Archive for the ‘Religion As Social-Status Tech’ Category
Cleaning Up After The Blessed
When you get to heaven, who will be your servants there? For if you have to do your own housework, it can hardly be heaven. Perhaps they outsource the maid service to an infernal cleaning agency. If that is so, the damned souls who come up on the service elevator every day to scrub the […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, Religion As Social-Status Tech
Joining The Country Club
Jews believe that God selected some individuals for a special status on the basis of their ethnicity. Catholics, Anglicans and Lutherans believe that God selected for a special status everyone who agreed to be so selected. Calvinists restricted the franchise again, with a God who selected a restricted sample for a special status out of […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, Religion As Social-Status Tech
Populating Heaven – Or Perhaps Not
Recently I came across the observation that if everyone went to heaven, as the very liberal Christians require, most believers wouldn’t want to go there any more. This is clearly true; the whole point of heaven is not the conditions of existence there, but the fact that you have been chosen and others not. In […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, Religion As Social-Status Tech
The Motor Of The World
That human beings are powered by the drive to obtain social status is old news. My impression, however, is that most thinkers have concentrated on objective status, one’s actual place in a hierarchy, and done so on the assumption that the sole point of achieving this is acquiring objective goods such as access to resources, […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, Religion As Social-Status Tech
The Ladder Of Social Ascent
The cognomen of the early Christian mystic John “Climacus” comes from his book, The Ladder of Divine Ascent. There are many icons and frescos based on this concept, showing people ascending a ladder to heaven, with devils trying to pull them off and frequently succeeding. (For those too impatient to put feet on rungs, the […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, Religion As Social-Status Tech
Some Notes On Ibn al-‘Arabi
It is, I devoutly hope, only typical of Hugo that one of his greatest allergies should be to a twelfth-century Sufi mystic, not exactly a household name. I have tried, I really have: I have read a book of his, in Spanish, and lot of English extracts, and half of an English biography that I […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, Religion As Social-Status Tech
The Price Of Censure
Having purchased one’s place in the hierarchy, and awaiting apotheosis in the afterlife, what else does one do in the here and now? The essential bargain of middle-class religion is that one renounces certain sexual rights – such as the right to open display of pre-marital sex, open display of adultery and in extreme cases […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, Religion As Social-Status Tech
Pass Go, Collect Salvation, Despise Others
A medieval Jewish source on the Rhineland pogroms of 1096 has the martyrs in the afterlife refusing to talk to the non-martyrs. “You shall not enter our company”, they say, “since you were not killed in sanctification of the name as we were.” Thus, salvation as social rivalry; let us cut our inferiors dead. The […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, Religion As Social-Status Tech
The Five Hierarchies
People talk as if a person is genetically programmed to be an alpha male (or alpha female). In fact there cannot be a simple “dominance gene”. If there were, its alleles, the “subordination genes”, would have been eliminated by reproductive competition millions of years ago. Animal dominance is a function of several things, such as […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, Religion As Social-Status Tech
Verse-Fu
Fundamentalist Christians have their own idiolect, often called “The Language of Zion”. People may laugh at anachronisms from the King James translation, but these do no harm to anybody; of greater interest, perhaps, is the way in which the idiolect allows fundis to clothe continuous one-upmanship and self-aggrandisement in the language of humility. When they […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, Religion As Social-Status Tech
