Being in the midst of the holiday season, I'm seeing a lot of people posting about various traditions and rituals and celebrations. But inevitably, this means that there are also people denigrating other people's traditions. Like the person I saw on social media going on an extended rant about Kwanzaa, the main gist of which was "it's completely made up."
I threw gasoline on the fire by commenting, "Boy, do I have bad news for you about every single other holiday."
Feeling like your own beliefs are the right and true and reasonable ones, and those of the other eight-billion-odd people in the world aren't, raises arrogance to the level of performance art, but a lot of people don't seem to see it that way. Apropos of others' beliefs, I tend to fall back on the tried-and-true rule of "don't be a dick." Because, after all, 99% of what people believe has absolutely zero effect on me personally, nor, for that matter, on anyone I care about. You want to pray to a deity on Saturday? Fine by me. You choose not to eat meat on Fridays? Okay. You think there are dozens of different gods, and not just one? Cool. Or no god at all? Equally fine.
As long as you're not demanding that other people believe the same way, trying to force them to live by your rules, or (worse) running around killing people who don't, I've got no quarrel with you.
It does create a problem for the anthropologists, however, who are trying their hardest to understand it all. Belief is an extremely powerful motivator to behavior, and in my egalitarian, "An it harm none, do what thou wilt" approach, it's hard to see what actually constitutes a belief system. How do you categorize something when there are eight billion different versions?
The problem comes into even sharper focus when you try to pin down whether something is even a belief or not. There's a whole Wikipedia page dedicated to pseudomythology, which are myths that aren't real (differentiating them, apparently, from the myths that are real). For example, this became a significant problem when anthropologists tried to study the beliefs of pre-Christians in the Slavic and Baltic regions, because prior to Christianity most of those folks had no written tradition. Jan Łasicki, a Polish historian and theologian who in 1615 published a book with the rather self-righteous title Concerning the Gods of Samagitians and Other Sarmatians and False Christians, gave the names of seventy-eight gods supposedly worshipped in what is now Lithuania. The consensus is now that Łasicki wrote down pretty much whatever anyone told him without question, meaning that it included deities who were the informants' personal invisible friends, and undoubtedly a few that were the result of of "There's this wingnut named Łasicki asking around, make sure to tell him the tallest tale you can think of -- he'll believe anything." Worse, some seem to have been made up by Łasicki himself, to pad his numbers.
But the same sort of thing is still happening today. In 2013, a poll found that the seventh-largest claimed religion in England is "Jediism." Yes, Jedi, as in Star Wars. In 2016, a guy who makes magic wands made the news because he wouldn't sell them to Harry Potter fans, because he says his wands really can cast magic spells, and he didn't want to cheapen his own reputation. There's apparently a sizable crowd who think that The Lord of the Rings is actual history, and The Silmarillion is basically their answer to the Bible. Don't even get me started about people like Carlos Castaneda, who fabricated an entire religion that he (falsely) claimed represented Indigenous beliefs from Mexico, and now -- almost thirty years after his death -- there are still people who teach his books as if they were real religious texts, and believe his "non-ordinary reality" is actually true. I would be remiss in not including Scientology on the list. Strangest of all, there are people who think that H. P. Lovecraft's books should be shelved on the non-fiction aisle, and are one hundred percent certain that Cthulhu and Tsathoggua and Yog-Sothoth and the rest of the gang are actually out there bubbling in the loathsome slime of eldritch primordial chaos, waiting for the humans to chant magic words with lots of apostrophes and zero vowels, which will let them back in.
Me, I find this last one a little hard to fathom. I mean, at least the others I mentioned aren't actively trying to destroy the entire universe. But having read a lot of what Lovecraft wrote, mostly what I remember is that even the people who were on the side of Azathoth et al. always ended up getting their limbs pulled off and their eyeballs melted. I find it difficult to understand why people like Wilbur Whateley were always so eager to bring back the Elder Gods. Me, I'd do everything I could to keep them out there in the nethermost wastes of infinite cosmic darkness where they belong.
If I actually believed in them, which brings us back to my original point. What does it take for something to be looked upon as an "actual belief system," whatever that means? Consider, for example, "Neo-Druidism," which took off in England, Scotland, and Wales in the eighteenth century. People took it totally seriously (and some still do), dressing up in robes and taking part in magic rituals and whatnot, because they claimed they were resurrecting the beliefs of the ancient Celts even though we honestly have almost no idea what the ancient Celts actually believed. Evidently even Paul Bunyan was never actually a "folk hero" that people in the upper Midwest told stories about; he was the invention of a guy named William Laughead, who wrote stories and claimed they were retellings of folklore, and bunches of people believed it. This phenomenon is so common the anthropologists have even come up with a name for it.
They call it "fakelore."
So where do you draw the line? Or do we even need to? A lot of this seems to be driven by our desperate need to categorize things, the same as our artificial (and awkward) definition of the word species in science reflects not an actual reality about the biological world but an interesting facet of our own psychology.
I don't know if I have an answer to any of this. Most of the time I tend not to worry about it. Like I said before, my general approach is that you can believe in whatever you want. As far as I'm concerned, you can believe that the universe is under the control of a Giant Green Bunny From The Andromeda Galaxy if you like. As long as you don't run around swinging machetes at non-Bunnyists, or demanding that Intelligent Design Bunnyology be taught in public schools, then knock yourself out.
I guess the bottom line here is really tolerance. It's a hard old world, full of strife and difficulty and grief, and we should be doing whatever we can not to make it harder. If you've landed on a model for Life, the Universe, and Everything that brings you peace and comfort, that is awesome. I've often wished I could find one. So much of what I see of human behavior just strikes me as baffling. I've felt, pretty much all my life -- to borrow Oliver Sacks's pithy phrase -- "like an anthropologist on Mars." I'm still searching for something to make sense of it all.
In any case, I hope you're enjoying the holiday season, whatever form that takes for you. As long as it doesn't involve waking Cthulhu up. I may be tolerant, but I draw the line there.
