Lathercadabra!

Earlier this year, I lost a friend. 

I didn't lose him to accident, disease, or even age.  I lost him to cowardice.  It was over a simple matter of soap.

My friend's wife makes soap.  She apparently makes some very high quality soap; it has all natural ingredients, with no harmful chemicals and no harmful byproducts.  It is good for your body and good for the planet and she's no doubt worked very hard to follow strictly "green" guidelines in her manufacturing process.  As I said, it's apparently very good soap. 

It also is infused with Reiki blessings of good fortune.  It says so right on the label.

A photo of my friend's wife's soap was posted online and I asked him about how the Reiki blessings helped exactly.  What, I wondered, was she actually selling.  She seemed to have some very fine soap, as I've said, but it seemed odd to me that she chose to combine her soap with the widely-debunked ideas of vitalism.  It seemed odd to me that such fine soap would need the addition of supernatural voodoo juice as a selling point.  To which he responded: what harm could it do?

Well, I pointed out, as a selling point for me, nothing.  It adds no additional benefit to me, seeing as the idea that waving hands over a batch of bubbling soap can focus the unseen positive powers of the universe into it is, to say the least, not something I'm likely to find appealing.  I did point out, however, that a great many people out there might find the idea of soap with special invisible powers to be a prime selling point.  I asked the question: how is selling this any different than the charlatans of old selling "snake oil" miracle cures? 

This was, apparently, a rather unpersuasive line of questioning (esp. in a forum that his wife could also read).  "So you believe my wife is a charlatan!?" he asked heatedly.  I'm just wondering if there is a difference and if so, could you demonstrate it, I replied.  And then poof!  He was gone.  He'd excommunicated me.  Gone I was from his Facebook friend list.  Banished evermore into the void where his wife's strange religion could no longer be questioned and her soap would retain its untarnished reputation among its undoubtedly loyal vitalist fans.

I found this entire turn of events both amusing and sad at the same time.  My friend, who had on countless occasions, told me of his beliefs in reason, in his skepticism of religions, of his anger toward how manipulative Christianity in particular was, was forced (in his mind anyway) to choose between the beliefs of the woman he loved and of those around him, and when in doubt, chose to run to comfort his wife, rather than to find comfort in his own beliefs and reason. 

 This was rather confusing to me until I remembered a day when we were roommates back in college and he'd fallen in love with a born-again Christian.  In the weeks that followed, he transformed himself into what she wanted him to be: just like her.  The fellow who used to love the whimsical celebration of Halloween so much that we often kept our apartment decorated for the holiday many months before and after the actual event, now found himself unable to enjoy it because of its un-Christian connotations.  The fellow who used to love Metallica was forced by conscience to give away his extensive CD collection of such music and keep his ears clean of such evil.  Eventually, they were married and he and I parted company, he bound for glory and I for whatever awaited sinners such as myself. 

In the years that followed, we lost contact, but through the "magic" of Facebook were reconnected a couple of years ago.  I learned that things had not worked out for him and his Christian bride and that he'd learned that he'd felt he'd made a big mistake by allowing his personal attachments to define his morality and guide his reason.  He said he was now in a relationship with a level-headed woman and had eschewed the supernatural for a more relaxed life, where his reason and intellect could roam free.  He made a few references to how he now identified more with Eastern religions, which I interpreted to mean the ideas of enlightenment, Buddhism, etc. 

And then came the soap.

And then came the realization that my friend's morality simply isn't built on reason.  Like so many of his kind, his reason is built on the sandy foundation of personal comfort.  Suddenly, his references to Eastern religions made sense.  His wife believes in Reiki, therefore he must.  His beliefs cannot stand alone and he is attracted to those who need him to conform to their beliefs.

What it really comes down to is this: some people need love so bad that they will simply abdicate their own personal beliefs and replace them with whatever those who will give them love believe, no matter how weak or unstable the foundations of these beliefs may be.  When he decided he didn't want to be my friend any more because I'd questioned the magical properties of his wife's soap, the conflict within him was simply too much to bear.  The weakness of his position was exposed and he once again chose the path of least resistance: silence the voice of reason by cutting off all ties with it...just as he had done earlier when he embraced Christianity. 

I wish my friend well.  I hope that he finds happiness.  I'm sorry to see that he doesn't have enough courage to stand for what he believes in, what reason calculates as right, and instead chooses to believe in what will make him happy.  My wife and I don't see eye-to-eye on everything, but we don't have to.  We're both complete people who believe that one plus one equals two and so we don't need to believe in what the other believes in, or see things the same way in order to be happy together. 

My hope for my friend is that he might figure out that equation for himself someday.

The Question WBC is Never Asked

The Westboro Baptist Church has an interesting view of the Bible.  As I've written before, the WBC has a pretty interesting interpretation of the scriptures.  After reading the scriptures thoroughly, Fred Phelps (in his own sociopathic way) has arrived on an interpretation that actually seems to hold up under scrutiny for those in his church:

God Hates The World. 

If you really read the Bible, it's not hard to imagine why they think this.  I mean, it pretty much is painted all over the Old Testament about how wrathful God is, how he "hates" various people, etc.  I've heard Fred's daughter say that God is the most intolerant person ever.  Not that I would endorse their teachings, but if you want to understand WBC's position, they make a pretty good case for it on their website.

One presumes that in the WBC, they are thoroughly indoctrinated into this belief system.  They sing songs about it to with their children.  They live life every day with the notion that God literally is trying to punish everyone on the planet but them...because He literally hates them. 

Faced with this premise; however, they make what I consider an astounding leap of morality: that because God created the Earth and all its people, that whatever he does with it is totally morally justified.  Their logic basically is; because God is too big for us to stand against, we must accept his morality and do his bidding or face his wrath.  Put simply: might makes right.

Since Thrasymachus and Socrates, we've had some insight into this idea of justice and morality and throughout time we've seen just how immoral the strong can be to the weak.   I don't believe that we should base our morality, our ideas of good and evil, on whether or not some bully will harm us if we say the wrong thing.  Morality is derived from reason, not from some threat of physical (or spiritual) harm.  The logical flaws should be self-evident here.  If I told someone to believe that the sky was purple or I would harm them, and they believed in my abilities to harm them earnestly enough, I could probably convince them eventually to actually believe that the sky was purple, but the problem is that the sky would still be blue!  Their acquiescence to my demands notwithstanding, physics just won't budge on this one.  You can't bully morality any more than you can physics. 

How then, does WBC never get asked this simple question: If you really believe that your god will punish you for believing in treating people with kindness, with decency, with tolerance and love, why do you follow him? 

Maybe it's because the answer is self-evident: it's because they are cowards. It's because they are afraid to stand up for what's truly moral from fear that they will be punished by the lunatic invisible fiend that Fred Phelps has shackled them with. 

Cowards, every one.