30 Comments

1. Matthew Cromer:

He’s dead right, religious faith is the cause of all the violence and oppression around the world. Savage religionists like Joseph Stalin — oh, wait a minute, he was an athiest wasn’t he. . .

Aug 5, 2004 - 10:50 am 2. Matthew Cromer:

Forgot to mention Fidel Castro, Pol Pot, and the Kims in North Korea.

I’m not a fundamentalist Christian or even conventionally religious, and I don’t agree with many of their social positions, but we can thank them for the fact that this country is so much better off than Europe. I honestly think decent, hardworking, religious folk are some of the best neighbors and citizens. I’d certainly never want to trade them for messianic athiest socialists as fellow citizens.

Aug 5, 2004 - 10:54 am 3. Matthew Cromer:

I’m sorry Roger, re-reading what you wrote above you I guess you didn’t want comments on this subject AT ALL.

Mea Culpa!

Aug 5, 2004 - 10:55 am 4. Kevin P:

Roger:

I am going to get the book.The subject of religous dogmatism and the choice of some within the faith community to totally abandon reason is a good subject. I might suggest that if they have time that the thread community also read “The Clash of Orthodoxies” by Robert P. George. There were some aspects of the book that I disagreed with but it contains reasoned arguments from a religous perspective. It also points out the religous nature of the Secular Orthodoxy.

Aug 5, 2004 - 10:58 am 5. Kevin P:

Roger:

Ditto mea culpa.

Aug 5, 2004 - 10:59 am 6. Lola:

Well, yes, Stalin was an atheist. His mother had him entered in the seminary, with hopes that he would become a priest (obviously, the hopes of a poor, abused woman married to a drunkard was not fulfilled). He is responsible for having hundreds, if not thousands, of churches and monasteries deconsecrated and/or destroyed, countless numbers of religious treasures sold off to the West or destroyed, killing hundreds of thousands and thousands of monks, nuns, priests, laypeople.

And yet the Orthodox religion held fast. Last month an icon which was smuggled out of Russia (the size is so large it requires two people to carry it . . . I’m still trying to figure out how it was smuggled out) was returned to Moscow Patriarchate. On OCA’s website, there is a picture of the Red Square, in the distance one can see Lenin’s tomb and the square is packed with people and clergy wearing their vestments with the icon in front, in procession to the church. I wish Stalin had been alive to see the results of his hard work. And to be held accountable for what he did.

Aug 5, 2004 - 11:06 am 7. Stan:

Ok, I need to get this book to be fair. But the idea is not novel or seemingly informed by modern scientific (empirical?)discoveries. By the brief review at Amazon this seems an “Amen” to the Humanists (John Dewey et al) of the turn of the century (19th / 20th).

Read the Humanist Manifesto.

I wish the author had read any number of texts in preparation for this enterprise but first I would point him to C.S. Lewis’s Abolition of Man.

Yes, Matthew, the list goes on – Mao, etc… Humanist rationalism has had all the answers!

This line has been going on for 100’s of years but we need a lecture from a 20 something grad student to set us all right!

Roger, I’m kind of disappointed in this post – I thought you had more intellectual chops than to flack a book like this.

Granted, I haven’t read it, but I don’t think you have either.

Stan

Aug 5, 2004 - 11:06 am 8. Stan:

Hey folks, Roger indicated he didn’t want a PROTRACTED discussion… but NO comments?

OK, done now…

Aug 5, 2004 - 11:14 am 9. chuck:

Well, I haven’t read the book. The question that interests me is why religion is such a persistent thread in human history. That is simply a fact, and should be investigated in it’s own right. The common explanations, that it is an naive explanation of nature, or attempts at controlling same, or a construct of priests, yadda, yadda, yadda, don’t satisfy me. There is something deeper in religion than mere orthodoxy, or as a superstitious substitude for ‘true’ science. From the description, the book seems to take a rather conventional view.

Aug 5, 2004 - 11:25 am 10. jerry:

Roger:

My only input is that the secular based ideology called Marxism…you know the doctrine that say religiion is the opiate of the masses…murdered more people then every other philosophy in history combined. When you throw in Nazism as an secular and athiest based philosophy the total gets even larger.

G.K. Chesterton said “it’s not that an athiest believes in nothing…it’s that he will believe in anything.

Faith is not soley the province of religion. An athiest has as much faith that there is no god as believer has in his existance.

