Archive for the ‘Religion as worldly toolbox’ Category
Religion or technology in the rain-forest
It is an old joke, but also a true observation, that whenever archaeologists unearth an object of unknown purpose, they designate it as ‘cultic’. This is a serious matter, for it exemplifies a regress: if we interpret everything in sight as being religion, then the proposition that man is a religious being becomes irrefutable, because [...]
The Last Judgment
Certain elements of religious doctrine may be seen as symbolic transpositions of evolutionary predicaments. Temple Judaism, for example, was a set of instructions for the survival, prosperity, multiplication and military victory of a particular genetic lineage, or at any rate of a polity that was deemed to share such a lineage. Whether in its valetudinarian [...]
Heavenly and earthly rewards
The greatest lie ever told by believers is that their love of God is disinterested. Religion is almost invariably a technology for achieving the same goals – economic, social, political and emotional – as are desired by the irreligious. That is to say, religion is a toolbox for obtaining money, power, security, happiness, imaginative revenge [...]
The four-cell model
The world does not satisfy our desires, including the desire not to suffer the consequences of our desires. There are two things we can do about this: change the world or change our desires. It may incautiously be assumed that these two methods are technology and religion respectively. This would be quite wrong, because religion [...]
Religion and the animal agenda
Religion generally seeks to instruct us in how to create functioning earthly societies by threatening or bribing us with supernatural sanctions or unearthly paradises. The believer and the atheist thus share the same goals, but disagree about how to achieve them. This being so, we might as well call religion a set of techniques for [...]
Prayer, sorcery and taxicabs
A hundred years ago, people used to distinguish between Higher Religions, centred on scriptures with a high ethical content, and lower ones, seen as primitive idolatries, focused on cutting lucrative deals with petty godlings. This rather ignored the number of devotees of the Higher Religions who were intent on cutting lucrative deals too. Such an [...]
Orgies in the heavens
Some born-again Christians have been overheard looking forward to all the smoking, drinking and orgies they are going to enjoy when they get to Heaven. It would be interesting to learn how far up the hierarchy of their particular church this misapprehension extends, or whether it is a matter merely of the dimmest bulbs in [...]
