Addendum: I also want to note that it is the court history maintained by the State’s monotheistic priests which have pre-dated monotheism to the involvement of the States which eventually adopted them (e.g. Christianity and Rome). I am skeptical of the veracity of these court histories.
Clayton -
I’m not familiar enough with China’s history to rebut you - but my point is not that “States cause monotheism” but, rather “State monopolization of religion causes monotheism.” So, did China’s historical states control a vast array of religions in a polytheistic (tolerant) manner?? Count me skeptical…
China was WAY statist and has always been more statist then the Muslim world. Buddhism and taoism argue for collectivism.
I cannot comment on Taoism for not having researched it, but Buddhism on the other hand is awesome. As far as religions go it’s probably the most individualistic, so I wonder how it argues for collectivism (I have not come across anything from Buddha’s teachings that suggest such things). Can you cite in Buddha’s teachings where he argued for such things?
(The irony is you argue Islam is anarchistic while Buddhism is collectivist, while history and scripture proves you wrong on both accounts.)
Maybe I don’t understand your thesis fully then. You’re right what you say here, but today India is practically communist, and certainly collectivist. So that history hasn’t helped them much in the modern era.
China mostly has imported religion, in the form of buddhism and the tao, along with confucianism which is more of a secular moral code than a religion, or an atheist religion you could say. The reigning mysticism would be ancestor worship.
Japan is interesting to me, they have buddhism defined as the religion of the inner world, and shinto as the religion of the external world–being made up of a blended melange of local deities, almost like India’s religions, and also ancestor worship 
But back to the point. State monopolization of religion causes monotheism, I see a bit more of what you meant now. Kind of like how Islam was spread by war.
It would be hard to make a similar case for christianity I think. Early christianity was not marked by state propagation but state persecution, up until the Romans converted. Until then, the Romans, an extremely statist group, believed in multiple gods.
Hmm, from what I know of the ancient world, it doesn’t seem like I can sustain the thread of your thought. But I did think it an interesting thought 
Some of the most powerful ancient regimes, some ruling for thousands of years like the Egyptians, still maintained a pantheon of multitudes of gods. Really the only monotheism that has arisen at all has been in connection to Jewish sources, of which christiantiy and Islam are derivative.
Even buddhism is not monotheist, not in india and not in China with it’s history of strong rulers. Nor in Japan with it’s very strong centralization.
While the Romans and Greeks were polytheist there was no coercion on the part of religion or politics on Northern Europeans, even they did inluence Gaulish, Celtic, and Germanic tribes in a variety of ways the polytheistic structure and worldview of the Northerners stayed the same. Even while they were essentially “occupying” territory and having battles with Germanic tribes, you see no major change in religion or politics til the influence of Christianity. In those cases either kings accepted it and made it the national religion by sword and killing the Heathens (oddly enough, their own countrymen), or like Iceland who adopted it in a democratic way and ruled it as the national religion, but did not ban it’s folk practices. Northern Europe was never fully Christianized, as the missionaries could not get rid of localized/folk practices (they became interwoven, essentially Christianity became Germanized), but the structure changed from poly to mono, and with that you get a couple hundred years of rule by divine right by God and other nonsense. Before that even with the polytheistic structure you had various cults in that structure. Thunor worship/cults in Sweden, Tyr or Othinn cults on the mainland, Freyr cults in another region, etc. Different tribes, different gods, but they were all part of a larger framework. In a political way, it’s pretty hard to control people who all don’t want to worship one particular god. With monotheism, one god, one state, one rule - that’s how it tends to appear.
Still, America at its founding was christian and moved away from the statism of its day, establishing a secular and limited government. Again, the thread of his thought doesn’t hold constant.
Still, America at its founding was christian and moved away from the statism of its day, establishing a secular and limited government. Again, the thread of his thought doesn’t hold constant.
