Christianity as a Religious Ideology

Historical Christianity relies on some fairly toxic misinterpretations of Jesus’ message. Michael Hudson’s Forgive them their debts describes how Jesus was on the side of the debtors, yet you’ll hear the hegemony invoked for homophobia and the anti-abortion wedge issues, never for debt jubilees or usury prohibition.

Even that admonition that “no one comes to the Father except through me” is not referring to the standard skin-bag ego. “As ye have done unto even the least of these, ye have done it to me” doesn’t describe the standard ego at all, and the hegemonic insistence on acknowledging Jesus as the only way to salvation is at least undercut by the admonition that treating others well is the path to salvation.

That’s an interesting take, Ian. I don’t disagree with any of it, though my takeaway may be slightly different.

Another takeaway is that Christianity is a paternalistic, authoritarian religion. The Christian god is a father figure, and he tells you what to do, and if someone disobeys the father figure then punishment is justified. This has huge political and cultural implications. Christian fundamentalist families also tend to be paternalistic and authoritarian. There’s nothing democratic about that.

Another takeaway is that Christianity, particularly Protestantism, believes in “just desserts.” That people get what they deserve. If someone is wealthy and enjoys a good life, it must be because God is believes he is a good person who deserves to be rewarded. But if someone is poor and miserable, it must be because God believes that person has sinned and deserves to be punished, and who are we to interfere with God’s plan? This worldview syncs nicely with laissez faire capitalism and some say that Protestantism made capitalism possible.

Of course one can cherry pick the Bible to support many different philosophies.

In the late 1970s and the 1980s, after decades in which strongly evangelical Christians had shunned politics, the so-called Moral Majority with Falwell, Pat Robertson, et al. got a lot of traction. I believed then and still do that it was a reaction against elite use of knowledge to benefit themselves at the expense of ordinary people. On things like placement of a highway or garbage dump, kinds of zoning laws, prerequisites for receiving benefits and the like, any public meeting would include presentations by engineers, economists, lawyers, whoever was relevant to the subject, pretty much telling people that they were ignorant and stupid, and practically doing a Radio City Music Hall Rockettes high-kicking dance routine singing that the elites’ preferred action was the one that science or economics or whatever indicated. You know, like more recently, all the elite economists intoned that we had to bail out the banks and foreclose on the homeowners.

When you’re not a scientist or engineer or economist, you don’t have the words or the experience in professional argument to refute their claims. But the one thing you can say that they can’t refute is, “God told me . . . .” Rather than interpreting this to mean that people didn’t want a highway run through their neighborhood and the engineering should support that goal, the elites preened themselves on their being rational and depending on science in contrast to most people who are anti-intellectual and stupid. And so the elite manipulation of technical solutions for their own benefit continues.

As Marx said, religion is the opium of the people. We need a society and decision making processes that don’t hurt so bad that you can only grab for the needle.

Even that admonition that “no one comes to the Father except through me” is not referring to the standard skin-bag ego. “As ye have done unto even the least of these, ye have done it to me” doesn’t describe the standard ego at all, and the hegemonic insistence on acknowledging Jesus as the only way to salvation is at least undercut by the admonition that treating others well is the path to salvation.

The two are not at odds, depending on one’s interpretation. My interpretation is, when Jesus says “no one comes to the Father except through me,” we must keep in mind that Jesus, albeit he is many things including the trinity per certain interpretations, is the Word versus the person. Jesus’ Word is the path. If everyone adhered to a life predicated on the Word, a heaven on earth would manifest. Humanity would be transformed. The world as we knew it would be transformed.

The psychopaths , however, could not and would not let this be so they usurped the budding movement and reshaoed it in their barbaric image. The Word was discarded and replaced with Jesus the person. Jesus the rock star. Jesus as icon. The marginalized Word includes “as ye have done unto even the least of these, ye have done it to me.” The Word is dead. Or better yet, it now belongs to Bill Gates and he charges you for it.

https://www.versionmuseum.com/images/applications/microsoft-word/microsoft-word%5E2015%5Ems-word-logo-new.png

What was it Jesus said about puffed-up pontificating pontificaters puffed-up-edly pontificating on street corners? Oh, right, put it in the closet. Matthew 6:5-6:

When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners so that others may see them. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go to your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you.

