Why Journalists Cite Tom Cruise

Posted on April 24, 2006 in Celebrity Reading Thinking

The quite irrational idea that the ability to perform a miracle was a guarantee of authority in matters of conduct and belief, and that somehow the credentials of Jesus were the authenticity of his miracles. This idea is not active today*, and we will not dwell on it except to note that, although it has left the religious sphere, its spirit still walks abroad in public life. When we find our newspapers inviting men who have knocked a golf-ball into a series of holes in the smallest number of attempts to express their views on the problem of survival after death, and when prominent geometricians or novelists are expected to have something of value to say about the philosophy of democracy, we have no difficulty in recognizing the type of mind which regarded the miraculous draft of fishes as an argument for the Sermon on the Mount.

— Herbert Dingle

*Apparently it was dying out when Dingle wrote this passage, but it sure as hell came back with a vengeance. Pity that some hide behind the miracles and throw blankets over the actual spirit of Christ’s message, eh? As I see it, if Christ had not performed a single miracle, his teachings would remain compelling.

When GQ goes chasing after Tom Cruise for his views about psychiatry, it crackles with a static peculiar to a small but influential subculture of American society, namely those persons of creativity who fear the dulling of their capacities for making art and literature. As if Scientology, with its forgery of a mythos, offers a viable alternative to lithium.