Subject: Re: CHRISTIANITY BETWEEN THE OLD and NEW TESTAMENTS -- continuation of "Search for the Real Parents of My Soul!" -- Exchange of views: IS RELIGION ON TRIAL?

 Subject: RE: CHRISTIANITY BETWEEN THE OLD and NEW TESTAMENT -- continuation of "Search for the Real Parents of My Soul!" – Exchange of views: IS RELIGION ON TRIAL?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© October 3, 2014

A READER WRITES:

All this history is interesting, but the most interesting aspect of the three religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, is that the form of government that all existed under, like the rest of the world, was dictatorship.  Whereas many other religions in the world believed in a more hierarchical structure, these three believed in a ruling dictator whose ultimate goal was control through punishment.  Which as has been said before is used by the priests or Imams to control the population.  For that reason I find no redeeming elements in religion.  The history just give evidence to this.  If a human being behaved like this god, they would be vilified if they had social stature and in prison if they did not.

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Clearly, your reading of history and mine are somewhat in conflict.

Not only First Principles apply to Mother Nature.  First Principles apply to human beings, and have since the beginning of man. 

Religion, which you clearly have a problem with, especially the three major religions, originates with the witch doctors of early man.

Man has been blessed with a conscious mind, a vision to see and interpret what is seen, an ability to think and imagine, to fear and to dread, and the instinct to retreat from harm’s way when the odds of his survival are in jeopardy.

Early man cowered at the flash of lightning and the loud boom of thunder, as anthropologist James George Frazer (Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 1996) shows.  Man turned to his Sharman or witch doctor to quell his fears allowing such leaders to develop a coping rationale.  So, religion has always been with us.

The prototype of the Sharman or witch doctor has been uncovered in every prehistoric culture. It looked to the father figure to explain what was feared and to provide an escape mechanism to be able to move on.

Clever men assumed this role as a way to power and control, as well as a way to quell their own fears.  It worked like magic!

Freud was intrigued with religion and how the religious dealt with fear and anxiety, although a non-believer himself. 

He could see how the earliest practitioners of "magic and religion" identified the need for a strong parent or leader, what he referred to as "the superego," the judgmental part of our make-up which he called “the morality principle,” to gain and maintain control. Superstitions and anxieties were natural condiments of the discipline.  

The interesting thing about this is that Freud who had his own problem with religion managed to describe why it has been so successful.

While Judaism, Christianity and Islam believe in the same God, the same Parent or Father figure, beyond that they part their ways. 

What is also ironic, however, while they detest infidels, all three religions have assimilated, more or less, pagan mystical-magical aspects into their theologies and theocratic systems.   

Moreover, all religions, including Judaism, started out as sects looking for a leader, looking for Yahweh, looking for someone outside themselves to lead them out of isolation and fear. 

Four signposts religions have recognized to advantage:

We are born egotists.  It is a survival mechanism or instinct.  We all love ourselves.

We are all more interested in ourselves than in anyone else in the world.  It is the engine of our being, the fuel of our soul, and is always wanting for nourishment.

Every person you meet wants to feel important, to be somebody, to count for something.  This is the fragile ego showing itself.  It is so fragile that it can be manipulated to its peril.

We crave the approval and affection of others, so that we may in turn approve of ourselves.

This may find us retreating into self-love, and in turn being rejected for this, and as a consequence becoming fixated in self-hate. 

Our culture prefers us to have more regard for others than for ourselves, which explains the appeal of those inclined to become “true believes” and join the crowd hysteria.

Complicating this even further is our programmed dependence.  We often refuse to recognize how easily we can be seduced into complacency and inaction. 

Organized religions know this is part of our character.  They know: 

We want freedom but we need security;

We want wealth but we need certainty;

We want happiness but we need comfort;

We want fame and fortune but we need acceptance;

We want adulation but cannot tolerate criticism;

We want success but cannot abide failure.

This can be reduced to two simple equations:

Pain + risk = growth

We want growth without the pain of embarrassment or without the risk of failure, which is an utter impossibility.

Belief + belonging = behavior

We are a social animal attracted to a belief system that makes us comfortable as we are seeking others who think and believe as we do.

It is why religions and political systems clash. 

Religions deny they are political systems and political systems deny they are religious.  One cannot exist without the other.  Passion and rhetoric are their tools.

Traditional religions are declining in popularity if you consider church attendance, at least in the West.  So what is the new religion?  Technology and its toys of distraction, at least in wealthy Western societies.

But in two thirds of the world, where 4.4 billion souls have no access to the Internet, religion, often religions of the fringe such as the jihads have replaced priests and rabbis and Imams sending out messages of hate to those that feel exploited.  It is an old formula, and it has always worked.  

Are Judaism, Christianity and Islam dictatorial?  I don’t think so.  They are inclined however to be closed rather than open systems. 

They are also hierarchical, in fact, they invented that organizational structure. 

With prehistoric man, everything evolved from the witch doctor or Sharman, first as clans and tribes before the family came into being, with the religious leader the judge, jury and executioner imitating the specter of a god.

But because so many of these splinter groups, these terrorist cells, claim to be advocates of a legitimate religion, is it fair to say "religion poisons everything"?

That was the late Christopher Hitchens' take ("god is not Great! How religion poisons everything," 2007).

