Imagine no Religion...
By
Roberto Diego
Chapter 4.
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Table of Contents
Chapter 2. Modern Cultural Paradigms
Chapter 3. The Principle of Progressive Benignity
Chapter 4. Ritual as Allegory
Chapter 6. How Does Altruism Feel?
Chapter 7. The Psychology of Collectivism
Chapter 8. The War against the Ego
Chapter 9. The Psychology of Moral Triangulation
Chapter 10. The Influence of the Enlightenment
Chapter 11. A Culture in Moral Crisis Link coming soon
Chapter 12. The Tyranny of Organized Religion – Cult as Culture Link coming soon
Chapter 13. The Separation of Church and State Link coming soon
Chapter 14. Is Religion the Foundation of Society? Link coming soon
Chapter 15. Rationalism Link coming soon
Chapter 16. Cynicism and Chauvinism Link coming soon
Chapter 17. Definition of Religion Link coming soon
Chapter 18. Curing Man Link coming soon
Chapter 19. Disenfranchising Unreason Link coming soon
The disenfranchisement of religious cultural leaders Link coming soon
The disenfranchisement of the Suffering Savior paradigm Link coming soon
The disenfranchisement of the good/evil paradigm Link coming soon
The disenfranchisement of the chorus (collectivism) Link coming soon
The enfranchisement of the ego Link coming soon
The establishment of reason Link coming soon
Prologue Link coming soon
Mankind lives in a cradle of the universe like a newborn babe secure in the knowledge that survival is possible within this cradle and that life is a unique and wonderful opportunity. However, the development of human consciousness and rationally defined action, must be an even more unique and special circumstance—still a mystery to man. That life developed in the direction of a being that is aware of his environment, a creature of knowledge, must be such a rare occurrence that it has to be considered an important and monumental event in the history of the universe. Man is more than a mere animal, more than just a collection of nerves and reactions, he is an aware animal that can think about life, love life and make decisions that will make life better and worth living. Man is an agent of consciously chosen causality.
We must wonder then, if man is a creature that survives by means of thinking, why most men don’t think, why instead they prefer to repeat religious rituals that have no basis in their direct survival? Ritual is a substitute for reason-based habit. It is repetitive action based upon a rationalistic philosophical base. Ritual has the power of ethical action because it is deemed proper to do what the gods did in their mythology. However, it also has the power of culture because the culture has embedded these acts into what it deems proper action. In fact, ritual is artificial morality embedded in society by cultural expectations and injected into the psychology of the individual through moral teachings.
Many modern rituals are watered down (by means of the principle of progressive benignity) acts whose original expressions were early brutal practices. We observe progressive benignity in religious morality through out history by observing that early mythical allegories progressed over centuries and became today’s religious morality; it started from the reenactments of mythological stories in the mystery religions where the individual was both a spectator and a participant, then from watching those stories in Greek drama, then toward the every day emulation of the Gods by means of ritual in religious masses, litanies, etc., (which are repetitions of the dramas in a collective setting) and then a repetition of those actions in every day life as self-sacrificing morality. For instance, the way men are taught to react to prideful people is a reenactment, a ritual, a repetition of the mythical acts of the gods in punishing men. These myths are implied “moral imperatives” on how to treat prideful people. Ritual is cultural paradigm in action. Myth is allegory. Allegory is morality play. Morality play is performed as life.
The most compelling issue for mankind, if he is to have a future worth living, must be the realization that inherited religious normative abstractions, in the form of cultural paradigms and rituals, can be false and strewn with victims. If they are not challenged, they will continue to cause fundamental prejudices about all men. For instance, the idea that Prometheus (man) should have been punished for bringing light to the world is the equivalent of punishing all men of achievement with disenfranchisement and oppression (Hate the rich person; make fun of the genius, bomb the capitalists, etc.). This myth provides the foundation in our society for hatred of the rich, hatred of achievement and higher taxes on the rich. In Muslim societies, it provides the foundation for hatred of all secular societies and provides the justification for wanting to do away with Americans as infidels that represent the evil (in the good/evil paradigm).