That’s pretty subtle, but not that subtle. Call it trolling (lol), but seriously, boiled down to ones and zeros balls on a brass monkey Jesus was in on the con: keep it to yourself, don’t attract attention, don’t make a damned fool of yourself. Put it in the closet. Of course Jesus – of whom there is absolutely no historical evidence which is odd in that the Romans were the most meticulous record-keepers of the time, a time which a Jewish revolt was prophesying the return of a king to rival Rome – Jesus, Mary and Joseph have been in numerous works purported to be Essenes, a communal sect of Jewish mystics, guardians of older knowledge who selectively shared that knowledge through secret societies, parables and allegory. No simpler allegory, really, than don’t make a damned fool of yourself. Put it in the closet.

Jihad is jihad. They all bow down to the same damned dog.

I wasn’t there when people were making up this stuff — Christianity qua ideology, that is. OK, so some very late variations are sort of my contemporaries — hypocritical teevee evangelists preaching a gospel of material rewards for believers, etc. But, the very many, many layers of christian theologies and ideologies down thru the ages — not so much.
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The idea of hegemonic ideologies is kind of interesting, but hegemonic is never exactly monopoly and I am unclear in my own mind about the extent to which hegemony implies an absolutism, or alternatively, confusion and hypocrisy as social lubricants. At important points in history, when the pretension to monopoly was challenged in the West, heresy was usually defined in relation to seemingly airy, other-worldly doctrines, like the Trinity, Virgin birth, transsubstantiation, and so on. There always seemed to be other co-existing complementary and competing ideologies; what got branded as heresy must have been a strategic choice by some group in authority, but those details are lost to me.
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I would not attribute the brutality of the Crusades to Christian theology, at least not without noting the long struggle of the Church to tame feudalism and the bandits that feudalism installed as a ruling class. The Crusades look to me as being a gambit for getting a bandit caste to focus their aggression outward and over there, out of town. The ideology of the feudal ruling class was chivalry; in relation to chivalry, Christianity was decorative: noble knights pursing the holy grail, et cetera — hardly core doctrines of the Church Fathers.
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And, as feudalism exploded from 11th century Anjou and Normandy into what eventually became the European conquest of the entire world, I think Christianity was often only along for the ride, existing in symbiosis with the would-be aristocrats and pirates to be sure, just as the merchant classes also were along for a potentially very profitable ride. But, I think you miss what is driving the dynamics if your analytics cannot admit the conflicts embedded in very different motivations and perspectives. Priests and monks pleading for the protection of the natives isn’t anomaly. And, as for the merchants, what is liberalism if not the bourgeois rebellion against the privilege and reactionary traditionalism of an hereditary aristocracy?
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In 17th century Britain, while the Thirty Year’s War raged thru Germany and after, as Louis XIV modernized the state system under the umbrella of monarchical absolutism, the British Isles and the Netherlands became incubators for modernity. The British Civil Wars at mid-century produced modern political ideologies, including a codification of Presbyterianism as an alternative to established church Protestantism and a slowly emerging consensus in favor of at least limited toleration. What pissed off Jenny Geddes so much that she threw her stool at the head of the minister reading from the Book of Common Prayer in St. Giles’ ? Not exactly sure how that became the Pearl Harbor moment for the British in their struggle with the Stuarts and Absolute Monarchy, but there it is.
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The Enlightenment that swept thru western Europe at the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century, installing secular humanism as an hegemonic ideology, criticized Catholicism mercilessly, making the pre-dominant form of Christianity reinvent itself, however reluctantly. That re-invention is still going on. (Just watched The Two Popes on Netflix — great propaganda for an institution conspicuously older than the Christianity it professes!)
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Go into a Catholic Church and do the Stations of the Cross and just think about how weirdly strange is the glorification of suffering. This is so NOT

We are innately bad, and we must be reformed by good education, including punishment. “Spare the rod, spoil the child.”

This is something much deeper, much stranger. I struggle to even imagine the horrible world in which the Stations of the Cross make moral sense; this is a doctrine that upends the moral ordering that rationalized a humiliating oppression of a massive scale and scope.

bruce wilder,

This is something much deeper, much stranger. I struggle to even imagine the horrible world in which the Stations of the Cross make moral sense; this is a doctrine that upends the moral ordering that rationalized a humiliating oppression of a massive scale and scope.

I’m not sure I understand the second part – are you saying the Stations of the Cross rationalized humiliating oppression? Or that the moral ordering it upended did?

In any case, that is the most powerful symbol in human history, is it not? God descended to earth, crucified. I think you have it slightly wrong though: it is not the suffering that is glorified, but Christ, who chose that path of his own will and ended in conquering death itself. (Although I’m guessing you disbelieve the resurrection, which is the main problem, the veil over your eyes.) Have you heard the Passion of St. John? That is the best exposition that I know of, of the Passion drama. “Oh great love, love without measure, that brought you to this martyr’s path. I lived in the world with pleasure and joy, and you must suffer.”

