Tales From Fantasy Bazaar

I just finished watching Baby Bible Bashers, a Channel 4 documentary about evangelical Christian preachers - who are children.

That was some fucked up shit.

To elaborate: It followed the story of three young missionaries aged between 7 and 12 years, as they spread the word of Jesus in their communities, or took their show on the road (so to speak).

Wait a minute, just writing a synopsis doesn’t convey the horror I felt while watching this. Watch it yourself.

Holy fucking god, let me think about this. I’m in shock. It makes me irretrievably depressed when I think about things like this. I get utterly confused and worried.

OK, Let me explain a few things first.

I enjoy debates and discussions as much as anybody, probably more, but when they are over and I’m running though the arguments in my mind, I find myself going off on tangents that, were I conversing with another person and not my own mind, would be terribly difficult to explain. This though process is hard to summarise for text, so bear with me. Basically, I start to run hypotheticals in my mind with myself, in order to explore other issues when I don’t have someone to talk to. (In fact I do this anyway because it’s a lot easier than having a proper discussion, I’ll get to that later.) The point I’m making is that when you explore issues in your mind, presenting yourself with obstacles to be overcome in order to test the strengths and weaknesses of a particular line of thought, you never have to explain your point articulately to the other side.

Please, bear with me.

Imagine a discussion to be like a game of table tennis. One player serves, and presents a perspective on the issue being discussed. The other players returns the serve, presenting their agreements and disagreements with the other players perspective. The ball passes between them as they share ideas and create hypotheses, eventually coming to a conclusion on the issue (or perhaps not, it is not always necessary or desirable to neatly wrap up a discussion as I’m sure you know). That’s a discussion. This analogy is not perfect. In a discussion the two (or more) sides, are not in competition, if they are then that’s a debate. Imagine it more like a game of catch then.

Now imagine playing this “discussion game” with yourself. That’s the point I’m getting at. It makes the whole thing a lot simpler by removing unnecessary explanation.

Fuck, this post is getting long I haven’t even started on the topic yet.

Whenever we think about an issue we make certain assumptions to support our views. And the same when we are arguing, fighting, debating, whatever.The truth is that the assumptions we, in fact everyone involved, makes are not there to support the opposing points of view but the argument itself. For example, the Baby Bible Bashers and their parents/guardians/morbidly obese grandparents/whatever in the documentary assume that anyone who does not accept their words is a sinner and will burn in hell, just as those who argue with them assume that the BBBs etc are blinkered, fundamentalist, intolerant, hypocritical xenophobes without two brain cells to rub together.

But I, in my lonely hours of complex inward contemplation, have found, if not a solution, then at least another level of complication that projects the debates we see everywhere (I mean everywhere, on every street corner, in every house, in every political race, in every current affairs discussion on every newsreel in every country in the world) to level of futility that makes my mind reel with sheer sadness and abject terror at the human condition.

Stop me if I’m going too fast.

Wait, you can’t.

Anyway my point is this: it’s all relative.

Through this method of essentially “talking to myself” I have reached a conclusion (a personal one, on no account am I trying to convince you of its legitimacy) on exactly why it is that people disagree with each other to such an extent that some views are considered “radical”. I have decided that it is completely impossible to actually attempt to understand life, the universe and everything from another person’s point of view, try as we might, because in actually shifting our perspective to that extent would be enough to drive us totally insane (I realise I’m using the collective here, just imagine I’m not). In other words: each of our personal worlds is based entirely on empirical evidence, and as such it is impossible to perceive a world based on evidence from any other source, or even to confirm that such a world exists.

To quote/paraphrase a character from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams: “My universe is my eyes and ears, everything else is hearsay.”

You with me?

As a result of this conclusion I have decided not to attempt to understand the reasoning behind the Baby Bible Bashers’ actions, and just to accept that there are some things I will never understand.

—————

Wow. When I started this post I didn’t expect it to go on like this. It says something about what happens when you write stuff down that I hadn’t had half of these ideas when I sat down to type.

That’s enough philosophy for today.

That is all.