If you run history in reverse, and see who is doing what for whom and why, and what justifications everyone always gives after the fact, which are always exactly the same justifications of God and justice and freedom, and you think of those people as acting out the "will of God on earth" - which means they are basically acting for God by thinking they basically are god - you get a much better view of who "God" really is.
And for individual Muslims and Christians who think that their "religion" really makes people better, simply because you feel it makes you better (which is often debatable), well, even if you are correct, and religion actually helps more people than it hurts, at least on a personal level, it still wouldn't matter.
Why?
Because the individual actions of the really good Christians, are nothing compared to the collective actions of the worst Christians of all. And the worst Christians of all, for whatever reason, just happen to be the ones running everything.
So it's like me doing my best to recycle everything, even though its the major corporations that dump by the day what I might throw away over the course of my entire life. In the same way that Conservatives say that there is no reason for America to stop polluting since China pollutes the planet way more than us, I can say that there is no point in my recycling since corporations pollute the environment at least a thousand fold more than I do.
But I do it anyway.
And Christianity has been doing it since Rome fell as an Empire on Earth, much like the apple in the garden of Eden, and rose from the dead as an Empire of the Mind, metastasizing in our collective consciousness like a cancer of ideas disguised as a "messiah," by convincing us all that the most "natural and universal" form of government in the world is necessarily from above, as Kenneth Clark claims in his book "Civilisation"(sic.) (unlike the Greeks, or the Native Americans, or countless other peoples dating back to before time began, who actually believed in democracy, and the idea that people should decide for themselves what to be, and do).
In a sense, the conflict of ideas that started between Greece and Rome, and has been at the heart of our ideas of politics and religion ever since, is simply a clash between those who want their freedom, and those who seek to impose some set of rules and "beliefs." The problem, of course, is that both people have different beliefs about what "freedom" means and requires, that each wants to impose on the other, and often for the same reasons.
This conflict works by taking certain ideas from your enemy, and making them your own, and using them agaisnt them. So when Trump claims the elections are rigged, it's probably because he's the one rigging the election. And when some religion or cult leader, from Waco to Stalin, offers you "freedom," it is always in the form of the slogan posted over the entrance gates at Auschwitz, Arbeit macht frei - "Work sets you free." Or as Dante put it in his Divine Comedy, "Abandon all Hope Ye Who Enter Here."
And what we called the Concentration camp, Orwell might well have called a farm, for it might as well have been. And his book 1984, was simply the application of the technology used in those camps to a society as a whole, only today much of that is done surreptitiously instead of out in the open. A year later, in 1949, when he published Animal Farm, that, according to Orwell, reflected the events leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and then on into the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union, he may have never known that it would apply even more to the United States in 2017.
St. Augustine is an example of a masterful propagandist for such a systems, for he can weave together opposing ideas as being mutually supportive, even if he didn't know that that's all he was actually doing. Augustine molds Socrates into a Catholic, for example, even though he clearly died as more of an atheist, or an agnostic, or something, but certainly not a Catholic. After all, it is unreasonable to suspect that a man who stood like Christ and Martin Luther before the religious leaders of his day, would willingly submit to the decrees of a Pope or a "saint," especially when Socrates was so clearly like both Descartes and Peter Abelard in his devotion to a religion of doubt, not belief.
And just because Socrates mentions God on his death bed, doesn't mean he believed in the same God Augustine did, or that he even believed in any God at all. I sometimes refer to "God" for example, but that doesn't mean I believe that "God" exists in the same way Augustine did, or anyone else.
Hence, Augustine is simply a charlatan for suggesting that Socrates, who challenged the ideas of "gods" held by Greece in the same way that Christ challenged the idea of "god" held by the Pharisees and the Sadducees, and with the same results, would be a Catholic who would willingly submit to a Pope - in ROME of all places! - anymore than it is to suggest that Thomas Jefferson would've knelt before Donald Trump if he had declared himself the pope, or Karl Marx would've prostrated himself to the economics of Milton Friedman.
But our biases blind us from seeing this bit of charlatanism, because the Christian who sees only the benevolence of their Christianity, and denies that the atrocities committed in its name are evidence of Christianity's true nature, are all the more likely to do the same thing with their economic religions as well, which happens to be exactly what Capitalism is doing around the world, that Christians often equally deny.
Maybe God, in other words, is Satan, and economics is his "religion of numbers" that, like a psychopath or a calculator or a computer that's fully devoid of all emotion, is simply mechanical, meticulous, and precise, reducing everyone to a binary 1 or 0 on a screen, and defines everything as "right" or "wrong" according to a balance sheet.
