During the Fifties I was in parochial school and led a rather normal life. My parents were not fanatical Catholics, indeed, they were barely Catholics at all. I was in a Catholic school out of convenience - my parents worked and I had to stay with my aunt who was catholic and lived near a church that had a school. Ergo ...
The upshot is that the completely mysterious workings of the Church were lost upon me. Not only did I not care but the tiny bit of dogma I was exposed to was more like what I found in pulp science fiction like Fantastic Stories. The science fiction stories were much more interesting than dogma and had the added advantage for a young mind of opening new frontiers with each story. Reading the dogma left me with the lingering question of "And...?"
This was also the time of the McCarthy Hearings - much more relevant and exciting. They had a plot and were always new like science fiction. Plus it had the added benefit of the support of the whole society for all intents and purposes.
Everyone was terrified of Communists. For me they were the monster living in the closet and the hearings were the process of rooting them out of the closet. In addition, they had a certain phenomenal characteristic that divorced them from reality. Really, if they were all just like me and behaved just like me and my parents what was the big deal? If the monster in the closet was merely Uncle Ed in some kind of political drag how bad could they be? None the less the society believed they were an imminent threat - mostly because they were "godless" and threatened the basis of our very society. But for me and, in fact, all of society they were the next major "evil" threat after the Nazis.
As time went on and my knowledge grew it became apparent, even to a fourteen year old that something had gone haywire in the national psyche. My father was a rational man and thought the hearings were political grandstanding. He never felt threatened except by the fact that it was made known that anyone for any reason could be accused and have to defend themselves against the patternicity of - the quite human disposition to see patterns and associations - often where none exist. Today we see this in the belief that earthquake, fire, storms, etc., somehow relate to the people of this country rejecting the "Word of God".
Built into our DNA is the need for fear and caution. The world is full of evil and we need some convenient way to categorize it and assign it to some causality. Religion can sooth us with the promise of pie in the sky by and by but unless it assigns the evil and our fear to some entity it provides us with no options for action. The first corollary of the God's Love theory is the fear of God and the unknown. Prayer to a loving God clearly was unsatisfactory since the first proto-human was stuck by lighting was accompanied by much prayer and ceremony and yet, evil still existed, we were subject to the whims of the unknown and statistically, prayer did not seem to affect any of this. But the human mind for patternicity divided all the good things into God's doing and all the bad things into our doing.
But no human rally believes he is bad and we needed a force, similar to god that was evil. So we invented Satan.
Using our patternicity we gathered unrelated events and assigned them as good or evil. God gets the good stuff and Satan gets the bad stuff. Patternicity is a derivative of our minds ability to recognize patterns and form them into relationships that help us survive. Patternicity is the bastard child of our imagination and our tendency to recognize patterns.
But are we not able to distinguish easily between related patterns that have survival value and imaginative patterns that have no value?
Ah, that is the question, no? the answer is cognitive dissonance; the ability of our minds to hold opposing concepts at the same time. God and Satan is a classic and well known example. The universe was created by an all loving, all knowing supreme being who, incidentally a powerful master of evil over which the supreme being is powerless. The opposition between the all powerful supreme being and the, for all intents and purposes, equally powerful master of evil causes us cognitive dissonance.
So big deal, right? As long as we get along and don’t, for example, feel the need to shout baseball sores at lamp posts or rub peanut butter in our hair who cares. Well, we all should. Our rational mind is the center for resolving conflicts and it spend a lot of time trying to resolve this dissonance among others. When so engaged we find that we are bombarded with empirical evidence that adds to this particular family of dissonance. This has the effect of rendering us incapable of several kinds of rational thought. The catch phrase in our society has become "to much information!" People stop learning because they don't know how to handle the new information in light of the old and false information so they simply dispense with the new or attempts to learn anything more than which welding rod to use with which metal.
The current fight between Darwinian Theory and religion exemplifies the problem very well. If you believe that Darwin had something and proceed to explore the possibilities great strides in knowledge are made not only in the biological sciences but in other empirical sciences.
If on the other hand you believe that the human race arose 6000 years ago from two naked teenagers, a talking snake and a magic apple you need to create another "theory of everything" that ultimately leads to confusion and collapse much as did the Ptolemaic Model of the solar system.
The ability of humans to believe nonsense is unlimited, or as Barnum said "There's a sucker born every minute."
