Truth
Religious Slavery, God and Moral Convenience
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee, Contents Updated: Monday, 14 November 2011
Religious Explanations?
Two elements can be distinguished in religion:
- The doctrinal or dogmatic elements offering mythical explanations for allegedly cosmic questions like “why are we here?” and “how did the world begin?”
- Ways of channelling emotions, particularly of fear, grief and anxiety, joy and gratitude, depending on the situation, via an accessible superbeing who can be considered responsible, and ritualized dramas to express the emotions.
Both are much less compelling than they once were, because religious explanations can now be seen by most people as explanations of nothing. The questions being asked are convincingly answered by science, as long as sufficient data exist to test scientific hypotheses. Where they do not, science can offer no confirmed answers, but then neither can religion. It is simply that religious answers, right or wrong, have to be accepted! It is dogma. Believers are so accustomed to believing what is not established that they willingly accept it as true.
With regard to the emotional side, some think ritual and belief in God is a valuable safety valve, or a type of placebo, even though such beliefs have no factual basis. Others think it can never be right to let people think that false beliefs should be taught, even if they do have a somewhat advantageous psychological effect. Of the great founders of psychology, Sigmund Freud took the latter view, and Carl G Jung the former.
Freud thought religion was akin to an obsessional compulsive neurosis, calling it “an illusion”, while Jung thought irrational thoughts and emotions were relieved by ritual and comforting myths. Despite that, he warned it would be wrong to “understand my observations to be a kind of proof of the existence of God. They prove only the archetypal image… ” jung was ready to give his speculations about “archetypes” much more credence than Freud gave to religion. Freud in this respect was the more scientific. Religion gives people an illusion of control over random natural events and unpleasant social ones by personifying them as spirits, or events controlled by spirits, or gods, or God, so that flattery, propitiation or supplication of the spirit will bring some sort of amelioration of the consequences of the unforeseen events.
Western psychologists, accustomed to nuclear families, see Gods as father figures, whereas the root of God is in the extended family, clan and tribe—the primitive human group. God is a personification of the human group, not particularly the father. Human security depends on the solidarity of the human group which provided everyone’s immediate environment and culture from birth until death. The personification of the group as the totem, then the ancestor or founding father, which became the tribal god, meant that the God has all the properties once associated with the group, and some associated with the father figure. So, belief in the god stops us feeling as weak and helpless as a solitary animal in the face of adversity. God as society protects us, and god as a father guides us and reassures us in the tasks we have been allocated as citizens with corresponding duties in society, duties commanded by God!
Heaven the Reward?
As our duties are God’s will, we share God’s purpose by living our lives as good citizens, and whatever we suffer as a consequence, God will reward us in compensation. The reward is heaven—a perfect society—and that indeed would be the outcome if everyone lived exemplary lives as citizens. Of course, we are born into an already existing society, and it was, for millennia, rare indeed for anyone to depart from life not still in it. So, normal society seemed to its members to be eternal.
It follows that the perfect society—heaven—was itself never ending, and so the myth arose that the members of that perfect society also lived forever. The citizens of the City of God, the perfect city, could never die. That then was their reward for doing their duty as God had commanded. A positive feedback system had evolved culturally to reinforce our social instincts. Those who fulfilled their social obligations were doing God’s will, and were rewarded by eternal life after death in God’s perfect society—Paradise.
To otherwise ignorant humans, it was compelling, not least because it had more than a grain of truth in it. The reward for good citizenship and prosociality was a good society, and an enjoyable and secure life, not supernatural to be sure, but better still, it was actual! The supernatural reward of religion was an illusion, but its point was the real benefits of mutual regard, concern and care that religion bolstered within the group. The trouble here again, though, is that inter group rivalries and competition focused on religious antagonism. Each tribe considered its culture superior to the others, and, as religion was the central feature of cultural bonding within a group, it was tha natural focus of tribal enmity. Zenophobia often condensed down to religious hatred. A global village requires any religion it has to be a true monotheism if global harmony is to prevail. The universal God is the God of all because He is global society.
What is Wrong with Sex?
Another trouble was that religions had gone beyond instinctive morality, in that those in charge of them, kings, priests, hierophants, could add to instinctive morals any additional morals that suited them in their desire to keep order and to maintain their class privileges, or ones that were suggested by the myths invented to account for the human situation. The Christian obsession with sex is an example of the latter. Sex could not be more natural, and rejecting it is utterly unnatural. In Christianity, it comes from Paul’s personal obsession with it, but that seems to be a misunderstanding of the Essene myth that sexlessness was angelic. The leading Essenes, the monastic ones, chose to be celibate because they believed heaven to be inhabited by angels—sexless beings, as Jesus explained—but it was a voluntary choice. It was possible for Essenes to marry and live a villagers life, and most did. Paul seems to have decided it must have been best for everyone, if they could, to live the chaste and celibate life. So, he virtually taught what the Essenes practiced, but he seemed to make the emphasis against sex, whereas the Essenes accepted that most would choose a normal sex life, and those who did not had to be exceptional men, and probably women too.
