Santa Claus, Voldemort and Galileo walk into a bar
to commiserate over living the life where reality cannot be named.
I never was a huge Harry Potter fan as the stories seemed too reliant on gadgets for my taste. I am more of a Lewis Carroll or Mark Twain fan where sardonic wit overlays truisms and soft hearted morality. But I have become a fan of the writer of J.K. Rowling for doing what the actors playing her characters in movies dare not. Rowling does the unspeakable by acknowledging there is something unique called woman and this creature is so not by her words, but by her DNA. Up until a few years ago to say there isn’t a unique creature called woman would have cast you out as a twisted misogynist. Those days have perished. But the denial of reality for an ulterior control purpose is not a new phenomenon. Just ask poor Galileo and Santa Claus.
In a Psychology Today article published in 2015, Psychiatrist Saul Levine wrote that we were in an age where many people deny truths even when presented with irrefutable scientific data. He concluded “when people refuse to accept or believe scientifically proven factual data because this interferes with their mind-set, we are indeed in deep trouble.” I dare say the doc is quite correct. But like most professionals with fancy degrees, they believe they are the only ones who are the gatekeepers of the truth and the rest of us need to be guided to “the truth.” In days past the gatekeepers were the religious leaders. Today they are the bureaucrats.
If one believes in reincarnation, perhaps Tony Fauci is the incarnate of Father Vincenzo Maculani da Firenzuola, the appointed inquisitor of Galileo. At the time, the collusion between science and religion concluded that “Earth was at the Center of the Universe, with all the stars and planets revolving around it, to honor Man, God's greatest creation.” Poor Galileo knew otherwise. He was warned to keep his beliefs to himself and all would be okay. Unfortunately, like Rowling, he seemed unable to keep quiet in the face of absurdity. A trial was held and the pious leaders found his beliefs heretical and against scripture. Desiring victory over this heretic, Galileo was, according to accounts, given a visitor tour of a dungeon with all its requisite torture devices. He took the hint that it could be his new abode. Not surprisingly, Galileo submitted a letter detesting his former theories as errors and heresies. This was a logical choice for an elderly man who most likely just wanted the remainder of his days to be done in peace. And perhaps he thought, “What was the point?” He after all was just a lone voice against a giant apparatus.
Perhaps Galileo is looking down from heaven and partially amused that the same deadly authoritarian ruthlessness that struck down his scientific beliefs in the face of scientific discovery has now been turned inverse. It is now the religious who are persecuted and they are done so by those who proclaim they are only following the science. As their faith cannot be touched - literally in the material world - means that it cannot exist. Their faith is evidence of their madness.
Instead of bibles, scientists - and those who portend that they are of a scientific mind - reach for Darwin. Random acts of evolution produced us - not a divinity or intelligent designer. To deny this is quite simply a backward mindset. Yet there are great minds that question Darwin’s evolution. They are derided but their brilliance persists. One favorite is David Berlinski. A quote sums up his belief rather nicely. “We never attribute the existence of a complex system to chance.” Yet that is exactly what Darwin adherents believe. There is the oft quoted statement that given enough time, chimpanzees on a typewriter will produce Shakespearean level literature. This would mean the heart wrenching Symphony 3 by Gorecki is merely the product of random occurrences. My heart tells me differently. Its notes strung together with haunting sorrow to reflect the concentration camp experience run by Eugenicists who feared no God to judge them. “Darwinism is not a sufficient condition for a phenomenon like Nazism but I think it's certainly a necessary one.” David Berlinski
And if we are always becoming according to Darwin, can you truly have a species? Berlinski argues not as the animal in question is always becoming. It is forever mutable. So the pooch that lies at your feet is not truly a dog but a ‘dog becoming.’ While I appreciate using meditation to ‘becoming one with source’ I do prefer to think of my body as a set species known as a human female.
This brings me to Christmas and Santa Claus. Like Voldemort, they call to things that shall not be named - yet they exist. Being forbidden in polite society to say the words does not erase their existence. And by being told to not say them instills a knowing that it is wrong. Not saying Voldemort is a hope of protection from him. In the case of Christmas and Santa Claus, one does not speak their names out of fear from them; rather, one refrains from fear of those who seek their erasure. And like denying that there is a construct of a human species called a woman - and not merely a social construct - the inability to use these words leaves a person unsettled, confused and downtrodden. While Darwin surely had no intent of destroying the human experience, his theories lifted into the secular world - most notably in the sphere of neo-Marxist thought and its derivatives - have driven us to this: a young woman look upon herself in a mirror and knows not who or what she gazes upon. What is reflected back is not her own reality but that of construct imposed upon her. To render a human so hopeless in what they know to be true is a cruelty that belongs only in a Grimm Fairy Tale and it is time to relegate it to such.
https://everything2.com/title/Copernican
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/PROJECTS/FTRIALS/galileo/condemnation.html
Charles Darwin may have been a naturalist, but was not a scientist; at least not a competent theorist. "Evolution" is not a theory, but merely a tautology. Whatever survive is therefore "fittest".
I'm much older than you, Elizabeth, but I've never read Harry Potter. It just doesn't appeal to me, but I absolutely love the "Outlander" series. I guess it means I like some fantasy, but it needs to be logical fantasy. Maybe that explains why the current climate drives me batty - everything is totally illogical. Thankfully, I'm no one important and the inquisition hasn't made me recant, but that makes me grateful that I'm not another Galileo. And because I'm retired I don't have to sign up for virtue signaling of any kind. I don't and didn't wear a mask, I skipped the jab and all the refills, I know what a woman is and I don't participate in the illusions or delusions of others. And I'm extremely happy to read writers that are awake, not woke.