Scientist Studies the Evolution Of Religion

Like Blanche DuBois, the Southern belle of Tennessee Williams' play "A Streetcar Named Desire," faith is beset by a world that often tramples on imagination and rewards strict rationality.

Fate led DuBois to a mental hospital, but religion has thrived for milliennia in every known culture, anthropologists say. For neo-Darwinists, looking at it from a strictly evolutionary standpoint, that poses a puzzle.

“Ever met an atheist that WASN’T a smug, condescending arrogant a-hole?” ~ MrB

bttt

Saturday, July 22, 2006
The Mythol-Gap Between Left, Right, and Wrong

I’m still thinking about the broken moral compass of the Left, and where it actually comes from. I think it’s very important to emphasize at the outset that the Left is not morally confused. Hardly. They are very sanctimonious and morally sure of themselves, as we discussed yesterday. They have a moral compass. It’s just that it points due south instead of north.

In other words, there is a deep structure of leftist morality that is the cause of moral choices made on the surface. Ironically, this deep structure is specifically Christian, even (or especially) for irreligious secular fundamentalists. It’s just that it is a twisted version of Christianity—literally a religious perversion. It is a perversion (please don’t get me wrong—I mean this literally, in the clinical and descriptive sense, not as an insult) that could only occur in a society that is thoroughly infused with Christian morality. (There is also a twisted version of Judaism that I don’t have time to get into; suffice it to say that Karl Marx was the great anti-Moses with the reverse Sinai revelation.)

If one is going to engage in comparative religion, one needs to exit history and take a martian’s-eye view of the situation. From that much wider trans-historical viewpoint, the Judeo-Christian tradition emerges not as religion, but the cure for religion—including the religion of atheism or “secularism.” Allow me to explain.

The default religion of human beings is the practice of human sacrifice. This pathological virus planted deep in the heart of the human species has been given insufficient attention by scholars. Virtually all primitive cultures and ancient civilizations engaged in it. For reasons I try to explain in my book there is something spontaneously but perversely “holy” or “sacred” in the taking of innocent human life.

Obviously, the foundation stone of Judaism is the injunction against human sacrifice, when God tells Abraham not to kill him a son out on highway 61. Superficially, Christianity may be seen as a resuscitation of the sacrificial motif, with the murder of the innocent Jesus, but in reality, this is clearly intended to convey the idea that when we murder innocence, we murder God. The crucifixion of Jesus is meant to be the last human sacrifice, with Jesus standing in for our own murdered innocence (and our own murderous selves). (I actually heard a leftist the other day on Err America argue that embryonic stem cell research is morally justified because the great lesson of Christianity is that it is good for fathers to kill their sons, and therefore, to destroy human embryos.)

Unfortunately, Islamism (if not Islam itself) clearly involves a reversion to the sacrificial impulse and a return to “mere” religion. If one reads the Koran, one is struck by how frequently Allah instructs his followers to murder in his name. While Christians have obviously behaved badly in the past, there is nothing in the actual Christian message that justifies it, i.e., witch hunts, pogroms, etc. As such, the Biblical text is ultimately “self-correcting” over time.

Apparently not so with the Koran. Far from engaging in some kind of aberration, the Islamists are following the letter of the law. There is nothing in the Koran that categorically forbids them to do what they do, and much that encourages it. They can quote chapter and verse from the Koran much more effectively than any provincial liberal who naively believes “all religions are the same.”

Aztec religion centered around the sacrifice of something like 50,000 innocent human beings a year. As such, like many religions, it was the very disease it sought to cure. If Jesus had appeared there, he would have simply been told to “take a number” and get in line. Again, taking the martian’s-eye view, humans are a sick and troubled species. They especially need a cure for their primordial religiosity.

Here is the point: what we call political correctness is a specifically Western perversion of Christianity, since Christianity is the religion that elevates the ultimate victim to the status of Godhood: God is the innocent victim and the innocent victim is God. (Perhaps I should note that these arguments are drawn from a wonderful book entitled Violence Unveiled, by Gil Bailie. Highly recommended. Ironically, Bailie is now engaged in trying to fend of the politically correct hijacking of his ideas.)

