Archive for the ‘Religion as political tech’ Category
EthnoGenesis
All nations develop and peddle a fictitious history. I have seen a Nazi atlas that showed both the old, ‘Jewish’ theory that Homo sapiens arose in East Africa and the new, ‘scientific’ theory that he arose on – guess where? – the North German Plain. The Americans imagine that their state was founded by the [...]
The Prophets as bloggers
Christians who read the Old Testament allegorically, or what is much worse, mine it for quotations with which to discommode their enemies, seem not to notice that the Prophets are politics from beginning to end; and intemperate radical politics at that. Not only domestic politics, as in the divine commandment to run a decent welfare [...]
We don’t want no interpretation
Biblical literalism (now misleadingly called fundamentalism) is not, as cheap journalists like to assume, anything whatever to do with the medieval church. On the contrary, all the medieval theologians knew perfectly well how to interpret the stranger things in the Bible allegorically. Literalism is, and always has been, the banner of a revolt of the [...]
Rigor mortis
The public does not appear to be taking the tendentious labelling of the Islamicist opponent lying down; ever since the Islamists were called ‘fundamentalists’, it has been common to refer to the Christian and Jewish ‘fundamentalists’ who are thought to have a disproportionate influence on the American and Israeli governments, with the implication that the [...]
God is big
In the school-chapel sketch from ‘The Meaning of Life’, the Monty Python team showed us how sycophantic Christian worship actually is. Half the effect came from the replacement of ‘great’ with ‘big’. We are used to hearing that God is ‘great’; but a chaplain intoning ‘O God, you are so terribly big’ brings home to [...]
Religion, war and economics
Many atheists, led by Dawkins, hold that religions cause wars, directly and out of nothing. That is, without religions, there would be no war. Others hold that the underlying cause of war is always economic; in the last analysis, it is one group of humans’ wanting to grab another group’s stuff. Religion is then used [...]
God’s job is to legitimise my politics
Christian conservatives pretend that their politics are formed by their religion, but in reality it is the other way round. They start with certain social and political prejudices, such as the desirability of low taxes, guns, executions and war, which appeal to their emotions. They then construct a religion around these desires, out of raw [...]
Politics and the other Hugo
In 1984 John Paul II ordered four Nicaraguan priests out of the Sandinista government, so as ‘not to mix religion and politics’. The principle does not, of course, apply to Opus Dei. As in so many other contexts, ‘politics’ here means any left-wing opposition to current arrangements that favour the speaker and his allies. [...]
Saving the souls and starving the bodies
For a hundred and fifty years, American evangelicals have been the most reliable foot-soldiers of American plutocracy and imperialism. Their theory is that free markets will lead to free societies, which will lead to freedom of religion, which will favour Protestant missionaries, which will grow their religions, which will make them rich. The impoverishment of [...]
When alpha males meet a hierarchy
The whole point of a hierarchy is that any given power, reward and so forth inheres in the office rather than in the individual. Consequently, people can advance in hierarchies without having any charisma or animal dominance, or even any brains or competence; sometimes survival and longevity is all that is needed. This is how [...]
