Totalitarianism has to rely on lies. If people knew the truth and especially if everybody knew that everybody else also knows the truth they would surely revolt. The Emperor's New Clothes.
The main lie about totalitarianism is that some people are inherently entitled to rule over others.
The extra totally crazy lies are kind of a Canary in Coalmine, does anybody dare to confront them? If not then the big lie about the power of the totalitarian government is safe too.
They present it as if it’s ridiculous (and it is) but is it any more ridiculous than the mainstream creation myths that millions and millions of completely sane and rational people believe or claim to believe now?
And the integration of religious rituals and beliefs into supposedly secular governments? Many us government ceremonies begin with a religious guru (e.g. congressional chaplain opening prayer) and have for decades. Occult iconography and religious inscriptions appear on instruments of government like banknotes, buildings and the like.
I’m fairly sure the majority of people don’t believe in literalist young earth creationism. It’s mostly a thing in certain Protestant sects, and regionally (especially in Turkey) in Islam.
If you’re talking about the vaguer “evolution happens, but, er, maybe a deity did something non-specific about it”, then that’s more common, granted.
I hate to say it, but I’ve been recently re-convinced that people like you and I live in a bubble. Most people are adamantly religious in the US if you start to dig down. I knew this when I was a reckless atheist teenager adamant about the beauty of evolution, but after surrounding myself with like-minded people for a decade, my natural tendency to give people the benefit of the doubt relapsed over that bit of my established world-view. It was only recently, when I took an astronomy class for fun and I started to talk to more people about timelines and aspects of the universe that excite me, but don’t jive with religious views so well, that I remembered this sad fact. It honestly makes it harder to hold onto any hope that the human race can reason itself out of the corner it’s worked itself into. :-(
I think the tendency arises from two critical components, which aren't present in most religious traditions (and hence why most religious problems don't have a problem squaring evolution with religion).
The first is a belief that the way to salvation is a narrow path and that those who seek to follow it are constantly buffeted by forces that would have them fall off. The second is a strident belief in the literal, inerrant truth of religious texts. Altogether, this ends up in a worldview of "If I question anything, I question everything, which means I fall off the path to salvation. Therefore, anything that would make me question my religion is automatically wrong."
I think it's about the sense of personal meaning and importance one gets: if God personally crafted you down to the tips of your toes, that makes you feel more important and like your life is more meaningful than if God created some system (evolution) which just happened to eventually result in you at the current point in time.
Good point. At the same time it is pretty clear by observing how babies are born and grow up, and if you believe God created human race, that you do believe he "created some system" by which we grow from sperm and eggs, to be the way we are :-)
I think the way cells "evolve" to become mammals is actually much more wonderous than one species evolving into another.
From a lot of otherwise science-accepting people I grew up with, the issue isn't that penguins or insects adapted to their environment in unique ways. The issue lies in humans coming from monkeys. People I've known have a hard time with us not being created as special companions for the creator.
I think this ideology is partly because being a God's special companion means you can rule over others. So it's a convenient patriarchal fiction for many who want to rule over others, with God on Their Side.
I consider myself deeply religious and I never had an issue with this or any other aspect of science. To me, the goal of science is understanding how God's universe works.
> However, it says that, if they did develop, then they did so under the impetus and guidance of God
There is also the literal adam and eve:
> In this regard, Pope Pius XII stated: “When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains either that after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parents of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now, it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the teaching authority of the Church proposed with regard to original sin which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam in which through generation is passed onto all and is in everyone as his own”
Fortunately souls don't exist, so at least that doesn't conflict with the bible.
You're quoting Pius XII, which died in the 50s. Since at least the 80s the Church[1] accepted that evolution is a thing, and I don't think anybody claimed Adam and Eve really existed. There was a symposium in '86, writings by Joannes Paulus II in the 90s, and more.
[1] yes, it is not a homogeneous group, I personally know people that believe I A&E and that evolution is "just a theory, not a fact". But that's the individual opinion of some priests and believers, not the official position.
Really totalitarians are all about believing their own flattering lies. Witness the "foes are strong and weak at the same time" hallmark and notice how incoherent and terrible their estimation of foes are. It is "good" at justifying travesties but incoherent doublethink doesn't lend well to strategy.
Plenty of non-totalitarian groups display these kinds of cognitive dissonances. This is not a unique, or even particularly noteworthy trait. It has little to no descriptive power.
Well, the reality is oddly close to the fantasy, actually.
According to Wikipedia (Origin_of_water_on_Earth):
> The region of the protoplanetary disk closest to the Sun was very hot early in the history of the Solar System, and it is not feasible that oceans of water condensed with the Earth as it formed. Further from the young Sun where temperatures were cooler, water could condense and form icy planetesimals. The boundary of the region where ice could form in the early Solar System is known as the frost line (or snow line), and is located in the modern asteroid belt, between about 2.7 and 3.1 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun.[18][19] It is therefore necessary that objects forming beyond the frost line–such as comets, trans-Neptunian objects, and water-rich meteoroids (protoplanets)–delivered water to Earth.
there is a group of conspiracy theories around the idea the all those "scientific occultism" and "psychological warfare" ventures continued in the USA among programs such as MKULTRA and others (say the theories) not yet declassified because they were more successful.
I suppose you could categorize these close to "Hitler retired in Argentina" and similar "Nazism went on" conspiracies.
To quote a famous movie: The biggest stunt Devil ever played on us was he made us believe he doesn't exist.
"Nazism" is still going on. Nazism is basically the same thing as totalitarianism in general. It never went away in many parts of the world. There are even Neo-Nazis in the USA.
The Nazi party implemented a totalitarian form of government. Totalitarianism predated Nazis and is still a common form of government around the world. Classic case of "A is an example of B, but not all B are A". E.g. calling Stalin a Nazi would be inaccurate. He fought Nazis, but was still a totalitarian of the highest order, arguably with a more heinous legacy (if measured in body count, geographic impact, duration of influence). Assad is a current totalitarian, along with many regimes in Africa. Describing these as regimes as Nazis would be a very inarticulate description, even though I'd get your point ("he bad").
I think the differences between different totalitarian governments is of little significance.
What is important is that they all want to eradicate democratic processes as much as possible. So whether you call them "Fascists" (in Italy) or "Nazis" in Germany or "Stalinist" (in Soviet Union) is fine, but really they all are more or less the same, authoritarian, totalitarian, anti-democratic.
That is why Neo-Nazis call themselves Neo-Nazis. They want to be LIKE NAZIS.
The main lie about totalitarianism is that some people are inherently entitled to rule over others.
The extra totally crazy lies are kind of a Canary in Coalmine, does anybody dare to confront them? If not then the big lie about the power of the totalitarian government is safe too.