by Cal LaFountain.
Libraries, churches, and casinos are everywhere, and they offer more than knowledge, faith, and fortune. These institutions fashion the world in disproportionate secrecy. Each invites you to engage its gods and fuels a striving for more.
Seeking a new loop of mind, spirit, and wallet, I’m exploring these places across America and extracting whatever meaning I can from them. I want to show the people who frequent them, the rituals that uphold them, and the presence they impart to communities.
Libraries and Human History
Neomania is a prevalent, unrecognized cognitive bias. It is the tendency to believe whatever is new is always better than what came before. This isn’t true, new things aren’t good just because they’re new. From the wheel to the wood table, quality inventions enjoy future use equal to or greater than their past use.
Three years ago on this site, I argued for audiobooks as a necessary vehicle to progress literature. I still believe this, as audiobooks recycle oral history, a tradition more evergreen than printed words. But I’m now curious to defend printed books as the sharpest knowledge spear.
Physical texts contain something like the raw essence of a person unanchored across time. In this frame, cultures, eras, and stylistic choices act more as filters than endpoints. Instead, the endpoint of a book is an elusive expression of mortality leveraged by precise language. That thing you can’t name—the unflippable switch—it’s known when it’s read.
Until some new media overturns the intimate power of written words, libraries, and their unspoken mission of tracking human history and guarding truth across time, possess infinite relevancy. As more of the world goes online, physical spaces, particularly ones that don’t require capital output to enjoy (like libraries), become more scarce. They thrive, even in their lowest forms, as places to sit and expire an hour with no pressure to spend money.
Embracing Church and Resisting ‘The Church’
Church is different from “The Church.” One is ancient and loving, sheltering anyone during the inevitable crashes of life. The other is a crooked racket curtaining humanity’s most atrocious acts.
To see into religion is to see past its nastiness. The core of belief systems and how their believers tarnish them require constant separation. Weaponizing faith for conquest is the failure of the practitioner, not the idea system. As a veil for crooked deeds rallied in the name of selfish gain, religion leaves a sour taste for many.
These perversions stand as proof of religion’s necessity in a flawed species. History has cabinets full of dogmatic campaigns that highlight this fact: humans will confiscate anything for personal benefit. To abolish religion and church is to clarify how a moral protocol combats primal failings.
Religions of all kinds, housed in the gothic fronts and ethereal beacons of churches around the globe, exist as reminders to strive beyond puny mortal fences. The failures of “The Church” then become nothing more than a scab falling off in the shower. Try to see past the gnarled skin and admire the clean layer beneath.
I’ve witnessed an identical glee light a man’s face when an ace hit the green felt of the blackjack table, and when the tithe money hit the red felt of the offering tray passed around after a sermon—two similar donations to two different gods. In the faces of the jubilant winner and the pious devotee, complex desires distill to a singular hope. Awash in that ecstasy, present equally during the choral exultation and the gutsy wager, how can I admonish anyone for their beliefs or their appetite for risk?
Casinos and Risk
The risks made in casinos and churches are not so foreign to each other. I went to school and learned about everything from Occam’s Razor to Pascal’s Wager, but none of these lofty philosophical frameworks prepare you for real life in the real world. They are no lifeboats when hit with the skin-in-the-game of true risk. When a soul or a bankroll hangs in unseen purgatory, no book, no quote, or therapist can help. It’s maximum life coursing your veins in those moments, and it’s a domain where personal experience reigns above theory.
The precise needle of science demurs personal experience, labeling its fragile nature as biased guesswork. Yet there is value there, one that often fails to fill rational explanations. The call of the improving chime is painful to ignore and ignoring it is like picking your nose with four different fingers: four times the work for four times the horrible reward.
The casino floor invites anyone bold enough to stab at its fruits. Any outcome, even a big win, leads to eventual loss. What’s gained is always a temporary loan on its way out.
Science is good. So is faith. Balance is better. I caution myself or anyone against thinking there are answers to all of life’s phenomena. In my personal experience, it’s more exciting when you’re gifted the good privilege to shrug and say “I don’t know.” More exposure to risk is more exposure to mystery.
Seek It All
In libraries, the conversion of energy to knowledge sometimes means taxpayers run amok at a town hall meeting. As controversial as churches are, tradition sustains them. Casinos are containers for the most extreme pendulums of human joy and misery, rife with ethical dilemmas. The ideas these buildings nourish, the hope they restore, and the connections they gift have staying power.
Religion requires a total kneeling to the unknown cosmic belch from which we all bubbled into our stresses and traumas, waiting to pop. Christ said, “Be in the world, not of the world.” The capacity to express faith, whether contained in piety, knowledge, or luck, represents humanity’s most redeemable feature.
No one stays on this Earth journey forever. The great meeting places of humans across time, fleeting as the bricks and fulcrums that built them, display the brightest desires of a thinking species. Compassion, selflessness, and understanding are present where people gather. Seek one and the rest follow.