Aug 5, 2004 - 11:33 am 11. Stephen_M:

Jerry, I quote Einstein: “From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist…. I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our being.”

Aug 5, 2004 - 12:06 pm 12. JeremyR:

I think in principle, he might be right, but generally speaking, without faith, people tend towards nihilism.

If God doesn’t exist, then everything is permitted.

OTOH, part of the trouble with atheists (and I speak as a former one) is they tend to be very very annoying, and just as much true believers as the most religious of people, they just believe in nothing.

Aug 5, 2004 - 1:26 pm 13. J_Crater:

It is not a war between reason and religion, but rather a conflict between tolerance and acceptance.

Aug 5, 2004 - 1:27 pm 14. wxjames:

It may be more than a choice between reason and faith. It would be almost impossible for a young man to know this but there is a third possibility. I believe organized religion missed the boat here. It’s possible that Jesus used light energy for healing. He may have taught it and attempted to spread the word. Surely such a thing fails the reason test. Also, because he was dealing with the paradigm of the time, Jesus failed to pass his art on to a single disciple. Instead, and because of his tragic death, they focused on the establishment. Instead of giving to Ceaser that which is Ceaser’s, they gave to the Vatican that which is Caeser’s. Today, however others have broken through and are now exploring the energy healing and a variety of applications. Is the focus of energy the path to heaven ? Is this God ? Does it come from God ? Or is God and heaven a part of the old paradigm ? One thing is for sure, that there’s more out there than reason get define.

Aug 5, 2004 - 1:27 pm 15. wxjames:

That should be There’s more out there than reason can define.

Aug 5, 2004 - 1:48 pm 16. Knucklehead:

Matthew Cromer,

AMEN! I’ll take a thoughtful religious neighbor over a raving moonbat any day of the week (and twice on Sunday ’cause they ain’t cranking up their vile lawnmowers at 8AM ;>)

Aug 5, 2004 - 1:55 pm 17. richard mcenroe:

I thought Marxism was a religion? After all, it’s a collection of arbitrary beliefs and unprovable tenets that requires a miraculous change in human nature to work…

Aug 5, 2004 - 2:32 pm 18. richard mcenroe:

Jeremy ó Atheism is as strongly dogmatic as any other fundamentalist religious position that requires absolute certainty in the face of a lack of absolute evidence…

Aug 5, 2004 - 2:49 pm 19. richard mcenroe:

Lola ñ A good argument for faith is that it gives you a reason to believe Stalin is facing the consequences of his actions…

Aug 5, 2004 - 3:07 pm 20. Bruce Cleaver:

Historian John Bury once wrote, “The idea of Progress contains its own refutation.” He was a Marxist, surprisingly. Once you jettison the idea of absolutes, the idea that Progress is the best idea is self-refuting.

Aug 5, 2004 - 3:13 pm 21. Ben:

I have been thinking about similar issues lately. One idea I have been mulling over is the question of whether there is something inherent in humanity that makes us want to believe in something bigger than ourselves. Every society since the beginning of time that I am aware of has followed a religion (loosely defined) of some sort, from Christianity to Communism to Ancestor Worship. (BTW, Atheism is as much a matter of faith as Theism).

IMHO, there are really two dangers centering around these ideas: (1) A society whose religion rejects basic moral and ethical pricniples (e.g., Nazism, Soviet Communism); and (2) A society that does not allow its faith to adapt in response to scientific discovery (e.g., today’s fundamentalist Muslims). I think that a Reformation would do the Muslims a world of good. By and large, Christianity has been able to adapt to modernity because of its own Reformation. That, I believe, is why you don’t see today’s Christian Fundamentalists slaughterning the un-converted.

Aug 5, 2004 - 3:22 pm 22. richard mcenroe:

Bruce Cleaver ó How so, unless you are in a situation you are certain cannot be improved upon? Certainly Marxism never replaced it with anything else that proved able to motivate the masses. When Communism mets its great test in WWII, Stalin was forced to fall back on the same calls to defend the Rodina, not the Party, that the Russians had been rising to since the days of Alexandr Nevsky…

Aug 5, 2004 - 3:25 pm 23. Pixy Misa:

I see people trotting out the usual misunderstandings about atheism.

There are two main forms of atheism.

The first is a belief that there are no gods. This is sometimes called “strong atheism”. This can be described as a religious belief, albeit a negative one. It’s certainly not a religion.