The ancient myths of religion ignore, and depend upon, the fact that man is a creature that chooses, has values, and those values are required for both survival and pleasure. In fact, the rituals based upon religious cultural paradigms limit man’s choices and pleasures, restrict man to a small range of pre-approved actions and make him into a creature of intellectual laziness and moral compromise – an actor in a play reciting lines. They represent merely the actions and pleasures that authority figures allow to man so they can control his mind and his pleasures – leaving the broad range that would normally have been available through reason as forbidden. Their methods of control consign man to a dark tunnel of repetition and sameness, make him a creature limited only to a small part of his truth, with only one path that yields a false understanding of himself as an automaton, without choice except to choose the prescribed, forbidden to go beyond the myth, forbidden to leave the cage that he has learned to love.
As we noted above, the earliest forms of ritual of which we know were the ritual dances of the passion plays and Greek drama. In each story, there are always lessons learned about life, love and the perennial struggle between good and evil as well as man’s role in the universe. The struggle between good and evil was seen by early man as central to life and morality, a struggle in which man must participate in an effort to rid the world of the evil, both through his own acts of kindness and by battling the evil people that represented the infidels/pagans.
Ritual had the following purposes in ancient cultures, 1) to appease the gods, 2) to express or internalize the basic premises that are embedded in the culture in order to make them habit, 3) to achieve catharsis in the initiate, 4) to advance collective social or cultural goals and 5) to enable the individual to self-objectify through enactment of a prescribed role and thereby experience a sense of moral belonging to a group through repetition of easily performed and culturally approved acts.
What characterizes mythical stories is that man in those stories is fated to suffer and die as both a pawn of destiny and as a stand in for the suffering god. Why such myths required suffering, pain, unhappiness, is a matter for conjecture, but it is safe to say, that the ancients were influenced in this direction by their own ideas of a malevolent and harsh environment that contained massive storms, floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, etc., presumably brought to man as punishment for a variety of human flaws. To the ancients, man could only be saved from the wrath of the gods, through obedience, propitiation, emulation and eventually by becoming one with the gods through a supreme sacrifice.
A major contradiction in ritualism is that a ritualized person equates “must do” with “it is right to do.” He is taught that cultural authorities know more than he knows and therefore what they preach must be right. This explains why so many of the things people do regularly are a chore and why so many people hate their lives and work. They are doing only what they are supposed to do in the face of a social response that criticizes them if they stray from the ritualized behavior. They do “what is right,” (what they must do) receiving little pleasure from it and they avoid doing what they want to do in order to avoid hatred.
Consider the implications of the following: if much of what religious people do is ritual, such as going to church, criticizing and punishing their children for being prideful, then they have lost the fundamental (reality-based) reasons why they do many things. Needless to say, with some of the most common habits, it takes merely a moment’s reflection to identify the ‘reason’ why they do them, but if they avoid doing things they want because of fear of hatred, then they have only one motive in life (whether they know it or not): to compromise with the collective. Further, when everything they do is done because it must be done, then they have little to think about, they need only repeat in action what they “know” they must do. This approach gives them little to enrich their lives except the “enrichment” found in obedience and compromise. If an individual avoids doing some things out of fear of hatred, what does that make of his life except that he is dominated and controlled by fear?
This situation points to the utter irresponsibility of our cultural leaders in blindly passing on outdated and illogical cultural paradigms and feeding them to young people without analysis and validation. The young child, looking for acceptance and understanding, has no way of knowing that the influences thrust upon him are deadly and dangerous. He becomes an actor on a stage, repeating the same rituals, in different forms, that were repeated in prehistoric mystery religions. But more importantly, he is taught, wrongly, that in order to obtain franchise in the world of humanity, he has to do and think in lock-step with the ideas given to him by the culture. He is taught that his value is created by their opinion of his willingness to live according to the dominant cultural paradigms of his age. Under this premise, only altruism is culturally viable.
Because the young individual is, for the most part, a blank slate, it is easy for him to accept the wrong ideas imposed by culture. Does anyone tell him that he is becoming a phony? No, they encourage his self-sacrificial behavior. Yet the desire to obtain the love of others through altruism is a “bait and switch.” They convince him, or he assumes, that if he does “altruism” he will be loved. The switch comes when they tell him there is no reward; that the ritual of sacrifice is an end in itself, that he hasn’t done enough of it, and that others are more important than he – which is in fact the original position that caused his self-doubt.
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