Aug 31 2008
Is there such a thing as cargo cult religion?
I mean that in the sense that Feynman talked about cargo cult science:
In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas — he’s the controller — and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.
A cargo cult religion, then, would be an act of apparent religiousness that doesn’t mean anything — it has no meaningful content at all. Not stories, parables, histories, ethics or in fact anything else.
Now, having said all that, I present a video of Kanon Tipton, the grandson of Reverend David Tipton.
I am really struggling to make a serious point, but the silliness of the video is fighting back. It’s a tiny child going through all the motions of fire-and-brimstone preaching with none of the real words. Maybe I should just leave it there.
clearly the wee man has got the hang of it. They don’t really add anything further with words
Frightening. Try Alan Spence’s “Magic Flute” for another version of style without substance in religeon