Christ’s life is felt with almost the same force in our civilization 2,000 years later. Look at the OP, and the all of the comments above bruce wilder’s — it’s fascinating and sad to me to watch secular materialists try to get out from the long shadow, and they just can’t do it. They are so desperate to redefine Christ in their own image, in material terms, but they just can’t do it, not even close.

Blizzard:

You guys are aware that the Crusades started after hundreds of years of Islamic invasions of Europe, where they established themselves throughout Spain and into France from the west, southern Italy via the Mediterranean, and Poland from the east? The Crusades started when Europe was under serious threat of being totally conquered by these Islamic invaders.

Your history if flawed. Seriously.

“Islamic Invasions of Europe”– culminated in the Battle of Tours, 732.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tours

Mind you, we’re not talking modern warfare. In reality, Tours was an isolated battle and the defeat of the Arab forces did no way preclude further incursions (a comparison with the Roman defeat at Teutonburg Forest in 9 AD is apt). It’s not clear how much Europe was “saved” from Islam in 732, 1683 (Battle of Vienna) or any other time.

My favorite anthropologist, Marvin Harris, observed that Islam is the only religion with a geographic boundary–it has always failed to expand into regions where pig farming was ecologically favored. Even when the Turks controlled the Balkans, Islam only made inroads into the deforested regions (i.e, unfavorable to raising pigs) and while the forested areas (favoring raising pigs) remained stoutly Christian.

So if you really want to keep those dastardly Muslim infidels at bay, Blizz, I suggest merely growing trees does the trick.

Now to the Crusades:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusades

Note– the first was 1096, some 364 years later, and they continued on-and-off until 1291. Europe proper was not being threatened by Islam, but Byzantium (the Eastern Roman Empire) was being threatened by the Turks. The only offensive being undertaken by anyone regarding Europe was the reconquest of Spain, where Christians were on the offensive.

The Crusades had nothing to do with any defense of Christandom. Bruce I think got a lot right was in that it was to focus the looting and destruction of the European nobility, with their favorite pastime–warring against each other and the resulting suffering inflicted on everyone else in the meantime–outward. Although there were also ‘internal crusades’ that were directed against Christian heretics that did their own fair share of killing and destruction.

While no religion has hands without stains, I prefer the Chinese non-exclusionary approach. Ian is correct that while Confucianism was often the official ideology of Chinese dynasties, it was merely the decor. Their actual practice was Legalism, which strikes me as not too far removed from Stalinism or Mao. Buddhism and Confucianism are more really more philosophical and ethical systems (though Buddhism inherited reincarnation from Hinduism) that were later intertwined and intermixed with pre-existing folk religions; just step into a temple in Asia and you’ll see plenty of things not strictly Buddhist at all (just like we have our Easter Bunny, our Christmas trees, and our devil with the forked tail and pitchfork which were all ‘steals’ from pre-Christian religions).

However, I do note that despite Chinese rulers being absolutely gawd-awful to their own people, they did not feel compelled, like their Christian and Muslim counterparts, to go forth and conquer the whole world. I think the belief that “our way is best and everyone else should be forced to copy it” does come from Abrahamic religion.

Blizzzzzard! You still haven’t answered my question, after all these years: is it your contention the grieving parents, first responders, and community and the dead teachers and children at Sandy Hook are crisis actors, and those dead teachers and children are not dead?

My reading of the Bible and Roman and Greek mythology and Egyptian beliefs lead me to think that the eastern Mediterranean was a pretty hostile place. You could die of mysterious disease (pretty much all disease was mysterious), wild animal attacks, neighboring enemies. Why? The people seem to have decided that it was all because there were gods who were permanently pissed off, who needed to be placated with sacrifices. You demonstrated your respect and obedience to a god by the value of the sacrifice. So you get perfect white bulls or sheep, or if the goddess is really mad at you, your daughter Iphigenia and kill them for the offended deity. Do it right and the gods will let you sail off to Troy. In the Abrahamic founding stories, Abraham demonstrates his obedience to God by being willing to sacrifice his son Isaac. The point of the sacrifice and the suffering is both to indicate respect for the god, especially in circumstances where you have failed to show adequate respect.

The Torah is full of instructions on what you have to sacrifice for what — heave offerings and wave offerings and burnt offerings. And it imports the notion of a scapegoat to take off the sin of what you didn’t sacrifice enough for. That’s the tradition out of which Christianity comes. It’s a movement from the gods as part of an animistic world (Horus, Zeus as a swan or bull or other incarnation, Mithras) to a totally human and abstract ideology. It also emphasizes human control, as God will punish you for sin, not just for getting caught between two gods’ druthers.

