyond a shadow of a doubt.

In a tirade that combines "tone-deafness," "misogyny," and "excusing pedophilia" into a truly nauseating confection of venom, Wise said:

I don’t know how much these women are getting paid, but I can only believe they’re getting a healthy sum.  If these stories were true, the women would have come forward years ago...  There ought to be a statute of limitations on this stuff.  How these gals came up with this, I don’t know.  They must have had some sweet dreams somewhere down the line...  Plus, there are some fourteen-year-olds, who, the way they look, could pass for twenty.

So now what a child looks like determines the age of consent?

Make no mistake about it; if we were talking about a Democrat here -- hell, if we were talking about a non-Trump-supporting Republican -- Wise would be recommending crucifixion.  This is a man who thinks that two men in a committed relationship getting married is "an abomination," but a grown man targeting children is "championing conservative religious values."

If you think that's bad, wait till you hear about the other one.  Mark Lee, a Trump voter who participated in a panel discussion on CNN, was talking about how wonderful the president is, how he's "draining the swamp" and "helping the little guy" even though mostly what the president seems to be doing is appointing unqualified cronies to public office, lining his own pockets, and tweeting messages that sound like they came from a petulant and rather stupid fourth grader.  But all of that pales by comparison to a statement Lee made later in the discussion: "If Jesus Christ gets down off the cross and told me Trump is with Russia, I would tell him, 'Hold on a second.  I need to check with the president if it's true.'"

Okay, what?

Isn't the whole idea of traditional, conservative Christianity that Jesus Christ is the ultimate authority?  Because it sure as hell sounds to me like in Mark Lee's mind, Donald Trump has somehow usurped that position.

What I'm most curious about this is what could possibly be the motivation.  Are these people simply siding with the person they think will give them what they want -- pro-life legislation, anti-LGBTQ legislation, conservatives running the courts, religion in school (only the right religion, of course), the Ten Commandments in every government building?  Because that's pretty Machiavellian, but at least I can understand it.  To some extent, most of us make deals with the devil when we vote -- there is seldom anyone who is 100% aligned with our beliefs and interests.

My fear, however, is that this goes way, way beyond pragmatism.  This kind of thing, especially the statement by Mark Lee, smacks of the same kind of single-minded veneration the people of North Korea are supposed to have for Dear Leader.  No, of course the president couldn't be wrong.  About anything.  It's the kind of thinking that inspired this:

Cf. the definition of cult above.

There's a real danger when people start claiming to know the Mind of God.  As Susan B. Anthony put it, "I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires."  It is far more dangerous, however, when people believe that some flesh-and-blood human is the embodiment of the divine -- and infinitely more so when that person has shown himself to be venial, corrupt, greedy, lecherous, and dishonest.

I'm not at all sure what to do about this.  Once you've ceded your will to anyone or anything else, there's not much anyone can do to help you.  I keep hoping that Robert Mueller will step in and put a stop to the miasma of corruption, cronyism, and nepotism our government has become, but I know that these people won't go down without a fight.

And what absolutely terrifies me is that the Earl Wises and Mark Lees of the world will be right there in the front, very likely well-armed, fighting for the man they've turned into a god.