Imagine no Religion by Roberto Diego

Copyright 2008 Roberto Diego. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the written permission of the copyright holder. This book is being offered to publishers who might be interested in publishing it as a hard cover or paper cover book. If you are a publisher and would like to talk to the author about publication of this book, please contact by email robdiego@aol.com.

Below is Chapter 1 of this earth shattering book. To order click on the order form link. Special: The next ten copies of this book are free.

Chapter 12. The Tyranny of Organized Religion – Cult as Culture Link coming soon

What do you think when you see a ritual mask like this? Perhaps you are accustomed to seeing many such masks and you relate them to a by-gone day when people lived primitive lives and clustered into tribes and grass huts. But perhaps you feel a tinge of fear and wonder why anyone would do such a thing as create a mask whose purpose is to engender fear and cowering. Perhaps you have thought that such a mask does not relate in any way to your religion, does not represent the intent of your priests or leaders and that today, in our modern world, we need not fear such masks. You might be surprised to learn that a primitive ritual mask has a modern equivalent in looks of hatred aimed at people who can’t seem to do as society considers proper; “selfish” people who don’t understand that modern morality represents imperatives and duties that, presumably, all men should perform for the benefit of others.

Since you were born, a battle has been waged over the one thing of value in this world, the single, most important and crucial factor that no other entity except man possesses. It is not merely a battle for your mind but, more importantly, it is a battle for your ability to act upon the thinking of your mind, your ability to act for the sake of your own interest. This factor is the ego, barely understood and barely acknowledged as a value for man. And the battle to harness it and direct it has consumed the ages since prehistory. From Plato to Hume to Kant and others, man’s abilities to learn from reality, to think for himself and to act for himself have been denounced as either impossible, wrong or naïve.

In this book, we will analyze certain cultural role paradigms and the generalizations that brought them about. These paradigms have functioned as silent killers throughout prehistory and history. They have been barely acknowledged as killers because they emerged from prehistory after a long period of development; from their ancient sources in brutality toward the so-called “benign” institutions that represent them in the world today. These concepts are altruism, which emerged from human sacrifice, the concept of intrinsic good and evil, which emerged from religious metaphysics, and collectivism which emerged from tribalism and mystery religions.

Indeed, the author will be accused of over-generalization in directly connecting such concepts as ritual human sacrifice with altruism. In my view, cultural paradigms are very real normative abstractions that have influenced man’s societies for centuries. They are based upon roles enacted by the gods during the mythological events of their (the gods) lives. As such, they provide role examples that circumvent the volitional nature of man by offering a “ready-made” ritual reenactment as a substitute for morality. Their influence is therefore profoundly negative because they are not based upon reason and the “real world” but upon rationalism and ritualized repetition. These abstractions provide the foundations for self-sacrifice, moral dualism and collectivism.

To unravel the issues that lead to an understanding of cultural paradigms we must understand the role that knowledge plays in the lives of individuals, how that knowledge yields proper action and how the process of thinking becomes sabotaged by religion.

Valid knowledge derives from verifiable facts. Certainly, much of what we call knowledge is not scientifically verified, but nevertheless “valid” knowledge is that which can be scientifically developed and supported, in other words, no matter how abstract a valid unit of knowledge, it can be supported by reference to reality. It can be analyzed and connected to reality by a chain of observations and generalizations. “Invalid” knowledge, then, must be that which cannot be verified.

The foundation for this definition of knowledge rests on questions and issues that have been debated for centuries. Indeed, much of what I consider to be false philosophical development has been founded upon the idea that man cannot be sure of his senses or even of the conclusions that he draws from his observations (See Plato, Hume, Kant, Popper, et al).

Although valid knowledge can be demonstrated scientifically, there is a whole range of thoughts and ideas that function as knowledge that are not validated in this way; many of them are outgrowths of cultural norms and mores that originated in prehistory. These are the precepts of the many religions that exist around the world. These forms of “knowledge” have seldom been reinvestigated and there are few studies that offer an understanding of how such “knowledge” was derived.

What is the relationship between knowledge and action? What are the steps between knowledge and human action? Not surprisingly, part of the answer can be found in ancient Greek philosophy. Aristotle knew what knowledge was and why it led to human action. And the definition that he provided reveals an understanding of the fundamental principles that give rise to knowledge, action based upon knowledge and what we call habit. Aristotle writes:

"Habit differs from disposition in being more lasting and more firmly established. The various kinds of knowledge and of virtue are habits, for knowledge, even when acquired only in a moderate degree, is, it is agreed, abiding in its character and difficult to displace..."