Therefore, improperly understood, this Christian cognitive template puts in place a sort of cultural “race to the bottom” in competition for who is more oppressed, and therefore, more godlike.

People who actually practice Christianity—real Christianity—don’t generally have this confusion.

Rather, it is only secular types who are nevertheless parasitic on the deep structure of a specifically Christian phenomenology (as well as horizontal “social justice” or “liberation theology” Christians who “immamentize the eschaton.”)

Once victim status is secured, then any behavior is excused and sanctioned.

This is how, say, the Palestinians (and the left in general), always get away with such bad behavior. Once you are the victim, you are virtually omnipotent and can do anything. Like O.J., you can murder someone, but if you can manage to depict yourself as the victim, you are innocent. Try reading your newspaper and looking for this prominent subtext on a daily basis. It won’t be hard to find. Often the political battle on any given issue comes down to who can successfully depict themselves as the victim. For example, who is the victim: the aborted fetus or the woman who cannot abort her fetus? Whoever is the victim, wins.

Check out Dr. Sanity’s little moral Rorschach Test from yesterday. Just like the Left, the Islamists are parasitic on Christianity, knowing full well that we value their innocent children more than they do. They know that if they deliberately cause as much suffering among their own people as possible, then the perverse conscience of the international Left will award them the ultimate “Christian” prize of victim status and blame Israel.

In a sick way, it’s a beautiful strategy. But it’s all manipulation. Islamic culture prizes only the “strong man” and the oppressor, not the victim. They’re just playing a game with the deep Christian structure of the international Left, and get away with it every time.

Pacifism is another sinister meme that is a perversion of Christianity. This week, that king of all metaphysical hucksters, Deepak Chopra, wrote an idiotorial for the Chronically San Franciscan newspaper. As you may know, these primitive new-age folks automatically tilt way left and therefore tend to be deeply morally confused. For example, Chopra asks, “Did Christ teach love or is that just a liberal bias? In the current climate, it’s hard to remember.... The reversal of Christianity from a religion of love to a religion of hate is the greatest religious tragedy of our time.”

This statement is so stupid on so many levels that it’s difficult to know where to begin. Chopra goes on to say that enlightened beings such as himself “can’t join any sect that preaches intolerance, yet we can’t fight it, either, because by definition fighting is a form of intolerance.” Do you see the perversion? Fighting of any kind is forbidden because it is automatically intolerant, and intolerance produces victims. Naturally, it is exactly this kind of sick morality that allows evil to flourish, while, at the same time, allowing Chopra and his ilk to feel superior to the brave and virtuous people who actually name and fight evil! Breathtaking, really.

Like all pacifists, Chopra is actively and enthusiastically working for the other side: the side of evil.

As I wrote in a past post, Chopra “reminds me of no one so much as Mahatma Gandhi, one of the most overrated human beings in history. Gandhi also thought that it was evil to fight the great evil of his day, Hitler—in other words, Gandhi wasn’t just morally confused, but morally deranged.” Again, I mean this in a literal sense, because how else can you describe someone who passionately urged European Jews to surrender to Hitler and accept whatever fate Hitler had prepared for them? Likewise, Gandhi told Churchill and the British, “Let them take possession of your beautiful island with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds.”

Later, Gandhi wrote two letters directly to Hitler, addressing him as “My Friend,” and fawning over him like Jimmy Carter might fawn over Kim Jung Il or Yasser Arafat: “That I address you as a friend is no formality. I own no foes. My business in life has been for the past 33 years to enlist the friendship of the whole of humanity by befriending mankind, irrespective of race, colour or creed.” To Gandhi, British colonialism was no different than Nazi totalitarianism. He wrote that “If there ever could be a justifiable war in the name of and for humanity, a war against Germany, to prevent the wanton persecution of a whole race, would be completely justified. But I do not believe in any war.”

As such, regarding the Holocaust, Gandhi wrote that if he were a Jew in Germany, he would challenge the nazis “to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon; I would refuse to be expelled or to submit to discriminating treatment. And for doing this, I should not wait for the fellow Jews to join me in civil resistance but would have confidence that in the end the rest are bound to follow my example. If one Jew or all the Jews were to accept the prescription here offered, he or they cannot be worse off than now. And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy which no number of resolutions of sympathy passed in the world outside Germany can. Indeed, even if Britain, France and America were to declare hostilities against Germany, they can bring no inner joy, no inner strength.”