The second form, sometimes called “weak atheism”, is simply a lack of belief in the existence of gods. This is not a matter of faith, nor a religious belief; it’s the absence of those. In scientific terms, it is the Null Hypothesis; lacking evidence, we continue to observe.

Communism promoted atheism not out of any rational agenda but because Communism was – and is – a belief system that can tolerate no competition. The horrors arising from Communism relate not at all to its lack of belief in gods, but to its implacable belief in its own principles in the face of overwhelming evidence that they were false.

Aug 5, 2004 - 5:45 pm 24. Catherine:

Well I for one don’t see exactly how a graduate student in neuroscience who “draws on new evidence from neuroscience and insights from philosophy to explore spirituality as a biological, brain-based need” can argue we should get rid of religion, or even that it would be possible to get rid of religion if we wanted to, which I, for one, do not.

I, for one, am trying to be more religious, not less. I wish Mr. Harris would do the same.

If spirituality is a biological, brain-based need, then it’s a biological, brain-based need. It’s not going away just because a contemporary neuroscientist or two disapproves; it’s built-in to the species.

Just like, for instance, being gay! Now there’s a biological, brain-based need I’m guessing Mr. Harris won’t be recommending for extinction any time soon.

The only way you get rid of biological, brain-based needs is to do zillions of dollars of research in search of biological, brain-based treatments and cures.

That and intensive behavioral treatment.

Since I write about the brain, and since everything I’ve seen so far tells me that in fact religion is both “biological” and “brain-based,” I’ve thought about faith in these terms myself.

For quite awhile I thought of religiosity as a kind of talent, like being naturally athletic, or teaching yourself to read at age 4. Some people are better at it than others.

The Minnesota twin studies can probably be read this way. Adult identical twins who were separated at birth and raised in different homes & even different cultures, end up having the same degree of religiosity. Those studies, along with the “God part” studies, which discovered the religious part of the brain in the temporal lobes, are important evidence for the core, biological nature of religion in human nature.

A couple of years ago, though, I began to think perhaps the “God part” isn’t like a talent. Perhaps it’s more like a sense.

Like seeing or hearing.

I began to wonder about this because in fact the experience of religion is similar to perception in that religious people feel the presence of God. They perceive God; they don’t just believe in God. That is to say, believing in God isn’t like believing in ghosts or aliens, at least I don’t think it is. (I should probably talk to some folks who believe in ghosts and aliens before I make broad generalizations about their beliefs.) People who believe in God “see” God.

That’s why in C.S. Lewis’s CHRONICLES OF NARNIA only the children can hear the animals talking, the children and one or two good-hearted adults. The mean uncle (he was an uncle, right?) doesn’t hear the words. He thinks the animals are just animals.

None so blind as those who will not see.

Once I began to think about the “God part” as a sense I realized that to the extent that this is so, it has certain implications.

Namely, we have the sense of vision because there are things in the world to see; we have the sense of hearing because there are things in the world to hear. Each of the five senses exists because it allows us to apprehend actual, existing elements of the universe.

Do we have the sense of God because there is a God to sense?

I won’t be answering that question any time soon, and neither will Sam Harris.

While we’re all busy not answering that question, I hope Sam Harris will find time to read a little history, for reasons Matthew Cromer and Kevin P have spelled out. Religion being brain-based and biological and all, there’s no getting away from it. You can get rid of Methodists and ban Catholics, you’re still going to have religion. (The Church of the Left, for one.) There’s terrific research (no link, sorry) implying that here in the U.S., as traditional religious belief fades, nontraditional belief gains. Large numbers of Americans now believe in reincarnation, for instance, and of course over on ANIMAL PLANET we have “Pet Psychic” and its many fans. Just to name the first two examples that spring to mind. I realize I’m conflating religion and superstition, which is wrong, but for a number of reasons I think the point still holds.

So a couple of courses in Western Civ wouldn’t hurt Mr. Harris, along with a course or two in moral philosophy.

For instance, this:

Richard Rorty, the leading postmodernist liberal theorist, candidly admits that at the end of the day liberalism is a matter of faith, not reason. Indeed, he goes further than this: He concedes that liberalism, once so jealous of its autonomy from Biblical faith, is in fact parasitc upon it. In his essay ‘Postmodern Bourgeois Liberalism,’ he describes secularist liberals like himself as ‘freeloading atheists.’ They continue to rely on the Judeo-Christian legacy of concern with human dignity despite their rejection of the revealed truth that alone could support this concern.