Once Christianity had become the Roman state religion, it was set with the founding story. There has been enormous redefinition, of course. Jews have successfully transitioned from Temple Judaism, which focused on sacrifice, to rabbinical Judaism which focuses on moral and ethical philosophy. That’s a route not open to Christianity, which is based on the sacrifice. I don’t have that much problem with the notion of sacrifice for a greater cause; I have more problem with vicarious justification.

For further elaboration, I recommend reading this book:

“Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow” by Yuval Noah Harari

https://www.amazon.com/Homo-Deus-Brief-History-Tomorrow/dp/0062464310/

Isn’t there a bit of a disconnect in juxtaposing a post on the “particularly dangerous” nature of monotheisms and their infallible gods with one on the looming spectre of mass genocide by a polytheistic faith with fallible gods against one of them?

There is some truth here but people really don’t need ideologies to do evil and in some cases Christians helped to put an end to some gruesome practices like human sacrifice by the Aztecs and others. That doesn’t mean that the excesses committed by the conquistadors and other Christians were laudable but I don’t buy into moral relativism or the noble savage myth.

I think it is similar to the way that communists historically committed many atrocities but also brought some genuine progress to peasants, workers and women. Hegemonic ideologies are a mixed bag but humans are capable of evil without ideology and often ideology just serves as a rationalization for greed or lust for power.

I would also point out that most modern Christians accept things like religious freedom and pluralism. Even among right-wing Christians you will not find many people who want to forcibly convert people and if these people exist they are marginal at best. The pro-life movement was also a liberal human rights movement, whether you agree with it or not. That explains the staying power of the movement compared to many of the more particularistic religious political movements in America like alcohol prohibition.

See: https://religionandpolitics.org/2016/05/31/when-being-pro-life-did-not-mean-being-conservative/

As I have said on this blog numerous times, universalist ideologies, while they have a dark side, are important in developing and maintaining the modern human rights order. They say that there are some moral truths that apply everywhere to all people. Now that many people no longer believe in any universal truths of any kind all we are left with is tribalism and consumer hedonism and the world is suffering for it.

Not sure how a movement supporting women not having control over their own bodies and with a curious and ahistorical definition of life counts as a “liberal human rights movement.”

@Hugh,

That is why the abortion debate is so heated, it involves two competing human rights claims. One focuses on the life of the unborn and the other on a woman’s bodily autonomy and equality. These are two competing human rights claims. I am not saying you have to agree with the perspective of pro-lifers who think they are arguing for human rights but that is the argument they make.

Daniel K. Williams, who was interviewed in the first link I posted, has written an interesting book on the history of the pro-life movement showing that it once contained many people who considered themselves to be liberals. I don’t think people on this blog will be interested in the book but I will post more articles and interviews by Williams anyway in case anyone is interested.

https://newbooksnetwork.com/daniel-k-williams-defenders-of-the-unborn-the-pro-life-movement-before-roe-v-wade-oxford-up-2016/

https://millennialjournal.com/2017/10/30/the-pro-life-movement-before-roe-and-its-lessons-for-today-an-interview-with-daniel-k-williams/

https://usreligion.blogspot.com/2016/04/6-questions-with-daniel-k-williams.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/02/daniel-williams-defenders-unborn/435369/

My ultimate point is that religion can sometimes fit with conceptions of universal human rights that we take for granted because religion often entails the existence of universal moral truths that apply to all people. That is why religious people could be found fighting against slavery and in favor of civil rights for racial minorities. Of course, others used religion to justify slavery and segregation. That is why I said that hegemonic ideologies are a mixed bag.

Yes, The Two Popes is propaganda, but it is also a handy compendium of the multiplicity of ideologies contained within the present day Roman Catholic Church, and by extension within the entire panoply of Christian and Christianist religious denominations, all partially derived from the Catholic model.

Two old men yakking for two hours amid the splendors of the Church, considering their errors and faults as well as those of the Church itself — and having very different views of what those errors might be — turns out to be an allegorical consideration of so much of what we (all) can get wrong when trying to do right. And how often desire leads us astray.

In other words, not even the Catholic Church is a unified ideology of universal application, no matter the propaganda. It’s too crusted with age and indignity for that.

The newer models are closer to the ideological compulsion, but each is mostly a socio-political unity rather than spiritual. They are eager for physical power over physical people in physical societies and to exercise physical power over those outside their direct control. In this they differ hardly at all from their Muslim counterparts called “terrorists.”

