Some thoughts on religion

Miscellaneous General
1

I hear and read constantly from libertarian sources an association between religion and violence. This mantra is repeated by everyone from Richard Dawkins to Daniel Dennett to Steven Pinker (who is an intellectual hero in many regards) to you-name-it.

But I think the blame really lies at the feet of the State. It is true that religion is violent like it is true that Wall Street heisted America. The “crony religionists” - to smith a new phrase - are certainly blood-drenched sociopaths. From the blood-spattered chain-mail of the Crusaders to the blood-soaked stone steps of a Mayan temple, there can be no doubt that God can wash away all sins… even the sin of murder.

The statists will be quick to squeal the ad hominem that I’m blaming the State out of a single-minded focus on the evil of the State… I’m so wrapped up in hating the State that, everywhere I look, I only see the State doing wrong and I don’t see the others - such as private criminals - who are also doing wrong. But this is incorrect. My view is the result of a theoretical idea that the moral essence of the State is hypocrisy and that hypocrisy is the root of aggression and lawlessness.

Hypocrisy is the application of a moral double-standard for the purpose of rationalizing the pursuit of one’s ends at the cost of another’s. It is logically equivalent to muzzling the other side of a legal or moral debate. Rather than each side getting to air their best arguments in a manner that applies equally to both sides, only one side gets to air their arguments and those arguments act as cover for imposition on the other side (invariably, through force or the threat of force).

Every criminal acts hypocritically insofar as he enjoys the advantages of property rights and the other protections of law while he selectively violates those rights as they extend to other individuals. In order to justify such behavior in a legal or moral argument, the criminal inevitably must resort to some form of hypocrisy. “It’s OK when I do it, but it’s not OK when others do it.” The King is the ultimate hypocrite. He is the hypocrite par excellance. He has the best rationalizations for his behavior. He is able to do in broad daylight what others can hardly get away with under the cover of darkness.

Religion cannot be cleanly distinguished from culture. There is no bright-line division. To convict religion of an inherent tendency toward violence is to convict culture of the same. But unless humans really are, as Hobbes posited, violent beasts restrained only by the ever-present thought of an omnipotent, vengeful Leviathan, there is no reason to believe that culture has any inherent tendency toward violence. Looked at in this light, you can see immediately the nature of the argument: the King is not responsible for the murder and violence in society, the culture is. This is just shifting the blame.

But what about the Mayan priest cutting out someone’s beating heart? Well, that priest is doing what he is doing with the express permission and support of the King, is he not? In fact, it seems reasonable to expect that a little digging would show the King is the primary beneficiary of the priest’s violence.

My theory is that religion is the first industry to be monopolized by the State precisely because of religion’s key role in transmitting moral values, in particular, in identifying the evil of hypocrisy. Precisely because the King is the ultimate hypocrite, the first thing he must do is kill the priests who uncompromisingly teach their adherents that the King is an evil hypocrite. This quickly has a cartelizing/monopolizing effect on the remaining priests who essentially become an organ of the State.

Apart from the State, religion and culture are inherently voluntary. Participation can be ended by simply walking out. When aggressive force is introduced into religion or culture, this is no longer the case. But it seems glaringly obvious to me that the problem is the aggression, not the culture. Remove the aggression, and the culture is no longer systemically hypocritical.

Now, religion (culture) is certainly a potential conveyor of the ideas and attitudes required to maintain systemic hypocrisy (aggression, violence). But, in its role as a conveyor, it is neutral - it conveys good ideas and attitudes just as well. Moral philosophy, legal philosophy and social philosophy must descend out of the clouds of Olympus with their detached and sweeping generalizations about “religion” and actually get their hands dirty refuting and supporting particular good and bad ideas. Meta-theorization about how bad ideas propagate and how good ideas can be further encouraged is fine, as far as it goes, but it is no substitute for actual, specific reasoned arguments to hold this idea rather than that idea or to promote this attitude rather than that attitude.

Because religion and culture are the system for conveying beliefs, ideas and attitudes, to oppose religion per se (a major aspect of culture) is self-defeating - it is basically handing the reins over to whoever currently controls religion and culture which, for the last few millenia, has been the State.

For all their strides in other areas, I think even the evolutionary psychologists have mis-identified the role of religion because they having incorrectly identified religion with superstition., which is a legacy of the doxis-heavy Church of Rome. Most religions in the world outside of Rome and Protestantism are more praxis oriented… what you do matters more than what you believe.

My view is that religion’s primary function is in mate-selection. This is a completely heterodox theory of my own. Religious practice (attending religious ceremonies, holy days and engaging in religious rituals) always has some social component to it and this social component creates a reputability network which is then utilized by parents in selecting mates for their children. This is all completely unconscious, no one specifically thought it through. There are, of course, complex interactions between religion and culture but I think this is really the defining attribute of all religion that sets it off from culture, in general.

It is true that false superstitions are dangerous and destructive. The antidote for superstitions is natural philosophy (science). When you can make weather models of global weather patterns, the superstitious belief in Zeus and Poseidon will take care of itself.

Attacking religion is attacking culture which is attacking the very conduit by which good ideas and attitudes can spread and eradicate bad ideas and attitudes. Libertarians should stop attacking “religion” and focus their attacks on particular evils: superstition, hypocrisy, and so on. It is not up to us to decide the manner by which people will choose to associate and spread information and ideas between each other.

Clayton -

2

Leaving aside thick libertarian arguments in favor of religion as necessary for a liberal cultural foundation, I think, regardless of your personal religious beliefs, there’s no compelling proof that atheistic or secular societies are freeer than religious ones. Maoist China, Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany were all atheistic and virulently opposed to their culture’s own religion, with Germanic paganism mixed in for the third. Most vocal atheists are highly statist (Hitchens, JREFers, RationalWikiers, Dawkinsites, secular humanists et. al), and it’s not like being among the most irreligious nations in the world has stopped the US and Western Europe being among the most statist. The modern ruling religion in Western nations is egalitarian secular humanism, which is itself an offshot of Millenial Pietism and the Social Gospel.

