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Chapter 6 : WESTERN RELIGION AND CIVILIZATION
Western religion, Western thought, and Western culture have become those of greatest influence among humans on the planet today and thus deserve some attention.
The religion of Western civilization is that of the Judeo-Christian-Islam tradition. All three major religions can be traced to a common significant ancestor, Abraham. According to the story, god spoke to Abraham and made a covenant with him, that his descendants would become a great nation and would be favored by god. Ultimately, god tested Abraham's obedience to him by telling him to offer his beloved son as a sacrifice to god. Abraham obeyed the command and was on the verge of killing his son but an angel of god stopped him at the last moment and Abraham killed a ram instead.
Because Abraham had proven his obedience to god by virtue of his willingness to kill his own son, god reaffirmed the promise made before, stating through an angel that Abraham's descendants would be blessed. God had made the covenant with Abraham, but it was Abraham's willingness to obey the order to kill his beloved son which closed the deal between the two parties.
The Jewish and, therefore, the Christian peoples are descendants of Isaac, Abraham's son by his wife Sarah. The Islamic people are the descendants of Ishmael, his son by Hagar the slave. So central is this story of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son that the two religious traditions differ on the point regarding which son Abraham was sacrificing. The Muslims indicate that it was Ishmael, while the Jews and Christians state that it was Isaac.
Each tradition wishes to lay claim to ownership of the story. The word Islam literally means submission, obedience, or surrender. Clearly, Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son is the ultimate act of submission and is considered as such by all three religions.
In Australia, there is a species of spider that was discovered to have a very bizarre mating pattern. The male of this species was observed to offer itself to the female during the act of copulation to be eaten alive. Zoologists, who were initially baffled, eventually came to understand the behavior. In the wild, the likelihood of a male of this species encountering a female is quite low and therefore, the opportunity to copulate and replicate one's genetic material probably occurs once in a lifetime.
If a male can entice the female to devour him during copulation, the male, who is much smaller than the female in this species, can get the opportunity to have a longer period of copulation while he is being devoured by her. As a result, he will have additional time to insert more of his sperm into her and, therefore, can enhance the odds of his, and not some other male's sperm going forward into the future. This tiny, small-brained creature goes to this length to follow the most fundamental rule of life, essentially committing suicide to ensure its genetic material's self-replication.
In contrast, we have Abraham, the hero of Western religious tradition, willingly taking his son to be slaughtered and burned. He was being asked to and agreed to violate the most basic rule of life in order to submit to the command of his god, in order to become the favored one of this god. His four billion-year-old basic genetic program was subverted as was every loyalty to life and nature - he effectively became a non-living creature, a form of anti-life. Abraham, the animal, turned against every element of his animality and became a monster.
To become a member of the Judeo-Christian-Muslim club, it is implicit that you must be prepared to kill your own innocent children to obey your god, you must be prepared to pass the initiation test. When Abraham obeyed the command, he rejected life. Once you have passed this test, you will be capable of all other forms of atrocities against the life within and around you. The resultant deadness and overwhelming destructiveness of the Judeo - Christian - Muslim world makes sense when one understands its reverence of Abraham and his obedience. The turning against life, which began in the diseased mind of Abraham, plays itself out inevitably in the betrayal of generations of parents of their offspring. His climb up the mountain inexorably leads to the inferno of the past century.
There are two important levels to the implications of the story of Abraham.
The first is that of submission and its implications. Turning human animals against their genetic program is essential in their domestication process. It represents the breaking of their wild animal spirit so that they can be effectively used by their domesticators. Once they have indicated that they will kill their children to obey the master, it shows that they have abandoned the internal agenda and are ready for whatever task the master needs them to fulfill. In addition, the betrayal of allegiance to that which is within oneself facilitates the successful creation of the impersonal world of the large society where one perceives oneself as simply a cog in a large collective. The power of the master is directly proportional to the size of this collective and the loyalty of each cog to the whole group.
The second level of implications relates to the anti-life agenda itself and its results. The masters of civilization have chosen power and gold as being of higher value than life itself. In order to have their domesticated humans enable them to achieve their objectives, it is helpful that these creatures be not only submissive but also affirming values necessary to achieve these ends.
