The Craziest Thing I Ever Heard...

Recently in class here at William Jewell, one of my fellow student talked about a religious practice in some cult. That student said it was, "the weirdest thing I ever heard about."

This provoked me to think about "the weirdest/craziest thing I ever heard about." It was also religion related and came as a little revelation (sarcasm, maybe) to me. Most certainly do I believe that there are a lot of crazy people, cults, and communities out there. They do crazy stuff and embrace their crazy s*** as super awesome pastime activities. But are those crazy things (killing each other, killing their children, eating each other - get as crazy as you want, let your mind wander and I bet someone or even some group did it) the "craziest things I ever heard about?"

Nope, because the premise for this to happen is that there are a couple of kooks out there that unite to do some crazy s***tuff (I just really feel like conforming to the American censorship of language and not swear so much right now). As mentioned above, it's a given that there are some nuts out there. So, do these lunatics and their actions surprise me? Maybe the creativity they come up with new s*** to do, but that's about it. Every toddler has access to the internet and can read up all the crazy s***, nothing new most of the times. So, what are "the craziest things I ever heard about?"

I quickly (much quicker than it took me to write those last two paragraphs or it took you to read them) came to the conclusion that my motivation for many posts in this blog are due to the craziest s*** I ever heard about. It's the creationists and literal-truth-of-the-bible movement. The craziest s*** I ever heard about has to be based on more than just some few lunatics, because that might be totally out of the social norm, but - as mentioned - enacted by nut-jobs. The creationist movement is a huge movement that - in large parts - consists of fairly well educated individuals with the ability for critical though processes (when it comes to anything BUT religion). It is deeply rooted in a 21st century, 1st world country that happens to be considered to be one of the prime examples of industrial evolution ("Evolution!" Oh, sweet irony). One of the - maybe the - most powerful countries in the world.

1/3 of this industrialized, highly educated people embraces a view as "the absolute truth" that has been disproven for more than 150 years and was strongly in doubt several years before it's Episode II was even written (6th century BCE).

Ultimately I think that how "crazy" something is has to be measured not only by how much it contradicts our current perception of what a social norm is (I do think eating each other is more crazy than believing in a being that makes stuff appear. Whenever, wherever, without any proof except an old book) but also by how many people follow it.

My formula for overall general craziness of an action/belief goes something like this:

Degree of Craziness = [(Number of People Involved + Number of People Killed) * Discord with Social Norms] - Weighted Scientific Evidence that Actions/Beliefs were/are Necessary for Society

You can see how in my - I think - fairly rational formula many crazy actions quickly move towards a freakin' high degree of craziness. At first I wanted to divide by the "Scientific Evidence" factor, but then thought better of it, as most even just moderately crazy stuff would be considered "impossibly crazy" as we would have to divide by "0."

So let's test the formula with an example!

30 alien-loving cult members kill themselves on the roof of a skyscraper on New Year's 99-2000.

Variables:

Discord with Social Norms (Standardized scale of 1-10, 10 being highest discord) - Killing oneself:

7 - pretty crazy, but not excessively punished by law.

Number of people involved:

30

Number of people killed:

30

Scientific Evidence:

0 - fairly indiscernible right now, but so far I think it's fair to assume that there was/is/will be not a lot of evidence supporting this to be the way to awesomeness.

[(30 + 30) * 7] - 0 = 420

From this first experiment I would say that anything above 100 can be considered pretty crazy.

Very scientific, I know.

I will leave you with this for now. I encourage anyone and anything to try this formula and see if you can come up with interesting results, prove it totally wrong, or improve it!

Also, I encourage an exercise of the mind... looking at how crazy the "literal Christians" movement is. Don't forget to include empirical data of the last couple millennia. As soon as I have another hour to spare, I will try to write a post looking at that.