Redneck Gnosticism

I don’t know what it is, but it cuts across multiple lines. A bizarre reading of the Bible in the 1870s becomes the anchor of “premillenial dispensationalism” and sends a whole denomination off the rails. The ravings of a 21st-century carnival geek become the revealed truth of a disturbingly large population. Dubious email with multicolored text and a whole string of “FW:” in the subject are accepted without question as truer than the sites that debunk them with citations and sources.

What the hell’s going on here? How did we get to a point where the bizarre, the esoteric, the kind of stuff that fifty years ago would have gotten you a nice padded room if you’d spoken it aloud – how did we reach the stage where this kind of nonsense is being held up as, literally, gospel truth?

Before they were crushed by the emerging Catholic church, the Gnostics were a collection of early Christian sects with some interesting ideas on the nature of God and man, largely based around information that was revealed in secret to the select few. Not everyone was privy to their particular revelations, and they made a point of keeping it close to the vest – but nevertheless, the idea remained that there was some sort of hidden wisdom that explained everything. (This is probably a gross oversimplification, but will do for what I’m driving at.)

Flash forward to 2010, where the Southern Baptists (among others) are wedded to an outlandish reading of the Bible in which, if you jump from this bit of Revelations to this bit of Daniel to this segment of Matthew to this bit of 1 Thessalonians, you can come up with something insane enough to get twelve volumes of badly-written “Bible-based” prophecy fiction. By this logic, I could tell stories about getting bombed at my first job with Mark and David and Michael and sell them as “Bible-based stories” because those are all names from the Gospels and Jesus turned water into wine at Cana. And yet, people buy into the notion that somehow this peculiar wisdom went entirely unnoticed for over eighteen centuries.

I’m not going to step too much more on that, because that’s Fred Clark’s beat and he does a bang-up job of it, but I will proceed from there to yet another spam forward (like I said, past a certain age you should have to pass a test before you’re allowed to forward email) which went into great detail about how basically everything we know about cancer treatment and prevention is actually wrong, and instead we should only eat out of glass and take all these supplements and avoid meat, because cancer cells have thick protein walls and if you don’t eat a lot of protein they’ll be weak, and…seriously, I’m losing IQ points just trying to remember this bullshit.

Yes, cancer is bad, and no, we don’t have a cure yet. And it’s understandable that in the face of such an implacable enemy, people will grasp for any straw of hope that might offer a solution. But this – along with all manner of other quack theories about supplements, additives, and what have you – would require you to believe that the medical-industrial complex, perhaps the most lucrative industry in the history of the United States, actually has some sort of miracle cancer treatment – and has made no effort to make money off it. Never has the principle of cui bono cut to the chase more quickly – Big Pharma would no sooner leave money on the table than a Scotch-Irish grad student would refuse a free pint of Guinness.

And this is before even getting into the high-conspiracy weeds that thrive on AM radio and certain television programs operated by drug-addled polygamy apologists. (You think a Vandy fan will ever pass up a cheap shot at the other side? We have a rep to uphold, son.) Long story short, there’s all the proof out there you could ask for that people will quickly and gladly throw reason, logic, verified research and peer-reviewed documentation over the side without hesitation. But why? Maybe they don’t like the answers they get from the scientific method. Maybe they don’t get answers from science at all, and have to have an answer badly enough that a made-up one will do just as well. And in some cases, there’s just cash in it – as Upton Sinclair said, it’s difficult to make a man understand something if his salary depends on him not understanding it.

The Gospels may not have a lot to say on government-run health care or gay marriage, but they are fairly uniform on the topic of earthly riches.

(Of which more later.)

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