Religion and Pornography

Let’s do some embedded YouTube videos quick, before someone notices that YouTube has no business model!

I do love the Daily Show. I think this clip nicely captures the beauty of trying to debate the essentially arational. Or, as Paul Myers puts it “This is exactly what I hear when someone tries to promote their favorite cult.”

Now, that’s not to say it isn’t possible to promote a cult in a way that will either amuse or attract me.

For example, I always kind of liked the idea at the core of the “Principia Chaotica“, that you make up the beliefs that are most useful at any given time, and then change them when they cease to be useful. I certainly do this to some extent in my life, choosing the way to tell myself the story of me that helps with whatever situation I am in–although I probably don’t take it quite as literally as Carroll does. I’m still an engineer at heart, and thus am a rationalist; I just recognize that stories and lies we tell ourselves can be extremely useful things.

Here’s a quote from that work:

It takes only the acceptance of a single belief to make someone a magician. It is the meta-belief that belief is a tool for achieving effects. This effect is often far easier to observe in others than in oneself. It is usually quite easy to see how other people, and indeed entire cultures, are both enabled and disabled by the beliefs they hold. Beliefs tend to lead to activities which tend to reconfirm belief in a circle they call virtuous rather than vicious, even if the results are not amusing.

You know who would be a great person to talk to about those ideas? Alan Moore. They line up pretty nicely with what I’ve read about Moore’s beliefs about magic, and certainly are at least in the same rough sphere as Moore worship of Glycon.

For example, Alan Moore makes his religion sound pretty good in this clip, extracted from Stewart Lee‘s documentary on blasphemey. It’s hard to disagree with a religion that is based on sweetness, good hair, and a bit of smugness:

(video link via Heidi MacDonald)

Speaking of Moore and things that would make religious fundamentalists go apeshit, I got this photo in an email from my retailer last night:

That’s his big pile of Lost GirlsConsidering what the retail price of those things is, I think it’s a sign of how good my local shop is that he’s not even slightly worried about moving 20+ copies of the book in a market the size of Halifax., Moore’s giant work of pornography. One of those is the special signed, limited one that is on hold for me. While there were a couple of things in the initial reports that made me a bit leery about this, subsequent interviews and reviews have erased my slight trepidations, and I am just excited about picking this up now. In fact, I’ll probably be heading in to town in less than two hours to pick that up.

Maybe collecting books is my religion. I’m sure I could make up a solid mythological framework growing from the underlying beliefs of the collector of literature…