Credo quia absurdum: "I believe because it is absurd." This is the common paraphrase of an argument by Tertullian, an early church father. It has been repeated through the centuries in various forms by religious apologists, and exemplifies a thought-terminating cliché: an idea that is ridiculous on its face, but stated in such a boldly counterintuitive and in-your-face manner that arguing against the proposition
is futile.
It may be an exaggeration, but hardly an extreme one, to say that virtually all religions, ideologies, worldviews and self-help philosophies are by definition absurd, containing every kind of unprovable axiom, self-contradictory tenet, illogicality and appeal to blind faith. They only gain a semblance of self-evident truth through age and familiarity, as the legend of John Frum illustrates.
About a century ago on the Pacific island of Vanuatu, a messiah cult centered on a mythical figure named John Frum, who would bring riches and happiness, rooted itself among the local population. It gained strength in World War II, when Allied air forces established landing fields on the island. The air crews brought desirable goods or “cargo,” much of which was exchanged to the islanders for their labor in building the airfields. In 1945, the seemingly heaven-sent outsiders departed, along with their novel goods.
Invasion of the MAGA body snatchers: How many friends have you lost to madness?
After the war, the cargo cult became a tradition, with adherents even building mock airstrips to induce John Frum to return from the skies with cargo. According to one anecdote, an anthropologist questioned a local chief on the implausibility of Frum’s return. He replied that he and his people had been waiting only 50 years; you Christians, on the other hand, had been waiting in vain for thousands.
And why, indeed, is the idea of a miraculous arrival of World War II-era C-47 transport aircraft loaded with military rations, Spam and cartons of Lucky Strike Greens any less believable than virgin births or resurrections from the dead? Or, for that matter, Karl Marx’s utopian communism or Friedrich Hayek’s perfectly self-equilibrating free market?
A belief system that may have the highest proportion of logical inconsistencies, irrational dogma, failed prophecies and broken promises of all major worldviews is one now on the upswing in the Western world. Why it should do so now, in a manner similar to the witch delusions that periodically swept medieval Europe or the Dutch tulip mania, has been much debated. Why it should infect nations that are prosperous, ostensibly well educated, and with civil societies that have supposedly developed beyond tribal superstition is a mystery that has never been explained.
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