Resaving Religion: Superstition, Degraded JPEGs, and Facebook Fear Memes

There is some really twisted, wrong Demonlover garbage on the internet. We all know this as people that have, well, seen the internet at least once. But when I'm really looking to fuck my outlook up, I journey down the Facebook halls of cameraphone screengrabs of prayers and pleas for earthly aid—and, with them, prayers and pleas to the the viewer to please just repost this one sad, blurry, grainy message so that the Lord himself will bestow upon them no less that $10,000, or something more vague but still plausible in that creepy-ass conversation-with-god evangelical sense.

If you ever want to experience and understand the total misery of American newjack evangelicals, just become friends with one on Facebook. Or don't. Instead, you can take a tour of this hall of existential terror with me here now, via the following E-Scrapbook of the Void. Caution: it will make you feel worse than you currently feel by several degrees. As you view these, just try to imagine the faces of the posters as they navigate the arrow closer and closer to the "share" or "retweet" buttons and not die a little bit deep down.

I'm a meticulous culler of my Facebook friend pool and remove accounts without much provocation. Meaning, it's rare to get the very worst of these on my own feed, so I've had to do a bit of active research. Congrats, internet friends, on your patience with other humans, or at least your lack of vigilance in unfriending them. Either way, a greatest hits of spreading the good word in the absolute saddest way imaginable:

What happened is that someone made a whole bunch of changes or "save as" modifications to a low-resolution .jpg file, or printed the image out, scanned it, and then reposted it. In either case, the whole process took some significant amount of time and God is probably impressed by that, at least.

You know, "steal" as in repost. A real friend will repost a thing of yours from the internet. The realest friend will actually write out all of the above in their iPhone's "Notes" app and then borrow their slightly less real friend's Rzr flip-phone to take a picture of the screen and then email said picture to some work-owned Dell that can do the hard labor of internetting it.

This is actually a misappropriation of an existing meme called "success kid," which Know Your Meme explains as such:

Success Kid, sometimes known as I Hate Sandcastles, is a reaction image of a baby at a beach with a smug facial expression. It has been used in image macros to designate either success or frustration. In early 2011, the original image was turned into an advice animal style image macro with captions describing a situation that goes better than expected.

So, I guess the success of Jesus kid up there is in not giving into Satan or forsaking Jesus, though I've never understood how people can imagine little kids responding in any reasonable or healthy way to religion when they're this tiny and have such mushy brains.

Thanks, but I'm just gonna risk it without the ghost pigeon and Frederick's of Hollywood catalog cover on my side.

We're really spiraling downward now and should pause to appreciate the simple fact that this exists as a shared thing on the internet. What did this start out as? A Jesus-y fortune cookie? No, it looks like it originated digitally somehow, right? It's cropped of course, but what from? The image is exquisitely degraded, but there's much more to it than that. The crop begs more questions than answers, alas. It's also one of the rare breed of religious "share if" memes that demand not just your share, but your sincerity in sharing.

This came out of someone's brain and when that someone discovers the term "hipster" they're going to explode just like that whale.

I'm way less concerned with the why of this than the how. I can't even guess what the original state of this may have looked like. Maybe someone printed out the text and it got really wet and so this person immediately slapped the wet, wrinkled paper on a scanner, followed by a long string of "save as" actions performed on the new document in the hope of resurrecting the original thing, which is actually still saved in the original form it was printed from right there on the same computer with a really obvious file name.

Also, "a fav" from god himself. God picks you up at the airport. God feeds your cat while you're on vacation. God changes your oil. God writes you a Xanax prescription. God: cool dude.

Not religious, but this is more of a bummer than my internet can even currently handle. So bleak.

"Car phone."

This is the very essence of the pragmatic sharer. There's not even any religion on it in the usual sense, just word salad and the "share if" threat we're all pretty used to by now.

Religion itself sometimes looks like a bunch of degraded jpegs: altered and saved, altered and saved, altered and saved. Every save losing a bit of the original such that talking about the original becomes mostly pointless. Printed and scanned and then saved and shared on Facebook. Just in case.

Like a lot of people in my general demographic slice, I went to church casually as a kid and lost my "faith" (or found my skepticism) about the same age as most kids do around middle school. I credit that loss in part with, after a certain point of authoritative explaining and resistance to questioning, just no longer getting it. There was suddenly this huge slice of churchness that had nothing to do with good or being good, but was instead all a bunch of jpegs like the ones above that were so human, afraid, and pathetic.

Social media is an expert in drawing out the superficial worst cases of anything. With religion we get the fear, desperation, and shallowness all traversing our screens in meme form and then we get way less of the actual goodness. Instead we get the part of God that is super-concerned about us saying his name without a really good reason or about us eyeing other gods or honoring our parents. Basically, the part of God that just seems like some human asshole parent imagining god.

That part of religion, just some asshole imagining god, is what you'd call pragmatic faith. Not much to do with goodness or metaphysics, just some rules and best practices in the interests of not being tortured for eternity in Hell. Pragmatic faith or "just in case" faith seems much more like superstition than actual faith in a thing. Looking at the memes above, it feels just as they look: degraded copies of someone else's fear. These are the exact opposites of, say, the Notre Dame, which was mostly definitely build from something other than fear or at least in addition to it.

Sharing has no costs to you the Facebooker, while not sharing could have huge costs in eternity, so why even bother debating reality. Play it safe.

It's about feeling better then, even in infinitesimal degrees. Ralph Wood's The Psychology of Religion, before asking the big question of whether religion is anything more than superstition, gives a simple example: "Joe knows full well that there's no rational basis for his lucky socks, but he just feels better wearing them. If success occurs, the socks will be cited as as proof of the superstition's truth." So too is it with some sad mom at their computer clicking "share." God and any of religion's rational or constructive aspects are gone far away, leaving a neat sample of religion's gross superstitious core.

When I turned atheist another part of the whole move was becoming aware of the gnawing fear that, suddenly, every adult around me in church seemed to have. Simply, I realized how many people were in church "just in case," hedging their afterlife bets an hour every Sunday. Which is, of course, the root of all of these stupid memes threatening … or else and, hey, all that takes is clicking "share," no Sunday required but it couldn't hurt.

The very root essence of religious superstition. Just in case.

@everydayelk