Fight The Darkness

My auto-biographical ramblings continue… (Part II is here.)

That moment at my great-aunt and uncle’s home was my awakening. After that, I began to see the absurdity all around me.

One of my best friend’s mom was completely over-the-top. To be fair to her, she had suffered from cancer at a young age and, in her desperation, turned to god. She was one of the lucky ones and had remission. It, of course, had nothing to do with turning to god, as the millions of devout who die from cancer anyway are proof of, but in her mind, the two were inextricably linked. God held sway over their household.

The used to have Chick Tracts around their house, which I used to read with just howls of laughter.

I used to laugh – for a while.

“Look at how stupid these are! What a bunch of crackpots! Aren’t they funny in their ignorance?” They were kind of like the village idiot. You tolerated them because it was funny to watch them fall down in the pig pen and stand up with a big turd in their mouth. I also didn’t really believe that, despite having them in their house, that my friend’s family believed the nonsense in them.

I remember one about radiocarbon dating a head of lettuce (or some other fresh vegetable) which proved conclusively that the lettuce was bazillions (insert whatever ridiculous number you want here) of years old. The conclusion therefore was that radiocarbon dating was obviously wrong and so the Earth was really just 6,000 years old after all, just like the bible says it is.

I must have been about 12 or 13, and I knew that was false. I also knew that they couldn’t have made that mistake by accident or ignorance. To have any notion of what radiocarbon dating was, you couldn’t argue about the validity of results on a fresh vegetable.

And that’s when I had my next revelation. Yes, people like my great-aunt and uncle were ignorant of the facts and blind in their world view, but there was another class of people – the people who put out things like the Chick Tracts – who intentionally distorted the truth to mislead people and to reaffirm that world view.

Those people are unacceptable to me. They are the worst kinds of liars and charlatans. They prey on the helpless and the ignorant to boost their own position. They are worst kind of hypocrites for they certainly must know what they are doing is a lie.

They are the bringers of darkness, but they’re not the only ones.