Dan Popp
Shamanism in shambles
By Dan Popp
Learn from science that you must doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. — Manhattan Project scientist Richard P. Feynman
Conservative commentators err when they talk about the "secularism" of the left. As we've seen, what remains after Christianity has been pushed out of this or that corner of the public square is not a vacuum; it's another religion. This one is cobbled together from the remnants of Molech worship (the sacramental slaughter of children); elements of Satanism (the open emulation of "the first rebel"); some thinly veiled Gaia worship; a heaping helping of the robber religion of Marx; and other garbage disguised as good intentions.
One important doctrine of this self-centered superstition is shamanism. A shaman is a witch doctor. He alone among his tribe has the juju, the medicine, the magic to tap the spirit world — for good or for evil. Laymen must not question him, or they may get the whammy for their impertinence.
A couple of examples will suffice. We're told that ordinary people cannot interpret the Constitution, even though ordinary people ratified it and thus made it "the law of the land." If these common folk didn't understand what they were approving, then the national contract has been a scam from the beginning. But supposedly only the Supreme Court knows what the Constitution really says.
In the same way we're assured that only scientists, scholars and experts know how complicated matters work. (Try not to think about how many times scholars have perpetrated hoaxes, or have been honestly mistaken. Just trust them. They're smart. You're not.) Someone has called this, "the cult of the expert." A proponent of Obamacare recently showed me a document written by Leading Authorities in the healthcare field summing up the whole world's needs in that area. (No hubris there.) After reading the first page, I was convinced that these brilliant PhDs could not pass a freshman-level Economics course. They didn't even understand the terms they were using.
Shamanism has taken some big hits in recent days. Consider the case of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman. The knowledgeable people in that matter are surely the police. They're privy to evidence that the public doesn't yet have. In the course of time, as investigations are concluded and charges are brought (or not) and Grand Juries are convened and trials or civil suits proceed, the public will eventually learn the facts — to the extent humanly possible. But all the facts are not in the public domain as of this writing. They are, for now, the property of the experts. Yet look who's telling us that the shaman is cheating; that they, the ignorant non-specialists, know the facts even though they weren't there and haven't investigated anything.
Maybe that would be good to remember the next time an upside-downer tells you that his appeal to authority trumps your reason.
Witch doctors have also been given a black eye by the eminent jurists on our Supreme Court. After all, the shamanists have told us for decades — at least since Roe v. Wade — that these nine lawyers are so smart, they know what should have been in the Constitution; and they are so good, they're writing it in there for us. But if the crown jewel of legislative love, Obamacare, is rejected by the Supremes, what will the cultists do? What can they say? That their experts are fallible? That the emperor has no clothes? That the voodoo Who's Who have lost their juju?
If we know leftists, we can predict that their response will be a denial of reality, followed by blaming some bogeymen (perhaps Dick Cheney) and loud calls for "justice," meaning more robbery, discriminatory treatment and legalized sin.
Perhaps they'll form a Blue-Ribbon Panel to figure out why there's a crisis of confidence in experts.
I should end there, but I can't resist tweaking a Christ-hating know-it-all, even though he's not an expert at anything except hypocrisy. Comedian Bill Maher recently blasted Christians (and Jews) by saying that we are afraid of knowledge; that the forbidden tree in the middle of the Garden of Eden was the "tree of knowledge." But as any 6-year-old fresh from his first afternoon in Vacation Bible School could have informed him, that tree was the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil." This refers to moral knowledge, or the ability to discern right from wrong, which knowledge Maher and other self-worshipers reject. So not only was he ignorant in calling others ignorant, he inadvertently mocked himself as one who is "afraid" of the tree in the middle of the Garden.
But these men revile the things which they do not understand; and the things which they know by instinct, like unreasoning animals, by these things they are destroyed. (Jude 10)
© Dan Popp
April 2, 2012
Learn from science that you must doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. — Manhattan Project scientist Richard P. Feynman
Conservative commentators err when they talk about the "secularism" of the left. As we've seen, what remains after Christianity has been pushed out of this or that corner of the public square is not a vacuum; it's another religion. This one is cobbled together from the remnants of Molech worship (the sacramental slaughter of children); elements of Satanism (the open emulation of "the first rebel"); some thinly veiled Gaia worship; a heaping helping of the robber religion of Marx; and other garbage disguised as good intentions.
One important doctrine of this self-centered superstition is shamanism. A shaman is a witch doctor. He alone among his tribe has the juju, the medicine, the magic to tap the spirit world — for good or for evil. Laymen must not question him, or they may get the whammy for their impertinence.
A couple of examples will suffice. We're told that ordinary people cannot interpret the Constitution, even though ordinary people ratified it and thus made it "the law of the land." If these common folk didn't understand what they were approving, then the national contract has been a scam from the beginning. But supposedly only the Supreme Court knows what the Constitution really says.
In the same way we're assured that only scientists, scholars and experts know how complicated matters work. (Try not to think about how many times scholars have perpetrated hoaxes, or have been honestly mistaken. Just trust them. They're smart. You're not.) Someone has called this, "the cult of the expert." A proponent of Obamacare recently showed me a document written by Leading Authorities in the healthcare field summing up the whole world's needs in that area. (No hubris there.) After reading the first page, I was convinced that these brilliant PhDs could not pass a freshman-level Economics course. They didn't even understand the terms they were using.
Shamanism has taken some big hits in recent days. Consider the case of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman. The knowledgeable people in that matter are surely the police. They're privy to evidence that the public doesn't yet have. In the course of time, as investigations are concluded and charges are brought (or not) and Grand Juries are convened and trials or civil suits proceed, the public will eventually learn the facts — to the extent humanly possible. But all the facts are not in the public domain as of this writing. They are, for now, the property of the experts. Yet look who's telling us that the shaman is cheating; that they, the ignorant non-specialists, know the facts even though they weren't there and haven't investigated anything.
Maybe that would be good to remember the next time an upside-downer tells you that his appeal to authority trumps your reason.
Witch doctors have also been given a black eye by the eminent jurists on our Supreme Court. After all, the shamanists have told us for decades — at least since Roe v. Wade — that these nine lawyers are so smart, they know what should have been in the Constitution; and they are so good, they're writing it in there for us. But if the crown jewel of legislative love, Obamacare, is rejected by the Supremes, what will the cultists do? What can they say? That their experts are fallible? That the emperor has no clothes? That the voodoo Who's Who have lost their juju?
If we know leftists, we can predict that their response will be a denial of reality, followed by blaming some bogeymen (perhaps Dick Cheney) and loud calls for "justice," meaning more robbery, discriminatory treatment and legalized sin.
Perhaps they'll form a Blue-Ribbon Panel to figure out why there's a crisis of confidence in experts.
I should end there, but I can't resist tweaking a Christ-hating know-it-all, even though he's not an expert at anything except hypocrisy. Comedian Bill Maher recently blasted Christians (and Jews) by saying that we are afraid of knowledge; that the forbidden tree in the middle of the Garden of Eden was the "tree of knowledge." But as any 6-year-old fresh from his first afternoon in Vacation Bible School could have informed him, that tree was the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil." This refers to moral knowledge, or the ability to discern right from wrong, which knowledge Maher and other self-worshipers reject. So not only was he ignorant in calling others ignorant, he inadvertently mocked himself as one who is "afraid" of the tree in the middle of the Garden.
But these men revile the things which they do not understand; and the things which they know by instinct, like unreasoning animals, by these things they are destroyed. (Jude 10)
© Dan Popp
The views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.
(See RenewAmerica's publishing standards.)