I found this quote in Aristotle’s Categories. In fact, it brings up a whole host of additional questions. One such question is “How does knowledge lead to habit?”

To begin to answer this question, we must acknowledge the range of actions that lead to knowledge and these include 1) the validity of the senses (what you see is real), 2) induction, 3) concept formation, 4) generalization and 5) knowledge. Each of these stages must be engaged correctly in order that both volitional ethical decision making and habit formation can be life-enhancing.

A habit, according to Merriam-Webster, “…refers to an act repeated so often by an individual that it has become automatic with him.” Surprisingly, one of the other definitions that Merriam and Webster give for “habit” is “disposition,” which means that Aristotle meant by “disposition” something automatic. Knowledge then must be something acquired by means of investigation, thought and reason that yields, by the power of the understanding, both volitionally chosen action and a new habit. Indeed, consider the thought process that might cause a person choose to act on anything other than knowledge. In the presence of knowledge, how could one ignore it and act contrary to it?

But what is the connection, psychologically, between knowledge and habit? According to Aristotle, it is the power of knowledge, the power of the certainty inherent in knowledge as knowledge of reality that gives it the power of habit and impels or motivates the individual to act according to the reality that knowledge identifies. That connection is emotion which leads to volitional choice and action, or to use a more appropriate word, valuing. Emotion refers to intense feeling, passion and desire for something. But it also refers to action that man takes to achieve his chosen values. I prefer the word valuing because the ability to value is what motivates man. When valid knowledge is acquired such knowledge becomes the basis for the pursuit of values, the feeling that animates that pursuit and the eventual winning of those values. When knowledge is acquired by means of reason, it provides an open door for valuing, for the appropriate emotional connection between knowledge and values and this leads to action toward values. This is the foundation of a proper study of psychology.

From a core psychological foundation each person moves intellectually through a series of desires, which are the early forms of values, then through the process of knowledge acquisition, the use of that knowledge to better understand and consciously define the values and purpose that can be achieved. Eventually, if a person attempts a systematic approach to gaining knowledge and understanding, this process becomes that of reasoning, valuing and loving. In short this is the process of integrating one’s understanding with one’s life.

The results of relying on a disintegrated knowledge base, a base with contradictions, wrong answers and repressed negatives, is a disintegrated soul that is characterized by the acceptance of some values on faith, the need to exert rational values and the conflict between these two types of values. When knowledge is disintegrated, valuing is disintegrated and the ability to choose higher values becomes corrupted.

Usually, the individual can develop a proper foundation on his own because at base he believes what he sees. But when corrupt cultural institutions invade his more advanced intellectual life they forbid the development of logical reasoning in favor of faith. At this point, knowledge becomes corrupted and intellectual disintegration is the result. When he is told that he can’t believe what he sees, that there are ineffable ghosts flying in the ether, that miracles can be believed and that at base he is evil, he cannot integrate that knowledge with what he feels and especially with what he needs in order to be happy. Unhappiness becomes the constant state of being.

For a good example of a confused state of mind that is grappling within itself to understand whether it can be certain, read Hume:

“Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favour shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings surround me? And on whom have I any influence, or who have any influence on me? I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, inviron’d with the deepest darkness, and utterly depriv’d of the use of every member and faculty.

Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium…I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours’ amusement, I wou’d return to these speculations, they appear so cold and strain’d and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther….

I am ready to throw all my books and papers into the fire, and resolve never more to renounce the pleasures of life for the sake of reasoning and philosophy… [Nevertheless] I cannot forbear having a curiosity to be acquainted with the principles of moral good and evil, the nature and foundation of government, and the cause of those several passions and inclinations, which actuate and govern me. I am uneasy to think I approve of one object, and disapprove of another, call one thing beautiful, and another deform’d; decide concerning truth and falsehood, reason and folly, without knowing upon what principles I proceed.”[1]

Why is reason incapable of dispelling Mr. Hume’s clouds? This is because his philosophy has separated reason from reality, separated it from his life and even from his pleasures. His philosophical musings are a boring drudgery, an exercise in futility, because he has no foundation in reality that would make the study interesting or even pleasurable; he has no consistent view that would organize all of his knowledge, no consistent principle that he sees in all of reality; he has in effect, “sliced” up his reality into different pieces and created a group of selective issues, each of which is disconnected from the whole. He has divorced himself, by means of his philosophy, from the enjoyment that comes from dealing with a universal truth because he has severed reality and discovery from reason and pleasure, in effect, he has told us that reason is ineffectual – and so, for him, it is ineffectual, boring and dreadful. Indeed, because of Mr. Hume, our culture is in the same state of confusion.

