Violence & the Sacred

A fatal flaw in the Christian mindset is that it is a religion of peace, even though it is founded on the use of both evil and violence,  both of which are inflicted mercilessly on the most innocent. But how can evil and violence be used to advance a moral plan? This is the problem of evil - it is something that Christianity claims to oppose, even though it is the very corner stone upon which the entire religion is built.  But how can a religion claim to champion peace and justice when it is based on the greatest act of violence and injustice in human history? And because it illustrates that even evil and violence can operate to advance God's divine will - which only demonstrates why such a will is itself either nonsensical at best and pure evil at worst - then does that mean that everything from global floods to the holocaust are all just part of God's "divine plan"?

 Christianity is a religion that, although it claims to worship the "prince of peace," actually worships violence as the preferred means by which God advances his "will," and cleanses and forgives the world for operating as only He and He alone designed it to operate. But there are two kinds of violence: one physical and the other spiritual. For Christians, the former is the means of preventing the other from exercising the joys of curiosity and creativity on one's religion, for fear that doing so may cause our spirituality to change or evolve into something new and improved - perhaps even something that no longer venerates human sacrifice, even through symbolic rituals, nor feels a need to drink blood to appease a God.

 Violence occurs during eras of great change. Because the social and the sacred are seen as one and the same, changes to the former are felt by "believers" as threats and acts of violence toward the latter. The latter, after all, is steeped in sacred traditions that are often violently uprooted by change fueled by technology. As such, physical violence exercised by "believers" is always felt to be in defense of, and in reaction against, the violence of  those who, like Jesus, advocate for spiritual change. And nothing ushers spiritual change, and thus a change in ideas of what is moral and immoral, more than commercial and technological progress. Take the Civil War, for example.

Christianity had been used in America to defend slavery as just and moral for centuries prior to a collective reversal that precipitated the Civil War. And what precipitated that change was the rise of the industrial revolution that sought to replace man power with machine power, one being treated like a machine and the other treating humans like servants to machines. Had the confederacy won the American Civil War,  their histories would only ever show that they used physical violence to defend themselves against the spiritual violence being committed by those Northern "yanks" who sought to replace tradition with technological progress. From the perspective of the South, Yankees were simply "the enemies of God" who sought to change the holy arrangement of society. Had the South won the Civil War, in other words, it's history books would look like simply another chapter added to the Old Testament.

The problem is that, while capitalism requires that the ratio of winners to losers remains always the same, everything else in the environment is subject to change. More than that, the accumulation of capital fuels technological development, and technological development has a compounding effect, accelerating changes faster and faster.

But there's the rub. While economics fuels changes in society, the command morality championed by religion requires believers to defend the system they depend on, which they see as their sacred social contract with their God, who they see as unchanging and eternal.   For them, failing to defend these ideas as ideal could result in them ending up in a never ending torture chamber called hell.  Whether its slavery 400 years ago or in opposing gay marriage today, the need to defend the social "ideal" sold by one's religion is a prerequisite for avoiding hell and reaching heaven.

Conversely, when resources begin to tighten due to environmental degradation, call it climate change or what you will, the change in the economic system is always framed within a religious perspective of judgment and punishment of "unbelievers" vs "believers." Since money itself is merely a tool that requires collective "belief," which is why the first temples were also the banks and the first financiers were the first priests, framing changes in any economic system as a conflict between "believers" and "unbelievers" is an easy way of flattering the former for their "faith" and scapegoating the latter for their lack of faith.  

Christianity is a world building exercise, after all, and money is the lifeblood of such an exercise. And to a deeply Conservative mindset, in which holding fast to tradition is seen as a noble virtue, change is often seen as threatening what is being built. Prior to the Civil War, the South was defending an agricultural way of life, for example, in which masters reaped the lions share of the profits wrung from the blood, sweat, and tears of slaves who were working "out their salvation in fear and trembling." The North, in contrast, had embraced the new technology of industrialism. 

But again, we are talking about two kinds of change: to both the physical world on the one hand, and a spiritual world on the other. And to change the former starts by first changing the latter, for both operate like reflections in a mirror.

Like the Civil War, all of the "punishments" of the Old Testament were acts of violence. That violence was either the one hand of God through nature, like plaques and droughts, or the other hand of God through his chosen people, whoever they are (for every sacred scripture has themself in mind), which include occasional pogroms or genocides against those defined always as "the enemies of God."

As seen with Jesus, violence is a response to a command morality. All of the violence in the Bible is always justified by believers as necessary for balancing the cosmic scales, and to pay the price-tag of free will that so often leads to the eternal disappointment of the God who "intelligently designed" us with the capacity to leave Him eternally disappointed in us.  But this is like making a dish washing machine with the "free will" that prefers breaking all of your dishes more to washing them, and then blaming the dish washing machine rather than the designer. 

(Can you imagine Maytag telling a customer the the problem with their machine is its free will not to work, so blame the machine, not the manufacturer?) 

Christians believe it is their job to protect the sacred social order of things, as reflecting God's will, which God is most certainly not free to change (unless it had to do with slavery and witch burning of course). And because God can never change his own will, enslaved to a divine order as it is, the Christian must equally refuse to change their view of their "beliefs" not only to save the world, but to save their own souls from eternal torture. 

What those same Christians simply ignore is how often God may feel one way about the manner in which his followers treat others, with slavery lasting for centuries, and then suddenly change his divine mind, thanks to the automation of industry that replaced the need for manual labor. Competition over resources are seen as the root cause of violence, and that competition always accompanies scapegoating, especially of the innocent, for demons and "sinners" can't be entitled to that which the righteous have earned through the sweat of their spiritually superior brow, and therefore deserve.

And when nature tightens the purse strings on its bounty, "othering" becomes the order of the day, when witchery is blamed for bad effects, and everyone accused of being a witch, heretic, or "unbelever" is crucified as scapegoats.