This twofold admission–that liberalism is merely a faith that remains dependent on an earlier faith, the authority of which it has rejected–should not, claims Rorty, dismay liberals in the least.

Or, heck, maybe he could stick closer to home and just read some evolutionary biology:

Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society by David Sloan Wilson

. . . religious belief and other symbolic systems are closely connected to reality in that they are a powerful force in motivating adaptive behaviors. . . . [Wilson] also includes a chapter considering forgiveness from an evolutionary perspective, and concludes by discussing how all social organizations, including science, could benefit by including elements of religion.

I’m not going to be reading Sam Harris’s book. Life is too short, and I still haven’t gotten around to Ramachandran’s Phantoms in the Brain which, I believe, introduced the research on the God Part to the public.

But I am going to find time for this one, because the reviews sound lovely:

The Probability of God: A Simple Calculation That Proves the Ultimate Truth by Stephen D. Unwin

books & links:

‘God spot’ is found in brain

More Believe In God Than Heaven

The Unraveling of Christianity in America

More Believe In God Than Heaven By Dana Blanton

Tuesday, October 14, 2003 FOX News

Aug 5, 2004 - 7:11 pm 25. chuck:

Some more thought on religion. I’m fascinated by its association with the rise of modern man: religious symbols and drawings, probably music and dance. Then there is Greek drama. I am not very knowledgeable about all these things, but it does seem to me that religion is closely related to what we are as human beings. This is more in the sense of a universal capacity rather than belief in any particular religion. Just as most folks distinquish between right and wrong, even though the concrete details of which is which may differ between people and cultures.

Aug 5, 2004 - 8:04 pm 26. Ben:

Pixy –

Atheism is a belief system. Your dichotomy between “strong” and “weak” atheism does not go to the question of whether or not atheism is a belief; it merely expresses how strongly that belief is held. Simply saying that atheism is not a belief but the absence of a belief is a cop out. The absence of belief is, in itself, a belief.

Based on the factual information presently available, it is impossible to verify factually whether there is or is not a god. Therefore, the question of whether there is a god can only be resolved by belief. Saying “I don’t believe in God because it’s not proven that He exists” is asking for proof where it is not possible for proof to exist.

A second problem is the question of which side bears the burden of proof. Must atheists prove that God does not exist or must theists prove that God exists? The answer is not obvious because there is sufficient circumstantial evidence in support of the existence of God to support the proposition that belief in God is rational. If all beliefs were held to the standard of proof that atheists claim to require is necessary to prove the existence of God, it would be literally impossible to hold almost any belief at all (see, e.g., Descartes). After all, I have no “proof” that you exist, and vice versa. For all either one of us “knows” for sure, the rest of the world could be a figment of our imaginations.

In order to lead our daily lives, it is necessary that we have “faith” in a lot of things. I can’t prove that anyone else exists, but if I take the position that the proposition is not proven and therefore I should believe nobody else exists as a default position, I might as well just go to bed tonight and stay there until it is proven that the rest of the world is something other than a figment of my imagination. This is, of course, absurd. Therefore, I proceed on faith.

Aug 5, 2004 - 8:39 pm 27. Pixy Misa:

Ben:

Atheism is a belief system.

This is only true in the sense that the empty set is still a set. If you choose to define the term “belief system” so that the lack of belief is still a “belief system”, then you can do so, but all you are doing is playing with words.

Your dichotomy between “strong” and “weak” atheism does not go to the question of whether or not atheism is a belief; it merely expresses how strongly that belief is held.

Completely false.

There is a fundamental distinction between the two, and nothing you say can blur or override that distinction.

Strong atheism is a belief.

Weak atheism is not.

Simply saying that atheism is not a belief but the absence of a belief is a cop out. The absence of belief is, in itself, a belief.

No it isn’t. That is complete nonsense. That’s just the same as saying the absence of apples is in itself apples.

Aug 5, 2004 - 9:31 pm 28. Catherine:

one more thing

from last week’s ECONOMIST:

As for religion, it is a powerful force for generosity. Most religions encourage giving, often setting a benchmark (10% is the goal of Christians, Jews and Sikhs alike). For Muslims, the Zakat or charity tax is the fourth pillar of Islam, as important as prayer, fasting or pilgrimage.

America’s religious enthusiasm partly explains its relative generosity. Quite a lot of research confirms that religious folk are more generous overall than non-believers. Indeed, COPPS figures suggest that people who profess a religion are more likely to make a gift and to make a larger gift than people who say they have no religion. The difference is particularly striking for Jews. Intriguingly, other work suggests that Jews whose faith fades give less than those who remain believers.