According to one scholar, “Even after the war, when the full extent of the Holocaust was revealed, Gandhi told one of his biographers, that the Jews died anyway, didn’t they? They might as well have died significantly.” This is sick.

Compare the morally confused Gandhi and Chopra to another Hindu who has had a profound influence on my own life, the morally lucid Sri Aurobindo. Aside from Winston Churchill, as far as I know, he was the most vociferous public opponent of Hitler in the 1930’s, when few others recognized the nature and extent of his evil. Many in India were actually supportive of Hitler’s aims, since they so hated the British. But Aurobindo wrote that such individuals “have no idea about the world and talk like little children. Hitler is the greatest menace the world has ever met.” Later he wrote that the struggle against Hitler was not just war, but “a defense of civilization and its highest attained social, cultural and spiritual values and of the whole future of humanity.”

What Sri Aurobindo wrote in the early 1940’s could be equally applied today, with not one word altered: “You should not think of it as a fight for certain nations against others... It is a struggle for an ideal that has to establish itself on earth in the life of humanity, for a Truth that has yet to realize itself fully and against a darkness and falsehood that are trying to overwhelm the earth and mankind.... It is the forces behind the battle that have to be seen and not this or that superficial circumstance... It is a struggle for the liberty of mankind to develop, for conditions in which men have freedom and room to think and act according to the light in them, and to grow in the Truth, grow in the Spirit. There cannot be the slightest doubt that if one side wins, there will be an end of all such freedom and hope of light and truth, and the [spiritual] work that has to be done will be subjected to conditions which would make it humanly impossible; there will be a reign of falsehood and darkness, a cruel oppression and degradation for most of the human race such as people in this country do not dream of and cannot yet realize.”

It may sound polemical to call someone like Chopra a moral idiot, but there are surely moral idiots, just as there are intellectual idiots. How could there not be? Half of mankind is, by definition, below average in whatever particular area one is assessing. Moral idiocy simply means that the person in question is unable to reason coherently within the realm of good and evil, and to make sound moral distinctions. In this regard, they might as well be working for the other side, because they are.

******

UPDATE:

Many similar examples of insane leftist morality on LGF today. Note the utter cynicism and the frighteningly unbound moral fervor, as discussed yesterday; and the twisted “reframing” of who is the real victim:

“This is a declaration to fight ethnic clensing and genocide whenever and where ever it happens.

As painful as it is to point out, and as much of a bald faced abomination as it is, I would be nothing but a damned hypocrite if I did not speak out and say “Never Again” now.

The statement is without equivication or loophole.

It’s not:

“Never Again - unless there is communist threat”,
“Never Again - unless there is terrorist threat”,
“Never Again - to Jews”,
“Never Again - unless the U.S. President says it is within his authority to authorize”,
“Never Again - unless the victims are ’fill in with your favorite sub-human group“

So this is what I will continue to argue-

1. Palestine is an Israeli administered concentration camp.
2. Israel (with U.S. funding) is conducting ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
3. The Governments of the United States and Israel should be in front of the World Court in the Hague and (if convicted and given the harshest penalty) be executed.”

Another:

“If the U.S. were just out blocking the passage of toothless U.N. ceasefire resolutions, you could ask the question “why do ‘they’ hate us?” But with the U.S. actively sending fuel and missiles to Israel in the midst of a shooting war, a war producing hundreds of victims..., we’ve moved way beyond that. The United States is now a legitimate military target in that war. That includes factories making the missiles or any parts or materials that go into them, refineries making aviation fuel, and trucks and railroads and ports and ships and planes being used to transport any of those things, not to mention any of the people involved in those activities.”

MY COMMENT: You see? The morally omnipotent victims are now free to discharge their violence against the real victimizers, the U.S. and Israel! The complete Christian inversion. Sick, sick, sick.

*****

More darkness visible at huffingandpissed. Beyond sick. (HT LGF)

posted by Gagdad Bob at 7/22/2006 07:29:00 AM 20 comments links to this post
Click here http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/search?q=pacifists and scroll down

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