But you can only see that, by going through history in reverse.
And if the Devil is as clever as the legends suggest, then I wouldn't put it past him for a second.
And for individual Muslims and Christians who think that their "religion" really makes people better, simply because you feel it makes you better (which is often debatable), well, even if you are correct, and religion actually helps more people than it hurts, at least on a personal level, it still wouldn't matter.
Why?
Because the individual actions of the really good Christians, are nothing compared to the collective actions of the worst Christians of all. And the worst Christians of all, for whatever reason, just happen to be the ones running everything.
So it's like me doing my best to recycle everything, even though its the major corporations that dump by the day what I might throw away over the course of my entire life. In the same way that Conservatives say that there is no reason for America to stop polluting since China pollutes the planet way more than us, I can say that there is no point in my recycling since corporations pollute the environment at least a thousand fold more than I do.
But I do it anyway.
And Christianity has been doing it since Rome fell as an Empire on Earth, much like the apple in the garden of Eden, and rose from the dead as an Empire of the Mind, metastasizing in our collective consciousness like a cancer of ideas disguised as a "messiah," by convincing us all that the most "natural and universal" form of government in the world is necessarily from above, as Kenneth Clark claims in his book "Civilisation"(sic.) (unlike the Greeks, or the Native Americans, or countless other peoples dating back to before time began, who actually believed in democracy, and the idea that people should decide for themselves what to be, and do).
In a sense, the conflict of ideas that started between Greece and Rome, and has been at the heart of our ideas of politics and religion ever since, is simply a clash between those who want their freedom, and those who seek to impose some set of rules and "beliefs." The problem, of course, is that both people have different beliefs about what "freedom" means and requires, that each wants to impose on the other, and often for the same reasons.
This conflict works by taking certain ideas from your enemy, and making them your own, and using them agaisnt them. So when Trump claims the elections are rigged, it's probably because he's the one rigging the election. And when some religion or cult leader, from Waco to Stalin, offers you "freedom," it is always in the form of the slogan posted over the entrance gates at Auschwitz, Arbeit macht frei - "Work sets you free." Or as Dante put it in his Divine Comedy, "Abandon all Hope Ye Who Enter Here."
And what we called the Concentration camp, Orwell might well have called a farm, for it might as well have been. And his book 1984, was simply the application of the technology used in those camps to a society as a whole, only today much of that is done surreptitiously instead of out in the open. A year later, in 1949, when he published Animal Farm, that, according to Orwell, reflected the events leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and then on into the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union, he may have never known that it would apply even more to the United States in 2017.
St. Augustine is an example of a masterful propagandist for such a systems, for he can weave together opposing ideas as being mutually supportive, even if he didn't know that that's all he was actually doing. Augustine molds Socrates into a Catholic, for example, even though he clearly died as more of an atheist, or an agnostic, or something, but certainly not a Catholic. After all, it is unreasonable to suspect that a man who stood like Christ and Martin Luther before the religious leaders of his day, would willingly submit to the decrees of a Pope or a "saint," especially when Socrates was so clearly like both Descartes and Peter Abelard in his devotion to a religion of doubt, not belief.
And just because Socrates mentions God on his death bed, doesn't mean he believed in the same God Augustine did, or that he even believed in any God at all. I sometimes refer to "God" for example, but that doesn't mean I believe that "God" exists in the same way Augustine did, or anyone else.
Hence, Augustine is simply a charlatan for suggesting that Socrates, who challenged the ideas of "gods" held by Greece in the same way that Christ challenged the idea of "god" held by the Pharisees and the Sadducees, and with the same results, would be a Catholic who would willingly submit to a Pope - in ROME of all places! - anymore than it is to suggest that Thomas Jefferson would've knelt before Donald Trump if he had declared himself the pope, or Karl Marx would've prostrated himself to the economics of Milton Friedman.
But our biases blind us from seeing this bit of charlatanism, because the Christian who sees only the benevolence of their Christianity, and denies that the atrocities committed in its name are evidence of Christianity's true nature, are all the more likely to do the same thing with their economic religions as well, which happens to be exactly what Capitalism is doing around the world, that Christians often equally deny.
Maybe God, in other words, is Satan, and economics is his "religion of numbers" that, like a psychopath or a calculator or a computer that's fully devoid of all emotion, is simply mechanical, meticulous, and precise, reducing everyone to a binary 1 or 0 on a screen, and defines everything as "right" or "wrong" according to a balance sheet.
But you can only see that, by going through history in reverse.
And if the Devil is as clever as the legends suggest, then I wouldn't put it past him for a second.
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