Doing well and doing good

Aug 6, 2004 - 4:03 am 29. Stan:

I think Pixy is confusing atheist (”weak”) and agnostic.

The “apples” analogy is pure silliness. The God / No God parameters involve an intangible logical thought – defined as either belief or its negation unbelief – so it is self-referencing by definition in a way that the existence of tangible apples are not. The third way of agnosticism refuses to answer the question of God’s existence by asserting that it is not subject to empirical proof (not “knowable” as they define “knowledge”)and they are not going to discuss it beyond what is “knowable”.

Atheists assert (believe) that God does not exist either fervently (”strong”) or tepidly (”weak”).

Aug 6, 2004 - 11:11 am 30. Joe Dees:

For those who have noticed a religiosity in Communism, here is a short paper I wrote on the subject.

The Human Dialectic of Absolute Premises: Christianity and Marxism

By Joe E. Dees

I. The Fundamental Contention

In the comparative analysis of two systems of belief, one immediately encounters problems as to the validity of one?s methodology. If the belief systems in question are not amenable to correlation, one has three choices: (1) to bias the analysis by assuming one belief system?s methodology over the other?s, (2) to render the analysis non-relational by choosing a methodology foreign to both, and (3) to beg the question by synthesizing the methodologies of the two systems prior to the comparative analysis.

Since a comparative analysis cannot take place without two distinct belief systems to compare, the question arises whether or not such an inquiry is possible. Certain pairs of systems, however, are indeed correlative and at the same time distinct. This occurs when two belief systems directly oppose one another; they are then relational as correlative opposites, and mutually contradict in their conclusions as a result of the operation of a single logic upon mutually exclusive premises. Two belief systems bearing this relationship may be viewed as thesis and antithesis and compared dialectically.

Such is the relationship between Christianity and Marxism. One asserts primordial Mind as the ground of being for the presence of matter, while the other asserts primordial Matter as the ground of becoming for emerging mind. One sees history as the temporal manifestation of transcendent intention, while the other sees it as the temporal evolution of immanent action. Both are absolutist, both are deterministic, and both accept deductive logic as valid and the principle of noncontradiction as sound.

If these are indeed systems of belief, the basic premise of each must lie outside the purview of knowledge. This means that neither premise may be undeniably demonstrable by example, nor may either be unequivocally denied by counterexample. Furthermore, induction proceeds from empirical data to statistically probable conclusions. The presence of a single measurable and repeatable datum would, due to their mutually antithetical nature, render one of the premises untrue while placing the other within the realm of probability, which is not belief, but statistical knowledge. Our two systems thus must be grounded upon absolute and not relative premises. This entails that neither premise may be statistically probable, in other words, neither may be either empirically verifiable or empirically falsifiable. This of course means that neither system may proceed from induction.

This is true of Christianity and Marxism. Our sciences, which proceed by induction according to the Verification Principle, are sciences of matter and energy. The sine qua non (condition in the absence of which they would not be what they are) of matter and energy is that they be sensorily perceivable phenomena. These immanent objects of perception are then measured by relating our perceptions of them to our perceptions of intersubjectively agreed-upon standards of measurement which are themselves physical. These quantified perceptions must then be amenable to repetition at will by means of any duplication of the conditions under which they appear. This method cannot be used to either verify or falsify the presence or absence of transcendent nonphysical Mind. Our sensuous perceptions, our technological augmentation of them, our devices of measurement, our method of repetition are all immanent and physical; they are categorically incapable of this task. We cannot prove God is anywhere, and neither can we prove that there is anywhere God is not. Induction is useless with respect to either Christianity of Marxism; the basic premise must be believed in, rather than known, and in either case, conclusions must follow by means of deduction from the basic premise, not induction from empirically obtained data. This explains why both belief systems accept the principle of noncontradiction as apodictically (self-evidently) true.

[/b]They both proceed by means of deduction from assumed a priori postulates.[/b]

What is this concept of Being, however, about the existence of which these two dogmas incessantly contendí It is a concept of absolute Wisdom, Justice, Goodness, Beauty, Power and Unity existing both a priori to and simultaneous with the temporal universe. It is the concept of a universal Creator, Circumscriber and Subsumer who provides source, impetus and goal for every act, passion and inspiration, and in whom is found the purified synthesis of all that is, was and will be, the common essence of apparent multiplicity in space and time.

