Celebrities, Pseudo-Spiritualism, and Religion

Great Debates
1

I guess the theme makes this forum the place. First, here’s the link to the Onion’s feature, where they ask a bunch of celebrities “Is There a God?”

http://www.theonionavclub.com/avclub3837/avfeature_3837.html

The creator of Buffy the TV series gives a straightforward atheist answer. Chris Matthew’s of MSNBC’s Hardball gives an almost straight up Christian answer. A few others including Bill Maher say yes to God, but reject a particular religion. Most of the rest were all undecideds, joking quips, or incomprehensible.

What surprised me was the sheer number of people who believe in jumbled incoherent new-age sounding theologies. Here’s a few:

In that case, why care?

NEVER elect this man to the school board. Pascal’s Wager? Are you serious? Maybe we should be teaching a basic logic course in Kindergarten, so those kids can realizing that just because believing a thing has benefits doesn’t make it true.

Ummm…what? There are many deities, but they’re part of us, but we can’t blame them, but they’re only metaphors, but…what?? Are you stupid or a $cientologist? Words mean things, look into it.

Wow, Qui-Gon, I’ve never seen midichlorian counts this high! We better get back to see Master Yoda. Quick, to the Naboo shuttlecraft! So what does the Force – I mean, what does the “collective power and energy” do? Does it power light bulbs, fuel combustion engines, exorcise the Native American burial ground under my backyard swimming pool?

Ok, now I don’t expect everyone to have good answers to a question like that. What I do expect, and usually get from people in places like the SDMB, is the good sense to admit you don’t know what your opinion is. On the other hand, if you’ve taken the time to formulate an opinion, think it through a bit. Come up with a system or something. At least know what the words and ideas you’re using mean. That would be somewhat respectable. You don’t get a free pass on any craziness you voice just because it’s in response to a question about religion/spiritualism. Or do you? Is any opinion at all, no matter how silly or illogical it sounds, a defensible opinion in the realm of spiritualism?

Are celebrities just more prone than regular people to adopt wacky, incoherent, new age pseudo-spiritualism? And as an atheist and materialist, I have to wonder what bothers me more: organized religion’s tendency towards oppression, or disorganized spiritualism’s tendency towards chaos and nonsense.

2

As Bokonon pointed out, it is very likely that most anything you believe will be a lie. Shouldn’t you then believe those lies that make you wise, kind and just?

3

I think you’re being a little too critical of these people. There’s nothing necessarily any stranger about believing that there is some force or energy in the universe that humans can’t explain or understand than there is believing in an anthroporphic god with theological rainbow sprinkles. These people sincerely seem to have these feelings: and they do seem willing to admit that they don’t really know exactly what they mean. What’s so bad about that?

You also don’t seem to be reading their quotes very charitably. Using god as a methaphor for other things isn’t particularly new-agey: it doesn’t even fit the supernatural definition of “spiritual.”

4

Are you aware that the Onion is satire?

5

Do you have religious beliefs that we can mock?

6

The Onion is satire, but the Onion AV club’s interviews are not.

Doesn’t this belong in the pit?

7

Why would their answers be any better thought up than an average man-on-the-street? Just like the celebrity, that common citizen has probably given very little thought to nailing down the specific structure of and reasons for their religious/spiritual beliefs, other than tradition, a personal experience that may or may not be fully explained by some established religion, or alternately “a feeling” they get that Something Greater is going on. And a whole heap of the populace who claim to follow “established” religions are in turn “cafeteria” Christians/Jews/Muslims/whatever, picking and choosing their preferred bits of the religion and adding their preferred flavor of cultural syncretism.

Thing is, that although the celebs are pretty much on the same footing as Joe Blow insofar as not having had one semester apiece of General Survey of Philosophy, Elements of Comparative Religion, and Introduction to Basic Metaphysics, they do have the doubtful “advantage” of being in an environment where they get many more opportunities to hear and read a lot of the terminology involved. If you add to this a certain, shall we say, cultural friction, between the “showbiz world” and the traditional religious establishment, you may have an underrepresentation of the more traditional-conservative worldviews and a higher visibility of the New Age that makes it looks like there is nothing but – when probably the more “mainstream”, “silent majority” spiritualities are there all along, only, well, “silent”.

Where the people in the article stumbled most, it seems, is when they felt they had to answer something, even if they were not sure of what, and they reached for their stored vocabulary. Just because you can put together a killer stand-up routine/guitar riff, deliver an award-winning acting performance, or “see” in your mind an entire stage show/graphic novel before production, doesn’t mean you are that great when unscripted. Just like a regular dude from Podunk will stumble if he feels he has to explain his less-than-orthodox beliefs, only with fancier terminology.