Mr. Hume, the skeptics that he spawned and the religionists have created for themselves a disconnection between their minds and a reality that they know little about. That Hume claimed to be an empiricist who was certain of his reality-based foundation seems strange on the face of it. Why is there no pleasure for him in his empiricism? That he was more comfortable with the ritual of socializing and game playing is also strange for a thinker of his influence. Indeed, there is no reason why a man of his intellect should be as confused as the average uneducated person of his time, except that perhaps his philosophy was flawed – the “knowledge” he held was not really based in reality.

I find it interesting that Mr. Hume enjoyed the ritual of game playing. The reason that he enjoyed it so much is because it had little to do with reality, indeed it was an escape from reality much like it is for people today that don’t see the connection between their work life and their affluence; people who cannot wait for Friday night so they can “unwind.” Celebration for them is escape from the reality that they dread, the reality that they reject as did David Hume.

What is the significance of this conflict between faith/skepticism and reason for our understanding of the importance and value of knowledge? Not only do skepticism and religion destroy knowledge but they also destroy morality and this is the truth that they all miss. When the connection between the mind and reality is severed, volitional choice becomes a matter of chance and emotional expression. This corruption is the loophole that enables evil (in the forms of religion and totalitarianism) to exist and get away with the damage it does. If an individual in this state wants to accomplish anything in the world, he does it by means of dropping context, dropping context of his own confusions and attempting to make others drop context as well; they must drop the context of principles and full knowledge; they must accept that disintegrated focus. The result is not the “good.” You cannot get to truth without a clear path to knowledge and you cannot get the “good” in action without clear thinking. Because of this corruption, mankind is sent on a path of inefficacy, toward an altruism that destroys lives and helps no one, toward a cynicism that hates people and destroys love and toward an envy that hates the ego and elevates incompetence.

Reality, in order to be understood, requires an affirmation, a statement of truth that expresses knowledge and thereby strengthens the motivation towards values. There is no mystery about whether knowledge is meaningful or real or connected if one takes the correct position and says, "I see it, therefore it is." If you allow one untruth in, one selective focus, or included middle, then the entire context of your knowledge is lost; at this point you can only live by rote because what you perceive as a disintegrated universe is as frightening and confusing as it was for Mr. Hume. Religion and skepticism are therefore forms of misguided action that enable corruption and evil to exist because human action is no longer connected to the full range of knowledge that is possible to man. Evil requires intellectual disintegration (faith) and skepticism about reality and man's mind.

The next question is, why are ritual and habit so closely associated and why is “habit tied to knowledge” superior to ritual which is habit severed from knowledge? The answer is that real knowledge is superior because it is contextual. New knowledge has a starting point in the verifiable, is connected conceptually with previous verifiable knowledge and represents an advance from previously accepted ideas or notions. It is connected by a succession or “string” of previous ideas and notions, each of which have been validated by investigation of reality. Ritual cannot be communicated in this way because it is disconnected from verifiable knowledge. The ritualized person is therefore disconnected intellectually and morally from reality.

Valid knowledge is therefore a source of certainty. It is even a source of peace of mind because it is connected to the integrated whole which is the whole of existence. It is a source of confidence and even a source of self-confidence. And in this fact we find the power of knowledge. Certainty has a specific psychological benefit in that it justifies a path to action and more importantly, provides a valid base and connection with the emotional, valuing makeup of man that is the key to motivation; the key to action. Knowledge therefore is the key to rational choice. Religion is based upon a “leap of faith,” a disconnection from reality and certainty.

No matter how certain the proponents of religion claim to be, religious “truths” are based upon faith and can only lead to rationalism and deduction from floating abstractions, ideas without a base in reality. In fact, the more abstract are the generalizations and principles developed from this foundation, the further from reality they descend. Though they pretend to be dealing with reality, religious thinkers are dealing with ideas and concepts that are founded upon another realm of reality; a realm or universe that they have never seen. The only way they can provide any valid knowledge is to contradict their own basic premises and look at the real world.

