Want Human Development? Beware Religious Superstition

American God Is Also the One Roman Emperors Invented, For the Same Awful Reasons Which In US America Festered:

As US America is the mentally leading nation it matters to all what the USA thinks (yes, there are five times more Chinese, and soon, Indians, and Europe has thrice the population; however US institutions dominate world institutions… and it’s more than a habit; as I said, it’s instituted and people are “cool” with it, worldwide… Because they tend to distrust their neighbour more than the USA… Maybe Russia went back to disastrous, Putin friendly Orthodox Christianism, precisely because the USA’s propaganda was impelling the notion that Christ was “cool”, the indispensable and easiest way to gain respect…).

Observes The Economist in “Young Americans believe in a vengeful God”

“Their deity offers relatively little protection and plenty of punishment.

The more stupid one is metaphysically, the less developed in all other ways one tends to be.

FEW rich nations are as God-fearing as America. A global poll by Gallup in 2009 found that 69% of the country’s adults consider religion an important part of their daily life, more than twice the share in Britain, France or Japan. A new survey by the Pew Research Centre shows that young Americans, though less devout than their elders, are still much more so than their peers in Europe.

Five-sixths of those aged 18 to 29 believe in some kind of deity, but their generation is the least likely to worship God as described in the Bible (43%). This is not because they have switched en masse to another mainstream religion: only 8% of them follow non-Christian faiths, just slightly above the national average of 6%. Rather, a large share of young people profess to believe in another higher power (39%), whatever that may mean.

God, as young Americans see her, is a bit less likely to be all-knowing and all-powerful than the God their parents worship. However, compared with their elders, young people see God as less likely to protect them and more likely to punish them. Alas, there are no historical data to reveal whether youngsters have always felt so cursed—or if the current crop are experiencing an unusual amount of divine persecution.”

It is easier to believe in the Biblical or Islamist God, than to gather the motivation to learn history and geography… or just to acquire a sophisticated common sense. Instead, the common sense of the ambient rabble fits all, is ready to wear, and indispensable to arrivistes. This is why US common sense arrives so well, all over.

Also the US god, was, originally, not that of North America, but the plain old God of Europe, the God which presided over the destruction of Greco-Roman civilization. Believing in a God made in the image of the all-powerful, all-knowing masters of the Roman empire, who imposed and engineered Christianism, is highly compatible with The Empire, having been devised by those at the helm of The Empire.

Embracing Constantine’s terror god shows to all others that one respects authority, one is anxious to please it, and Constantine, and today’s replacement of Constantine, and one is endowed with proper naivety and anxiety to fit among one’s peers, and have a beautiful career. This is also why so many politicians in the West, including the revered Obama told us Islam was a religion of peace and Angelina Jolie, a movie star and UN ambassador tried to imprint on us, sotto voce, that “Islam is a beautiful religion“. (The rest of Jolie’s speech was commendable, of course, and indeed, that’s how manipulative politicians do it; at least since Adolf Hitler… Dilute lethal venom, in an appealing drink.) 

India is on the left…

These properties, the awe for plutocrats, wealth, fate, and the vengeful, jealous common deity, enable those immigrants or descendants of rather recent immigrants who constitute most of the US citizenry to fit with each other, a common way to empathy.

The problem is all this indeed, sets the same sort of mood which presided over the fall of the Roman empire, and one can expect the same results. Believing in the vengeful, all-everything Lord sets a belief in vengeance and justice in another world, not in the one at hand…. meanwhile, obey the boss! Faith in the Christo-Islamist god replaces the drive to progress with the patience of resentment. It makes the youth inclined to respect omnipotence (the NSA) and omniscience (Facebook) and the power of politicians, rather than to fight plutocracy, and for progress. After all, the biblical God is, at least symbolically, the ultimate plutocrat: owning everything, knowing everything and ready to use violence and ultimate cruelty to impose her glory and jealousy.

The biblical God is the perfect God for the rule of wealth and evil, and in America, this enormous (mostly) European colony stolen from the Natives, it justifies the very existence of the society: a precious gift.

SUPERSTITIOUS religion tends to make its practitioners believe that, whatever happens to be, was ordained by the organizer of the universe. So it is fundamentally friendly to the powers that be. That is tyrants, dictators, plutocrats… And force, and wealth. So this is what the USA preach.

And another point: China is imminently non-religious. In the last two millennia, China had disastrous experiences with state mandated Confucianism at one point, and state mandated Buddhism, at another. And entire dynasties or states were affected. In the end, the experienced of the state of Qin, first to unify China as the Qin dynasty, in the last three millennia, was that, it was better to depend upon secular law (like its contemporary, the Roman Republic).

Modern China is pretty much following the same model as Qin… or Rome: law and public works (the ascent of Qin culminated with the short-lived Qin dynasty, However the state of Qin itself had lasted centuries before that, and its model got launched by Lord Shang Yang, circa 361 BCE, advocating the philosophy of Legalism (also translatable as “rationalism”: Cartesianism, 20 centuries before Descartes…)

Secularism of China goes a long way to explain its spectacular development…  By the way, it goes without saying that, should one be a potentate, or a class of potentates anxious to prevent the human development of We The People, a most efficient way to do this is to foster religious superstition. So watch the construction of gigantic mosques and associated buildings in Morocco, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Turkey… Algeria, flush with enormous oil and gas revenue, has one of the world’s worst educational level (127th in world rankings… although better than Morocco with 152th… Morocco has only 75% of the phosphate reserves of the world! Such countries do so poorly, because their elites do so well…)

Religion is not just the opium of the people, it is the politics of the soul.

And then, of course, superstitious religions foster a respect for mental ways friendly to losing a grip on reality. When one has no grip whatsoever, one offers oneself to be trampled by the powers that be. It’s hard to imagine carpets happy. Nor can they make their friends as happy as could be, either!

Patrice Ayme

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Note: Karl Marx: “religion in itself is without content, it owes its being not to heaven but to earth, and with the abolition of distorted reality of which it is the theory, it will collapse of itself” [The German-French Yearbooks, 1842.] In 1843, Marx in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: ”Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions”….

Thus, for example, US citizens withstand US plutocracy the easier, the more they embrace their belief in the vengeful deity… So it’s a self-feeding, vicious spiral… Fortunately, in Europe, the strong identification of fascism with superstitious religion damaged both (clearly in Spain, Italy, Germany with the SS’ “Gott Mit Uns!”… But even in Marxist fascist countries with living deities such as Stalin, Ceausescu, Tito, etc.)

Tags: Human Development Index, Religion, superstition