This is not what the early Christians had in mind, I think. But after Constantine, there was no going back.

Upwards of thirty-five million First Americans were put to the sword in the name of abraham’s dog in what we today think of as “America” alone, a genocide of perhaps a hundred million Humans Beings across the “western hemisphere”. Not counting Yurp, or the Levante. Someone mentioned they didn’t think it was a very pleasant place to live; it’s long been my contention these “books”, the testaments and koran, and the misappropriations plagiarized in the fabrication process of value only as documentation of one group of peoples’ – the Semites – five thousand year history of refusing to get along with each other. Bunch of god-damned animals refusing to grow the fuck up.

Neglected generally is the graven image clause of the stricture, the don’t be bowing down to anybody but me monopoly, a demonstration in and of itself of bowing down to a graven image: the arrogance that mere mortals could know the mind of god. Religion itself is the graven image.

There are obscure references in Indian history of nukes blowing entire civilizations away but, they’re obscure. We have no idea how many the ancestors of those who today believe it OK to gang-rape a four year old girl to death may have killed, whither or no their score approaches the couple of hundred million deaths both here and in all the books of abraham’s dog but we do know that a couple hundred million – call it quarter billion – have been put to the sword in the name of abraham’s dog. That’s the best score we know of, nobody tops it.

Interesting to note the Indians (India Indians) share a fixation with the Israelis, that in the deep, dark recessess of antiquity their ancestresses bred with giants, and those who fell from the sky.

Peter

Isn’t there a bit of a disconnect in juxtaposing a post on the “particularly dangerous” nature of monotheisms and their infallible gods with one on the looming spectre of mass genocide by a polytheistic faith with fallible gods against one of them?

Are you talking about Hinduism? Why are their gods fallible, for starters? Besides, I don’t think any would claim that Hinduism has had the tolerance that the other East Asian philosophies/”religions” have for each other. When it’s perfectly acceptable to be following three “religions” or more at once, when religions are not considered exclusionary, you’d think that’s a big plus insofar as civil peace.

As for monotheism versus polytheism in general, it does seem that polytheism holds sway over a culture divided in numerous political entities (say, city-state Greece) and monotheism takes over once you get the Great Wise All-Seeing All-Knowing Father Leader in charge. Ancient Egypt was at first polytheistic but went increasingly monotheistic as the power of the pharaohs grew. It was likewise inevitable that Rome too would switch from polytheism to a type of monotheism after becoming an empire (Christianity was just the lucky–and ruthless– ‘mystery religion’ to have won out. Christian emperors persecuted pagans and other mystery religions with a sustained ferocity that no pagan emperor had every displayed towards Christianity. I know this isn’t the Cecil B. DeMille version of history most learned, but it is a fact). There is something inherently totalitarian about an all-seeing all-knowing omnipresent Diety. It’s the goal of every totalitarian.

Religions are our attempt to explain the physical and human universes and our place in them. They are also about a sense of belonging and that the universe makes “sense,” that it has understandable rules.

As most religions pre-date modern science, their physical explanations can at most be taken metaphorically. It is pretty bizarre to see how various sects bend and distort science or simply dispense with it entirely to fit thousand(s) year old conceptions of the world, even as these people use without a second thought or question things like their smart phone or medicine that are the product of this science they reject.

With abortion, there is also the move to define a particular view of life backwards into history. For example, the association of coitus with pregnancy is extremely ancient, but there was no particular association with life from conception to the quickening, or perceptible movement in the uterus at about 18 weeks. The word “quickening” derives from the original meaning of quick: alive, as in the expression “the quick and the dead,” and is linguistically related to both Latin vivus and Greek bios. We also get the word “spirit” from the Latin “spiritus” or breath. This is important because while life might be perceivable at 18 weeks or so, the entrance of the soul into the body was taken to occur only at the new born’s first breath. The idea that “ensouled” life begins at conception is a relatively modern concept. Googling, I came up with the Catholic Church removed the distinction between “unensouled” and “ensouled” life only in 1869. I would assume that anti-abortion Protestant churches took this point up sometime after that.

http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/human-life-and-dignity/abortion/respect-for-unborn-human-life.cfm

At the same time, the insights of religions into human character can remain quite profound even over thousands of years. The Sermon on the Mount comes to mind, but a coherent set of principles that can actually be used to run a modern society as opposed to informing and shaping its values is just not where thousand(s) year old religions are, or where we should reasonably expect them ever to have been.

There’s something about monotheism which supercharges normal human defense mechanisms, making more of their adherents susceptible to manipulation by clever evil than other kinds of religions.

