Imagine no Religion...
By
Roberto Diego
Chapter 8.
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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 See Below
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
If one of the goals of society according to religion is to discourage or prevent people from “doing wrong,” then one of the major failures of our culture is that it hasn’t adequately defined what is wrong action in a practical sense. This is shown most eloquently in the concept of “the ego.” What is it? Is it intelligence, enlightenment and knowledge? Is it being beautiful and pure in soul? If so, why do so many in our culture still ridicule intelligence, beauty, knowledge, even honesty and integrity and especially success? Why do so many feel a jolt of pleasure when they see the rich ridiculed by politicians, or when they see art that distorts and disfigures the human form? Why do many still ridicule pride and berate young people for being assertive and self-interested? Why do so many talented people reduce themselves to humility when they are praised?
My view is that there is a psychological process that explains addiction and other self-destructive acts. For centuries we have tried to put our finger upon why people are always doing what is wrong. There are three basic reasons for this:
Religion insists that people act in ways that are harmful to them through the injunction to self-sacrifice. This creates a subconscious guilt that the individual is not supposed to feel but that he does feel wordlessly. Those acts that involve altruism and collective joining are actually harmful to people because they deflect human action into areas that cause the individual to lose property and even personal integrity. There is a negative subconscious sum that is calculated by the mind that the individual is trained to ignore. What is considered good action is actually bad action and the individual experiences the damage subconsciously. In a sense, the individual feels subconscious guilt for not defending his own ego.
Because many people are not able to verbalize their feelings of guilt and loss, they are also not able to control and verbalize the intense need to rebel against anti-egoistic guilt. The difficulty here is that because of the war against egoism, many good acts also produce guilt and this exacerbates the problem and moves the person to do even more self-destructive actions even if some of those actions are benign in terms of their short-term harm.
The result of these principles, the effect that they have upon the individual, is that he is not supposed to feel good about being selfish (he is supposed to feel bad) and, on the other hand, he is supposed to feel good about being altruistic so he must fake feeling good. This breeds anxiety and self-doubt which makes it impossible for him to feel radiantly happy about being himself. Decision making is impossible for him because he has no foundation for it; he has only the option of altruism which makes his entire life into a boring struggle to accomplish nothing. And for many men, since they have only the choice to live for the sake of others; and since there is no incentive for self-interested decision-making and action, their only chance of feeling alive is to engage in euphoric short-term pleasures that sabotage long-term success.
In fact, many men spend their lives moving back and forth between their secret guilty pleasures and their self-sacrificial boredom. When the day comes that their short-term pleasures destroy their self-sacrificing façade, the world wonders just what went wrong. How could a person who had so much promise throw it all away for the sake of being a fake? How could he be an addict? The answer: altruism is not beneficial; it is mindless and destructive. Regardless of how much a person pretends to love working for others, there is little reward for it and it is drudgery. It should be little wonder that a person would develop an inexorable drive toward pleasurable diversions. Considering the context of his life, it was the only thing he could do.
In my view, each human being is born with a perfect core that is the center of his sensory, emotional and reasoning capacity. That center is the ego, the “I” in each of us, comfortable with what is internal while focused on the external. From this center, each person makes his life, defines his values and decides how he will live and what he will enjoy.
Schizophrenia, on the other hand, is a sickness where thoughts and expectations are not connected. The Schizophrenic believes god talks to him, sees demons in animals, talks to the trees, hears voices, etc. The milder form, paranoia believes others are against the individual. To the paranoid person, all men symbolically wear the metaphorical “ritual mask,” understand his thoughts, know his foibles and laugh at his ineptitude. This is the guilty secret he keeps from others and himself: he fears the hatred of all men. This is a cognitive mistake. The paranoid creates within his mind a false metaphysical reality that says “All men hate me and are against me.” The source of paranoid and schizophrenic disconnection can only be philosophies that propagate that disconnection.
Sanity versus Schizophrenia expresses the two fundamental psychological divisions for man, the borders that make up the full range of human psychology. One comes from a consistent focus on the world, the other from a habitual focus on others. The champion of sanity, therefore, is reality-focus, induction and reason. The champion of Schizophrenia is religion and its rationalism, miracles, contradictions, ritual masks and fear.
One could say that many religious men seem sane, and certainly this is true in our society where secularism has enabled even religious men to live and survive in a world of facts. But look at other religious societies where men live as primitives in the jungle as they did in pre-Neolithic societies. For instance, look at the utter Schizophrenia of radical Muslims who pray constantly and consider that their service to humanity should consist of blowing themselves up in the midst of secular societies. If these aren’t examples of schizophrenia created by religion, then there are no examples to be found.
