More help to avoid and detox from cults

One reason that many young people and adults fall into cults, such as Scientology, is that they lack proper grounding and education in facts of science. People, despite all the “progress” and “education” available in schools are in less possession of facts of life than just about any generation before. When one does not understand the physical, real biological world, one is more prone to imagine occult and spiritual forces as the “explanation” for “phenomenon” and wild speculations about the “real origins of humans” and “aliens.” Here is the analogy. Suppose you lived in a world where you never actually saw a McDonalds or a Burger King, but someone just brought you one whenever you felt like it. If you never read the news, never drove a car, and never cooked a burger for yourself, you could imagine some really crazy stuff about where the burger came from, where your gofer obtained it. You could start imagining that the burger’s shaped like the vehicle that aliens use to bring the burgers to earth as food for highly evolved beings. You’d have no clue that some 17 year old kid who buys his clothes from Goodwill is flipping that burger along route 90. So it is a real problem that many people do not understand how life and the earth actually works, and that they lack understanding of real facts that can be observed, proved, tested and explained. That’s what science is all about.

Despite what many think, the Catholic Church is very enthusiastic about science. The Catholic Church operates its own space observatory, for example, with a telescope to study space. The Catholic Church also believes in evolution and natural selection as biological realities. It’s non-Catholic fundamental evangelical Christians who deny evolution and take the “seven days of creation” of the Bible to mean literally seven human 24 hour days, instead of seven God length days (that could well be millions or billions of what we call years). People keep mentioning Galileo but jeez, get a life. Back then the Church wasn’t the only group that had problems with modern scientific discoveries. Most folk had one foot on old superstition and the other foot in the modern scholarly tradition; the Church was no exception. So the Catholic Church is very cool with dinosaurs, evolution of humans from early mammals, and the earth being four billion years old, more or less. Many Catholics are ardent scientists; I am one of them. They collect rocks, go on nature walks, hope to “save a whale” and ponder the depths of the sea, try to learn about the particles of the universe, follow the space explorations with keen interest and admire ethical breakthroughs in understanding the human genome and advances in medicine.

When you study the history and structure of the earth and the life upon it, both animal and plant, you have a calendar that has recorded four billion years of history that you can see and touch. There is no “imaginary” history or “gosh, I wonder where we came from.” You can see it and physically feel it. In science class you learn how to determine the age of rocks. So you can learn just how scientists are able to determine the age of the earth, and the age of specific rocks found all over the earth. For example, photos were recently published on the Internet of rocks in Greenland that are almost four billion years old that used to be part of the earth’s ocean bottom. You can read a technical article about them on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isua_greenstone_belt. But there were lots of popular and easier to read articles with photos that you can search for that was recently published. So you can see and feel (and walk upon) rocks that were formed not long after the earth was formed. You can see for yourself how it formed, the natural processes such as lava flows. So with fundamental knowledge of geology that is taught (or at least, used to be taught) in any science class, you can observe the development of earth, mountains, valleys, land masses and the ground you walk over every day laid out as a calendar that is easy to read and not controversial. People have been able to date the age of rocks for many decades now. So there is no “magic” in the creation of the body of the earth, except in the awe of nature at work.

Likewise you can observe the ways of the plants and animals on earth. You can observe how they live now in their native habitats, and you can determine how long that species has been on earth by examining their remains that are preserved in fossilized rock. Fossils are not controversial or a fake because anyone on any day can go out and find one for oneself; they are literally everywhere. When I was in high school my best friend’s grandparents had a camp in upstate New York near a waterfall deep in the woods. We could walk to the woods and up to the wall of the waterfall. Any rock that we pulled out of the side of the waterfall was filled with fossils. I brought boxes of them home. They were mostly what is called “horn coral,” which is a type of coral that used to live in the ocean and is shaped like a cow’s horn. This is because that area of New York used to be under the ocean. The most elemental study of fossils have shown humans how the continents were once joined, broke apart, drifted, were covered by ocean, had sea water retreats, and all sorts of natural cycles of geologic activity over hundreds of millions of years. The Grand Canyon is an obvious example of a natural formation created by nothing more mysterious than a river running through rock that gradually is eroded and abraded away.

Everyone has seen dinosaur fossilized skeletons. Growing up in the 1950’s and the 1960’s I remember the heyday of great dinosaur discoveries. No one was running around planting bogus skeletons to find. In fact the discoveries were quite startling and not what fake manufacturers would have expected. For example scientists were surprised by the first finding of dinosaur eggs, and the first finding of the imprint of feathers on dinosaur hides. It was then that people figured out that modern birds evolved from the same roots as dinosaurs. I was there, reading the science magazines and watching the new with fascination as people were figuring this astonishing discover out. I also remember the first discoveries of fossils of animals we know today, such as sharks, turtles, whales and crocodiles, indicating that they were already existing as species hundreds of millions of years ago. Not so long ago scientists in China (who certainly have no theological axe to grind) discovered the fossils of the earliest known flowers. It’s called Archaefructus sinensis and you can find pictures of it on the Internet. The country of Hungary recently uncovered the trunks of cypress trees that are eight million years old. An early mammal has been dated to being 55 million years old. There are so many discoveries of plant and animal fossils and remains and such accuracy in dating that I have trouble keeping up with all the news! But I save pictures and articles of favorites, such as when they find fossils of whales.