This feature would explain what appears to outsiders, to be an utter disregard for major sections of holy scripture, and us a total faith in humans ‘anointed’ by this theistic form.

So we wind up with American evangelicals trying to do their part to bring about rapturous Armageddon, while at the very same time, trying to do their part to avoid rapturous Armageddon.

I suppose the explanatory gain in moving from “human beings can be vicious” to “religions can be vicious” has to do with scale: explaining socially coordinated mass-murder, wars and so on.

In hoc signo vinces — Constantine’s motto supposedly.

If you think about religion as an attempt to improve human society morally, I think one would have to conclude that Christianity has persisted with only very limited success, by any humane standard.

Has it made human society worse? What is the counterfactual standard? If human society was not at the scale it is, I do not imagine it would need any of the world religions organizing around or alongside empires and monarchies and nation-states.

The whole “true religion” schtick — where people dispute whether this policy or that notion contradicts what Christianity (or Islam or any other religion) “really believes” kind of misses the point of how religion operates vis a vis human ambivalence and psychology.

I was raised in the Catholic Church. I could not begin to explain how the bishops of the Church rationalize their support of a murderous Argentine Junta or “forgiveness” and cover-up for a pedophile priest. I do not quite grasp how a Mother Theresa maintains her legend for saintly caring while hobnobing with Papa Doc Duvalier.

(Caesar’s conquest of Briton lowered the island’s population such that it took 1500 years for the island’s population to reach pre-Roman levels).

Say what?!?

What is the basic design flaw that allows this blatant incongruity to persist?

You think it is just one “design flaw”?

I have never felt I had an adequate understanding of what it means to say, “I believe . . .”

What is this thing we call “belief” as in “faith” or “worldview” or “ideology”?

It looks a bit like affirming a counterfactual: “believing” a proposition that does not refer to an actual fact but expresses a theory of the case. It also looks like having a favorite (fictional? fictionalized?) story, a story or argument that calls forth reinforcing emotions or soothes anxiety. ( “You sure are lucky you were not more seriously injured in that accident.” ) Or, maybe it is an expression of “meaning” without physical “function”: wishing someone well without aiding them, praying for something; rituals. Rituals seem to have moral, social significance. And, it seems to me that ritual recitation and affirmation of certain slogans or memes plays a part in organizing politically.

Ordinarily, I would think an ideology consists a kind of half-examined theory that serves to affirm the moral worth of a social class in pursuit of its material interests. Not really sure how this applies to religions, which must reconcile the place of several social classes, though there have been some suggestions in previous comments about how this works. Still, I find it hard to draw a line to the Nicene Creed. Transsubstantiation?

In comments, I often draw attention to the flood of propaganda that has accompanied the communication revolution. The term derives I think as a metaphor from the example of the Church’s efforts to propagate the faith by means of polemical argument. Propaganda is structured in the manner of hypnotic trance induction more than it is like an Euclidean proof. That propaganda works as a means to organize and motivate people may be the kind of solution to a social problem (how to coordinate and motivate) that is its own fatal flaw. It creates a means of social domination, which is necessary to scaling up society, but social domination invites predatory and parasitic behavior into the core of a larger society.

Bruce Wilder:

“Say What?

I admit I was watching a TeeVee show that mentioned this, on Roman conquests, but since you asked, I did some web searching. Estimates for pre-Roman Briton were ~ 4 million. After the Roman conquest, the estimate fell to ~ 1 – 1.5 million. The population of Britain did not reach 4 million again until the Tudor period (1600 AD) though it may have come close to that just before the Black Death struck.

A similar pattern happened in Gaul, where Caesar boasted to have killed a million Gauls and to have enslaved as many more. Here is an article I found on recent archaeology of this genocide.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279961274_Fire_and_Sword_The_archaeology_of_Caesar's_Gallic_War

As a quote from Tacitus from a Germanic chief has it “Where they (the Romans) make a desert, they call it peace”.

Eek, your comment is even worse than the post Ian. I appreciate 99% of your writing here as pithy, clear, and focused without being too general on big subjects. On Buddhism and meditation, you\’ve been really informative. But every once in a while you focus on Christianity specifically, and it\’s just a monolithic bogeyman to you.

\”Christianity\” doesn\’t \”believe\” or \”do\” anything. It\’s such a big, old box it\’s hardly useful as a subject in any sentence. Certain Christians in specific times and places (many different ones!) have done all the bad things you\’ve mentioned. Same goes or will go for Hinduism, etc., and you can blame \”Christianity\” for much of that too.

