Sunday Afternoon False Prophet

Yesterday evening I got a call from a friend of mine who's currently reading Breaking the Spell by Daniel C. Dennet. I should probably read it again. He was curious about Marjoe Gortner, the child evangelist who later in life revealed himself to be a fraud in an award winning documentary film. I haven't seen it yet, so my friend told me where I could find a short clip on teh intertubes. It's been a while since I posted a video on a Sunday for those of you no longer under the spell of religion or the hypocrisy of belief in belief, and Dennet sets this one up quite nicely with the following dilemma.

...we see poor people emptying their wallets and purses into the collection plate, their eyes glistening with tears of joy, thrilled to be getting "salvation" from this charismatic phony. The question that has been troubling me ever since I saw the film when it first came out is: who is committing the more reprehensible act - Marjoe Gortner, who lies to these people in order to get their money, or the filmmakers who expose these lies (with Gortner's enthusiastic complicity), thereby robbing these good folk of the meaning they thought they had found for their lives? (p. 286)

It gets worse.

Dilemmas like this are all too familiar in somewhat different contexts, of course. Should the sweet old lady in the nursing home be told that her son has just been sent to prison? Should the awkward twelve-year-old boy who wasn't cut from the baseball team be told about the arm-twisting by all the parents that persuaded the coach to keep him on the squad? In spite of ferocious differences of opinion about other moral issues, there seems to be something approaching consensus that it is cruel and malicious to interfere with the life-enhancing illusions of others - unless those illusions are themselves the cause of greater ills. The disagreements come over what these greater ills might be - and this has led to the breakdown of the whole rationale. Keeping secrets from people for their own good can often be wise, but it takes only one person to give away a secret, and since there are disagreements about which cases warrant discretion, the result is an unsavory miasma of hypocrisy, lies, and frantic but fruitless attempts at distraction. (p. 288)

...

We've got ourselves caught in a hypocrisy trap, and there is no clear path out. Are we like the families in which the adults go through all the motions of believing in Santa Claus for the sake of the kids, and the kids all pretend still to believe in Santa Claus so as not to spoil the adults' fun? If only our current predicament were as innocuous and even comical as that! In the adult world of religion, people are dying and killing, with the moderates cowed into silence by the intransigence of the radicals in their own faiths, and many afraid to acknowledge what they actually believe for fear of breaking Granny's heart, or offending their neighbors at the point of getting run out of town, or worse. (p. 291)

It's a wonderful day to be an atheist.