Media and Myth

Today’s media are bursting with the latest developments in politics, economics, culture, technology, and science, but in one area they remain stagnated in the Middle Ages. No matter how hard you look, you will rarely find a word in any newspaper, magazine, television, or internet source contesting the widely prevailing and erroneous belief that somehow, out there, there exists an invisible, all-powerful being called “God.” Nobody, from the President on down, dares challenge the taboo against seriously discussing this widespread myth. Even the most sophisticated media outlets dare not expose the fact that the emperor, called “religion,” has no clothes.

I am a retired attorney who practiced in New York and Connecticut for 37 years. My entire life was devoted to the consideration of rational evidence. Every court in America adheres to the proposition that the assertion of any claim requires evidence. There is no place in the legal world where you can claim that someone exists who is invisible. You cannot go before any jury and claim that it ought to accept your argument on faith. You have to come up with the cold, hard, empirical facts or you and your client will be tossed out of court on your collective duffs.

For some reason, when it comes to discussing God, this is not the case in the media and popular culture. It is not only de rigueur today to fully accept the claim that there is an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good and loving being who tools around in the sky and controls our lives, but it is a violent sin against political correctness and good manners to suggest that this absurd belief is without any foundation.

Every city, town, and village in this land is peppered with churches. A thousand meetings a day are commenced with invocation of a remote deity. Every funeral serves up the comforting pabulum that the deceased is not really dead but has gone to a “better place” (Paris?). We are incessantly assured that despite the conflicting raw evidence of the Holocaust, earthquakes in Haiti, tsunamis in Asia, deadly diseases, the slaughter of 9/11, and the terrible suffering of children everywhere, “God loves us.” We are perpetually advised to pray to this aloof and detached spirit despite the fact that in thousands of years there has never been a scintilla of solid evidence that the divinity has ever answered a single prayer.

Much of organized religion today surrounds itself with medieval rites and trappings calculated to inspire awe and mystery. Many less ostentatious groups, such as Protestants, practice ancient rites of healing, speaking in tongues, and the singing of sacred hymns. Connected to all of this there is a considerable amount of baloney and angling for money. The faithful seem numb to the fraud and deceit inherent in these activities.

Why are the media unable to confront this subject with rational discourse? Why do they shun it like the Swine Flu? Is it because they are afraid of losing customers and advertisers? Is it because they are afraid of offending the hierarchy of the various organized sects and denominations? Do they fear retaliation from conservative politicians? Are they afraid of the millions of ordinary citizens who have invested so much emotional capital in these fairy tales?

Perhaps it would not be a good thing to open up these sources of comfort and consolation to critical examination. Perhaps people should be left alone with their delusions about God, saints, angels, devils, and a moral law based on the word of the Almighty. But I ask, is it moral and proper to go on promulgating a false myth just because it is widely accepted?

The mathematician, William K. Clifford, put it well when he said: “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” To Clifford, the life of the man who suppresses doubts and avoids inquiry about questions which might disturb belief is “one long sin against mankind.”