And who is not moved by the discovery of the bones of early human ancestors. I grew up in the generation that was fascinated by the Leakey family and other scientists who dedicated their lives to finding the rarest of fossils and piecing together the human history puzzle. It’s a puzzle because the remains obviously deteriorated over time; it’s not a puzzle because something goofy happened from outer space. Any idiot can see how the folds and shapes of the earth formed, how simple single cell life forms came into being in the waters of the earth, and how gradually over hundreds of millions of years sophisticated life came into being as adaptations to the environmental cradle in which they lived. If they could find food, water and shelter they lived and thrived. When environmental changes occurred they either adapted, migrated or died out. There is a myriad of examples that can be studied today. For example, the Brazil nut tree can only grow in Brazil because it is pollinated by a specific moth that only lives there AND the seeds are successfully dispersed only by one specific animal native to Brazil. Life is both fluid and interlocked. Life responds to its environment (much like supply and demand economics!) but it is also adaptable and flexible, for example finding new food sources, or the use of tools.

And if you study animals you can see amazing things. One classic puzzle is how that a flock of thousands of birds can turn direction in unison in a split second. It’s not because Igor from the planet Clorox has implanted billions of transceivers in their brains to tell them when the lord Uga Bugga wants them to turn to the right and fly to coo coo land. It’s because life is marvelous and has enormous variability, talents and complexity that have developed over an incredibly slow and undisturbed process over hundreds of millions of years. As more people study animals and plants and have more sophisticated tools (I remember when the electron microscope was a brand new invented tool, for example plus, obviously, computers) they are able to understand the way and the how that animals (and plants) have marvelous capabilities. Just because they are marvelous and awe inspiring does not mean that it is the result of crazy imaginary aliens with “great powers” (said with ominous and industrial music tones). Life is marvelous, but it is not mysterious. Humans are marvelous, but they are not mysterious. A migraine headache is a really bad headache that we have not yet found the cause of or the cure for, but it’s not mysterious.

If children (and adults) received the information and fact based proper education that they should have, many fewer of them would be vulnerable to crazy and exploitive cults. It’s no coincidence that when people had to get up every day and dig around in the dirt for their daily food that they didn’t have a lot of “issues.” Reality is reality, and when you lose your grip on reality you let other people fill the vacuum with exploitive paranoid bilge. When you let your head be empty of knowledge and facts you let mean and demented people puke into your brain to fill up the empty space instead. The great Catholic saints repeatedly reminded people that they need both “faith and reason.” “Reason” means learning and facts (I mention this because nowadays many think of the word “reason” as only indicating explanation or the “why” of something happening. The traditional definition of reason means using brain power to think and learn the facts of a matter). So even the holy people in the Catholic tradition taught that not only are God (faith) and science (reason) compatible and not at odds with each other, but they are actually both necessary in the total man or woman. People who are all airy fairy and “spiritual” are not correct or complete. Likewise people who are all dry science are not correct or complete (the hunger to find God is natural and inborn in humans). So whether you are an academic or an average person who just wants to have fun, you really need to have a firm and realistic grounding in science and the reality of the world. When you are learned enough to understand how the earth and life came about, even in the most general terms, you are not prone to look for crazy scenarios full of drama, oppression, and dark forces to explain simple things like depression, stress, headaches or angst. Which makes more sense? If someone is depressed might they have a food or vitamin deficiency, a thyroid imbalance, or an insufficient level of vocation, hope or happiness? Or the depressed person needs to give lots of money to someone else and believe that aardvarks from Antares have taken over their minds and they feel naked and hence depressed without their scales? It would be funny if it hasn’t been so very awful for humans, and all at their own doing. Never have people possessed so much resources, factual understanding of the world, mastery over its resources, and yet have fallen away from “faith and reason” for absolutely no reason at all.

Those of you, who have lost your family members to cults, if you have any contact with them, try to stimulate an interest in science and nature. There is a calming and educational advantage to reading books that are about the realities and facts of science and nature. Even picture books of wildlife photographs, landscapes and so forth can have a small but helpful nudge toward reconnecting with the reality that is earth and life on earth. Pet books are not helpful because some cultists have even contaminated people’s perceptions of pets as having a role in their crazy theology of “spirit beings.” Animals are marvelous, insightful and spiritual (read Genesis) but they are not players in the crazy drama of the High Lord Snub Nosed Rat who reigns throughout the mystical spheres of the anal rings of time. I sometimes think the best detox from cults would come from putting a person in a cabin with only the food they can gather for a year. There is nothing like having one’s feet on the ground and not being in a fantasy land to restore awareness and critical thinking. Watching a turtle in a lake, for example, and knowing that turtles have been doing the same darn successful activity for tens of millions of years tends to take the imaginary drama out of pondering the nature of life. Being alone is helpful for people who suffer from smarty pants complex, which many cultists have. Without an audience, control freaks have to get real again about their own life and eventual death. That is real death, and not an imaginary death. People who have to raise their own food and make it day to day tend not to have too many “out of body” experiences.

I hope that this is helpful to those who read this blog posting. Parents, remember that science is an antidote and protective for your children against the bullshit artists. You are not doing your jobs if you let your kids get “street cred” for bullshit, but not “reality cred” for how the earth and life came into being and the reality of physical cause and effect.