Indeed, the problem encountered by the reality-focused individual comes from the external world of people; primarily from people who, early in the individual’s life, impose ideas that are false; ideas consisting of such premises that one cannot rely on one’s senses, that pride and self-love are evil, that one must allow others to determine the truth, that one should sacrifice to others, that one can operate on ideas disconnected from reality and that acting on faith is a viable method of thinking. These are the messages found in religious cultural paradigms.
Below, you will see moral hatred based in altruism bitterly attacking its enemy, the ego.
“The demon of pride is the cause of the most grievous fall of the soul. It counsels the soul not to profess God as its helper, but to ascribe to itself its righteousness and to puff itself up before its brethren, considering them to be ignorant because not all of them think so highly of it. Pride is followed by anger and discontent and by the final evil - going out of one's mind, frenzy and visions of many demons in the air.”
-Abba Evagrius
Comment: Consider the utter arrogance of dealing with young people according to this view, the utter uncertainty and invalidity of the idea of “puffing itself up” as if that means something. Here, pride is considered to be the cause of all evil in the world. In fact, the author is equating chauvinism with egoism. None of these ideas connect to reality. Are we to believe that an angry animal, trying to defend itself against a threatening enemy has “pride” when it defends itself? Indeed, for Abba Evagrius, pride is a demon, a spirit whose intent is to do harm in the world. What about pride in accomplishment, pride in doing good, pride for having lived a productive life? What evil do they create? Further, also consider the utter ruthlessness of these opinions; a ruthlessness and hatred every bit as virulent as that which religion ascribes to its myth of predatory egoism.
Consider also, that the very idea of going out of one’s mind as a result of pride is exactly what that criticism is designed to create which is to make people distrust their own motives. If you have pride and if you become confused by this form of criticism of your pride, if you give these religious people the authority to criticize you, if you take them seriously, you will become confused and you will fulfill their wish: you will go out of your mind from sheer confusion over why you are guilty – this is paranoia that will lead to schizophrenia. Indeed, it is unearned guilt, like that invoked in the above statement, that would drive a person out of this mind. Yet no one criticizes the utter cruelty and unfairness of statements of this type. And few notice that it is unearned guilt that is the stock in trade of religion.
“The proud man wants to be in charge of things. He would feel lost otherwise.”
-St. John Climacus
Comment: Here, men like Adolf Hitler are considered to have been the creations of pride. Pride is an individual emotion separated from the opinions of others. How can it want to be in charge of others? Some men, who have achieved high status among others, do feel pride. But pride is the cause, not the result of their success. Rather, it is hatred of man (cynicism and chauvinism) that creates Hitlerian types, a hatred that believes people are too stupid to know what to do and that they must therefore be led. It is religion that has this sort of cynicism about man, not egoism. Pride is not a response to collective hatred. Chauvinism is that response and it is the chauvinist that would feel lost when not in charge. Also, consider the utter weakness and inefficacy of any person who would say this.
"There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians ever imagine that they are guilty themselves....The essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil; Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind...As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you..."
-C.S Lewis, Mere Christianity
Comment: It is religion that holds pride to be vicious self-absorption and predatory behavior (Don’t ask your enemies to define you). Pride is so bad for Lewis that it is even worse than self-destructive acts. Why? No answer. How is this so? No answer. Why is pride evil? What has it done in the world that is so evil? Touch god? Is that an answer? Notice the utter, almost screaming, militancy of this attitude; as if he were yelling at all mankind. This is schizophrenia…ideas do not match reality.
"For the laws of nature (as justice, equity, modesty, mercy, and, in sum, doing to others as we would be done to) of themselves, without the terror of some power, to cause them to be observed, are contrary to our natural passions, that carry us to partiality, pride, revenge and the like.”
-Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
Comment: Here, pride is joined with prejudice, revenge (hatred) and other hateful emotions. How? No answer. Why? No answer. By what reason; by what standard of the good; by what logic? Logic? No answer. Worse, we see here the point that fear is the essence of religious belief, the essence of the altruists’ view of the world and the tip-off that they do not want you to be happy; that they want you to be afraid and stop living. Yet no one attacks this form of advice as cruel, vicious and unfair.
All of these quotes are cynical about man; they are the verbal equivalents of the ritual mask of vengeance aimed at man, the proverbial ritual dance of hatred of the ego. Yet, there is no altruism here or benevolence or even the benefit of the doubt when it comes to responding to perceived pride in others. In other words, when they tell you that you must live for others, they don’t mean that others must live for you; but you had better live for others. Altruism is not benevolence toward all men; it is the exhortation that all men must abdicate their very selves and live as slaves amenable to the whims of the leaders of religious societies.
Pride is the opposite of pretense. It is pride that chauvinists pretend to have. Where pretense is used to prop up the avoidant, fearful personality, pride gives cohesion to the soul and releases the ego. That is why pride is always attacked by altruists. Pride is conviction in one’s value and it is based upon a firm understanding of the self; pride is the emotion that makes positive action possible; it is the conduit between reality and the mind, bridging the two and making freedom of action possible. When a person accepts criticism for having pride, he loses his personal foundation and the ability to develop character.