And how long did that last? We do not have a limited government, and how secular is questionable (seems that a majority of statist measures are pushed by far Right principles that fall in line with some political Christian agenda, how convenient). Though the founding was not necessarily founded on Christian principles or values, but on those of the Enlightenment.
I’m fuzzy on remembering some history, but wasn’t the idea of some general welfare pushed by government legislation in the late 19th and early 20th century influenced by the church and Christian morality? The selfless altruism that became entangled in politics.
We still have a secular government, so I’d say it’s been pretty successful and has lasted up to the current day
As for limited government, true that’s largely been lost, but that’s because of two things: the philosophical trends and widespread beliefs of the populace which is largely statist, and because the constitution has gigantic gaping holes in it which allowed statism in.
When Benjamin Franklin came back from France the second constitutional congress was in session discussing our current constitution. He walked in, and George Washington offered him the chair, which he accepted. He sat down and asked to see a copy of the proposed constitution. He read it over and then stood to speak.
He said, “I see three places in this constitution where unlimited power has been granted. In the executive branch, the legislative branch, and the judicial branch.”
But his concerns were ignored and they went on with the proceedings.
He signed it reluctantly, saying, “Well we have a constitution. It’s not as good as we could have hoped. But it’s what we have.”
Only five members of the original continental congress, the true founders of our republic and signers of the Declaration of Independence, signed the constitution we now have. Mostly because they weren’t at the second constitutional congress and were business lobbying against it :\
I’m fuzzy on remembering some history, but wasn’t the idea of some general welfare pushed by government legislation in the late 19th and early 20th century influenced by the church and Christian morality? The selfless altruism that became entangled in politics.
Christianity does have concepts of altruism within it–but, and this is crucial, they are never, never conflated with government. the evil of the left is to take a moral concept, like altruism, and proclaim that if this is so moral, then let’s FORCE people to be moral using the compulsion of state power.
That is evil, and that’s not christianity.
+1 Bert
@Anenome: Well, let’s take your most challenging example so far, Egypt. Look at the history of the conflict between “Atun” and “Amun” Pharaohs - even among an organized pantheon there is some chief deity. For the Greeks it was (arguably) Zeus, who the Romans called Jupiter (Zeus-pater or “Father Zeus”). In every case, the autocrat is either the literal descendant or symbolic designate of the chief deity. The whole purpose of the State’s monopolizing of religion is to lend moral whitewash to its bloody deeds.
Now, during the several millenia of history prior to the dominance of monotheism, you could argue “there were empires/massive States and monotheism was not predominant” but I think it’s just a scale/perspective problem. A person living 1,000 years in the future where the Vatican has finally succeeded in its avowed mission to wipe out all competing religions and the whole world belongs to the Holy Mother Church might look back to today and call us polytheists because, well, there are at least 5 major religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism) plus variations, sects, occultists, gnostics, pagans, atheists, and so on. But who can doubt that the US government is an imperial power and represents the essence of Statism?
It’s just a matter of perspective. Today, the State is attempting to metamorphose and centralize all moral legitimacy within itself. Earlier, States were very bloody kinds of things and required the holy water of a morally spotless priestly class in order to be sanctified. Today, the State is its own priesthood, it is the moral high ground (at least, this is the message of modern social democracy). But what the secularists fail to realize is this is an extremely combustible form of hidden monotheism. All religions are wrong. Well, all except the one that we all universally assent to (the unwritten Zeitgeist as embodied in government policy). I don’t believe the secular movement exists by accident or is a completely organic outgrowth of human philosophy.
Here, I risk losing a lot of people but I’ll say it anyway… I think the Vatican has a direct interest in organizing secularism (through the auspices of its subversive arm, the Jesuit order) in order to contain it and as a way to discredit “all” religion. I put “all” in quotes because humans are intrinsically religious, a fact that the Vatican understands more deeply than anyone else possibly can. Read the history of the power wielded by ancient Popes - such power is founded on the abuse of the religious impulse within the masses for the ends of aggrandizing the temporal power of the corrupt ruling order. But that inherent gullibility or religious impulse doesn’t go away because the academics have decided to dub our society a “secular” society. The reality is that a secular society is a society which is ripe for religious takeover.