Some critical distinctions must be made between knowledge and ignorance. It is critical that the actual facts taken as knowledge are true; and it is equally critical that the generalizations drawn from reality are valid. Once statements of fact are accepted as truthful, they function as knowledge, so even if one “makes” a mistake in investigating the facts, once accepted, they lead to action of some sort. Therefore poor knowledge or ideas accepted purely on faith or through poor logic have disastrous consequences because they provide a path to action that has no tangible result or benefit in reality – they are the equivalent of flying blindly. As long as an idea is taken as knowledge, regardless of whether it is true or false, it functions motivationally with the power of certainty but it results in disaster if the knowledge is false.

“…for perceiving, and also both thinking and knowing, are, on their own assumption, ways of being affected or moved.”[2]

Once man has accepted a perception or statement of fact as knowledge, it affects man in such a way that, psychologically, he must use that knowledge in action. Knowledge provides a sort of pathway, an irresistible motive between feeling and acting. This is because knowledge, once accepted, has the power of truth and man cannot act against it except through denial and restriction of action. This gives us an indication of the power of knowledge and of the power of a morality based on existence and reason. The kind of certainty developed upon this foundation is as sound as existence, as the world, so to speak, because it is based upon existence, upon a correct evaluation of the entities in our world. And since we all live in the same universe that functions according to the same laws, in spite of what the skeptics say, we can be certain that what we communicate as truth will be verifiable by those to whom we communicate.

The ability to create and act upon knowledge, is the distinct capacity that only man possesses, but it is important that he be open to new knowledge and new ideas – rather than cut off from them by the injunction to accept false ideas on faith. Before you can tie your emotions to your own well being, you must tie them to reason and a realization that only reason will help you attain survival, happiness and even love. Further, to understand the value of reason, you must know how to engage in the activity of reasoning, not in the abstract sense, but in the practical sense of how to do it.

To illustrate how far removed religion is from an appreciation of the value of reason you can look at the argument made by some faithful that it takes more faith not to believe in God than it does to embrace the deity. The assumption in this argument is that faith provides some form of real certainty that is not found in other sources of knowledge. This is a weak argument that would appeal only to people who have never learned the value and practical power of reason; who have never learned the connection between knowledge and volitionally chosen action.

With this view the religionists are confusing faith with certainty, even with confidence and hope. Contrary to religious propaganda, faith is not confidence and hope, but a conviction that the best way to deal with uncertainty is by believing in the existence of something that cannot be proven to exist. Therefore, faith is based in uncertainty.

The idea of faith is derived from a prejudice against the power of the human mind. Faith is what we are exhorted to accept when others cannot provide us with proof. Reason is the opposite of faith, the faculty that enables man to judge the world (reality) and determine actions based upon knowledge. Reason uses concepts, ideas, methods of proof and validation that enable man to expand his cognitive capacities and to understand a far broader range of facts than are available to a person dependent mostly upon faith. Faith keeps man bound to the level of floating abstractions. Faithful thinking is therefore limited to a futile effort to understand reality by focusing on the floating abstractions of religion. This is rationalism.

Faith says that the way to truth is by not pursuing it. To have faith is to suspend reasoning and judgment. The practitioners of faith hold that finding truth is as easy as believing what they tell us. The propaganda of faith tells us that we are enlightened when we accept such notions as “ghosts populate the universe,” that people can rise from the dead and that the role of every man is to sacrifice his life and goods for the collective. Yet, there is not a single provable fact behind any of these ideas.

In our time, to criticize faith is considered evil, and people who have rejected faith are considered despicable and worthy of exclusion in all matters. A barrage of hatred is aimed at the “faithless” person, so much so that you’d think that wanting to use reason in life is the equivalent of Nazi-style brutality or wanton irrationality. Yet, there is nothing more irrational than suspending one’s judgment in favor of the unsupported pronouncements of others. Faith is the sacrifice of one’s mind; and since the mind is what man needs in order to survive, faith is the enfranchisement of evil.

Many people believe that it is acceptable to compromise with faith in order avoid the hatred of others. They accept some issues on faith (the most important issues that are the purview of religion), such as the nature of reality, universal principles and the nature of knowledge. They hope that this compromise will make others like them. And they think that it is merely a matter of choice to do so; a choice that has no consequence in the person’s life. But consider what they are giving up: an understanding of a reality that is independent of the mind, confidence in their sensory mechanism and their own causal efficacy. They end up sacrificing everything they see and experience, the very issues that determine an individual’s certainty, knowledge and efficacious moral action for the sake of escaping hatred. Needless to say, this is exactly what the proponents of faith want.

