Hot Dog God

God As A Dog In The Sky
Only god could know that god does not exist. But if god knows this, there is no god, and if she does not know that, she is no god either…

Perhaps the most important fact shown by the history of science is that people can believe in the most foolish things for the longest time, for no good reason whatsoever, except mental inertia or otherwise falling victim to the idle boredom minds cannot tolerate. We are most deluded creatures, deliberately so. But that’s OK, imagination should come first, and it makes our minds expand beyond anything: transhumanism, always going beyond humanism, is the definition of the genus Homo, the genius of the genus.

Error is most fruitful, and everywhere, and is more than recommended, as long as it is accompanied by error correction… Overall and ultimately.

That, too, the history of science shows abundantly.

Modern science shows that immense complexity can give astounding answers: little somethings somewhere can give tremendous effects of a completely different nature, somewhere else. We don’t necessarily have the god(s) causing spectacular miracles: science and complexities can enact miracles.

We simply do not need superstition to believe in miracles anymore…We can literally have effects at a distance we can’t even know about until a potentially very distant future… (Nonlocal effects in Quantum Mechanics.)

The science of anthropology shows the weirdest, most injurious beliefs have existed forever. In all societies, at all times. This is too systemic to be accidental.

A closer examination of history shows that this is no accident. Superstitious religions are follies that bind, precisely because they enabled to mass-kill, mass-injure, or mass-terrorize multitudes. Most of the known 400+ superstitious religions have gravely injured multitudes at one point or another, they are generally how oligarchies rule… through the minds.
But, some will object, is not there any virtue in organized religions? Of course there is, like there is virtue in the whiteness in the Arctic Bear’s coat, Ursus Martitimus.

Superstitious religions are watchdogs keeping souls in line… to better serve the masters as politely as needed to optimize their earthly repose.

Now, of course, all too secular religions such as nationalism, tribalism, gangsterism achieve the same sort of ganging up effects, and are also united by crime, if no other rituals…

All of these are example of mental, or intellectual, when not outright political fascism, which all appeal to the same satisfying feeling of doing much with a restricted instruction set… So, instead of attacking directly the faith into follies that bind, one should rather attack the meta-logy behind them. For example the fact so may people make a virtue of not been “distracted” by the tangential, where the details, and thus the devil, are to be found.

Wisdom lays in the tangential, off the thoroughly beaten common paths…

Patrice Ayme

Symmetry Breaking, Afghanistan, Islam, Psychology And Civilization: Steven Weinberg In Memoriam

Abstract: Symmetry Breaking, a key concept in modern physics, is actually useful all over the world of thought. Continually, thinkers grab inequivalent categories, say “Christian civilization” and “Islam”, proclaim them equivalent, when they are not, and then proceed with insane thoughts. Breaking a symmetry, and then reasoning by analogy, when the symmetry does not hold, is fraught.

Another example of groundless symmetry proclaimed, is to believe that, because history happened some way before, it always will. Of course, it will not, and the titanic climate calamity is an example. In truth, the breaking of symmetry is crucial, in all matters of analysis.

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High minds call for high thoughts and instructive debates. As García Márquez noticed: “we are living in the age of vulgarity“… Better talk with a dead high mind than live creepy-crawlies. A top, unfortunately now defunct, physicist made an observation on civilization, which is particularly striking in light of those who claims there is a perfect symmetry between “Christian civilization” (something that is disqualified, because it never really happened, as Nietzsche pointed out) and Islam (a comically cosmic octopus, a superstition which pretends to be civilization itself). 

 

Steven Weinberg played a central part in formulating and establishing theoretical physics’ two standard models — the standard model of fundamental interactions and the standard model of cosmology. He was professor at Berkeley when he proposed the unified theory of electromagnetism and weak interactions, which is still in use, He would ultimately get the Nobel Prize for it in 1979. However, Berkeley did not deem that enough of an achievement, and did not give him tenure… 

Weinberg sometimes expressed strong views against religion, such as this: “Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.”