(E.g., \”Hinduism\” is a European colonial construct hitched to European (Westphalian) statist ideology within a western (\”Christian\”) and Chinese (\”Atheist\”) dominated geopolitics where \”Islam\” is everyone\’s demon and scapegoat. With the Europeans dividing up India, the middle east and central Asia as they did and then proceeding to try and re-try ethno-religiously inflected nationalism while the planet heats and loses its carrying capacity (thanks to western power sources), is it any surprise Modi or a successor of his is liable to massacre a lot of non-Hindus? But in this picture what kind of \”analysis\” ends with blaming \”Hinduism\” and/or \”Christianity?\”)

I think you sure can make a case for why and how Christianity, or certain forms of theism, or religion, in general, go bad, and even why a certain tradition or concept always carries within it the \”seed\” that will unleash evil under certain conditions. But you have not made that case.

Crusades, Inquisitions, and a sex-obsessed misogynistic patriarchy/rape culture (that lots of women keep supporting) have core pathologies common to all Bronze-age religions. it\’s not the monotheism. They were not all monotheistic, and they still are not monotheistic in the same ways. I would finger the authoritarian male-gendered deity obsessed with immortality through the propagation of his \”seed\” as a key source of the hegemonic, domination-focused ideologies that undergird all western notions of the state, authority, kingship, nations, being \”a people,\” etc. This is material that gets played up and down in different Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions. They are quite nasty when they play this stuff up and much nicer when they offer the alternatives — God being able to be wrong, change his mind, be successfully opposed by humans, carry multiple identities—including multiple genders, etc…

But those infallible, unchanging, immortal, omniscient qualities of the western monotheistic deity are mostly imported from the Greeks (Aristotle) which then gets intensified through medieval elaboration by Jewish, Muslim, and Christian scholars alike. Lots of problems come from the Greek metaphysical foundationalism of western thought. Christians (mainly Catholics) held onto it too long, but no one thinks natively like that anymore. When religious ideologues prescribe violent solutions for people who don\’t fit into their categories, they don\’t think it\’s warranted because their views are from God and therefore infallible. They usually say really honest, revealing things that come close to a version of the \”fourteen words.\” They are simply Bronze-age era bullies — little more than gorilla society with basic literacy which they use to create metaphysical rationales that normalize the absurdities and horrors they can\’t repress by simple denial.

Bruce wrote: ‘It doesn’t seem remotely plausible to me, though, that Caesar with roughly ten legions could kill a million people and enslave another million.’

It seems damned infeasible to me, too. As you also note, though,”as a general rule, war does not compete in the same league as famine and plague, numbers-wise.”

So maybe something similar to the reality behind the claim that Ten Bear made — i.e. “upwards of thirty-five million First Americans were put to the sword in the name of abraham’s dog in what we today think of as “America” alone” — applies. That is, maybe the Romans brought some pathogens along and that killed large numbers of then-existing Brits.

But I just came back from there, from a town in Cumbria in the Northern UK where a hill near its center has the remains of an 11th-century castle built on a previously-existing Roman fort. I was a schoolboy in London and have a UK passport. And I have to tell you the claim that the Romans killed that many early Brits would be news to any English person I’ve ever known

As Mark wrote, the East Coast of the US, that is the original thirteen colonies, is not devoid of Native Americans. Some have had difficulty establishing Federal recognition, but many of the tribes have been there all along and are still there. They weren’t removed or exterminated.

What a surprise when I worked in Upstate New York in the mid-Seventies to find tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy living on and off reservations of lands they’d held for centuries, perhaps much longer, something I, coming from California, knew nothing about. There are Native tribal communities all over New England, New York and many other places up and down the East Coast, some “recognized” by Federal or State government, some not, but the point is, they’re still there. Eastern Band of Cherokee resisted removal — some with the help of their would be oppressors — and their descendants live on ancestral Cherokee land to this day. We could tick off the names of numerous tribes that never left the regions of their ancestors.

Relationships between Natives and settlers weren’t/aren’t simple. The dominant culture has very little knowledge or understanding of how widespread Natives and Native culture is in this country, not much knowledge or understanding of what happened historically and what is happening now, and often not a lot of interest, either.

Even the removals and genocides which did take place weren’t usually complete. There were almost always survivors who escaped the massacres, the diseases, the forced ethnic cleansings and so on. Some of their descendants are still there.

@Che Pasa

Forgive me if I’m misreading you, but you seem to be minimizing the settlers’ treatment of native peoples. How would you react to a paragraph like the following describing German treatment of Jews in the 30s and 40s:

Even the removals and genocides which did take place weren’t usually complete. There were almost always survivors who escaped the massacres, the diseases, the forced ethnic cleansings and so on. Some of their descendants are still there.