Statistics show that an overwhelming majority of people believe in some form of faith-based religion. By accepting the idea that faith is superior to reason, men denigrate themselves and refuse to think. The practical result of faith is that it creates a docile, compromising person who promiscuously thinks first what he thinks others think. This creates a world of mediocrities that are not able even to decide with any conviction who should lead them in their path toward oblivion. In a world where nuclear weapons are at the control of power-grubbing politicians and dictators, individuals need more than faith to survive. They need to learn how to use their minds.

The earliest thinkers of man’s past were not philosophers but storytellers, tribal leaders, prophets; people who taught and ruled man by means of powerful examples, stories and iconic images that had deep meaning and import. These leaders did not have trained educated minds, logic, reason or integrated forms of knowledge. They suffered from a lack of knowledge in the same ways as those they led; they tried to understand the elements of nature, the difficulty of survival; and they sought to lead men in the best way they knew by interpreting the lives of the gods, using the stories of gods as allegories for life, developing a moral understanding, interpreting nature for men in order to help them survive its wrath. We find a new, deeper understanding of the history of ideas, and how these ideas have influenced our modern age by analyzing how ancient cultural paradigms have evolved, how they incorporated false knowledge and how they are influencing us today.

If one has followed the reasoning of this argument, one can conclude that man cannot survive without the use of his mind, that he needs facts and knowledge in order to survive and even to be happy; in short he needs reason; that religion is antithetical to reason and harmful to the individual; that to demand faith is the first evil that makes all other evils possible.

Because of the development of religion, many people today merely possess the capacity for reason, operating, for the most part, upon a foundation of ancient cultural paradigms, thinking and acting like ritualized automatons, avoiding logic, seeking the “good” that is defined by others, depending for survival upon the reason and logicality of economic “organizers” and corporate managers, while at the same time engaged in a political battle to exploit and destroy the very people upon whom their survival depends. Most people operate upon principles they barely understand, the sources of which are lost in prehistory, the solutions to which they have barely considered—since they are not aware that there are problems with their modes of thinking. Yet, those problems, stemming from the illogic of their cultural paradigms, are the very problems that plague them incessantly and keep them unhappy.

Religion is based in rationalism, a way of thinking that uses words disconnected from their referents in reality. When an individual uses rationalistic modes of thought, he has severed the relationship between his mind and reality. In place of his senses and basic judgment he uses words that are often not connected to anything known or proven. The spectacles of biblical commentary, prophesy, miracles and un-sourced “knowledge” all testify to the fact that religion is not designed to help man learn about reality but to create alternative forms of “knowledge” and “truth” that do not relate to reality. Where a rational man must evaluate reality and conform his thinking and actions to what is real, religion insists that the world and man’s actions conform themselves to words found in ancient manuscripts.

Ancient cultural paradigms are ideas or examples that developed as a consequence of man’s efforts to interpret the meanings of specific pre-historical events. In the past, man may have sought to understand major events in pre-history by developing stories and myths that enabled him to pass information and moral messages to his progeny. In essence, man became an emulator of the gods, doing what the gods did in order to integrate the identity and characteristics of the gods into his own personality. He used examples from his own life and survival methods in order to explain or communicate the meaning of these events and to give them moral import. Many of these original ideas have been reinterpreted over time and the sources of those ideas have been lost.

We can learn something about cultural paradigms through archaeology, psychology, analysis of ancient texts and through objective religious studies. These teach us that out of early man’s relationship with father came god; out of that with mother came the virgin mother or Venus; out of that with animals in the hunt came the animal deities; out of man’s struggle to survive came the struggle of the gods against each other; out of his tools of survival came the tools and weapons of the gods, etc. An action taken by what was interpreted to be a god may have been converted allegorically into a moral premise in order to create understanding and import for man and his life as it was. Eventually, these allegories became stories about the gods converted to ritual reenactments, then rituals, then religious morality. Material culture became, over centuries, a photograph-like expression, a memory preserved in art. Early art expressed the metaphysical make up of the world as understood by this emerging creature and the societies that he developed.