To return to the original discussion, I think that what we call “polytheism” today was originally many small nations/tribes/clans which worshipped one chief deity and possibly other minor deities (that may have been borrowed from the pantheon of surrounding nations/tribes/clans, this is especially pronounced in India where every Hindu worships every Hindu god but each region within India regards one particular deity as its chief deity). The chieftain may have also been the medicine man/priest or they may have been separate but the primary moral limit on the chief’s actions were the consequences of his actions on himself, that is, the potential for retaliation or usurpation from others within the tribe.
This is in contrast to the mega-States of today where there really are no limits to power except the very weak limits imposed by the Zeitgeist, itself largely a creation of the State. We have gone from the tribal order where moral limitations on leadership were iron shackles on their power to the modern situation where there are no meaningful limits on the naked exercise of power. This was done through the catalyst of State monopolization of religion which perverted it. The unifying feature of all natural religion everywhere has been veneration of the sacred. The sacred is usually associated with absolute moral purity, high character, through-and-through integrity, and so on. But the chief role of the major modern religions is to whitewash murder, extortion, pillaging, slavery, tribute, colonization and imperialism. It is hypocrisy at its most putrid.
Clayton -
That’s a very good point. Both China and Japan also use the ‘descended from godhood’ trope to justify their rulers.
But didn’t Egypt go further than the US on statism? All citizens were slaves, owned by the pharaoh–this has been the case in many civilizations, and ruled for some 3,000 years unchanged, yet they didn’t advance towards monotheism. Although, your point about the Egyptians having favored particular deities is taken, perhaps that could be seen as an advancing trend of monotheism which later bloomed fully.
You know, I think you may have something here. This would be a fantastic topic for a PhD student
So then, the atheism of madern states would be seen as taking the place of religion in gaining that legitimacy, replacing the idea of ‘god’s representative’ with ‘representative of the people’?
Exactly. I’m with you.
Hmm, I’m not sure that follows. Because religion and government are separate categories innately and not that easy to conflate. If religion represents moral collectivism, tyranny represents political collectivism. I would say that what’s happening is not the state-as-god, but a substitution of moral legitimacy from that granted by the representative of god (religion) to that granted by the people. It is the democracy, the will of the people, that represents the god of the left. But not in a literal sense. Only in terms of where legitimacy to govern comes from. This switch is more a symptom of secularization of society generally and the attempt to limit religion to the sphere of religion–a result of the enlightenment–than anything else.
Which is why we still has muslim nations taking their legitimacy to govern from religious figures :\
Also interesting.
o_O
Quite a conspiracy theory you’ve got going there I didn’t know you actually meant you suspect the Vatican.
Not as long as skepticism is the reigning philosophy.
Kinda reminds me of some of the statements I’ve seen leftists make, that ‘the only thing greater than each of is all of us, the collective will’. I’ve even seen some leftists refer to the collective as ‘the only god they know’.
I guess that make The Wizard of Oz relevant all over again, the dictator is the man behind the curtain, and law his god-machine.
Islam preaches an economic system very similar to the ones Austrians preach. And guess what? Islamic countries don’t have the financial crises Christian countries do. Coincidence?
F4M, you still have not told me where in Buddha’s teachings he argues for collectivism.
Wouldn’t it be reasonable to say he was anti-collectivism, considering his distaste for the Hindu caste system?
You wont find any explicit argument in favor of or against collectivism in Buddhist texts, but I think it’s fair to say that Buddhism in general is fairly compatible with collectivist ideologies and socialism.
Buddha’s main argument was that pain and suffering are ultimately the result of dissapointment associated with the material world (moksa) and as such, one must disconnect themselves from all material desires. Of course, this is something quite common to all religions, but isn’t typically a central tenet. One of the noble truths in Buddhism is that “desire causes suffering” and one of the Bodhistava vows is to “free oneself from all material desires.”