As the above quotes indicate, most modern religions are steeped in deep cynicism, a belief in original sin, the imperfection of man, his inability to bridge the chasm between a carnal, worldly nature in favor of an elusive spiritual perfection. The leaders of such groups know not how to breed hope in people because they cannot and will not allow the sources of hope, reason and pride to flourish. They deny the role of reason in people’s lives because reason is anathema to faith. They criticize pride because the proud man thinks for himself.
Reason is not a religion; it is not the enemy of religion; it is simply a way of arriving at truth. And because it is such a method, you have to wonder at the mentality of men who would denigrate reason in favor of blind acceptance of blind prophesy. Without reason, those men who consider themselves “paragons of virtue” are free to engage their whims and to fake the “certainty” that makes it possible for them to blindly dictate the right and correctness of faith and altruism. Reason is a method of learning about reality while faith and altruism are evasions of reality.
Many people are so affected and so disabled by religious cultural paradigms that they make up the millions of mediocrities that populate our societies. Their only real danger is when they create a chorus that empowers the haters who are their leaders. They represent the fertile field that creates the “victimized” voters, the thugs, the storm troopers and the terrorists of our modern day who would destroy the foundations of civilization, freedom and reason in order to put forward their cynical precepts and express their chauvinistic anger; to wage the war against the individual through the ritual mask of hatred, religious crusades and jihads. Not all of the haters carry bombs. Many of them teach in our universities.
If you have ever criticized an individual for being “selfish” or “prideful;” if you have ever felt a tinge of jealousy or envy at a person who is more successful or more beautiful than you; if you have ever talked behind a person’s back in criticism over something he has done that has earned him praise; if you have ever told a child not to be too happy about an accomplishment because others would be jealous; if you have ever voted for higher taxes on the rich; then you are engaged in the ritual of human sacrifice.
In Greek myth, it was Zeus that sent Lucifer/Prometheus to his punishment back down to earth for having the effrontery to steal his light for the benefit of man. Prometheus is the symbol for ambition and engaging in a quest for accomplishment. He is reputed to have had the qualities (or flaws) of ambition, pride, etc. It is also implied in his story that it was his independence that was his crime.[1] These myths and many others with similar themes have created a hatred of the ego and a justification to attack and ridicule anyone who reveals pride, which means that society has taken upon itself the authority to impose ritual “justice” upon anyone who is deemed “prideful” and ambitious, worldly and self-interested.
Both cultural and personal attacks upon the prideful individual are an expression, a ritual, a re-enactment, of the punishing of Prometheus in mythology. Likewise, the hatred that some cultures express toward the United States is the same reenactment. The U.S. is hated as an interloper for bringing light and freedom to man. The reaction to the existence of the U.S., in the minds of some cultural authorities, is to punish the country with hatred, propaganda and even violent terrorism. That our way of life brings more affluence and well being than all of the whole history of altruism is irrelevant. It is more important for religious people to attack the egoism implicit in the political system that makes affluence possible. There is only a difference of degree between the altruism that requires an individual to sacrifice himself with a bomb attached to his body and the altruism that requires he give up a large portion of his income. They are both altruism and they both require self-sacrifice. When men begin to realize the truth of that statement, they will run from altruism like the scourge that it is.
The ego is assertive hope seeking the best in life, it is selfishness without the comparison of one’s self with others – a pure form of self-regard that includes the basic conviction that one can pursue one’s happiness without holding back. The ego is the source of human freedom in society. It is freedom, a celebration of man and his capabilities. If we understand that the ego is the foundation of man’s emotional core, his free mind supplemented with knowledge, we learn to express it in a human way, not as a guilty pursuit of mindless pleasures, but as a pursuit of a happy life lived without guilt and without regret – and especially without fear. The ego has nothing to do with “others” but is the essence of human striving and even the source of such positive emotions as good will and romantic love. It has nothing to do with a suffering god and his quest for the light. The Ego is a natural quest to which the individual is drawn for self-understanding and self-fulfillment, in short, for happiness.
After centuries and generations of religion negatively equating the ego with both pride and villainy, we can now arrive at an appropriate definition of the ego. The ego is the core emotion of man, the key requirement of his psychological health. The ego is the central emotion, the soul, the driving force of man whose goals are survival and happiness. This is why it is the cardinal evil for all religions, the one point that has to be attacked and driven out in order to drive men into herds of complacent and obedient slaves. The ego is best achieved when guided by logic because logic is pure thinking and the ego is pure positive emotion and innocent striving.