The modern manifestation of a cultural paradigm is a subconscious set of morals and actions that are seen as imperatives (rituals) by a large number of people (i.e., Jesus as paradigm) and social institutions. Somewhere in the past, man was instructed by cultural leaders to perform “rituals,” repetitive acts that achieved a number of social goals. These rituals were reenactments of those early events in the lives of the gods and provided a sort of social cohesion and expression, catharsis. Early rituals became the mystery religions. The mystery religions became drama, sport, theater and art.

Today’s cultural paradigms are based upon the experience of the culture and develop within both society and the individual into conscious and subconscious thought patterns. As such they form the foundation for the values of the culture and of individuals. Most importantly, when they form, through rationalism, the foundation for generally accepted knowledge, they replace the normal role of reason in decision-making. Their most profound impact is in the every-day decisions and judgments made by individuals and institutions. Since those decisions are founded in collectivism (the chorus), self-sacrifice (the suffering savior) and prejudice against man (moral dualism), mankind has inadvertently embedded the negative consequences of these primitive cultural influences into his daily actions and life.

Cultural paradigms are passed to individuals primarily from and through the culture by means of the child’s early capacity for emulation and incorporation of the actions and characteristics of parents and peers. The child is moved to emulate his parents by a desire to do the “right thing.” Since the parents were, early in their lives, “taught” in the same way, a paradigmatic method of thinking and acting has perpetuated itself generation-to-generation, without thought, critical analysis and with little change – straight from pre-history into modern times with the subconscious minds of millions of individuals as the conduits. The difference between this method of thinking and one based on reason is that when paradigms or normative examples are followed rationalistically, the individual becomes unable to integrate his life and thinking with the real world. When the examples the individual follows are clearly irrational, only moral and psychological disintegration results. His only hope is that, sometimes, he actually relies on real knowledge that contradicts the rationalistic “knowledge” of religion.

In the field of psychology, a concept called “incorporation” provides another clue about how cultural paradigms become entrenched in an individual and even in society. When a young individual assimilates objects (usually people) into his personality, he seems to become the objects (parent and authority figures). The child literally absorbs all that is implicit in the ideas, opinions, body language and actions of the significant adults in his life as if they were valid and unquestionable. He incorporates these people into his newly forming personality and accepts, by implication, all the culturally induced premises previously absorbed by the adults when they incorporated the attitudes of their parents.

In such a context of emulation, when a religious person attempts to understand an issue or face a question of dire import, most often he resorts, by habit, to the influence of a cultural paradigm rather than to facts, logic and true solutions. He becomes, in effect, an automaton, guided by a set of built-in examples that he must follow by rote. In spite of the fact that much of recent philosophical and scientific development has been characterized by a challenge to ancient authority, most of mankind is still culturally, subconsciously influenced by ancient cultural paradigms. This is why it is difficult to remove religious premises from society. In spite of the fact that there is no foundation in logic for them, they still hold prominence.

I submit that ancient cultural paradigms are the cause of most of modern man’s psychological problems and are a scourge to humanity and human progress even while they are wrapped in the propaganda of progress and justice. As such they represent a destruction of individual integrity because they express a pretended concern for the welfare of people and a cynical and democratic acceptance of all men regardless of the value of any one individual. Because of their rationalistic base, they destroy all knowledge and force man to compromise his mind, his senses and his values for the sake of “getting along” with the leaders who assert an ineffable and inaccessible knowledge. And more importantly they are destructive of individual integrity since they insist that man sacrifice his mind, the source of integrity, to faith.

The cultural paradigms that we will analyze are not, however, important as mere normative examples. It is the cultural power of certain ideas that are implicit in them and their subconscious impact in the minds of millions of people that give them dominance in the culture, and make their study necessary. It is because they replace real knowledge with an illusory principle that is based upon rationalistic acceptance (faith) that they are harmful to man.

I define a cultural paradigm as a fundamental example or set of ideas that is rooted in the culture and functions subliminally as a foundation for subsequent cultural and social development. A cultural paradigm can be an idea; an institution that is made up of a number of ideas or a fundamental example that has cultural control and power. I believe that a combination of three of the most powerful cultural paradigms have controlled and decimated world prehistory, history, philosophy, parental influences, the whole population of mankind that exists, has ever existed and may ever exist. It is indeed a most lethal combination. The cultural paradigms that we will examine are the Chorus, the Good/Evil paradigm and the Suffering Savior paradigm.