Overall, even if you have a hate-on for religion like Dawkins does, it’s functionally irrelevant to libertarianism, since most people who possess these two traits reside in countries where religion is a target of mockery and scorn (unless it’s non-PC to do so, like native religions and Islam) and is growing less and less relevant to politics and mainstream society by the day. Keith Preston has some good material on this one, particularily the leftward shift of evangelical politics. On the British side of things (where secularism is most prominent, outside perhaps of a few Scandinavian countries), check out Sean Gabb, particularily “How Long Before Christians Are Actively Persecuted In England?”.

3

I find that kind of argument irritating. Religion is like language. Clearly, we have an innate capacity for it but there’s no necessary reason why it has to be this way rather than that way so long as it complies with the general rules of the “religion module” in our brain.

To say otherwise is to argue superstition, which is the opposite of philosophy and science.

I’ve read Christian-sympathetic libertarians, for example, look back at history and basically say “oh, look, liberalism and capitalism emerged first in Christian countries” (I don’t think this is even true in any sense that matters) … “therefore, Christianity is the best religion if you want to have a liberal, capitalist society.” Well, even if the first part were true, the second part would be a non-sequitir in exactly the same way that the conclusions of so many econometrics papers and sociology papers are non-sequitirs. OK, women are paid less than men. So what?

But I’m also irritated by the libertarians who engage in this almost collectivist daydreaming where they imagine a world without religion and how much better it would be. My response to someone who thinks that a world without religion would be better is: it’s not up to you, now is it?

Unlike the State, religion has its origins in harmonious human behavior. The State is a vestige of the bad parts of tribalism and what I call alpha-male morality where some individuals are more special than others.

Clayton -

4

When most people are highly religious and superstitious, the state’s ideological basis and justification for existance is highly religious and superstitious. When most people fancy themselves to be naturalists, the state’s ideological basis is naturalist.

The state will just exploit whatever people believe in to retain legitimacy. You could have a religious creed which endorsed voluntaryism, indeed there have been many, and the state would stamp it out, or co-opt it and make it statist if it were popular enough.

Scientism is no better than any other kind of dogma. If the state thinks it has the ‘best’ and wisest scientists in the land, it can feel that it has the prerogitive to interfere in the lives of all the ‘ignorant’ citizens. It’s can even be worse than a mystical religion, because there’s more room for pluralism with mysticism.

The problem is claiming a monopoly on what is true and right, and the right to force it upon others.

5

Spot on.

6

Nazi Germany were all atheistic and virulently opposed to their culture’s own religion, with Germanic paganism mixed in for the third.

Hitler didn’t give a shit about the pagans in Germany, they were persecuted like the rest. There’s a quote by Hitler were he’s essentially talking down Himmler for the research department they had on pre-Christian Europe saying something along the lines of “Himmler is interested in our ancestors when they were living in stick and mud huts when he should be looking towards ancient Greece” (but more lengthy and sounding more like an asshole).

On religion I take a more traditionalist view. If anyone’s interested there’s some documentaries/lectures by Joseph Campbell on Netflix on the role of myth (and religion) and how they come about (that they are subconcsious projections that reflect a structure and foundation, it builds to family, community, and eventually the state). I think it was called “Mythos” and was in 5 parts. If you look at polytheistic religions the gods build a heirarchy (Dumezil called this the tripartite division of social classes, which seems to be a reflection of the Platonic tripartite division of the state), so I think you see something like this stemming from culture/religion, but there used to be a certain symbolism in that of a king (I see the perversion of the monarch when NW Europe went from polytheism to monotheism). For example, Campbell had got on the topic of courts and judges (don’t remember the source of this specifically), and that judges wear robes as a sort of symbolism, that it’s a position and individual different than the ones on trial, that you are not seeing the person, but the robe, and what that robe suppose to represent, but that’s all gone now. We know that judges have their own agendas before they get the robe on, so it no longer matters.

7

No I disagree strongly. I am of the opinion that religion superseded the state or collectivist power structures. The state only contributed to the problem of contrived collective belief systems. Religion was more of a catalyst of manipulation or a mechanism of control for the state.

But religion contributed to problems with the state, the more modern times the state has been more separated from the priest class than previously in history. Religion does not positively benefit the human experience. It locks people in to a specific reality that is untrue, living a life awaiting a better life is not way to live a life. I am against the state and being against the merger between the state and religion is just secondary factor.

8

it sounds like you are generalizing quite a bit. Do you mean to suggest that no set of beliefs and practices that form a theory of life are beneficial to any humans?

9

Good post, Clayton. I have been thinking for quite some time that the ultimate definition of the State is hypocrisy. They have the right to acquire their sustenance living by taking things from the population while I can’t.

10

The state doesn’t have to be hypocritical though; for instance, if you define theft as “immoral property-taking” and depending on your views of morality, one could easily justify things like taxation (as we know from the history of political philosophy and science).

For instance, the old liberals considered taxes to be a payment made voluntary by elections, between the people and the government. As such it was not theft and so it was not immoral in itself.

Or also, on the argument that means have to be proportionate to ends, one can say that since the end of any order is the common good, then that organization(s) which is entrusted with this good must have the means needed to reach it; and if these means include property, then the state must be allowed to protect its property like any property holder (as long as such protection does not itself, destroy the common good). Although, I’ve never really heard this argument enunciated, I suspect it to be the unspoken common notion among people.