Suspended Disbelief and Religious Tradition
The Freedom to Dream...
Every society, ours not least, is established on religious tradition, and all religious traditions require the suspension of disbelief. To be a practicing Christian requires an acceptance of fantastic narratives like the immaculate conception, feeding five thousand with five loaves and two fish, and the resurrection as divine truth. Likewise, to be a practicing Jew requires acceptance of equally fantastic narratives like the burning bush, the ten plagues, the parting of the Red Sea, and the miracle on Mt. Sinai.
The suspension of disbelief clears the way for faith in something unseen but far greater than our corporeal selves. That’s why the suspension of disbelief has always been the first condition imposed by religious leaders, village elders, artists, and court jesters alike on congregants, tribe members, and audiences for millennia.
Likewise, the suspension of disbelief has been a prominent feature of the political landscape forever, blatantly obvious over the past several years as we were told ad nauseum by government officials that the COVID lab leak was conspiracy theory, that the greatest domestic threat to the nation was white supremacy, that our southern border was secure, and that our president was somehow compos mentis — all despite our lying eyes.
Dreams — like religious tradition — also require the suspension of disbelief. Indeed, the suspension of disbelief is prerequisite to the translation of our dreams into reality, and from reality into all artistic interpretation of reality.
Absent theocratic authority, religious tradition is a liberating call to dream, not the opiate of the masses. The Founding Fathers, the great dreamers of the Enlightenment, understood this long before Karl Marx turned bitter and decided to take it out on the rest of the world. They understood that the real alternative to theocratic rule wasn’t the elimination of religious tradition, but the free, unencumbered, individual expression of it. There’s a reason why the free expression of religion is the first freedom cited in the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights: there can be no freedom of speech, no freedom of the press, no freedom of assembly, and no freedom to petition the government without the free expression of religion first. The Founding Fathers understood that freedom is a spiritual endowment.
A society without core religious tradition, however, is a society that eventually stops dreaming. And a society that forsakes or denies the free expression of religion is a rudderless society that eventually turns nihilistic and authoritarian.
That’s why the Democratic Party can no longer dream about the future and can only focus on the tribal insults and injuries of the past. In the absence of dreams the wholesale introduction and weaponization of DEI across institutional America represents little more than a retrogressive return and celebration of systemic racism writ large as the historical imperative and DNA of the Democratic Party. In the absence of dreams they are compelled to return to their roots as plantation masters and Jim Crow enforcers.
That’s why they have turned so censorious, so intolerant, and so autocratic in recent years. And that’s why they are no longer the party of Martin Luther King Jr. They have chosen to replace religious tradition with transactional narcissism for profit, and now can simply no longer suspend disbelief in religious tradition long enough to share or even imagine his dream. Worse yet, they have turned that same working-class dream of equal opportunity into a dystopian class war against poor and middle class people of all colors and creeds worldwide.
The corresponding irony of ironies, of course, is that the MAGA Republicans, those who still profess fealty to core religious tradition, are now the party of Martin Luther King Jr. and the stewards of his dream. Who could have imagined just one generation ago that MAGA Republicans would emerge in the 21st century as the defenders of free speech and civil liberties? Who could have imagined just one generation ago that MAGA Republicans would emerge in the 21st century as the stewards of dreams? Go figure.
So go forth in faith, however miraculous, and remember this about your own dreams: far stranger things have happened. Believe in yourself and suspend disbelief long enough not only to dream, but to make your dreams a reality. Just remember to smile and give thanks…
It takes a lot more suspension of disbelief to buy the Big Bang than it does the existence of a universal consciousness that created the universe.
Perspective appreciated Jeff, but I gotta press that weight perpendicularly away from my manly CS Lewis chest & the collected accumulation of experiences, insights & syntheses it holds.
Professions of fealty (to the usual suspects & their aspects) are the faulty me once, twice, ad infinitum - because learning isn’t optional, & not learning is even more not optional.
The Word/s, & the performance “art” of it/hose, intoxicate-propel rooked pawns into Bishop’s Rat Pack position set to an all knight Queen soundtrack to/for/by The King (&, of course, all that messaging is approved by the Colonel Tom Parker behind the throne) forever & ever, amen.
(Daniel Amen has the brain scans. Just ask him. He’ll assert.)
But when pathological susceptibility to an intoxicant is so broadly common in a population, it is “democratically” cogdis alchemized into gold; it is rendered natural - which it actually is, was, will forever be - & “therefore” healthy - which it manifestly & prima facie isn’t, & will never be.
Chess … & men without chests … is a sanitized game of murder-suicide.
The stuff of suspension of disbelief dreams, the dream-stuffing, the dream-stuffed, is the raw material that dream-weavers fashion into emperor’s robes straitjackets & papoose-slings.
A fraternity of Weaver-assassins, can you believe it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edpEspHOeVU
I remember Johnny Lang being PR lauded as “The New Stevie Ray Vaughan.” Shameless.
But JL’s overwrought performance of “Lie To Me” is a perfect confession of the obsession to deny & disallow secession: the union preceded the states & Borg-Matrices billionaires/trillionaires techno-fascist sociopaths concede nothing to mere “individuals” en masse who have “Lie To Me” booming on perma-loop off the cranial cathedral-vaults that encase their overwrought pre-recorded brains.
(Wannabe Big Kahunas is where Big Bangs originate…those hope the reverb will reap residual revenue forever & ever, amen. Ya’ll will own nuthin’ but subscriptions & remain happily fully subscribed forever & ever is the new & final amen/dment to the con•stitution - & resistance is futile you damned Whisky Rebels! Saith my name is Alex Ozymandias Hamilton, king of kings, look on my works & despair ye mighty!)
Suspension of disbelief is the featured weevil in the flour, not a bug that needs any encouragement.
And that’s the purpose, the reason for, the motivation behind, tech: manipulation of the meat.
Tech 1.0 was that old time religion. Captured imagination is indistinguishable from magic in the captured imagination.
Subsequent tech iterations served to magic-enchant ~ & murder ~ ever more efficiently.
And so of course the artificial intelligence that conceived murder-suicide into a game of/by/for the big-brained got around to AI chessboards 🎶When the men on the chessboard Get up and tell you where to go🎶
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziP4yd0K89w
Punitiverse punters only want their big bang to be bigger than all the other punitiverse punters big bangs are.
Meet the new self/other-loathing meat, same as the old other/self-loathing meat.
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Cool piece, & not just to the touch, that metal print.