Who you callin' a cargo cultist?
Every religious person should contemplate Cargo, the well-known body of Papuan cults that arose after Europeans arrived in New Guinea and other islands of the southwestern Pacific. Quite early in the twentieth century, Cargo believers, under the influence of a number of homegrown messiahs and prophets, were building ramshackle jetties and performing rituals intended to lure ships laden with trade goods. Later, and more famously, Cargoists tried the same practices with airplanes, running up pitiful stick-and-rattan imitations of control towers and stamping "runways" out of the bush, in the belief that this would fetch the C47s they had seen Americans flying in.
Reason didn't work very well against Cargo. Papuans defined anybody who came from over the horizon as supernatural; ergo, Europeans were spirits and their inventions were obviously made for them somewhere outside the visible world and brought to them by magical means that others could learn and employ. A lot of additional mumbo-jumbo went into Cargo, including belief in an apocalypse that would sweep away the Europeans, and that unquestionably increased its appeal.
Cargo was a stubborn cult. First, the Cargoists craved trade goods, and they meant to get them no matter what. Second, they clung mulishly to their initial assumptions about the nature of the world and about how magic influenced it (among old-time Papuans, everything, no matter how mundane, is accomplished by magical means), and lack of results didn't phase them. After all, Cargo was a chiliastic religion, and the faithful were ready to wait. (Prophets, always include the end of the world in your doctrine; keeps 'em happily anticipating for years.)
Cargo has changed over the last generation or so but, alas, it isn't quite dead even yet. John Frum, bye m' bye 'e come plenny too muss!
I say that religious believers should take a good look at Cargo because in descriptive terms, i.e., viewed from the outside, it looks exactly like any other faith. Cargo had and has its prophets, its doctrine, its initiations, its rituals and observances and hymns. Cargo even has its martyrs, sad to say. Cargo is a religion like any other.
And yet Cargo is based on assumptions - beliefs - that we know absolutely to be false.
The parallel between Cargo and other religions is obvious to any thinking person; no point laboring over it. But try it out on an otherwise intelligent religious believer and watch how obtuse he suddenly becomes. Alas, alas.