And yet, that sentence is literally true.

Nonetheless, at least 12 states have passed laws requiring Holocaust education in the public schools, to make “Never again” sure. There are no similar laws requiring education about American treatment of Native Americans or African-Americans. The argument given is that those subjects are covered adequately in the regular American history classes. But as you note,

The dominant culture has very little knowledge or understanding of how widespread Natives and Native culture is in this country, not much knowledge or understanding of what happened historically and what is happening now, and often not a lot of interest, either.

A lot of the difference has to do with the usual national self-congratulation. We beat the Nazis and freed the concentration camps!!! Heroic us!!! Native American genocide and slavery — not so heroic, so let’s keep it as a minor or even missing element in our consciousness. What I’ve come to believe is that the emphasis on the Holocaust supports our endless aggressive wars. Hey, heroic us, there’s another Hitler of the month oppressing his people on resource-rich land, so it’s “Humanitarian bombs away!!!”

On the other hand, settler violation of indigenous rights continue unabated. The Central and South American countries are bad. There appears to be a full-on assault in Guatemala and Brazil. In our own country it’s hard to see the siting of pipelines and mining as equitable. I’d like to see a “never again” campaign waged on the history of American indigenous and forcibly imported people.

I’d like to see a “never again” campaign waged on the history of American indigenous and forcibly imported people.

That can’t and won’t happen until, like the Jews, the American Indigenous learn to become money changers. Or, in otherwords, not until the American Indigenous learn how to engage in monkey business. I guess the casinos are a start. That’s monkey business for sure. God bless this woman. Such brutal honesty.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loXwb8Zy-eg

If you judge by their deeds and not their words, there are many, many right-wing Christians in America who love guns more than they love Jesus.

@ bruce wilder

Apologies for taking so long to respond to your comment directed to me above, it’s been a very busy few days doing other less pleasant things.

Your comment opens up a slew of interesting thoughtways, as usual, but I don’t know if anybody is even looking at this thread anymore, so I don’t want to take the time here to compose a worthy response.

So, I’ll just say, for now:

I never expect to fully describe or explain or understand any complex situation based only on one factor. There are many perspectives that contain some piece of the truth, and none that contain all of it (that I have found). I like to think in terms of “plausible scenarios,” which then have to be analyzed individually and evaluated for their peculiar merits and deficiencies, and then all factors determined to have meaningful relevance need to be balanced against all others factors. Some will emerge as the most worthy to dwell upon. I suspect you do the same, based on your writings. I subscribe to much of the kind of analysis that Pirsig writes about in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, especially in having an appreciation that the real magic lies in where the plausible scenarios, i.e., the hypotheses worth exploring, come from.

I also trained early in psychology, and although I thought B.F. Skinner was limited when I first studied his methods (which I have always used for training dogs), over time I have come to understand that the power of conditioning leading to habituation is huge, and the messaging and marketing people that control everything these days, with the help of technology, all seem to understand this better than the population they seek to control with these techniques. The power of ritual seems to track with the power of habituation. Not really about rationality, necessarily. But very good for setting the framing and boundaries of thought. and therefore behavior. I am reminded that psychotics can sometimes be understood to be acting rationally once one perceives what their basic delusional belief is.

Finally, I think it is very important to appreciate the differences in perspective and, especially, in interests, between the influencers/controllers/planners committed to controlling a population, and the members of the population itself. In short, it may be advantageous for the shepherd to persuade the sheep that he is just like them, but he is not. Your mind is astute enough to follow that path, I am sure. 🙂

Your thoughtful comments are a prime factor in why I still enjoy this venue. I look forward to future interactions.

Ian, on the subject of the British Isles specifically, the DNA evidence seems to show that the genetics of people in the UK today are much the same as they were 2,000 years ago.

The isles don\’t seem to have been massively depopulated, with invaders filling the void with new DNA. The core genetics of the population have stayed the same, just seasoned with invader DNA. The Romans, Vikings, and Normans dont seem to have left much of a lineage behind at all, and the Anglo-Saxons may have left behind as much as 25% of the genetic makeup of the average Briton today. Which is a lot, but doesn\’t seem to indicate genocide.

Instead the various invaders seem to have had much more success at leaving behind deep cultural and linguistic influemces on the native population.

Britain seems to have become Anglo-Saxon mostly through the natives adopting the invaders language and culture, rather than the Anglo-Saxons killing a bunch of people and replacing them with Germanic colonists. The celtic Britons weren\’t replaced by the Anglish; instead they gradually became the Anglish.