Arguing over imaginary friends is futile
When I was a young child, I had a pair of imaginary Afghan Hounds. Apparently I would pick them up to cross the road and spend time talking to them. As far as I was concerned, they were real.
I cannot remember any of this, but my father will jump at any opportunity to remind me, usually in front of friends about my ‘afdams’. He reminds me of this because he thinks that it is hilarious that a young child would have imaginary friends for some reason. I think that he also likes to remind me that I was a very, very late talker and got many of my words muddled, but that is a whole other subject.
Except, and this is something I do not understand, many people around the world spend significant amount of time, energy and money on their imaginary friend and very few people think that this is not normal. There is a whole global infrastructure around a relatively small number of imaginary friends. Wars are fought over which imaginary friend is more real, people publicly proclaim their love for their imaginary friends, people are murdered, mutilated and outcast over their imaginary friend preference.
Yet few people find this odd.
In fact many people look to their imaginary friend in times of grief and pain and somehow feel comfort.
As I write this, it is less than 24 hours after an attack in Brussel, once more a group of people attacked a random selection of civilians in the name of their imaginary friend. There are spontaneous tributes springing up around the airport and metro station. All of these have imaginary friend symbolism plastered all other them.
Believing whatever you want to believe is fine by me. I just want to make that point. However, please, unless you can prove the existence of your imaginary friend, then please allow me to laugh a little when you tell me about them.
If you want to believe that, for example, there is a small teapot orbiting the sun somewhere between the orbits of The Earth and Mars, then that is perfectly fine. But unless you can actually prove it, then it remains simply a belief and as such it should not be forced on others. if you want to start the ‘Holy Teapot’ religion, then feel free.
If however your religion, your belief in an abstract idea, declares war on the rest of the world that think you are crazy, then I believe that you need help, therapy and education. You need to understand that with no proof, there are no facts, no facts means that you are simply believing in a figment of your imagination.
By a startling coincidence, this is exactly how I feel about the rest of the world and their imaginary friends.
There is zero proof of your imaginary friend. None at all. All of these friends were assumed to exist in order to explain away the world. It was not long ago in humans history that we believed that the Sun and the Moon were quite literally chariots of the gods. That Mars, the red planet, was the harbinger of war. We did not have the maths, the mental capacity, the tools to actually figure things out.
It is much easier to explain the world in terms of supernatural beings, that just happen to be invisible and undetectable, but are seen by their actions. It is much easier to think of a god that pushes the sun across the sky daily, than it is to explain orbital mechanics, to someone that could not add up ‘two beans plus two beans’ and come up with an answer that was anything other than ‘some beans’.
But now we are living in a much more educated world, In general the majority of the population understand that the world is not flat, that it orbits the sun and that neither are the centre of the universe. This is a big issue for those with imaginary friends, it is very hard for them to understand that we actually live in a fairly ‘out of the way’ part of our galaxy, a galaxy that contains at least a hundred billion other stars, any number of which have planet and any number of which, over the universe of time and spare, could hold life.
We can also see, through fossil records that every creature alive today has ancestors that were just a little different and that we can all be traced back to a common ancestor, albeit one that lived about 3.9 billion years ago. Yet there are still people today that believe that the earth is only a few thousand years old and that the evidence that leads us to other conclusions was planted here by an imaginary friend. The reasons for this are never fully explored. This is a shame really as I would love to understand why the imaginary friend would go to such lengths to obscure the truth.
We are special on this planet, because we have mastered tool use and language use and we have built our societies that help the general populace.
Yet still many cling to their imaginary friends, some kill others because they do not share the same view, many people are downtrodden, many people have a miserable life simply because the rulers of their nation have an imaginary friend and thus they rule the nation in the way that they believe they should.
The current ‘war’ with IS is all about imaginary friends. IS have a specifically war-like friend that demands that any non-believer should be put to death, for the crime of not having the same imaginary friend.
Think about that for a moment.
All of the major imaginary friend appreciation societies have been through this.
Between 1618 and 1648, something between three and eleven million people were killing in the Thirty Years war, fought between two groups that ostensibly had the same imaginary friend.
Between 1562 and 1598, the same two groups had another round, this time the dead toll was somewhere between two and four million.
The Sudanese Civil War (1983 -2005) was fought between two fairly disparate groups of imaginary friend followers, and again the death toll was somewhere between one and two million
The exact same group has clashed before, back in 1095, for almost two hundred years, a war raged in the ‘Holy Land’ and killed between one and three million people.
I still do not understand why it is OK to call out a child who has an imaginary friend, but it is certainly not OK to call out an adult you considers Jesus or Allah a friend is verboten.