Familiar absurdities

Imagine you're walking down the street, minding your own business, and a stranger walks up to you and points disapprovingly at the belt you're wearing.  "You know belts are against the law, don't you?"  You naturally stare at him in bafflement.  "Yes, they are," he insists.  "You can get a year in jail for wearing a belt."

"I don't believe there's any such law," you scoff.

"That's foolish of you," he insists.  "You're going to end up going to jail for a year.  You've already worn the belt; you've already broken the law.  There's only one way out."

By now you're getting just slightly nervous, so you ask, "And what's that?"

"Well," he explains, "a long time ago another guy got sent to prison for something he didn't do.  And because that was so wrong, the courts decided that from then on, people who commit crimes could get out of going to jail for them -- so long as they believe that this guy went to prison back then."

By now you're figuring this person is totally nuts.  "That's ridiculous.  No sane court would do things that way."

"Oh, there's one other thing," the stranger says, pulling a thick wad of paper out of his pocket.  "That guy who went to prison had a long list of things he didn't like people to do, and you need to promise you'll never do any of them for the rest of your life.  Then you can get out of going to jail for wearing that belt, because he went to prison all those years ago."  He pushes the wad of paper toward you.

You don't take it.  "Look, just go away," you demand.  "I don't believe you can go to jail for wearing a belt, I don't believe you can get out of it just because some other guy years ago was wrongly imprisoned, and I don't see why I should care about all these things that guy didn't like people doing.  None of it makes any sense."

"But," he replies, "it's a year in jail if you don't believe me and do what I say.  Do you really want to take that risk?"

o o o o o

This story is obviously ridiculous, but as I'm sure all readers noticed, it has the same basic "logic" as the central myth of a religion which is dominant in large areas of the world.  We don't see the absurdities of the Christian scheme of salvation because it's familiar and we tend not to analyze it.  We don't see the fundamental immorality of it either, for the same reason.  Not only are most religious taboos stupid (being gay, trimming your beard, working on Sunday, etc. don't harm anyone else and there is thus no legitimate reason to prohibit them), but if you really have done something seriously wrong that you deserve to be punished for, it is neither logical nor moral that you could escape punishment because Jesus was unjustly killed 2,000 years ago.

There are many such absurdities which we don't see as such simply because they are familiar.  If somebody told you that he, by reciting certain words in Dutch over a candy bar, could transform that candy bar into the actual flesh of Captain Kirk from Star Trek, you would figure he was either bullshitting you or suffering from delusions.  Yet it is one of the central dogmas of the world's largest Christian sect that if a child molester recites certain words in Latin over a piece of bread, that bread is "transubstantiated" into the flesh of Jesus.  A talking rabbit luring a girl down a rabbit hole immediately marks Alice in Wonderland as a fantasy tale, but a talking snake tempting a woman to eat a piece of fruit (with even more dire consequences) is a "spiritual belief", supposedly entitled to respect even if one does not share it.

Perhaps this is why, for many people, the road to escape from religion starts with learning about some religion other than their own.  It's easy to see that unfamiliar nonsense is nonsense, and this leads to taking a fresh look at the familiar nonsense.

It also helps explain why so few non-religious people nowadays become religious, compared with the much larger numbers of religious people abandoning religion.  Yes, people who were brought up believing this stuff tend to keep doing so out of inertia, but to start believing in it when you previously didn't?  The mental contortions involved are almost beyond imagining.