The point is that it is not sex in this world that is sinful, but having children without the responsibility that marriage conferred upon parents to provide for their children. The Essenes were fully familiar with the damage caused to abandoned children and to orphans by the loss of parents, because they kept up their numbers in the camps by taking in waifs and strays and bringing them up to be leaders aspiring to be angels.
The holy family is far from obvious in the career of Jesus, once the birth narratives of Luke and Matthew are discarded as Hellenistic Romance. Joseph is barely mentioned at all, and Mary the Mother appears infrequently. The Essenes were a brotherhood, and it seems likely that they had an associated sisterhood, like the same or closely related sects, the Therapeutae and the Bnay and Bnat Qyama of fourth century Syriac Christianity, and eventually like the Catholic monks and nuns of later times. So, the references to Jesus’s brothers and sisters do not have to imply a family group. If the parallels with Catholic monastics are historical, then communes of brothers would have been led by a Father (Abbot), and communes of sisters by a Mother (Abbess).
The gospel evidence could be interpreted as showing that a Mother ran the travellers’ lodges that Jesus and his followers used and the Essenes are known to have had. So, the holy family was a construct of the gentile churches keen to appeal to Romans who otherwise would have been highly suspicious of Christians originating in bands of rebellious Jews living communally in brotherhoods. The Jews, of course, rebelled against Roman rule in 66 AD, about the time that Paul was ending his mission to the gentiles. A family then, as now, seemed much more cosy, normal and acceptable. In truth, Jesus was likely an orphan or a waif adopted by the Essenes, and never had a family group.
So sex is wrongly a major issue in Christianity. Leaving children destitute is the real issue for us all, Christian or otherwise, in a caring society.
Evil as a Threat
A prominent psychologist, J C Flugel (Man, Morals and Society) observed that people have “the most need of God when they feel themselves the most helpless in the face of evil”. “Evil” is scarcely a scientific term, but Flugel here is expressing the concern in the way a believer would. Evil is anything that gives someone cause to fear for their lives. Faced with such a fear, people pray to God—the reason Christians like to say “there are no atheists in a shell hole”. As God is a personification of the primitive social group, the prayer to God is a stylized alarm call, such as social animals other than humans still use—a cry for help or for the others to watch out.
In early times, people would rarely wander around by themselves. The whole point of the group was safety in numbers, but, if someone did come face to face with a deadly predator, their instinct is to call out so that others will come to help, or at least be alerted to the danger. The need for God expresses our dependence on each other—our dependence on human society. Though religions have given evil a supernatural connotation, it began by simply meaning “dangerous”.
Much of the purpose of the human group was, after all, security, mutual protection, initially from dangers in the wild, then as the human population grew and human groups were pressed into closer proximity, increasingly danger from rival human groups. Then these strangers with their strange ways and peculiar habits were also classified as evil. They worshipped alien gods, whom our own superior divines declared to be devils, and their whole culture and way of life was demonized as rivalry intensified.
It is still the same. Devotees of any god will regard the devotees of another as satanic. Thus morality is debased and modified to suit the prejudices of a particular people and the special interests of their leaders. The priests, for example, make it a moral duty to serve the “god”, but as there is no god needing to be served, in practice it amounts to serving them, the priests. It is plain in the Old Testament where the gods were served by offerings of food. Later it was money, corban, like the widow’s mite!
Serving God
The presence of an extended period of misfortune, say a drought or a famine, will often be considered a punishment by a people’s own gods for some wrongdoing. The priests have to decide what the fault is and then institute actions to propitiate the gods. The gods will be propitiated by abstract rites that will kid the people into thinking measures are being taken to resolve the problem, and, of course, the propitiary gifts served to the gods will be consumed by the priests. Whatever the cause of the misfortune, the cure will be of particular benefit to the priests and the nobility.
The moral obligation of having “services” for the gods ensures that the priests have a good living in prosperous times, and survive the deathly ones, unlike many of their congregation. In other words, it is an insurance policy for the priestly class. Of course, in prosperous times, people are inclined to get complacent and think they can manage quite well without having to serve the gods. That is why serving them is defined as a moral obligation, why people are made to feel guilty unless they do it diligently, and the prosperity enjoyed proves that the gods are pleased, so the serving of them is working! The declaration of such rituals as a moral obligation extends the insurance for the priests to the deathly times, when it matters even more. In famines and other such deathly times, when the people are flocking in fear to the temple or the church, the priests are the last to lose any weight.
The God of the Jews, Yehouah, who became the God of the Christians when Christianity formed as a branch of the Essene sect of Judaism, was described in the Jewish scriptures as a “jealous God”. His slaves were not to wander to any other god or apostatize. It was what the priests wanted the Jews to believe. The Christians believed it.