By religion, what ties us together, Weinberg meant religious superstition, of course. (The religion of the Republic also exists… and it’s good!)

 

This is interesting in the light of Feynman, the most famous US born physicist, who tried to insinuate, idiotically, that philosophy was of no value… in physics (his son became a philosopher)… while in truth he made plenty of philosophy (including a bit with yours truly).  

 

Compare with Joe Biden’s assertion that “the US has no national interest in Afghanistan”. Whatever the usage of that present mode means! Does civilization have an interest in Afghanistan? Biden just gave Afghanistan, a country of 40 million, to the Taliban, a group of superstitious fanatics who contradict the naturally given religion of humanity, the cult of reason.

Some cynics will say, oh no, Biden just gave Afghanistan to Pakistan. Indeed, look at the map: they fit perfectly, and have in common the Pashtun country, the dominant ethnic group of Afghanistan… enemy of others… and with a traditional old moral system anterior to, and compatible with, Islam.

 

The weak minded make a symmetry between Afghanistan and Vietnam. Kissinger told Nixon that within two years nobody would care about Vietnam, and Vietnam would become a backwater. However the North Vietnamese military were, roughly, no less civilized than the South Vietnamese military. North and South were both corrupt, in different ways, there was a rough symmetry.

 

I know that specialists like Lewis claim that: “Why did the discoverers of America sail from Spain rather than from a Muslim Atlantic port, out of which such voyages were indeed attempted in earlier times? Why did the great scientific breakthrough occur in Europe and not, as one might reasonably have expected, in the richer, more advanced, and in most respects more enlightened realm of Islam?

A more sophisticated form of the blame game finds its targets inside, rather than outside, Islamic society. One such target is religion—for some, specifically Islam. But to blame Islam as such is usually hazardous and not often attempted. Nor is it very plausible. For most of the Middle Ages it was neither the older cultures of the Orient nor the newer cultures of the West that were the major centers of civilization and progress but the world of Islam.”

Is Lewis lying, or just ignorant, or fundamentally stupid? Or is he just earning his stipend as a friend of the ruling fossil fuel plutocracy of the West and its love of Islam (Fundamentalism)? “Islam” meant, literally, that slavery was an integral part of society. Only servants of plutocracy like Lewis would consider that slavery is “civilization and progress”. This is just one point. That escaped slaves were rewarded by impalement doesn’t even need to be mentioned… 

Also Lewis observes that: “to blame Islam as such is usually hazardous and not often attempted.” In other words “Islam” is a sadistic hyper violent regime as hazardous as… as what?… a rattlesnake?

Religious apologists of violently interpretable superstitions (RAVIS) always evoke contexts. Here one can see that, in context, Islam apologist Lewis says slavery is OK, and “hazardous” religious terror is OK. Similarly, Biden says nobody has been killed yet, while terrorized Afghans fall from the sky. 

Islam is what one should call a war religion, a war superstition. Just read an unexpunged version of the Qur’an. Now the Jewish Bible, root of Judeo-Christianism, and thus Islam, is also a war superstition, where God order the Jews to holocaust an athnicity at least once. Islam is just more so (although there are versions of Islam which have their own version of the Qur’an, it’s not the case of the Shia and Suni).

 

Just as with pandemic and global heating from the climate calamity, some will say it does not matter. But Afghanistan was held by only 2,500 US soldiers for a total of 9,582 soldiers from NATO nations. No US soldier got killed in 18 months in Afghanistan. The mission in Afghanistan cost nearly nothing, to the USA, relative to the danger of letting fanatics in command of an enormous country, subjugating twenty million females into slavery.. 

 

Now that superstition is hyper powerful, What if the Taliban and his allies were to seize power in Pakistan, get control of the enormous nuclear force there? The senile Biden will say whatever about it. But the possibility has augmented enormously now, because Biden has shown that obstinacy in matters of fanaticism can win over anything, not just the military, but reason itself.

