EBOLA AND A DISEASE OF THE MIND

Gays are under attack in Liberia.  According to Catholic Archbishop Lewis Zeigler of Monrovia (along with many other many Christian leaders in Liberia), Ebola is a punishment from God for the act of homosexuality.

 

However, John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel, thinks different. In his view, the current Ebola outbreak is God’s punishment for U.S. President Barack Obama attempting to divide Jerusalem. Who would have guessed?

 

However, the “Before its News” website, which appears to produce baloney on an industrial scale, has a more terrifying assessment to share. It tells us that “our culture is becoming morally degraded with each passing year. Additionally, mysterious events are happening throughout the world and many prophecies are being fulfilled right before our eyes: Pandemics rising (Ebola, TB, cancer, aids), … God’s judgment is coming” it announces gleefully.

 

If you thought that was bad enough, then according to Ronnie Baity, (or should that be “Batty”) a Baptist preacher in Winston-Salem, N.C., much worse awaits us all, for God is about to send something even worse than Ebola. This is because he (God that is, not Ronnie) is so angry over the decision of a federal judge to strike down a ban on gay marriage in North Carolina. Why isn’t there Ebola in North Carolina then?

 

All of this is palpable nonsense of course.  Ebola is not a biblical punishment – it is a blood born virus, like HIV. Transmission is by infected body fluids alone and as such, is probably about as easy, or difficult, to catch as HIV. The most important differences between it and HIV are that, instead of years, it manifests itself within days with an incubation period of between 2 and 21 days. Ebola kills up to about 60 to 70 percent of its victims under truly gruesome, horrific circumstances. Hence all the anxiety and fear. However, a person with Ebola is not infectious until they have developed the symptoms. It is not airborne; you can’t contract Ebola from sitting next to someone on a bus or breathing the same air as them or through casual contact. It’s a virus, virulent, deadly, non-discriminatory but also weak. For instance it does not like heat and it can’t survive for long outside its host and is quickly killed by soap and water. The full attentions of our health institutions are now lasering in on it and it’s likely an effective treatment if not even a cure, will be found soon.

 

Yet, in addition to this, Ebola also seems to activate a “disease of the mind”, as the opening quotes above by these religious figures seem to show. Whilst most Christians will find these sentiments as ridiculous and crass as anyone else, this fundamentalist religious style of viewing the world’s misfortunes is still pervasive. The desire to attribute divine intervention to all earthly events, especially those causing suffering and misery speaks not to holy interventions, but to a form of possession of the mind. The notion of God and its much wider philosophical dimensions are cast to one side in favor of a small minded, malevolent and mercilessly brutal Old Testament monster.

 

There is a virus of the mind at work here, a meme, which prevents the mind from exercising any form of balanced rational examination of the facts. The capacity for sensible thought has been taken captive by an extreme philosophy of unreason. Many people are easily able to see though these mad statements - why does God not hate gays in countries where Ebola has not broken out? Why is God punishing Africans in Liberia for America’s attempt to divide Israel, and so on?

 

We see evidence everywhere of these memes that cultivate perverse ways of thinking, from suicide bombers believing that, though mass murder and self-immolation, an eternal reward awaits them, though to the a preoccupation with the great doomsday event, replete with all its terrible judgments and damnations. The outbreak of Ebola induces another outbreak of perverted thinking in those who see God’s handiwork in this horrible sickness. Their only intellectual currency is anger, misery and despair, and either consciously or subconsciously, an almost sadistic yearning for the final human Götterdämmerung, secure in the delusional assumptions of their own immunity from it.

Our Crazy Polarised Politics

Why do we hate politicians or is that a dumb question? Listening to all the vitriol you could be forgiven for thinking that they are some kind of separate species to the rest of us; that they have a different DNA predisposing them to corruption, dishonesty and all those other negative attributes with which we so readily condemn them.

 

Of course there will be really bad ones, but overall, are they really so different to the rest of us – and I’m thinking here of reasonably sensible and established democracies?  If we were in the same positions, would we be any different or better? The answer to that is probably not. Power corrupts, so they say, and if any of us were to be given access to that power, then we may already be starting to delude ourselves if we think we would be different. We look at politicians with their elastic morality. "We are not like that; we would not be corrupted like them, or do or say the things they do", or so we think. And as we do, are we not becoming guilty of dressing ourselves up, like proverbial emperors, in the cheap robes of our own smug, self-delusions. I'll bet most politicians, left, right, up, down or inside out, all thought exactly the same, when their individual idealism and honest intentions were yet to confront the real world.

 

Perhaps some of it is down to how they are now so often career politicians who've never really worked or lived in the real world, remote from the public and obsessed with clinging on to office. It's that ruthless streak of self-preservation and the willingness to do or say what necessary to stay in power. Sounds like an emotion a lot of us share, especially if our jobs or livelihoods are threatened.

 

It's the same with political parties. Just listen to them. Have they all gone mad? And more seriously, have we as we journey down the super highway of angry intolerance, hoarse with shouting and the waving of our verbal fists.  Every side spews forth its own torrent of effluent for this is no longer about a civilised difference of opinions; all reason seems too often to have fled way to be replaced by something that sounds like it's based upon raw fury alone. Just listen to the anger about the outcome of the US mid-terms for instance. Anyone might think there had been some kind of military putsch. It's an election and a mid-term one at that. Put it in perspective - these things are cyclical. People die for the right to vote. It seems some are now on the verge of giving themselves near fatal aneurysms based upon the outcome of one.

 

It's the same in many other places too. The outcome of an election too often heralds a period of rioting, clamp downs and messy compromises. Why are we all so angry and intolerant (wait for the retorts "it's not us, it's them")? Generally, humans are seeing a broad trend towards living longer and have rising standards of living and health care. Poverty and child mortality are on the decline and have been for years. More and more people now benefit from improving levels of education; literacy is rising. Yes, perpetually angry pedants can always point to painful exceptions, however, we seem to be getting more and more angry about less and less. Everybody....just chill out a bit.....after all, they've just legalised marihuana in Washington DC.