The successful person suffering under hatred of the ego should understand fully what success means: you are hated in this religion-dominated society precisely because of your success. Those who hate success believe that you are evil; you have done something unthinkable to them: you have discovered or learned something that made you successful – you have learned that it is possible to succeed within a chaos of failure. In other words, you used your mind, they did not, and they intend to make you suffer for it. So they tell you, “Money is the root of all evil”, “Pride is a sin” in order to make you question your brilliance and your greatness. They believe that you must bear the burden of their prejudice and that you deserve to suffer. You possess a characteristic that their culture has forbidden; and they think they are right, through the authority of culture, to hate you and punish you. Your evil, to them, consists of refusing to compromise to the views of others. This is why you are sometimes not happy: you had no idea they would hate you for thinking. You had no idea that you were supposed to be, in their view, the suffering savior.
The worst aspect of hatred of the ego is that the most successful in our society are also confused by cultural paradigms themselves and don’t understand why their success and abilities have brought them unhappiness and criticism. They wanted to feel pride and yet they don’t realize that the reason for their discomfort is that they actually care what hateful people think of them. Too many successful people have accepted the notion that the best reason to strive for success and pride is to obtain the respect and admiration of others. When respect and admiration do not come, they descend into depression and spend large amounts of time making psychiatrists wealthy. Too often such people spend their large riches appeasing the haters in a futile attempt to ameliorate their self-imposed suffering. This serves only to embolden the haters into more virulent hatred and criticism. They’ve found their mark.
Pride cannot be the result of both achievement and villainy. Aristotle’s law of the excluded middle argues that a thing cannot be both itself and its opposite. Yet, the commonly accepted idea of the ego includes both the freedom of action to achieve high values and treacherous villainy. Clearly, we have a problem of crucial importance for man and his understanding of what is proper action; how can one concept be considered both anti-social and good? Man is either free to achieve high values or he should not do so. He cannot do both consistently; and he cannot survive if he is supposed to suppress his need for accomplishment.
Properly, evil, in a human social context, is any act that violates the rights of others to achieve their own survival. Anti-social behavior includes any act that deprives others of the life and/or property that they rightly hold. Assertive action then, in order to be good, is any act that is rightly taken for the benefit of the individual. It is an expression of his rights to happiness, property and freedom. The ego, in order to function, in any creature, requires complete freedom and especially, it requires an advanced use of abstract knowledge not available on the animal level. Whether you call the ego assertive action, egoism, rational egoism, etc., the point is that man should be free to achieve values through the use of the mind, without the imposition of guilt, faith and the requirement of self-sacrifice. It is those who impose self-sacrifice that are truly evil because they seek to abscond with the property of others.
Are most people hateful toward the ego? Yes, in the sense that most have absorbed into their subconscious mind all the negative characteristics considered by religion to be part of the ego. The presence of the suffering savior paradigm in our culture is the pervasive ritual that accomplishes the hatred of the ego. The common response to the assertion that man’s ego should be free is anger and disbelief – that someone would openly advocate such an “evil” idea is unthinkable in their view. This is because most people are confused about the issue and are subconsciously repeating the lessons of mythology through ritualized expressions of hatred of the ego they are trained to perform.
It is the so-called leaders of men who know a real, deadly and deliberate hatred of the ego. These people believe that all you have to do is define man’s concepts for him and his opinions will match yours. The fact that they want the individual to accept the idea that man is evil should be the first clue to the presence of a conman out to pick men’s pockets. But more than this, these leaders’ hatred of man, because it is accepted by most men as valid, is what destroys men and keeps them blind to the nature of the con game that is being perpetrated.
A rationally selfish man is a clear thinker that uses his own mind, who defines his generalizations by means of looking at reality and not from copying the thoughts of others. The rationally selfish man, by keeping the property that is his, spreads life and hope for the future and he shows others the example of how to be happy, free and successful. A result of the existence of the rationally selfish man is success. That the altruistic leader considers this man to be a malefactor and robber baron only shows that the altruist is after expropriation, sacrifice and guilt.
The power of reason and egoism, however, can be seen everywhere. Look at the clean cities, tall buildings, air conditioned offices, jumbo jets and space stations built by people in the United States and you see the power of men who can look at reality, have confidence in the validity of their senses and use their minds to create technology that positively affects their own lives and that of others. Reason is released by political freedom, and because man is free, he can benefit from his own thinking; because he is free he can trade with others who see the value of his skills and products; because he is free he can make his own life and the lives of others better through production. This is the power that altruists hate. This is what they consider evil, this is what they consider to be theft – while they (the altruists) enjoy their beautiful multi-million dollar homes, limousines and private jets – given to them from money they have extorted through making honest men feel guilty.
The singular lesson of history is the recognition that religious culture has been at war against the ego since prehistory. The ego represents the individual’s right to self-create, self-objectify and self-love. In my egoistic view, the rights of the ego should never be considered a point of ridicule. It is through the elimination of religion and the harm it causes to mankind that we can move forward to lives of hope and love.
[1] Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus
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