 

It is hard to see, at this point, how the electro-weak theory will contribute to civilization… But it can be done. The electro-weak depends upon SYMMETRY BREAKING. 

 

In physics, symmetry breaking is a phenomenon in which (infinitesimally) small fluctuations acting on a system crossing a critical point decide the system’s fate, by determining which branch of a bifurcation is taken. To an outside observer unaware of the fluctuations (or “noise”), the choice will appear arbitrary. This process is called symmetry “breaking”, because such transitions usually bring the system from a symmetric but disorderly state into one or more definite states. Symmetry breaking is thought to play a major role in pattern formation.

 

In his 1972 Science paper titled “MORE IS DIFFERENT” Nobel laureate (and great physicist, a co-inventor of the Higgs, if not more) Philip.W. Anderson used the idea of symmetry breaking to show that even if reductionism is true, its converse, constructionism, which is the idea that scientists can easily predict complex phenomena given theories describing their components, is not. Symmetry Breaking creates indeterminacy. 

 

Giving Afghanistan to violent supertitionists broke the symmetry, pandemonium will ensue. That pandemonium always favors the USA is an historical truth, it has become subconsciously institutional… Hence the will of the US Deep State to give Afghanistan back to the Taliban, obvious since 2001… However, what has always happened for some good reasons, does not have to stay true once these reasons are removed. Contrarily to the preceding centuries, North America is now vulnerable to attack… In more ways than one. For example, North America depends upon China… next to Afghanistan. So say:”Oh, let the Chinese discipline the Taliban!”. Yes, well, next dictator Xi of China would then discipline much more. And so on. 

On August 1, 1914, the fascist racist disciplinarian imperialists of Germany decided to take control of the French Republic. It would take just a few days. Then it would be Russia’s turn, and Great Britain would then negotiate. In the real world, the French fought like demons and five weeks later nearly destroyed the entire German army which had to precipitously retreat. So even trusting disciplinarian dictatorship to bring order is no sure thing, in the way of order. A branch of the Taliban is actually fighting the Pakistani government, and the Taliban, or its allies, one could well imagined, could be in control of Pakistan and its nukes… next year.

How one got into that calamity, traditionally called World War One, has to do with the envoy of US president Wilson waxing lyrical on the racial inferiority of the French, in Berlin, June 1, 1914, two months earlier, in the Kaiser’s office (and proposing an alliance, no less: crafty war mongering by US “Democrats” is nothing new, just ask Lincoln…)

Psychology matters, it’s symmetry breaking. Mania in crowds, and insanity in the collectives are all examples of symmetry breaking, and making more, completely different from the symmetrical order it arose from.

Patrice Ayme

This is a picture of Bliss Park, above Lake Tahoe, California, at an altitude of 1900 meters (6,500 feet), August 22, 2021, today. The smoke is blatant, it’s coming from the Caldor Fire, located 50 kilometers way. But not just that: notice that some of the large tress are already dead. This is symmetry breaking in action: trees centuries old are already dead. The future will then not be as the past: the time symmetry has been broken. At the same time, millions of of centuries old trees, which were not already dead, are burning in other giant California fires. The smoke, often laden with half-burned industrial chemicals, is so vicious, there is evidence that it can kill trees directly…

The Republic Is The Religion, Tolerate Only Vaccinated Superstitions!

Superstitious faiths are not just private matters, as soon as they impact others. In a Republic, the default religion is the Republic itself: it ties (ligare) people again (re). Being in a Republic requires to believe in the religion of the Republic, and other faiths are tolerated only when they don’t contradict the Republic and its laws.

History provides with many catastrophic examples of what happens when a superstition takes over the state. The Judea war of 66-73 CE is an example: fanatical Jews didn’t just attack Roman soldiers, they heavily fought each others. Jerusalem in the end was sieged by Titus and his legions, while inside the capital, Jewish sects were fighting each other to death. The end result was the annihilation of Israel as a state, an administration, and even a location where Jews were found.