It is extremely interesting that the mind-set that Abraham started has, in fact, proven to be very effective in achieving dominance among the human species. The anti-life philosophy of Western religion and culture is paradoxically empowering. When you stop caring about life, certain actions become options - options which would never be considered by a life-affirming being. Creating this deadness within oneself gives one a tactical advantage to overwhelm alive, feeling creatures. A secret to the success of civilization is that dead things are masquerading as living organisms. The dead things wish to somehow continue, nonetheless even as they break every law of life and destroy whatever gets in the way of them achieving their objectives.
The statements regarding Western religion and culture are not meant to indicate that non-Western civilizations have been life-affirming forces. The differences have been in terms of degree but not regarding their fundamental natures. The more 'successful' civilizations have achieved such status typically due to their willingness to do whatever was required to obtain power and gold. Their adaptability and cleverness have been undeniably remarkable, but this remarkability has been perverse both in terms of means and ends. Non-Western civilizations have simply been less effective forms of the same monstrosity.
The challenge to the civilized creatures is how to continue their agenda of conquest within the constructs of their animal bodies. Despite their apparent success, both in terms of numbers and dominance, they must rely more and more on their coping mechanisms, both internal and external, to maintain their anesthetized state while continuing to be functional. The more they destroy their natural base and violate their internal genetic programs, the more vulnerable they become to personal and mass destruction. For most, having bought into the anti-life agenda completely, the solution is to further manipulate the interior and exterior environments. Reliance on drugs and technology within their bodies, and attempts to expand civilization to ultimately involve a fundamental restructuring of the whole universe to accommodate their humanoid form become their means to continuance.
While Abraham was a key figure in the evolution of human animal domestication and the sanctification of anti-life values, a still more important individual in the enslavement of our kind was Jesus Christ. What Abraham started, Christ took to the next level. Christianity consolidated the philosophy of slavery to enable the eventual rise of civilization to its present dominance. In so doing it distanced itself even further from reality and natural law than its two related religions.
While the objective of Abraham was to achieve success in this world through his alliance with a god that required him to be willing to kill his child as proof of obedience, Christ minimized the importance of this world. He was not advising people how to live so as to maximize the self-replication of their genetic information on this planet. He advised his followers how to best gain access to another reality of eternal life and eternal salvation.
As a function of this, his message went contrary to much that is intuitive for a living creature. He taught that the meek would be blessed, that one should love one's enemies, and that one should turn the other cheek to those that do one harm in order to offer them the opportunity to harm them again. He encouraged his followers not to use their logical faculties to judge others for fear that they too would be judged. He taught that the first would be last and the last would be first at the time of judgment day, and that he who humbles himself would be exalted. He stated that the one who loves his life will lose it but the one who hates his life in this world will receive eternal life.
All of these messages signify a pathetic resignation to the impossibility of the achievement of anything worthwhile in this life and on this planet. What joy one might obtain here would simply be due to anticipation of the ecstasy that the kingdom of heaven apparently offered those chosen few who were devoted and fortunate enough to receive it. The focus was changed from this life and world to that which awaited, a state without death or suffering. The main point that Christ stressed over and over was that giving importance to the reality of this world was the greatest sin that an individual could commit and a sure way to prevent oneself from obtaining eternal salvation.
The reality of Abraham had been taken one step further. Having declared one's allegiance to god by being willing to kill one's offspring, the next step was to disclaim any interest at all in one's life on earth.
Christ led by example. If one is to believe the story, he was some kind of alien. He was born of a virgin whose uterus was used as an incubator to enable this god to be born in human form. He was, therefore, not the product of sexual reproduction, and also not the descendent of the one-celled organisms that eventually evolved into apes. He certainly was out of the dynamic of genetic preservation and self-replication that all of the rest of us experience. One has to wonder if his body even operated using a gene-based system. According to the story, all that can be said is that he had a human form but, clearly, was not one of us.
In that regard, his conduct on the planet reveals his lack of interest in ensuring the continuance of his genetic information. His yearned to be up on the cross. His position is well exemplified by his approach of non-resistance during his trial and execution.
He allowed himself to be humiliated, and abused, and furthermore, went willingly to his execution. A human who valued his pride when confronting a situation in which no escape is possible would have refused to play along and either forced his captors to kill him on the spot or to carry or drag him to his execution. Pride, however, implies a caring for oneself and one's life.