Chinese Buddhist schools of thought, of which there were many, all stressed and held as a central tenet the belief that everything is entirely interconnected and interdependent; nothing exists on it’s own. In fact, all distinctions are merely illusory (nonsubstantiality). There is, quite literally, only the “greater whole;” individuals do not truly exist.
Buddhism’s focus on potentiality (dharmakayana), rather than existence, is closely related to point #2. There isn’t anything necessarily collectivist about this aspect, but it endorses the mysticism often associated with various socialist frameworks and the blatant denial of logic. Essentially, there are no constants (everything is in flux) and all things simultaneously exist and do not exist (related to the notion of “3,000 realms in a single moment”). Madhaymika quite literally asserts that “nothing is everything and everything is nothing.”
There is a specifically statist element to Buddhism as well and it is related to the notion of the “enlightened wheel turner” (referring to kings and leaders). Kings in both Hindu and Buddhist societies are supposed to be enlightened benevolent leaders who understood the nature of the universe. They were supposed to use their vast knowledge and power to implement the “correct” society. Buddhism was supposed to be the method by which rulers and kings were transformed into these idealised “wheel turners.” (I should note that many argue that Buddhist teachings served as a constraint on early rulers, preventing them from doing what they otherwise might have done if it weren’t for the relatively passive teachings of Kharma and Dharma).
Essentially It is my belief that Buddhism, and eastern Asian mysticism in general is primarily the reason why the far east (which is rich with natural resources and natural intelligence) is generally characterized by material deprivation and sociopolitical oppression. The Communists obviously weren’t Buddhists but much of their ideology was perfectly consistent with the teachings of Buddhism (and other eastern religions) which were interwoven in the fabric of that society (though the actual religions have faded as significant institutions).
Although i believe the op got some points, i agree with John James as well.
i m a former muslim, i come from a muslim family, My parants, my relatives and most of my compatriot friends are muslims, i can tell you that even as a most Liberalized muslim nation which is most closer to westernized life style, we have some social problems as well.
even in our country masses are not that educated, i can tell you something positive is that families trying their best to improve their children’s education level, most dems want their children to be educated.
if i say something general about middle east, religion and traditions put too mutch obsticals in front of people and some issues in middle east are need to be reversed as soon as possible.
there are still gap between men and women from equality aspect which is negative for women, ignorance, intolarence to differences, social disperity to gays/non theists/concentual acts, being tendent to violance (which probabely comes from lack of education), poverty are major problems.
so there’s actually something need to be done in the middle east, but not by gun point ascide from conflicting with extremist terrorism for sure.
to conclude, anything without considering social dynamics may cause failiour in the end.
don’t take my word personally but i have to call it bullshit.
we can discuss how keynessian model caused problems or how welfare state is the one of the biggest evil happend durring the last centuries, but your comparison to muslim countries with Austrian school’s mentality is not that true.
none of the muslim countries that industrilized and some are relying on oil based economy.
lebanon could be kinda example but they are not governed by islamic sharia anyways, the reason is lebanese are good at trading.
gotlucky, the Buddhist path is a rather individual path when compared with other religions, it just so happens to be the least material path. As far as the caste system goes it no longer serves a purpose, it’s been currupted.
Esuric, I’m familiar with Buddha’s tenets (and fond of Buddhism as well), but I don’t think F4M could articulate an argument as to why it’s so. Point 4 is Platonic, which theoretically I’m not opposed to, but I suppose it’s a bit of wishful thinking.
Esuric: Interesting break-down on Buddhism. It seems Buddhism reflects a conception of the world built on metaphysical collectivism.
It’s point-4 that is perhaps the most interesting in terms of China’s history of rulers, where rulers were blamed if anything went wrong in the country in general, and failings of the state of the nation were prescribed specifically to personal failings of the ruler, as if a causal link existed. The philosopher-king “ideal” strikes again.
