Christianity and Islam are theistic religions, and they have surely done their share of blood spilling for their Gods, even as their adherents distance themselves from such horrors by insisting that their religions are strictly benevolent.
But whether you insist that your religion is whole separate from all of the horrors that have been carried out in its name, or whether you are an atheist who thinks religions are the most evil monster humanity ever created for itself, the worst religion by far, is economics.
Bertrand Russell argued the the bloodshed of the 20th century would never have been possible if not for religion predisposing human beings to accept absurdities on faith, without the need to question the myriad assumptions that such absurdities have always been built upon. And by accepting that such absurdities necessarily constituted "the truth," even when they were so obviously just "beliefs" that people wanted (indeed, many dreadfully needed) to be true, they opened the superstitious mind of man to every other absurdity it could possible design.
From kings and queens to witches, goblins and ghosts, humanity had decided that its "beliefs" constituted the most reliable form of "truth" the gods could ever bestow on lowly fallible humanity beings. While knowledge was only ever as finite and fallible as we were, "beliefs" came from God himself, and thus were true, no matter how insane they seemed. Indeed, the more insane they seemed, according the Immanuel Kant, the more true they must be!
And whether for race or spiritual supremacy, our need to depend on over simplified ideas about the world around us opened the door to the deadliest serpent of all - economics.
Like the beliefs in kings and queens, and in religions from Buddha to Abraham to Mohammad to Christ, economics spawned it's own competing belief systems that went to war during the 20th century in the same way the religions went to war in the middle ages.
Like Game of Thrones, the old gods were Allah and Christ, the new gods were capitalism and communism, but all promised to deliver us from evil, and bring us to one version of heaven or another.
Today, the economic religion of Capitalism, having vanquished it's old economic rival Communism (in the form of the USSR), relies on the binary paradigm of good and evil still. Only today, what is "good" are the billionaires, who know how to run a company more efficiently, and what is "bad," is government, which is as evil as Nazism and Stalinism and Marxism all rolled into one.
In truth, studies show that private companies are no more or less efficient that governments for the most part, and there are plenty of examples where gov't have accomplished things that no private corporation could've dared to dream, including iphones, the internet, the race to the moon, and countless medications, to name just a few.
But in the quest for profits, Big Pharma killed just as many Africans after 1995 to defend their patent on AID medication (that was actually developed thanks to tax payer subsidization and Govt R&D) as Nazi Germany killed Jews, or Christians killed Native Americans.
And today, Trump reigns supreme because people are so emotionally addicted to their beliefs in capitalism, and so intellectually stunted by their Christianity to know how to tell the difference between a pure "belief" and a "fact," that we now accept that "alternate facts" are, in fact, facts!
Hence Conservatives reject reality for their religion in capitalism. They chose to believe that billionaires will save them, and their jobs, and the whole world, instead of ever considering that the world is far far more complicated than the God vs Devil paradigm they depend on to make sense of the world.
Corporations and billionaires, in other words are "good" (or at least better than gov't), and gov't is "bad, (or at least worse than private corporations and billionaires).
And into this fantasy of economic religion, we all marched gleefully down the yellow brick road into the sea,like lemmings herded off of a cliff for the fairy tale that everyone knew in their heart wasn't true, and disappeared into a watery grave, from whence we came.
But whether you insist that your religion is whole separate from all of the horrors that have been carried out in its name, or whether you are an atheist who thinks religions are the most evil monster humanity ever created for itself, the worst religion by far, is economics.
Bertrand Russell argued the the bloodshed of the 20th century would never have been possible if not for religion predisposing human beings to accept absurdities on faith, without the need to question the myriad assumptions that such absurdities have always been built upon. And by accepting that such absurdities necessarily constituted "the truth," even when they were so obviously just "beliefs" that people wanted (indeed, many dreadfully needed) to be true, they opened the superstitious mind of man to every other absurdity it could possible design.
From kings and queens to witches, goblins and ghosts, humanity had decided that its "beliefs" constituted the most reliable form of "truth" the gods could ever bestow on lowly fallible humanity beings. While knowledge was only ever as finite and fallible as we were, "beliefs" came from God himself, and thus were true, no matter how insane they seemed. Indeed, the more insane they seemed, according the Immanuel Kant, the more true they must be!
And whether for race or spiritual supremacy, our need to depend on over simplified ideas about the world around us opened the door to the deadliest serpent of all - economics.
Like the beliefs in kings and queens, and in religions from Buddha to Abraham to Mohammad to Christ, economics spawned it's own competing belief systems that went to war during the 20th century in the same way the religions went to war in the middle ages.
Like Game of Thrones, the old gods were Allah and Christ, the new gods were capitalism and communism, but all promised to deliver us from evil, and bring us to one version of heaven or another.
Today, the economic religion of Capitalism, having vanquished it's old economic rival Communism (in the form of the USSR), relies on the binary paradigm of good and evil still. Only today, what is "good" are the billionaires, who know how to run a company more efficiently, and what is "bad," is government, which is as evil as Nazism and Stalinism and Marxism all rolled into one.
In truth, studies show that private companies are no more or less efficient that governments for the most part, and there are plenty of examples where gov't have accomplished things that no private corporation could've dared to dream, including iphones, the internet, the race to the moon, and countless medications, to name just a few.
But in the quest for profits, Big Pharma killed just as many Africans after 1995 to defend their patent on AID medication (that was actually developed thanks to tax payer subsidization and Govt R&D) as Nazi Germany killed Jews, or Christians killed Native Americans.
And today, Trump reigns supreme because people are so emotionally addicted to their beliefs in capitalism, and so intellectually stunted by their Christianity to know how to tell the difference between a pure "belief" and a "fact," that we now accept that "alternate facts" are, in fact, facts!
Hence Conservatives reject reality for their religion in capitalism. They chose to believe that billionaires will save them, and their jobs, and the whole world, instead of ever considering that the world is far far more complicated than the God vs Devil paradigm they depend on to make sense of the world.
Corporations and billionaires, in other words are "good" (or at least better than gov't), and gov't is "bad, (or at least worse than private corporations and billionaires).
And into this fantasy of economic religion, we all marched gleefully down the yellow brick road into the sea,like lemmings herded off of a cliff for the fairy tale that everyone knew in their heart wasn't true, and disappeared into a watery grave, from whence we came.
Comments
Post a Comment