Capitalize any human virtue and it becomes an attribute of God, the Perfect Mind.

Ludwig Feuerbachís analysis of humanityís relationship to this concept proceeds according to the Hegelian dialectic. Declaring religion to be anthropology and its evolution to be the history of humankind, he states clearly and the three movements of this dialectic and what is being moved. They are:

(1) The animal, becoming human by becoming aware of the humanity emerging within it (which is part of it and yet still controls it), purifies and projects this awareness into an absolute and transcendent realm; emerging mind becomes crystallized in Mind, an Other Mind. This objectification of self as Other, Feuerbach contends, is necessary for the humanization of humanity in abstract terms.

(2) Now, however, nothing is left to the human. It has all been invested in the Other. Humanity finds that it has bankrupted itself by giving the Other all that was recognizable in it as more-than-animal. Humanity finds itself an object, having given its subjecthood away.

(3) Humanity now ìreallyî emerges, or rather finally merges with itself. Seeing that it has alienated itself from its own soul, which it has called God, Humanity shreds the veil of self-delusion and reclaims its own heart from the transcendent altar-prison that it had itself built. This synthesis of animal and God becomes the new thesis, the thesis of the human.

However, the movements of the human dialectic are not at an end, Feuerbach notwithstanding. The God of Absolute and Perfect Mind has been disputed, true, and by a premise both as basic and as absolute. ìGod isî found itself facing ìGod is notî. But then, what is to be held holy? We must have some common unity or we must call ourselves nothing, and, for the great majority of us, that is existentially unbearable. But an understanding once achieved could not in good faith be forgotten, and once our eyes had been opened, we could not close them again. Personhood had been fragmented non-relational persons; what God could reclaim the altar, to replace the God whose throne humanity had usurped, the God whom humanity had conquered, and therefore lost?

The new God-concept was provided by Karl Marx, and was both as absolute as the old God-concept and antithetical to it. In fact, it was not addressed by the name God but by the name Reality. The geist of Apollo was met by the geist of Dionysius. Jesus? God was a God of Mind; Marxís God was a God of Matter. Jesus? God inhabited our souls; Marxís God constituted our bodies. The invisible God promising the invisible Heavens was faced with the visible God promising the visible Earth. Dialectical idealism was opposed by dialectical materialism, and contemplation by action. The doctrine of immanence as illusion was no longer an imperative, but an alternative; now another alternative existed; the doctrine of transcendence as illusion. The slave was to spend nights no longer in pursuit of a justification of slavery and the justification of self as slave in the higher order of things. Instead, both days and nights were to be spent correcting the injustice that forced the worker, the producer, and the priest at the altar of the Material God, into servitude for the sake of parasitic inferiors, the bourgeois masters.

Philosophyís task was finished, and now its products must be implemented. There was work to be done. The thesis, Christianity, through Aquinas, Kant, Hegel and Feuerbach, had finally spawned its antithesis, Marxism.

II. The Church as State

During the first few hundred years after the life of Jesus, the thesis of Godís presence was accepted by many. These people worshipped first in secret, and oppression by a state (the Roman state) unified these believers in martyrdom and as conspiracy of clandestine religious communion. When however, Constantine the emperor of Rome accepted Christianity and proclaimed it the official religion of the Roman Empire, a unifying structure became necessary. Since the dominant structural model present at the time was monarchy, a monarchial form was adopted.

This choice fitted in very well with the idea of a sovereign God, and allowed the bishops of each area to speak for their people. Soon the bishop of Rome was recognized as Pope, and all Christians spoke with one voice. That voice, however, was many times not what many would have chosen; many times it spoke for itself and the people of Christianity were coerced into accepting the trappings of totalitarianism as incomprehensible to them, but ordained of God as the best way. God, after all, could not be wrong; God was Perfect Mind. But none of the elaborate ritual of the Roman Catholic Church, and none of its clerical hierarchy, were outlined by Jesus. It was created by the elite, and much of it for the elite. For instance, the people of the church have no say in choosing this elite; it is chosen by itself. Popes choose cardinals; when the Pope dies the cardinals choose a new one. Election and popular vote was never even considered as far as the laity were concerned; appointment by a superior was and is the method of clerical advancement. The only election is to the highest office, by those immediately beneath, and it is for life. Diplomatic ties with other sovereignties were formed with the intention of having the sovereignty of the Church recognized by the states, so that dual sovereignty was demanded of their people; allegiance to both King and Pope, and the Pope first. Vast lands and riches, the price of heaven, were amassed.

