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? 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 floors [...]
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 selects a restricted sample for a special status out of [...]
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. Those falling off include monks and prelates, which serves as [...]
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 [...]
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 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 [...]
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 [...]
Compounding for sins they are inclined to
Theologians may call the more trivial concerns by the name of ‘adiafora’, and point out how little interest the ‘wine-bibber’ Jesus showed in them. But this is utterly to miss the point. The serious moral stuff, in which Jesus was interested, is unsuitable for the purchase of the place in the new hierarchy, because it [...]
The female-consumer package
Whereas male power is mainly economic and political, female power is largely definitional. That religious establishments are male is irrelevant as long as their customer base is female, because the laws of the market dictate that the men must sell the kind of religion that the women want to buy: namely one in which people [...]
A true story
The reason why religious people are often found making a greater fuss about nudity and verbal bawdiness than about economic oppression – the precise opposite, of course, of the priorities of their founders – is that zealous concern with the rules of polite dress and speech is a class marker but charity is not.
A [...]