I agree with a lot of points JJ makes although I don’t like his defence of Israel. And his citing of neocon sources like Robert Spencer reeks of a political agenda slanted towards Israel. And no sane man should ever ever cite Dershovitz.. That guy is the worst most blatent apologist of Israel. I am not a fan of Israel becuase I want to reduce the influence of religions in general. I can’t do that and promote an ethnic and religious state.
That being said Christianity and Islam are two religions with the greatest proclivity to violence. Lot of people here have argued that violence commited in the name of Islam is an abberation and not the norm of the religion. And I do think muslims are persecuted and villified for political ends. What is being done in the arab world is an outright travesty and Obama and Bush should be held infront of a war crimes tribunal. and that includes a lot of Israeilis as well. Israelis have commited war crimes in the name of fighting terrorism.
But much like Sam Harris I see religion as a failed science. It was an answer in the previous times that is nolonger valid today. Most christian societies have moved past christianity as the guide to everything. The age of enlightment reduced or replaced Christianity with science and inquiry.
Yet I see the muslim world hellbent on authoritrainism aslong as it is islamic authoritarianism. Islam dominates every thought and every aspect of their life. One of the most annoying things about debating with muslims and I hope fellow muslims here will respond to this as well is that why do muslims have to always respond with the Koran? Every time you talk about islam someone will cite some offshoot verse which is suppose to justify their argument.
Why cant muslim people just say ‘hey you know what this is my argument’ and leave it at that. Everytime its all like ‘my argument and here is a free verse from the Koran’. here is the thing man. no sane man will accept the idea that one book can dictate everything in life. Whatever that book may be.
Christianity is violent in its tents,as we all know with the witch burning, crusades, stonings. But the fact of the matter is that Christian societies are some of the most tolerant peaceful and advanced scoeities on earth today precisely becuase they don’t cling to their religion to arrange the entire society through that narrow prism.
On the other hand even modern muslim societies like Malaysia practices discrimination against local Hindus, Nigeria has many elements that are violent and Islamic and Nigeria is not a country dominated by the US. Not to forget the domination of almost all Asia through sword and forcing the spread of Islam in the past. And add to the fact that muslim socities although to be fair just like every developing world countries score dead last on individual rights, persecute women and gays. How is it that the treatment of palestinians quite rightly makes every arab country fit with rage but when muslims commit similiar crimes among themselves its not even openely condemend like the situation right now with Syria.
Islam much like christianity before has failed in spreading the good values that it supposedly contains. At some point in time you have to say that Islam has failed in teaching the good values it suppposedly contains. So this idea that islam is somegreat religion corrupted by a few is not valid at all. Infact it actually invalidates islam since islam is suppose to be the guiding light to ‘good behaviour’.
The only way Islamic societies can progress is to recognize that their religion is not some perfect way of life but strife with contradictions and bends towards violent actions much like christianity before. And its ok. there are better avenues to seek answers and let the influnece of Islam fade for the good of their own.
I don’t think you can meaningfully speak of “Buddhism” without qualification - I think it depends on the form of Buddhism. Listen to just about any lecture by the Dalai Lama… he sounds like an orientalized Ludwig von Mises. He talks about suffering (want) as the spring of action. And I think the Buddhists actually have an important point about psychological self-control (elimination of excess yearning) as an integral component of overall happiness.
As for being anti-rational, I think it depends on the particular school of Buddhism. The Zens are much more mystical and most of the Zen I’ve read is gibberish to me.
I was disappointed to learn that the Dalai Lama is actually a (deposed) political leader. I don’t know how much substantial knowledge was revealed by prior Dalai Lamas but I have yet to read or see anything that the current Dalai Lama has said that could not be characterized as simply wise. Even his speculative teachings about reincarnation are not as crazy as they sound once you dig under the surface a little bit.
Clayton -