Tunnels

I know I promised to shed off the heavy political commentary last week. I’m following through on that with this week’s post but it does mention Hillary Clinton but it’s not a political post.

Again, I point out that I teach a conspiracy theory and skepticism course. Over the weekend, I’m sure that you may have noticed a gunman was arrested (not shot, he was apparently the right religion) in a DC area pizza place. Normally this would probably have made the news and then have quickly been forgotten. However the accused gunman, had an interesting motive: he was searching for secret tunnels wherein Hillary Clinton and John Podesta were allegedly keeping a stock of child sex slaves that they would abuse, rent out, and then ritually murder. This was seriously the motivation.

Now this kind of accusation is as baseless as it is familiar to me. I remember this from the “news” in the 80s and 90s in what we now refer to as “the Satanic Panic.” The allegations were made against daycares most famously and resulted in long trials (the LA McMartin trial was the longest and most expensive in California’s and the US’s history) that resulted in some convictions based on discredited science, spurious evidence, and “experts” whose information was informed from what their particular brand of paranoid Christianity told them.

The reports of this latest addition to the controversy neglect linking this completely made up and fictional accusation to Satanism, but all of the ingredients are there. Child sex abuse, an expansive ring, powerful politicians, symbolism, and most of all tunnels. It’s always tunnels.

The skeptic in me immediately rolls his eyes at this. It’s such an old accusation. Christians were accused of doing this during the Roman Empire. When they took over they accused the Jews of needing Christian baby blood for their unleavened bread (for what? Who the hell knows maybe blood is a good bread softener or something). The witch panic of Europe brought this out again, and then in the 80s it was the Satanists. The worldwide totally secret underground Satanic child murderer rapists that no one could ever establish existed. The only testimony came from people under hypnosis and from evangelical Christians who were “saved” from the life of Satanic ritual abuse. The main book on the subject “Michelle Remembers” formed the template by which all other ritual murder accusations would follow and that book is discounted as a work of fiction.

The symbolism in this case is not just lazy, it’s lazy for a conspiracy theory. It’s one thing to claim that the Free Masons control the government because the Eye of Providence is on the one dollar bill and not know that the Eye is an Illuminati symbol. It’s wholly another to just claim that spiral shapes which are obvious images of pizza are a call out to other pedophiles. I’ve looked through pages and pages of these “clues” and find them to be only interesting for the fact that I’m going to be covering them next semester. According to a document purported to have been found in the FBI database by WikiLeaks, there are symbols that pedophiles use to identify one another. Here’s the problem with this document, the first is that it only appears on WikiLeaks and sources referencing it. Secondly, the bottom half of the document shows jewelry with the same triangular spiral on it, but it looks like it is lifted directly from an Etsy page. Thirdly, this symbol does not even appear on Comet Pizza’s shop. It’s from a nearby pizza place. Never let the facts get in the way of a story though, as people began to think that this was proof the conspiracy was real.

Then there’s the tunnels. Again, it’s always secret tunnels where the abuse takes place. The tunnels make sense in one way because the abuse has to take place somewhere and it’s not like they can do it on the restaurant floor. On the other hand, it’s ridiculous because a tunnel is hard to hide. Sure, if you are standing on the street you can’t see the tunnel, but it has to exist somewhere. A tunnel is, by definition, through something. It’s the material that it’s in that can’t be moved. The McMartin trial was a pretty clear case of this, people swore that the tunnels existed underneath the daycare center. No investigation of the facility ever found them, sonar surveys couldn’t locate them, and even partial excavation of the ground couldn’t find them. Just as our gunman on Sunday could neither locate the secret rooms he could not locate the secret tunnels. Is this just a fear of the underground? Or is it merely that evil stuff has to take place underground because of superstition reasons? Honestly, I don’t know.

However this entire affair points not only to people’s apparent need to believe the worst in those they hate but also that it feeds into the story that a certain branch of Christianity needs to be true: that of secret Satanism which seeks to oppress and murder Christians. I don’t go through my day secretly hoping to fight against a worldwide and perfectly concealed conspiracy. Especially not one that I think targets my children. However this is rational thinking which has no place here. Instead of reacting emotionally to a story we ought to be subjecting those initial impulses to the strictest of objective scrutiny. While I doubt that I would ever find a believer who would admit to “wanting” this story to be true, I would no doubt find them agreeing that it “must be true” because it fits into this worldview that they want to be a part of. Reasoned arguments aren’t going to convince them otherwise, if it did, these beliefs wouldn’t exist in the first place.

 

An Atheist’s Perspective: An Unholy Alliance

The town of Greece NY, a few miles from my home, recently won a Supreme Court decision that would allow them to continue to open their town meetings with religious prayer provided that the prayer is not exclusionary (e.g. no praying for the souls of X because they aren’t in religion Y). While I emphatically disagree with the majority opinion, especially basing it on an appeal to tradition; I think the consequences of that decision are more than what the town and/or the religious people that consider this a victory are going to be willing to accept. One of my problems with the decision centers around the idea that “freedom of religion” also means “freedom from religion.” The state is not allowed to make you adhere to any particular religion, nor is it allowed to make you adhere to any religion at all. The Constitution, in article Six expressly forbids the use of a religion as a requirement of any public office or trust in the United States; not to mention the first Amendment’s prohibition on the respecting of a particular religion by Congress in particular which has then been extended by the 14th to government in general.

