Firsts and Lasts

In which I discuss The Trump, for the one and only time I care to give that… man, any time. A few trigger warnings for people. I am going to be discussing religion, Santa Claus, lies, Lies and LIES. Also, there are absolutely no joke links in this post. All links are to sources and or further reading so I did not have to spend paragraphs explaining things. If you do not know what I am talking about please check it out.

Santa Claus is the first lie I can attribute to all the people I trusted in this world. Parents, teachers, Uncles, Aunts, and worst of all, grandparents, all told me this lie. It was a grand lie, told to me in order to make me happy. I firmly believe that. It is a lie of majesty and wonder; magical surrealism to bring a smile and a bit of awe to a sometimes terrible and always mundane world. I don’t believe anyone truly tells this lie to control behaviour or influence my thinking.

In point of fact, the Santa lie is the absolute worst lie for behaviour control. Be good and get shiny stuff is the worst reason to do, or not do anything. The lie makes sociopaths, not empathetic humans. If you want to teach a child good behaviour, you teach them empathy and that our actions have consequences. Of course, this lie mostly starts before we fully develop theory of mind which is essential for empathy, but I digress. Santa isn’t really, in my mind anyway, thought or behaviour control. What Santa really is might just be the first stage in our programming to believe authority. If we believe this thing that we cannot see we are rewarded. Once we develop reason and start to fall away from the belief, we are given a glimpse of why those we are supposed to trust lied to us.

Parents never say to their kids, I told you about Santa Claus to make you behave at Christmas time because it is so stressful and busy, I just couldn’t handle the season and your behaviour. We are told the lie was to make us happy and bring us a bit of holiday joy. People we trust lied to us, but it is ok, because it was for our own good.

As we age, we start to branch out, struggling for identity, searching for community. We begin to try and make sense of this great big world and our place in it. This is when we get hit with religion.

Right about now we are going to have some disagreement up in here. I want to say from the outset that I know for a fact that there are people who are going to read this who believe in God. I do not. This is ok because those who know me, should know that I respect them as people and as thinking agents. What I can say of all of the believers I know personally is that they are not lying about God. They truly believe in God. I do not think they are liars at all when they say this. It is possible for me to believe they are honestly mistaken in this one aspect and still respect their belief as sincere, and that their intellect is no better or worse than my own.

I do however think there are a metric crap ton of people who are lying about religion. I have seen enough from major apologists to recognize they are most likely lying. This is what I am going to address here from the mindset of lies.

As we age we are given a more complex set of lies regarding the world. We are introduced to the concepts of Ultimate reward and ultimate punishment from most religions. Act one way and you will have some form of eternal peace, act anouther and get ready to be Dorian Greyed for the rest of existence.

This proposition is given to us with the same level of evidence as Santa. Here’s some books. Here’s some personal experiences that we cannot confirm. Since biblical times, God has been forced to act through others, just like Santa Claus. I am being a bit flippant I know; yet, I have been examining this issue for two years on a daily basis. I have heard from theologians and philosophers, watched atheists and theists debate, read books about Bayesian Probability, been witnessed to, been preached at, been argued with and here I sit, unconvinced. Most of that is beside the point, but illustrates the sheer volume of people and methods that religion and irreligion are disseminated.

I am convinced that there are people who use religion to get what they want. I am convinced there are liars who proudly proclaim the existence of a God they do not believe, in order to influence behaviour.

While there is a small debatable case to be made for religions being created to control people, I am not convinced of this at all. I believe religions evolved because we needed answers to questions we had about the world. We wanted to know how we got here and how we are supposed to live. Humans have instincts and that is all well and good, but how do we make those instincts work for a society, especially when they may come in conflict with how we need to behave to get along in a larger group setting. How to we keep my instinct to procreate from destroying your instinct to not procreate with me? How do we we keep my survival from infringing on yours when I think your salted pork is what I need to survive? This is a long winded way of saying, I believe the God of the gaps is how it all started.

Where did lightening come from? Zeus of course. But wait, we understand it to be a natural phenomenon, not directly controlled by a mind. Insert prime mover. Yay! Someone created everything and this is how  they wanted it to be. Our knowledge has progressed, and we now feel less and less inclined to need that one explained, so we seek answers to philosophical questions. What does it all mean? Why?

Once again we have a story told to us. We can choose to have faith in this story told to us by trusted wise older people or we can reject it. For arguments sake I am going to say that it is a lie to move the discussion forward. We come out of this lie when we are exposed to a broader society. A community that includes multiple religions and philosophies. We become educated in scientific understanding and we begin to see this as the Santa thing all over again. Well meaning people have told us the good news to make a world that is harsh and “designed” to kill us seem more palatable and worth being a part of. These stories are then perpetuated by well meaning people who believe it with sincerity and conviction. One of my best friends is a believer and I have never thought he was dumb or deceiving me. I believe he is honestly portraying his belief and has only been sincerely interested in the well being of others and he came to this belief honestly and through examination, so while I say what he is telling me is a lie in my mind, it isn’t in his.

What I am really getting at here is that we start with a lie (Santa), and then we are given a new story which we are asked to accept without evidence, and occassionally told we are not good people for not buying that story.

