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In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a massive super computer is asked for a simple answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. It spends 7 and a half million years to determine that the answer is 42. Of course, the realization is quickly made that a simple answer to an extremely complex question, or more accurately many difficult questions, is ridiculous on its face. The real answers to all the big problems are not easy, however badly we may desire them to be.
A lot of irrational beliefs have been fostered and perpetuated by barbaric civilizations in their desperate quest for answers. Virgins have been thrown into volcanoes to appease angry volcano gods. Rain dances have been performed to water dried up crops. People pray to various gods to heal a sick loved one. I happen to be an atheist. If I tell a person his prayers won’t work because his god doesn’t exist, it’s not so I can give him a new god to pray to instead. The point is encouraging him to abandon the simplistic answer to a very difficult problem so he can face the cold hard reality. There are many realistic cures for cancer being pursued with varying degrees of success, but they can be painful, time-consuming, expensive, and don’t always work. If he pursues these and his loved one gets better, his god will get the credit. If not, he will make excuses. Perhaps his faith wasn’t strong enough! Through an atheist’s eyes, his prayers had little to do with his loved one getting better except perhaps from a placebo effect.
We look to governments in much the same way we look to gods, to offer us easy answers. Similarly, when things work, we give government credit. When they don’t, we make excuses. We still have crime, war, car accidents, poverty, sickness, and death, despite the fix-all of authoritarian monopolistic governments, and sometimes because of. Instead, governments are forgiven for these massive failures and we continue to insist they have some crucial role to play.