The Greece case was brought about because two women (one Jewish and one atheist) felt that the opening prayer was exclusionary. I for one find it more troubling the Greece town board thinks that only a god being can solve their issues, but as I don’t live in Greece I don’t know how bad it is there (it’s not that bad), rather than trust in their own abilities at governance. In general this country is populated by Christians. The last poll puts Christianity at around 75% dominance with all other beliefs and non-belief filling out the remaining 25%. So if a Catholic has to sit through a minister’s prayer, it might be strange but it won’t be foreign, and vice versa. If you aren’t a Christian, then the appeals to Jesus can be quite off putting a feeling that most people in the US won’t understand unless they attend a Jewish wedding or similar situation.

Aside from the Greece ruling, there have been other lawsuits regarding religious symbols–all of them Christian, in public squares and every time the ruling by the respective courts is roughly the same: all or nothing. It’s why you can’t teach Creation in schools: it’s a myth favoring one particular religion. And while I would rather have the “nothing” be the result I understand the “all.” Since the backbone of this country protects the citizen from religious favoritism by the government we end up with all religions being equal in the eyes of the law.

We must remember that the point of the establishment clause was not to protect Christians from the oppression of Islam, Atheism, or Judaism. Rather the genesis of the establishment clause was to protect Christians from Christians. Thomas Jefferson’s “Wall of separation” in his letter to the Danbury Baptists was addressing a concern that the Baptists would have their right of free exercise stripped by the majority religion of Connecticut at the time. It’s worth repeating that the term “Christian” refers to not one belief system but to many. It is a recent phenomenon to lump all of them together as one religion, but in the time of the revolution until some point in the 20th (I’m working to identify it) century it would be very strange if we considered a Mormon, Catholic, and a Baptist to all be members of the same religion. Sure they all believe in a Jesus figure, but Mormon rites differ from Catholic and Baptist rites so distinctly that it seems wrong to say they are members of the same thing. It’s one reason that Presidential candidates John Kennedy and Mitt Romney had to specifically address their religious differences.

Why does any of this bear mentioning? Because most people think that the minor differences among Christian sects, as well as Jewish and Islam, are going to be satisfied with statues such as the ten commandments or that appeals to the god of Abraham can’t be too offensive since these majority religions all pray to the same being. A Christian paying for and placing a statue of the ten commandments ought to be just fine, it’s part of their religion (minus the graven image part). Yet we’ve seen in Florida as a response to the manger scene at the state capital, a festivus pole erected. Now, in Oklahoma in response to a Ten Commandment statue we see a submission from the Church of Satan a Baphomet statue in honor, their words, “Our monument celebrates an unwavering respect for the Constitutional values of religious freedom and free expression.”

Their point is that if one religion gets a statue, then they get one as well. I for one, get their point, and like the decision of the Supreme Court in the case against the Westboro Baptist church’s right to protest a funeral, this is one of those tests of free speech. The Oklahoma government rushed a ban on statue submissions but it doesn’t matter as their submission made it in before hand, one of the troubles with hindsight laws. Attempting to ban their goat headed chair statue is essentially saying that state of Oklahoma respects one religion and not another–a move forbidden by the law.

What concerns me though, is the support of the church of Satan by other atheists. The position that I assumed I would hear the most was that it was another statue celebrating another religion going up in the public square, and then a bunch of diatribes against superstition. Part of what I expected came from my own ignorance. My experience of what Satanism is, comes primarily from my experience in watching television shows in the 80s and the moral panic that ensued as the now discredited and falsified stories of ritual abuse by Satanists. I expected this to be another religion, albeit a heretical Christian one (given that stereotypically the believe in Jesus, God, the Bible etc. they just worship the other side of it). Modern Satanism, at least the group proposing the statue, is more like Buddhism with regard to gods, i.e. they don’t believe in any substantive deities. We must also realize that the so-called “black mass” of the Satanists can be attributed to a Christian fear mongering in the book “malleus maleficarum” or “hammer of the witches,” which described it as the behavior of witches, Satanists, and humanists. It has more akin to the blood libel against the Jews as a slander rather than an actual reported event.

All that aside the problem is one of image. Those in support of the statue were more likely to support it because it represented a troll against Christians, a way to stick it to them. This should not be representative of atheism since it represents anti-Christianism being so specific in tone. It’s the exact brush that the extreme right wing likes to paint atheists with anyway and now a whole bunch of assholes just gave them a new can. It would be like supporting a Muslim image going up because that sticks it to the Republican state representative who helped get the commandment statue–and it misses the point just the same. The reason to support the Baphomet statue is one of free speech and free religion, not anti-Christianism or any kind of hate. This action may do more to shut down the erection of statues than the court cases because it is a direct test of those who say they support religious liberty, and now we will see if they are hypocrites or not.

PS. It should be noted that no new statues are going up in OK due to an official suspension by the OK government due to a lawsuit by the ACLU to remove the Commandment statue.