Frankensense

By Carl S ~

Mary Shelley's novel, “Frankenstein,” is about Dr. Frankenstein and the man he created, and is well known. It‘s about a scientist bringing life into a corpse assembled from various body parts, using electrical forces. It is also a precautionary tale, since the creation becomes a monster, turns on his creator, kills innocent people, and must be destroyed. Perhaps the story is the origin of the “mad scientist” stereotype so beloved of, and exploited by, fiction writers and movie makers, which fed paranoia about the power of science to begin with. This story has been used as a warning for scientists not to “play God.” (Although it may be argued that the creator-god of the bible is insane.)

Let us consider Dr. Frankenstein’s method as a reflection of theologies. Religions construct their bodies of evidence from the salvaged body parts of dead religions. As EChamberlainMD stated, “Judaism borrowed from, modified and adopted the various religions it encountered in the Middle East and Egypt and created it's ‘one true god’ mess — the mess upon which Christianity is built.”

Let's go further back. On the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is a mural depicting “Adam” as a fully formed inert body, with the breath of god infusing it with life. One observer of this painting said, “Hey wait a minute. Life, in nature, is inherent to an organism. It doesn’t come from outside itself.” What is represented in this painting is a god playing Dr. Frankenstein, not the other way around. But religions insist it’s the way life works. They claim that “souls” are “infused” into organisms at some point in time, “souls” existing outside of organisms. Indeed, they claim “supernatural” lives outside of material existences, which control and determine nature itself. Even entering and exiting bodies! (Good and evil. Think exorcism.) All of the creator-gods, eternal life, and resurrection myths derive from this belief. What is the resurrection of Jesus if not the re-animating of a dead body?

What are theologies really for, except to convince others that life exists independent of material substances, while yet acting on them? Rather than shocking the stopped heart into beating again, as EMT’s and MD’s do, theologians are more like magicians shocking dead immaterial bodies into the appearance of living systems. Theologians and other religious speakers refer us to the biblical bodies of the “walking dead via spirit-force re-animating the dead“ and the “living words of god“ spoken by ancient ignorant men who saw spirits everywhere. Such are the “voltages” used to reanimate the dead bodies of religions. Theologians keep their invisible bodies “alive” by re-animating those creations through fanciful, entertaining, pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-scientific, arguments.

Religious theologies thrive in confirmation-bias. Consider this as compared to psychological states of mind. To a paranoid person, evidence supports the mind-set of the paranoid. One cannot reason otherwise to that mind-set. Now imagine a support group composed of paranoids, reinforcing each others’ confirmations. Is not this akin to the mind-set of religious belief systems? (Was St. Paul‘s a “beautiful mind”?) It's no wonder you can't argue sense to nonsense; you can't go there - there's no “there” there to begin with. It’s because those humanly created spirits and their stories are just that; ergo, incapable of creating and entering real living organisms through some “spiritual osmosis.”

If you think about it, it‘s really weird that religions would invoke the Dr. Frankenstein tale as a warning against scientific, reality-based research and discovery, when they have their own “Dr. Frankensteins,” a.k.a. theologians, continuously trying to make invisible corpses into animated beings.

Caution: theological arguments don't make sense because they’re Frankensense.