With the lie we know we are lying, with the story we are not sure, or we believe we are not lying, either way these are lies for the greater good, sometimes not even lies.

You know who is lying and knows he is lying but doesn’t give a fuck about it? Donald J. Trump.

I know Hitchens’ Razor: What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence is at play here. I lack the patience to find a whole whack ton of clips and articles for you. I will provide you with the following though.

Trump has made an issue of the migrant caravan and stated that it contains unknown middle easterners.

When pressed for evidence he stated “there’s no proof of anything.”

In my estimation, this is a man who is just saying something he wants people to believe without evidence, without facts. He wants you to believe it, so he said it.

Recently, Mr. Trump has been campaigning for the mid term elections in the United States. One of his major talking points has been that he and congress are going to be passing a major tax cut before the election. This is a complete fabrication. He is well aware that congress has adjurned until after the election and so this is utterly impossible. This has been pointed out to hi, but he has failed to change his rhetoric. He did verbal gymnastics to try and refute it, but the truth is, he is out right lying. Not in the way that all politicians shade the truth into their corner. He is literally making shit up and saying it is true.

The president of the United States of America is supposed to be a person we trust. The media are supposed to be people we trust. They are feeding us these lies. You know what the difference is between Trump and Santa Claus? Trump and religion? Trump does not have your interests in mind. He is not benevolent.

We are supposed to desire more from our leaders.

Leaders are supposed to be able to make hard decisions and drive our society forward. Leaders are supposed to assimilate the will of the people into a direction that can work. Leaders are supposed to protect us and nurture our society.

This week, Mr. Trump has tried to blame everyone but himself and his fellow party members for the level of discourse in politics. The truth is, we went from unrealised hope to outright villification and fear mongering.

Isis is hiding in this group of people.

The democrats are going to take away all your everything. It’s an older code sir, but it checks out.

Lock her up.

Anyone who can body slam a reporter is ok in my book.

Fuck this fucking guy and the hair piece he rode in on.

But Dragon you say, you are Canadian, you say. Why do you care? I care for three reasons.

1. The president has been called the leader of the free world. While not strictly true, the sentiment and practicality is true. Trends are set by the person who holds that office. Others take their cues from this role model. He sets the cultural norms for discourse and behaviour. While I am not so foolish as to blaim him for the rash of suspicious packages being mailed to his rivals, I am not willing to give him a free pass either. This is the reaction you get when you begin to slide the rhetoric into hate.
2. We and the Naboo form a symbiant circle. What happens to one effects the other. I live so close to America that I take splash damage from them. My dex save is very low.
3. I am tired of the lies, but more importantly, I am tired of the villification of people who disagree or pose counter points. Mr. Trump has created a no win scenario for anyone who disagrees. He shouted for so long about fake news, he made it impossible for the waters to be clear. In practicing fire-hose propaganda, he has made it difficult to sift through and find the truth. No one has any credibility any more, and so the truth just becomes that which you believe to be true.

If it is true that objective truth has become increasingly difficult to find, where does that leave us? Where do we go from here?

We educate. Knowledge is power, but the ultimate power is critical thinking. I am not talking about cynical thinking where we comepletely disbelieve. I am talking about starting from a default position of any claim needs to be proven, and until it is, it is rejected. That doesn’t mean it is false or a lie, but rather that it is not true until proven true. That mau seem like samantics, but what I am saying is, in critical thinking, we examine a statement, and if proven true, we can incorporate it in to our understanding. If it is not proven, we put it aside until it is. If someone cares enough about the statement, they will try and prove it. In cynical thinking we reject the claim, and that becomes what we incorporate in to our thinking. Say the statement is Aliens! The cynical thinker rejects Aliens and makes decisions based on the fact there are no aliens. They live a life without aliens existing, which is fine if they do not exist,  but boy howdy are they screwed if aliens are real. The critical thinker asks for proof. If there is not sufficient proof, you don’t say there are none, you say maybe, but there is nothing we can do until we know for sure. This leaves open the possibility of searching, the idea there might be more information and we are open to it. The cynic is closed off and so not open to noticing a small sign that the critical thinker might be able to accept and thus be prepared in the future.

The non questioner buys what is being sold without a true examination of the features or warranties. This is not a safe place. The non questioner could accept anything, even if it goes against their self interest. If you don’t question or examine, you are simply going on feeling and instinct. Instinct is what allows the hen to mate with the rooster with the best ploomage. Did I mention the hair piece? Feeling is what has us embrace otherism and fear. The human evolved, not because we are the fastest or strongest. We evolved because we had a well developed sense of fear and the ability to recognize patterns.

We need to question our leaders. We need our leaders to remember they represent us. The likes of Trump and Doug Ford may have the will to govern, but we need to make sure the have the traits necessary to lead. We need to promote media that questions and researches and presents facts over opinions. We need people who are not afraid to present the truth. When one side is wrong, you don’t need to give their idea equal weight or time, you just need to prove they are wrong.

The pattern of lying to ourselves to make ourselves feel better, or to accept unproven things because of the way we feel about them needs to end.

Current leadership has told us everyone but them is lying, while lying. Current leadership needs to go home and take a nap.