It helped, in seducing the Mediterranean basin, that the Roman Republic outlawed all religions calling for human sacrifices. To keep itself together, the Roman empire had to become tolerant to all religions, as long as they forbid human sacrifices…

However, the “Catholic Orthodox” took over under Constantine (Nikea Council, 323 CE). Soon enough heretics could be executed (380 CE), libraries  and books were burned, freedom of expression and reflection were outlawed, the justice system gutted, etc. Rendered mad and stupid by Christianity, the empire collapsed quasi-instantaneously (Arbogast and his Western empire, secular Frankish army go defeated by Theodosius at the Frigidus battle in 394 CE, the great invasions happened in 406 CE, Rome fell to the Goths in 410 CE).

Thus, it is important to draw the line. The state religion is the Republic: the public is god, and the public comes with human ethology, the practice of reason… enshrined by law. As the Romans used to say under the Republic: the law is hard, but it’s the law.

When one doesn’t respect the laws of the Republic, the Republic collapses: this is what happened in slow motion with the Roman Republic over 550 years:

During the Renaissance, in the Sixteenth Century, Pope Julius II ordered the destruction of Roman monuments, even using stones to make cement with! Prior to this, Roman monuments were mostly intact. Thus Roman catholicism destroyed Rome twice; in the Fourth Century, for real, and in the Sixteenth Century, in memoriam. my opinion? Roman monuments should be rebuilt! Precisely, so we can remember better the rage of those mad with god.Starting in 150 BCE (say), the spirit of the Republic, that the most powerful shouldn’t be too powerful, was violated. That spirit was enforced by laws against excessive wealth and expenses (sumptuary laws). They got eroded beyond sustainability, the Gracchi brothers and their supporters noticed, and tried to correct. The lack of replenishment of the Republic led to a strange combination of collapse and expansion… both driven by increasing fascism which culminated in the installment of “Orthodox Catholicism” as state religion by emperor Constantine. That in turn brought further mental and cognitive collapse…  A collapse which went, even though the Renaissance was launched: arguably the Renaissance was on as early as the Seventh Century (outlawing slavery) and the Eight Century (mandatory education). However, as the example of the disastrous Sixteenth Century shows, collapsing feature driven by religion, or, more exactly plutocratic superstition, led not just to the destruction of the Roman Forum then, but also of a quick succession of devastating religious wars.

Actually “Orthodox Catholicism” got horrendous in the Fourth Century and then again ramped up its terror starting in 1026 CE… precisely because a striking Renaissance was in full swing in Normandy and surrounding regions…. While Rome also stirred (an attempt to relaunch the Senate happened then), and the Italian Republics became ever stronger.

There is little doubt that Catholicism endowed fascism for centuries… not just as the Occidental Roman state collapsed… But all the way to 1789 CE…

So what to do, as Sharia raises its ugly primitivism? Well, be vigilant!

An example is vaccinations. Vaccinations protect the vaccinated, and others too, as the disease vaccinated against finds it hard to get a grip in the public. Not to vaccinate a child is a crime, against the child, and against other children and all citizens (as vaccinations protect all). Crimes against the Republic should be punished… Be it only to show which religion is the boss… namely the religion of secular law, the skeleton of the state.  

Patrice Ayme

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The preceding was inspired by a NYT article on Orthodox Jews in the New York area refusing vaccinations, which brought an epidemic of dangerous measles. We Are Taking Religious Freedom Too Far
We have a right to practice our beliefs, but we don’t have the right to discriminate against others, or endanger their lives.

Here is the conclusion of that article:

Before you ask an entire student body to bow their heads and pray, remember that banning prayer in public school never stopped any child from praying. It just prevents students who don’t belong to the dominant religion from feeling ostracized.

Religious faith is a private matter between a believer and God. But how a believer lives in community with other people is something different altogether. It’s time to stop giving believers a pass just because their beliefs happen to run counter to the laws of the nation they live in. Human lives may depend on it.

 

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.)

Real Civilization Does Not Confuse Civilization and Superstition.

