Plenty of cults exist - every cult has its 'religious dogma', its idols, its 'prophets', its 'science', its 'proof' and its intolerant liturgy of demands. Cults everywhere: Corona, 'The Science' or Scientism, Islam, the State, the cult of Gender Fascism, Marxism, Darwin and Evolution, Globaloneywarming, Changing Climate, Abortion...
Tempus Fugit Memento Mori - Time Flies Remember Death
Religion – Separate Spirituality from Supernaturality
Religions of all varieties would help themselves and the world, if they modernized their doctrines.
by StFerdIII
One must state that the entire fabric of Western Civilization is premised on Judeo-Christian values. There is no disputation of this. But how in an era of infected Islamic warring upon the greater world, the spread of pagan Arabism to all corners of the globe, can ‘Western’ populations sit meekly by and not realize that the great mental illness of this paganism threatens civilization ? I would offer that the inability of all 3 major Near Eastern religions to remodel their philosophies to adapt to the modern world, has made most in the West indifferent and indeed hostile to all religions. This means that our own culture is at risk because we as a group have failed to modernize our spirituality.
Other factors also come into play. The war on fascist Islam receives little media sympathy; there is widespread democratic apathy; anti-US and anti-Jew sentiment is very strong; and there is the general gross ignorance of historical clashes and a misreading of what Islam is all about. But we can offer one more reason and one that the average man or woman would allude to – the current War on Islamic fundamentalism does not feel like a war because all religions lead to mindless submission and eventually violence. This is ‘social liberalism’ or the idea of relativity. If Islam is bad, that is because all religions are bad. This is not true but has some reasonable strands and small grains of truth in its objection.
One must ask: what makes Islam so dangerous? Like Judeo-Christianity Islam is forthrightly an elevation of pagan cultism into a spiritual justification to control all behavior. The precursors of all 3 religions can be found rooted in historical cults, pagan societies and polytheistic beliefs. Unlike Judaism or Christianity however, Islam is light on serious intellectual and spiritual content. This leads inevitably to the poverty of its religion, and once you meld religion and the state together, which is what Islam demands, the poverty of its entire socio-economic and political organization naturally follows suit. Islam is a failure because unlike the Judeo-Christian religions it has failed to add sober, earthly wisdom, morality and the separation of what is Caesar’s from what is God’s.
But in the famous question posed by Christ ‘what is God’s’? Islam believes that all is God’s – he owns you, your possessions, your mind, your wife, your son, your daughter and any concrete or spiritual asset you might possess. You are rendered a tool of God – a tool to be used to spread the word of God through war, practices of conversion or just plain mindless submission. The Judeo-Christian approach is rather more intelligent. God demands obedience to certain rules, morality and codes of conduct. He can be a happy God and pat your head when you are acting within the rules, or he can be a ruthless and bloody God and strike you down or make you sacrifice your closest family to appease his wrath. But at least in this storyline, which has ancestral similarities to almost every Near Eastern pagan religion stretching for 2000 years before the arrival of Christ, you had control over your earthly and worldlier possessions and matters.
The fact that great gulfs exist between the 3 main Near Eastern religions is obvious. But the real problem with religion has been the millennia long march from concrete moral roadmaps and frameworks, into the nihilist and romanticist camps of supernaturality and blind obedience for the sake of the ‘faith’ on the one hand, and the maintenance of pagan supernaturality on the other. Though many people today are religious – probably at least 50 % in Canada and a far higher number in the USA – religious groups would do themselves and the rest of us who are agnostic, atheist or indifferent, a favor by reforming and dropping the more insipid features of their supernaturality. It is this supernaturality in an age of science and mass education that generates loathing and nausea in mainstream society.
How could Mary have been a Virgin? How did Christ roll back the rock and ascend to heaven? Why did God choose Mohammad to be his mouthpiece? How did Mohammad fly to Jerusalem to visit a Church that had been destroyed hundreds of years earlier? Why do angels present themselves only to certain people? You can’t expect rational people in a literate age to blindly accept such ideas. It is as ridiculous as saying ‘God exists because you can’t prove he does not’. No you are right. I also cannot prove that the pink elephant you see in the corner of the room does not exist either.
Unlike Islam there are good and some very excellent aspects to Judeo-Christian thought. Christianity at its root is about the replacement of uncivilized savage behavior with a belief that some divine inspiration exists in all men. This divine excellence transcends the mere trial of living and extends into all areas of human conduct and thought. Society thus becomes reordered since life, you and the world are gifts of a powerful force of light and good. This force of goodness has morality, behavioral rules and noble aspirations attached to it. This conception is worthy, uplifting and inspiring. But the layering on of supernaturality and the maintenance of pagan storylines distorts the importance of the Judeo-Christian ideal.
I would blame the ‘unnatural’ development of a politically and economically interested church class for the misfortunate layering in of supernaturality. The church hierarchy and class – caste system was a natural evolution from pagan pre-religious organizations. The priestly class in pagan times needed super-natural punishment to elicit obedience and such practices were carried forth with great aplomb to help build the 3 Near Eastern religions. But such organizational principles and attitudes which elevate ‘other wordly forces’, are simply out of step with a modern educated populace.
The bible and related religious texts are full of supernatural nonsense, apocryphal writings, and bad translations as well as tracts that are full of gibberish and contradictions. This does mean that the religious books are valueless of course. But the construction of untruths only detracts from for example, the power of the Bible as a book of messages, parables and examples. It certainly is not a book of any God, but a book built over hundreds of years by human minds in all their glorious corruption. The work by these feverish and sometimes enlightened people helped form our modern world. The spiritual and moral lessons contained in the Bible are fantastically relevant and important - but they get lost in the maze of pagan supernaturality.
Dangerously we live in an age of ‘social liberalism’. This is the ultimate 'relativity' theory of social construction. Nothing matters, all is equal, all is shared, all is good. This largely immoral construct informs and perverts everything from education to foreign policy. In this regard we need religion or a framework of morality and better yet one that matches our modern world. Most people living today have nary a clue about what produced the society they live in, what makes societies rich and prosperous and what values permeate Westernism. As such they are more preoccupied with American Idol or ice hockey, than about the pro's and con's of idolatry or the importance of the ‘Golden Rule’. Such apathy leads directly to a ‘who cares about the war on fascist Islam’ mentality. As such we put our own civilization at risk.
A little reality injection would do religion and the rest of us, a lot of good.
