Amateur Megalomania

Mysteries

As I’ve noted, Dan Brown is cashing in on the big conspiracy market.  Tens of millions of people have invested the time and money in these elaborate tales that try to re-tell the roots of Christianity.  Judging by the hundreds of spin-offs, there seems to be some deep appetite for this idea that things aren’t what they seem when it comes to religion or history.

Why?

American and European church attendance has been in decline for decades.  Some would argue that general morality is in steep decline (I don’t know that I agree, but certainly traditional institutions like marriage are changing radically).  I think it is fair to ask: why is Christianity having a hard time selling itself, yet fictional works of pseudo-spiritual inquiry sell like crazy?

An easy answer is that Dan Brown doesn’t require you to change your behavior.  Sure, I can see that.  But I think we are still seeing an undeniable hunger in the spiritual arena, and it still remains for the established faiths to harvest that ‘market’.  Right or wrong, the Church is failing in this endeavor.

I don’t have an answer for them.  I’m not suggesting some bizarre convergence of Christ and Da Vinci.  I don’t know what they should do.

The observations lead to more observations about people as a whole.  We’ve always been drawn to the mystery.  Before we had Loch Ness and Yeti, we had maps with ‘Here Be Dragons’.  Science continues to push back the boundary of mystery, until the truly unknowable becomes too esoteric for most people to even understand what isn’t known.  There are few mysteries left that people care about, so is it any surprise that some of the more bizarre conspiracy theories flourish despite hard evidence to the contrary?

People like to know things.  People enjoy discovery.  But gone are the days of the garage laboratory providing any meaningful discovery.  The frontier of science is dominated by billion dollar machines and consortiums of hundreds of scientists devoted to truly microscopic discoveries.

I wonder about those ancient, famous Greeks whose names should be recognizable in the roots of many common English words.  Were these men exceptionally brilliant even by today’s terms, or were they ‘fortunate’ to live in a world where the things to be discovered practically littered the ground around them?  Was Pythagoras a staggering genius, or just the first guy to get some basic ideas down on parchment and was lucky enough to see that scrap of text survive?

No disrespect intended.

My point is about the human nature to seek answers.  The modern world does not indulge this drive too easily when it comes to the physical sciences.  That well is pretty much dry.  So are we now turning to the less rigorous arena of pseudo-science or historical revision as away to indulge this drive?  Is this why these things sell?

As a people, we hunger.  But for what?