True, there were the Holy Crusades that weren't very holy, armies and assassins of the Catholic papacy, and let us not forget the Inquisition. 

Roman Catholicism has had its warrior popes, as has Islam had its warrior Imams.  Judaism’s High Priests have been known to betray the Law of Moses by adopting the ways of Hellenism regressing from the diet and discipline of Judaism for the Greek ways.  None of these great religions has a flawless history, but they have given man faith and direction despite their human limitations.  

That said where would Western Civilization be without the Catholic Church? 

Modern science was born in the Catholic Church;

Catholic priests developed the free-market economy 500 years before Adam Smith;

The Catholic Church invented the university;

Western civil law grew out of Catholic Church canon law;

Catholicism, despite the stain of the Inquisition, can lay claim to insisting on the sacredness of human life from conception.  

Christopher Hitchens, for whom I have some regard, could rant with eloquence, but I think history will proof his book on God an embarrassment.  I am aware he was playing to an influential audience of atheists and church haters.

God is not Great is a rant with rampant inaccuracies and incomprehensible assertions on nearly every page.  He had the talent for a prosecutor style of the competent essayist but for some reason abandoned that style. 

Hitchens' diatribe is evidence of how deep in the bone marrow are our emotions that color our better sense.  We are far more a feeling than a thinking being.

A FEW WORDS ABOUT THIS STUDY

This study was first written forty years ago, and promptly forgotten, I thought. 

But as I write it now, or better yet retype it now, as I have no other record of it other than my bound hard copy, I find it gave me permission to see why I was so angry after South Africa, and why I behaved as I did.

I was hurting and confused when I retreated from South Africa and apartheid in 1968, and blamed it all on my religion, especially my priests with their authoritarian ways. 

Writing this for a graduate seminar was cathartic, and strangely, not consciously, insightful of my paradoxical dilemma.  Now I see:

Religion from the dawn of man provided two pragmatic things and two idealistic things.

Religion provided leadership and organization in a pragmatic sense.

Religion provided a will and a way to live and the motivation to love beyond the limits of one's own person in an idealistic sense, and therefore a survival sense as the human race.

This survival strategy, as imperfect and flawed as it is, has lifted man out of himself so that it could return less full of himself and more attuned to the demands of humanity.  Without this survival strategy man would have perished a long time ago.

We make so much of man's inventiveness, and his capacity to think but we give little credence to the importance of his emotional health and capacity to live and behave civilly with other human beings. 

The weapon of mass construction is love and humor that provides man with balance and perspective.

Often in the history of man, he has been in the Manichean struggle between self-realization and self-destruction, self-love and self-hatred, self-directed and other directed. 

He has championed his capacity to think but seldom given equal regard to his capacity to feel. 

Never has this been more evident than now where people routinely retreat into alcohol, drugs, promiscuity, or become workaholics, chasing the mechanical rabbit of their minds around a never ending circular fixation.    

People cannot handle silence; cannot be alone; cannot trust their own thoughts but must be with others; must find out what others think and believe and how others behave as they want to be in sync with the prevailing norm to feel legitimate, authentic.

This is an attempt to keep at bay our fears and natural paranoia, and what is the greatest fear?  It is to be loved and loving, especially to love and respect ourselves, nothing is harder.   

This paradox is the perfect arena for religion, but the dilemma is that organized religions are obsessed with the same demands as everyone else and therefore the forward inertia.

The precepts of most religions are uplifting and positive, but as you point out, religions can become impatient and judgmental, resorting to dictatorial measures forgetting the fundamentals of their mission.  It happens.

Do you think it is happening more now than before?  My study suggests otherwise. 

Perhaps we are more aware that our religions cannot save us from ourselves, as they once attempted to do.  Now, we are on our own, and therefore the terror. 

In early Judea before the Christian era, Sadducees held to the literal interpretation of the words of Moses, or Talmud Law, believing in "an eye for an eye," while the Pharisees were more pragmatic, adjusting to the demands of the times. 

Pharisees have survived in Rabbinical Judaism to this day, but the Sadducees have disappeared.

The history of religion presents the same play only with different characters on stage.  As the “Search for the Real Parents of My Soul” continues, this will become more apparent.

Thank you for your comments.   I hope you accept mine in the spirit that they are given be you of a completely other mind.

*     *     *

REFERENCES:

James George Frazer, The Illustrated Golden Bough, 1996

F. Adamson Hoebel, Anthropology: The Study of Man, 1966

Roger Lewin, In the Age of Mankind, 1988

Lucy Freeman, Freud Rediscovered, 1980

George Brand (ed.), Catholicism, 1962

J. Leslie Dunstan (ed.), Protestantism, 1962

Arthur Hertzberg, Judaism, 1962

John Alden Williams, Islam, 1962

Roberto Ferdman, “Much of the world remains offline,” The Tampa Bay Times, Op-Ed, October 3, 2014

Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., Purposeful Selling, 2014

Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., Meet Your New Best Friend, 2014

Christopher Hitchens, “god is not Great! How religion poisons everything,” 2007

Thomas E. Woods, Jr., How The Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, 2005

James Raymond Fisher, Jr., A Green Island in A Black Sea: A Novel of South Africa during Apartheid, 2013

James R. Fisher, Jr., Who Put You in the Cage? 2014

James R. Fisher, Jr., Search for the Real Parents of My Soul, unpublished