Instead, the message of Jesus, shown through his death and resurrection, was that he was victorious. His captors could not really kill or harm him because through his obedience to god he was rewarded with eternal life. Life on earth was simply a test of obedience and otherwise of no inherent value whatsoever.
The more one denies oneself in the name of god, the greater one's chance of receiving eternal life and freedom from suffering.
Selflessness became the supreme virtue. He told his followers to give generously to those who could not repay a kindness for the very reason that they could not give repayment because one's repayment would be received at judgment day. He also said that they had to renounce all that they had and to hate their relatives and even their own lives in order to be his disciples.
A true Christian would spend its existence seeking out the most vile and pathetic creatures on the planet in order to serve them tirelessly. It would simultaneously strive to discover any additional means to deprive itself of any earthly pleasure praying continuously for the end of the universe and the wonderful Day of Judgment. A true Christian would do everything in its power to imitate its leader, to find itself also up on a cross.
It is obvious that such an approach to reality is in fundamental conflict with the healthy agenda of any living organism. Only those who have given up on any hope for meaning or pleasure on this planet, who perceive life as an endless process of pain and suffering, who have come to hate the world and life, who consider themselves to be powerless pawns and desperately just want a way out and someone to take them away from all of this could be drawn to such an ideology.
In short, caged human animals - slaves.
It is my professional opinion that Jesus Christ was a very delusional individual. Likely due to the reality of his illegitimacy, he suffered from profound feelings of lack of self-worth which he strove to neutralize through his coping mechanism of perceiving himself to be the son of god sent to earth to save the sinners of the world. By becoming a martyr and proving himself not to be of this world, he strove to validate his existence. He genuinely cared about nothing else because of his degree of mental illness and the importance of his coping mechanism to neutralize his inner discomfort.
Apart from the tenacity of his commitment to his coping mechanism, Jesus Christ was bereft of any admirable qualities. He was a very sick man who could not succeed in life and embraced the anti-life to an extreme degree. As has been the case with mystics and miracle workers for centuries, he found others who fed into and aided him in his delusional state. They did what had to be done to establish him at the time and to carry on his legacy - altering and embellishing the facts as needed.
Jesus has consistently been worshipped by slaves. He appealed to the hopeless who had had nothing left to lose and felt that they had nothing truly to gain on this planet either. Paradoxically, their rejection of life empowered them. Just as the kamikaze pilot or terrorist is the hardest to defend against because it is prepared to do what any life-desiring individual would not, the followers of Christ were zealots for their faith. If they were tortured or killed for it, that would only increase their probability of receiving eternal salvation in heaven. As a result, the usual measures taken to repress their beliefs were less successful than with other groups. Like their founder, they were suicides who sought martyrdom.
Nonetheless, their religion would likely have remained only a fringe group if it had not been for the intervention of politics. In the fourth century, the leaders of a Roman empire in trouble, recognized that the Christian faith encouraged discipline, obedience, and selflessness. They realized that by making it the religion of the state, these slave-like qualities could be encouraged among the people and used to sustain the faltering regime that they led. They thus institutionalized the values of Christianity by making it the religion of the empire.
Obviously, not all the subjects of the empire would have the same degree of religious devotion as the initial Christians. Nonetheless, the Romans realized that this religion with its slave agenda could be used to maintain the machine of the empire as it needed to protect itself from its destruction from without and within. Ironically, the Roman empire did come to an end not very long afterwards, but this institutionalization of the Christian religion allowed it to become one of the most enduring remnants of the empire.
Due to the commitment of its followers and its obvious utility in helping to keep the human apes in their domesticated form, the Christian religion has been embraced over and over again by the leaders of many civilizations to this day. In the times of colonialization, the standard approach when the explorers found new land was to send the priests out shortly afterward in order to subvert the beliefs and customs of the indigenous people. By perverting the minds and values of these somewhat uncivilized humans they became more amenable to the conquest and domestication which followed.
There has never been a more destructive belief system than Christianity, in terms of the quantity and quality of damage done to life on this planet, due to the values which it promotes and its followers' actions based on those values.
Christianity is the perfect zoo morality.
I have briefly focused on certain aspects of Western religions. It should be understood, however, that religions have been used over and over again by all civilizations to instill obedience and fear into the domesticated human animals in order to best achieve the objectives of the zookeepers.
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