Salvation was bought and sold for what the buyer possessed, be it wealth or widowís mite. Finally, a Pope granted himself infallibility when speaking ex cathedra, thus grounding totalitarian authority upon the declaration of the declarer.

There were difficulties encountered along the way. The Roman Empire fell. There was a great schism and the Russian and Greek churches broke away. The iron demands of conformity to the party line and subservience to the religious sovereign and his clerical nobility were refused by those who disliked what the Catholic Church had become.

Martin Luther sparked a Reformation that was actually a religious revolution; the Pope was denied sovereignty over both Protestants and Anglicans, who spurned Roman Catholicismís claim to be the temporal arm of God. Monarchy was opposed by democracy, and conformity by freedom of religious choice. Now Christianity is a faith embodied in a multiplicity of expressions and the Roman Catholic Church, while still the largest voice, is one of many which people are free to choose to or not to heed in most areas. Only in a few countries is the manner of Christian expression not a matter of personal choice. It is significant to note that such freedom has never been given, only taken. Spain and Portugal, until recently authoritarian states welded to an institutional church, are the most recent to take such freedoms for their people, but only after the people took their freedoms from the state.

III. The State as Church

Marx, like Jesus, had not specifically outlined a form for Marxism to take. He had stated the purpose of his call for revolution, true; a communist economic system maintained for the fair distribution of the products of labor (goods and services), centrally administered and collectively owned. But the structures of responsibility, decision and communication had not been patterned out or their interrelations delineated. Jesus preached mutual love between people through mediation of Mind and Marx preached mutual service between people through implementation of Matter. Jesus assumes that upon the Apocalypse, which he expected soon, governmental forms would be unnecessary, and Marx assumed that upon the advent of communism that a temporary post-revolutionary organizing authority, the dictatorship of the proletariat, would quite voluntarily ìwither awayî.

The Russian Revolution took the Marxists by surprise. Marx was dead and could not lead; Lenin took command. He possessed a faith, the shambles of a monarchial system, and many millions of religious people.

He instituted a ìdictatorship of the proletariatî modeled on the monarchial structure, abolished private property, purged the opposition, and installed himself as leader of a monarchial economic state. Successors were to be chosen by the majority vote of commissars that the previous leader appointed, and all members of the government were to be members of the one party allowed, the Communist Party. The Soviet government was built in the image of the Roman Catholic Church, and Lenin became its first Pope. The communist parties in other nations were required to accept the soviet party as absolute sovereign and not to be questioned. Things move more quickly these days, for thirty years after the Soviet republic was born Marshal Tito, the first harbinger of schism, appeared on the scene. Soon after, we had socialist as well as communist states, as we have predominately catholic and predominately protestant countries; the Socialist Reformation has taken place before our eyes, despite attempts by the Soviet Republic to repress same in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland. It is significant to note that communists may form parties within socialist countries, but until recently, when the issue was forced, not the other way around. This is a duplication of the Catholic-Protestant paradigm of one-way (or predominately one-way) discrimination.

IV. Church-State vs. People

Both of these systems of belief, as practiced by their dominant organs, are monarchies – but not genetic ones. They are ideological monarchies. Neither has much use for the criticisms of philosophy, which they both distrust because they cannot control it. Both have three dogmas that correlate nicely. They are: (1) the Statement of Faith (Catholic – God is, and subsidiary dogma; Communist – God is not, and subsidiary dogma), (2) the Personal Admonition (Catholic – love others; Communist – labor for others), and (3) the Acknowledgement of Authority (Catholic – the church/Pope is infallible; Communist – the Party/President is infallible). One joins them only by publicly endorsing their doctrines, and advances by being perceived by oneís superiors as passionately conforming to them. The laity of each lack the power to dictate the course of church-state actions; power issues from the apex – the crowned head of the controlling minority of the ideological elite.