Stan Lee handled it very well: “Well, let me put it this way… [Pauses.] No, I’m not going to try to be clever. I really don’t know. I just don’t know.” Nice and HONEST. Had he tried to be clever, and failed, he may have joined the ridicule list.

8

When I read this I busted out laughing. It’s the perfect thing to say to that bunch of meaningless bile that person was spewing…

9

HEY!!! I have an idea!!!
Let’s mock people we don’t know for their beliefs!!

Wouldn’t that make us look cool?

10

I never realized celebrities weren’t regular people before now.

The fight marches on!

11

David Byrne’s answer sounds like he’s a deist. That’s not exactly “new age”. IIRC Jefferson, Washington and Voltaire (for starters) were deists. None of those quoted by you sound nutty or incoherent to me (atheist BTW).

12

I didn’t find these answers even SLIGHTLY more bizarre than I find any other organized religious beliefs. You might hear the christian take more often, but it certainly doesn’t make MORE SENSE than these! In fact, I tend to give the most credence to what David Byrne says (which incidently, is frequently pretty close to the answer we get when we ask christians why their god behaves the way he does – “He works in mysterious ways…it is not ours to understand”…etc.).

13

We do it all the time around here.

14

And it’s a fucking shame sometimes.

15

I like this.

On a hijack, remember the old joke:

“Everyone has to believe in something; I believe I’ll have another drink.”

16

This is probably my first “me, too” post in response to something december said. I think this calls for a drink.

17

Several.

18

Would disagree slightly with the suggestion that celebs are no different from the ordinary man in the street. Many of them lack, um, formal academic backgrounds, or were schooled on the set of movies in an RV for 2 hours a day. Too, their lifestyle of constantly touring the world, and the fact that many of the more successful celebrities get to where they are by single-minded workaholic devotion to flogging their career, may mean that they don’t have as much real-world experience as the rest of us (they might counter that they are better-traveled and more cosmopolitan, but I’m not sure that hanging out with the same jet set in Cannes and Malibu and Bali widens the mental horizons as much as they’d like us to think). To take a somewhat-digressive analogy, it’s long struck me that billionaire businessmen who have spent twenty years building their empire by working seven days a week are perhaps the worst-qualified people to buy professional sports teams and meddle in on-field decisions, given that while every other middle class man in America was absorbing hour upon hour of sports coverage and information, Joe Tycoon was burning the midnight oil scheming to build his company – yet the Jerry Joneses of the world are not at all bashful about offering their opinions on matters they may have little technical grounding in. As noted, Stan Lee is the “celebrity” exception to the corollary phenomenon, an “entertainer” able to know and admit that he doesn’t know. Although B. Streisand was admittedly on the defensive and back-pedaling, her embarrassing praise of the faux-Shakespearean, clunky Caesar doggerel even after its exposure shows at least one celeb not at all daunted to opine publicly, emphatically but uninformedly on matters (there, prosody, meter, and rhetoric) on which she doesn’t necessarily have much to offer the world at large.

It would also seem likely that there is some self-selecting going on in the people who seek out stardom – they are likely disproportionately prone to viewing themselves as more sensitive than the common ruck by virtue of their artiste-hood, and to being quite happy with the public’s viewing them as such delicate plants as well – which tendency only becomes reinforced as they achieve increasing acclaim for their “art” and are challenged less and less by their entourages for boneheaded statements. Being vaguely “spiritual but not religioius” probably works really well here on a number of levels: (a) it bespeaks yet more creativity/originality; what could be more unimaginative than admitting you were “merely” following the received tenets of, say, something as creaky and un-sexy as the Quaker faith or traditional Catholocism or orthodox Judaism? No, give us spirituality stylings – faith along the lines of a celeb’s. “personal interpretation” of the National Anthem; (b) you can be as flighty as you like without fear of guilt/public embarrassment when you act contrary to the tenets of an espoused established faith – because if you’re making up the spirituality as you go along, who’s to say when you act inconsistently with your publicly-proclaimed faith?; © the spiritual principles/deity or higher power of the vaguely spiritual star can, without much effort, begin to look and sound a lot like . . . the star herself! – which jibes quite nicely with the cosmology many of these folk have likely envisioned from their early days; (d) feelings, and being perceived as having strong and sincere ones, seem to be of considerable importance to a lot of celebs, and feelings are easier to have (or to fake) than theological knowledge.

19

I understood them all perfectly. Seems the difficulty is with you.

20

I understood them all perfectly. Seems the difficulty is with you.