Yes - Chapter Seven
Religion
Even more obvious than the econoplastic feedback that drives the pop charts, currency markets, football results and celebrity lists is the section of the conspiracy we call religion.
Even stinking idiotic dumbasses like you will admit that there is such as thing as a false religion in this world. That the Greek gods were even less real than the Spice Girls, that Venus was nothing more than a metaphor, a parable. That billions of people the world over have been believing a lie, dedicating their whole lives to worship of false gods, wasting their time on conspiracy insanity.
But, of course, your religion is right! You’re actually sitting there thinking that there’s a god! Or, that there isn’t one. You really think your conception of the way the universe works is better than the ancients. When it’s just as absurdly inaccurate and half-witted as the idea that “Zeus” or “Bob” or “Science” rule the world.
You can study, if you’re bored enough, the history of religions. How one morphed and merged with the next, the whole exotic memology and family tree of monotheism, philosophy, the entire arbitrary survival-of-the-poppist evolution of yer modern religious ideology.
Yet still your loony, laughable, ludicrous, hand-me-down ideas are somehow more valuable than those ancient, old, broken religions.
Oh yes, you look strangely at people who say that the conspiracy is a real, tangible, measurable thing, that you’re an unwitting dupe of a gigantic global CON. Then you smile and nod in agreement when some dude in a dress says he’s god’s messenger on earth and you do as he says for fear his irrational voices-in-the-head invisible sky god will zap you in the afterlife.
The afterlife! Some tripped-out caveman thinks he can see a world beyond his pathetic CroMagnon ken, he tells his hairy Paleolithic friend about it and a million years later you’re cowering in fear. Fear that you’ll get the mushroom-driven fiery-hell-visions rather than the blissful rolling blue sky clouds and green green grass.
You’ve heard all the Machiavellian types spouting their own dogma, that religion is the opiate of the masses, that the common man considers it true, the wise man false, and the powerful man as useful. You’ve heard that to the enlightened, praying is like writing a letter to Santa. You know it, and yet somehow your own mummy and daddy were righter when they said there was a sky-god than the were when they said there were fairies. You’re really dumb enough to think your own conspiracy gunk is better than the last guy’s.
You’re not helped by your biology, again, the very brain you use to think with (if you can call it that) is built by millions of years of evolution to understand other dupes like you. You instinctively ascribe motive, intent and reason to every sappy random chaotic thing that happens in your life. Miracles and the presence of the gods everywhere because your brain grocks that more easily than mathematics and chance and probability.
The Con would have you believe that there are no atheists in foxholes, and the CON is right, as usual, because once their vicious memetic viruses get stuck in your brain it’ll go through them one by one in an emergency, searching for something to help, no matter how ludicrous and unlikely. Then if by some fluke you actually survive you’ll be convinced it was the fault of your god because the idea of being adrift in the chaotic see of pointless luck is just to unfathomable. You can’t reason with chance.
Again, the whole construct is a self-creating mythology, just more religoplastic feedback, more freaked out conspiracy spunk seeping into your almost completely incapable monkey brain, but of course it’s gonna feel real, to you.
Even if you think you have no religion, the truth is that exhuming the deep seated lies and fantasy given to you by the conspiracy would mean taking your entire being apart. You’re that far gone it’s all but hopeless, you embody the conspiracy, you hackneyed pathetic drooling dunce.