Each is plagued with the wide propagation of a more democratic alternative (Protestantism, Socialism), which it regards as an obstreperous and irreverent stepchild, for although each wants the world to accept its views, each also desires the final disposition of them. Dissent is either treasonous (contra people) or blasphemous (contra God); one punishes it directly in this life, one indirectly through disposition of a believed-in next. To join either is to forfeit it your rights. One is world negating the other is other-than-world negating. Each asserts that the only way to be truly human is to embrace its faith. Both have collectively deterministic views of history; one is determined by Mind (what happens is ordained of God) and the other is determined by Matter (the evolution of the distribution of material is the guiding force of history), and both culminate in utopia. Both have a person to worship and a book to read, and both have trained experts to communicate the orthodox meaning of each to the mass herds, and to denounce forbidden concepts and conceivers. The masses of each are constrained to take their words at face value, the words of ideologues commissioned to propagate the Faith.

That such similarities should manifest themselves in the relational structures between these belief systems and their respective social masses is not surprising. Correlative opposites mutually and symmetrically define from a neutral or uncommitted perspective; us-them only manifests itself after a Leap – in either direction. Marxism would have to have a governmental system of absolute authority from below to be in good faith with itself. Lacking time and a practicable paradigm from which to develop such a system, the closest available, complementary alternative was employed – a governmental system of absolute authority from above, the model of its ideological antithesis and methodological twin, Christianity. The adoption of this internal self-contradiction festered in the heart of the Soviet system, and in the end, facilitated its demise.

V. The Social Subsumption

Feuerbachís work was brilliant and insightful, and at first one might suspect that Marx had betrayed him by placing the God of Matter upon the throne from which Feuerbach had only recently removed the God of Mind. Actually, Feuerbach had only dealt with one side of the question, and Marx embarked upon the first movement of the other side when he crystallized Matter into an icon. That Apollo had been given away, missed, and reclaimed by humanity we an incomplete resolution of the situation; the same dialectic had to be traversed in Dionysian terms. Chaos and Order are co-primordial, and neither can be apprehended absolutely by humankind, only believed in (a major problem in computer science is the inability to construct a truly random number generator; any pattern – including the Kantian categories of space, time and causality – necessarily begets pattern). At the same instant that humanity became aware of mind, that is, when humanity began to become human, humanity also became aware of body – a body that Marx had enshrined and thus stolen from them. The thesis of Jesus, the crystallizer of Mind, had been dialectically resolved by Feuerbach; who would resolve the Marxian thesis.

It has been done, by Friedrich Nietszche. The majority of his work concerns how humanity had divorced itself from its body. Nietszche missed this body, and reclaimed it in his monumental work THE WILL TO POWER. Nietszche did not write as Feuerbach did; he wrote not with the Apollonian clarity of the dialectic, but with the Dionysian passion of the hammer.

Feuerbach and Nietszche, the humanizers of Jesusí God of Mind and Marxís God of Matter, the Promethean reclaimers of Order and Chaos, formulated the restated thesis and antithesis of ìGod isî and ìGod is notî, which really said ìMindgod is and Mattergod is notî and ìMattergod is and Mindgod is notî. Their statements are, respectively, ìMindgod is humanî and ìMattergod is humanî. Now these must be combined into the next synthesis, the synthesis not yet widely spoken but of which the world is already implicitly aware. It is this: Mindgod and Mattergod are the thesis and antithesis which are synthesized in humanity.

This can be intuited even in Aristotles hylomorphic composition of the world, although he did not apply it to humanity. For Aristotle, things are contingent phenomenal syntheses of noumenal absolutes. So are humans, but incredibly enriched! Human contingency is the dynamic and never-completed synthesis of opposing absolutes, which itself can only apprehend in contingent terms, but in two opposing yet complementary directions. There are in constant interplay with each other and their names are intuitive right-brain synthesis into unity (from Matter to Mind) and intellectual left-brain analysis into multiplicity (from Mind to Matter). In these two modes of self-consciousness, which are synthesis reflecting upon analysis (which assumes the synthetic whole in order to analyze) and analysis reflecting upon synthesis (which assumes the analytic parts in order to synthesize), the former views their human conjunction as Mind ruling Matter and the latter views it as Matter ruling Mind. Each, like Jesus and Marx, Feuerbach and Nietszche, is partly right and partly wrong, for each focused on a single aspect of the human coin. Neither rules and both do, each by consent of the other. This is the paradox of contingency, which frees history from the determinism of either side alone while still allowing for the interplay of trends, and humanity from the imperative to follow one side of existence exclusively, while still leaving humanity its humanness. The bare existence or lack of same of either absolute is nonrelational to humankind, which is free for each of its individual members to subjectively and intersubjectively experience the plenitude of contingent synthetic/analytic existence.

Aug 6, 2004 - 11:27 pm

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