These modern cultural paradigms breed individual and cultural failure because they are not now functional in a positive sense; they don’t work in this world, and belong to an entirely different, undefined or lost context. They are today the passport to mediocrity and inefficacy for every man influenced by them. They are based upon “dead” knowledge. Even most “scientific” efforts to understand the development of morality assume that religion is a given and even a positive factor in history and prehistory. To make things worse, valid concepts derived from reason are lumped with questionable religious concepts into a sort of selective hodge-podge of philosophically indefensible mish mash.[3]

My purpose is to rescue reason from the destruction that has been inflicted upon it by rationalism and cultural paradigms. Their child, religion, is the organized collection of ideas that establish cultural paradigms and give them their power and prevalence. Religion is merely the structure that has enabled cultural paradigms to advance cult as if it were valid culture.

Cultural paradigms are active concepts of consciousness; they are the epistemological and psychological mechanisms that animate religious individuals as well as corrupt society. They provide the subconscious foundations that destroy man’s ability to reason. They are, in effect, psychological bulwarks that, because they function in each individual subconsciously, they provide a mechanism for living that precludes the development of reason as an active process.

· Origins: Today’s dominant cultural paradigms are sourced in the mythologies of many groups that emerged from pre-historical times. The most dominant mythology for our culture is obviously that of the Greeks which also had a strong influence on Christianity and Islam. The Greeks were philosophical giants and created much of the foundation for modern civilization, particularly those aspects of civilization that make up what we call secular society, but they also had a mystical side since they, like all cultures during their times, emerged from a religious influence. Indeed, most of the religious paradigms that we find today, even in Christianity, can be sourced in Greek myth. Paradigms such as the chorus and the suffering savior are clearly Greek in origin. These influences can be found in the voluminous literature that has been preserved.

· Authority: Cultural paradigms and their ritual reenactments have the power of authority and are deemed unquestionable. They also permeate social, cultural and governmental decisions. This authority is presumed to be unquestionable since cultural paradigms have a strong ethical component that has become part of the dominant ethical base of modern ritualized ethical action. Their authority gives power to those who presume to take the positions of cultural leaders.

· Control: Ancient cultural paradigms require the willful subjugation of the individual to the opinions, ideas and admonitions of cultural authorities. The individual defines himself as one who performs a set of rituals and believes a set of ideas willingly, but in fact, the ideas are mere rationalizations designed to support obedience engaged in order to obtain the approval of authorities; a sort of cultural reward system (in the area of character development) where the individual obtains approval from others through moral acquiescence. The result is control of action by cultural authorities.

· Belief: The cultural paradigm is a rationalized belief system that involves a culturally approved way of thinking about and seeing the world. Because the paradigm is a form of rationalism, it subjugates the laws of nature and redefines them. As such, belief permeates decisions before investigation of the facts relating to any important issue and sets the pattern of thinking before conclusions are reached. Such a belief system provides ready-made solutions to cultural and social questions that often go unquestioned. It also disconnects the individual from his need to understand reality as a fundamental unity that provides metaphysical and psychological certainty.

· Ritual: The cultural paradigm invokes a set of reenactments (acting out). In early days these rituals were more organized and prescribed and some of them may even have had an orgiastic aspect. Today, through the principle of progressive benignity, they have become ethical responses that are approved of by cultural authorities, the completion of which indicate the “goodness” of the actor. Ritualized action creates a lessening of consciousness and awareness away from reality (the world out there). Expressed in other terms, ritual involves acting out a set of automatic virtues that develop into a trance-like state with trance-like behaviors and daily repetitions that enable a pretense of “goodness.”

· Consequences: The cultural paradigm has the effect of blinding men to its own consequences in their lives. Ritualized acts are blind acts that accomplish only a re-enactment and a meaningless primordial “appeasement” of the gods. Such a motive does not work today and most likely did not work in prehistory. In fact, as we will see, many such paradigms create the exact opposite of their presumed modern consequences. They attack man globally by creating some of the worst man-made disasters of history and they attack man, the individual, by means of destroying his ability to solve the issues and problems of life, creating self-doubt, avoidance, guilt and confusion; creating inefficacy for which religion then offers itself as solution.

[1] Treatise, edited by Selby-Bigge, quoted by W. T. Jones in A History of Western Philosophy Volume III.

[2] On the Soul Book 1: Ch 5 25

[3] A good example of this method is “The Science of Good & Evil” by Michael Shermer

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Chapter 1. Cultural Paradigms