Posted: May 21, 2015 4:43 am
Leucius Charinus wrote:Darwinsbulldog wrote:Religion is the practice of not seeing the man in the gorilla suit.
The church organisations know how to work the crowd. Business is business.Or wearing the guerrilla suit. Or something.
Well Judaism, Christianity and Islam all started as centralised monotheistic state religions which were based on canonised "Holy Writs" and were all ushered in by supreme military warlords at the zenith of their military power. We all know war is a racket, but too few understand that these centralised monotheistic religions are the SPIN-OFF rackets of war. Why use a legion of soldiers and guerrillas to maintain the conquered territory of an empire when you can use a codex and a bishop?
Sure. If we look at the monotheistic religions in particular, it does not take much imagination to realize that Yehwah, Allah etc are idealised warlords. Humans can fuck up, so an imaginary super-duper butcher makes a good model leader when going off to war to rape and pillage.
Even more telling is that the holy scriptures [allegedly] authored by these often provide handy hints on stuff like slavery, rape, bigotry for the warrior-sheep to follow. Coincidentally [
] these pathologically violent resonate with the warrior-sheep's personal desire to do awful things to other folks under the fiat of god. A win-win, at least for the victors. Religion also wins for god-botherers who are defeated, because they didn't believe hard enough, or were sinners who didn't reserved victory, etc, etc. So opposing some tyrant is bad enough. Oppose a religious tyrant and you not only have to take on city hall, but you are a religious heretic as well. A two-for. very handy at keeping your own, or other folks under the thumb.
Religion is politics by other means. Just like warfare.
