Who Rejects God Believes in Fairy Tales

This essay looks good: Knowledge and Freedom (from Exercises in the Elements). There was a time I didn't understand or even see the necessary relationship between these two, but you may be certain: there is no knowledge in the absence of freedom, and vice versa; to affirm one is to imply the other.

That's the good news. The bad news is that you have only to deny one in order to limit or destroy the other.

But the left takes no chances, and undermines both. Which is why few institutions are less intellectually and spiritually free and open than our corrupt and fraudulent educational establishment, which every year cranks out millions of closed-minded clones who are "triggered" -- which is to say, traumatized -- by truth.

Now that I think about it, truth is traumatic, at least much of the time. Yet it is still truth, and it is up to us to adapt to it, rather than vice versa.

I first encountered this principle back in grad school, and it has been with me ever since. Really, it's just a more abstract and formal way of talking about Freud's concept of "resistance," which is present in everyone to a greater or lesser degree. To put it simply, the more we have of it, the crazier we are, since resistance is always resistance to the truth.

To jump back a bit -- more than a bit, actually, to the very Beginning -- why would such a cognitive capacity be woven into the human psyche? Why is it part of our standard equipment? I would say for the same reason we have an immune system to identify foreign invaders and preserve the integrity of the body. Just so, we need to be careful about what we let into the psyche, for reasons of both self-flourishing and self-preservation. In other words, humans cannot survive without accurate information about the world. And yet, too much of the wrong kind of truth can wreck a man.

Regarding the latter, you don't have to read too much history to realize that people believe a lot of things not because they're true but because they're consoling, or convenient, or containing. They can help to structure an otherwise chaotic mind and world.

In this regard, I present you with two diametrically opposed opinions. First, the other day, Democrat mouthpiece Chuck Todd suggested that the millions of us who support the president are predisposed to do so in light of our belief in Christian fairy tales:

“Why do good people support Trump? It's because people have been trained from childhood to believe in fairy tales. This set their minds up to accept things that make them feel good. The more fairy tales and lies he tells the better they feel. Show me a person who believes in Noah's ark, and I will show you a Trump voter.”

“Look, this gets at something that my executive producer likes to say, voters want to be lied to sometimes. They don't always love being told hard truths,” Todd proclaimed.

That's deep. And brave. Now do Islam. And Judaism. We'll wait.

But that's not my point. Of course Todd is a coward, which is why he plays the bully. The deeper point is that he's saying the exact same thing I am -- that people are motivated to believe a comforting lie because truth can be painful. So we both agree on the mechanism, but we disagree on who is using it to distort reality beyond all recognition, Trump supporters or Trump haters such as himself.

Now, denial wouldn't be very effective if it didn't deny denial! In other words, denial always covers its tracks, so the the person engaging in it doesn't know he is doing so. Nevertheless, it's not that easy to eradicate the truth. In fact, it can't be done. So, what happens to it?

Well, it returns in various ways, in the form of persecution. Forgive me if this is all too obvious, but the most common way for truth to haunt the person who denies it is in the form of symptoms. Indeed, virtually every patient I see presents with what are called "symptoms" -- both psychic and somatic -- which are really just "transformations of truth," so to speak.

It's really rather profound: truth is easily transformed into pain, but one of the purposes of the transformation is to prevent the person from connecting the pain to the truth it simultaneously reveals and conceals. This is so common as to be... commonplace. When you see a real doctor, you might say something like: "I'm having this pain. What's really causing it, Doc?" Same thing when you see a so-called doctor such as myself, only it's more like this: "I'm having this pain, Dr. Gagdad. Please don't tell me what's really causing it." Again, that's what Freud calls "resistance," and it is ubiquitous.

Now let's contrast Todd's foolish take to this one by Dennis Prager, which goes to the question of what leftists really believe, and why they believe such crazy things. "How," he asks, "is one to understand what leftism stands for?"

The truth is it is almost impossible. What leftist in history would have ever imagined that to be a leftist, one would have to believe that men give birth or men have periods, or that it is fair to women to have to compete in sports with biological males who identify as females?

There are two primary reasons it is so difficult, if not impossible, to define leftism. One is that it ultimately stands for chaos.

He means this literally, and goes on to provide a partial list of specific policies which I would say are both a cause and consequence of Chaos (yes, such dis-order is demonic, but let's stay on track), including open borders, imaginary genders, meaningless "art" requiring no talent, "Drag Queen Story Hour for 5-year-olds," "rejection of the concept of better or worse civilizations," "the end of all use of fossil fuels," the dismantling of capitalism, etc.

How is it that we who believe in authorized "religious fairy tales" are so much more in touch with reality than the people who explicitly reject them? Prager goes on to explain why, but it is for reasons we've discussed on numerous occasions. The bottom line is that man is religious and cannot not be religious, in the sense that the human qua human is ordered to the Absolute, AKA God. Remove the real Absolute and man will inevitably replace it with an unauthorized false one. This story is told in Genesis 3, and retold in and by every subsequent generation.

How do we avoid being seduced and hypnotized by a fake religion such as leftism, feminism, Marxism, environmentalism, progressivism, et al? Well, when you put it that way, the question answers itself. For example, the other day, Prager published another essay on true Judaism. I suppose Todd, if he is to be intellectually honest and consistent -- an impossibility, but we'll let it pass -- would have to call this "fairy tale thinking." Prager mentions seventeen metaphysical, ontological, existential, theological, epistemological, and ethical principles (or fairy tales, you decide), including,

--"There is one universal God" [or Absolute]. This God is the Creator of the world and the God of all humanity. Given this principle, racism is impossible.

--"One universal God means there is one universal morality." [Morality is not relative.]

--God is incorporeal, eternal, transcendent, personal, and the source of goodness and morality.

--"God's primary demand is that people be good." (Indeed, if people were only good, this would be paradise. We would say the restoration of God's grace is the necessary condition of real goodness, i.e., sanctity, but such theological distinctions would be the subject of a different post.)

--"There is an afterlife -- God rewards the good and punishes the bad." If this weren't the case, then God would be unjust, which would defy logic.

--"Human beings are not born basically good." (There are two kinds of people -- those who believe man is fallen, and idiots.)

--"Therefore, evil comes primarily from within the human being, not from external causes, such as poverty." Interior chaos generates the exterior kind. See Democrat run cities for details.

--"All people are created in the image of God." Somewhat of a no-brainer if you understand what man is, and that he couldn't possibly be what he is if God weren't Who Am.

--"Judaism is a religion of distinctions," which is to say, a cure for the formless chaos of the left, e.g., "God and man, Good and evil, Man and woman, Holy and profane, Life and death," etc.

I suppose if you want to be really stupid, you could oppose such fairy tales to science. In which case,

Man's self-limitation to scientific knowledge in the strict sense can mean that he loses his openness for the unlimited object of knowledge [the Absolute]. In other words, there is a particular form of intellectual un-freedom, the root of which is the exclusive ideal of science (Pieper).

Any form of scientism is a fairy tale. Leftism is a materialistic ideology. Ergo, leftism is a fairy tale.