Another day, another Jihadist attack aimed at children. The Islamist State has long given instructions to kill children. Twenty-two killed, 60 maimed in Manchester at a concert for children. A 22 year old cultural Libyan exploded himself. The “multicultural” assassin was technically, but not culturally, a Brit. Time to face reality.

An eight year old little girl died, among others. Who is responsible? The  savage who exploded himself, according to Islam, or those who, misleadingly, call Islam a “civilization”? Excited, nihilistic maniacs, or those who, in the philosophical establishment, call their religion civilized?

Here is a Sword Verse, one of a great many in the Qur’an, Surah 9, verse 59:

“But when the forbidden months are past,

then fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them,

and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war)…”

[Partisan Muslims whine that this is out of context; actually the context is much more terrible than that: all sorts of people are supposed to be killed, according to Literal Islam, for example homosexuals, just because they are homosexual, following explicitly the Bible, are supposed to “rain stones on homosexuals”. By the way, that’s ironical, as Muslim societies are INTRINSICALLY homosexual!]

Islam is not a civilization, it’s a superstition, and it has been highly successful precisely because this superstition gives a lot of pretexts to kill all sorts of people, while claiming warriors will be pals with god. Islam is not a civilization. How can we take seriously those who confuse “civilization” and superstition? Instead, indeed, Islam is just a superstition. And a pretty nihilistic one at that. “Nihil” means nothing in Latin, it’s related to annihilation. Muhammad explained from the beginning that Islam aimed at annihilating the Greco-Roman and Sassanid (Persian) empires.

Islam orders that society and superstition should not be separated. Said otherwise, Islam orders society to become a “theocracy” (power of god).

Tenochtitlan, Sixteenth Century. This is a civilization. It separated governance and superstition, because a civilization has to separate reality from fancy.

This is primitive. Serious civilizations separated, and separate, superstition and political governance. In Japan the Shogun heading the government was no priest. Nor was the Chinese empire a theocracy. An even more enlightening civilization was the Mexican one. The (more or less central) Aztec government separated the religion and the government: the emperor had diverse titles (including “speaker”), but he had no religious title. The Aztec emperor was not a priest. The two top priests of Tenochtitlan were at the head of the Aztec Church, a completely distinct hierarchy from political governance (which comprised war, justice, commerce, finance).  

Make no mistake: I don’t mind the devil, if, and whenever, it serves civilization: for example, I do not condemn the massive bombing campaigns against the populations who had supported the mass murdering fascist regimes of Germany and Japan. It was the cheapest way, by a very long shot, cheapest not just economically and militarily, but also, overall, in human lives, to win the war.

The Aztecs distinguished completely their superstitious religion from governance, That reflects, and encourages, the ability to distinguish reality from a fiction “above” it. Governance has to be grounded in reality, thus divorced from fiction.

The “West” did this, and did it all along, under the Roman Republic. The separation of church and state was re-asserted formally when (all too Catholic!) emperor Justinian ordered a (“Pagan“!) law professor to head a commission to refurbish Roman Law (by then nearly 13 centuries old, and full of obsolete considerations). Justinian gave just one instruction: to separate secular from religious law. Justinian’s refurbished law was immediately made law in the empire of the Franks (Imperium Francorum), which held (most of) Western Europe.

Thus, both Aztecs and Western Europe separated superstitious church and reality-based state.

A real civilization does not confuse civilization and superstition.

A civilization is the ultimate achievement of humanity. A superstition is a butterfly’s dream. And when a superstition is just a dressing for nihilism, it’s nothing to be proud of. Nothing. Not that nihilism is nothing, far from it.

Where does nihilism comes from? Nihilism is a characteristic of human ethology. The greatest enemy of man is not just man, but the enormous destruction which man can bring to terrestrial ecology. Thus, the enemy of man is man, squared. Including oneself. To destroy that ecological destruction man brings, it’s best to destroy men. That’s where the nihilist instinct comes from. When there are more people than the ecology can stand, people have to die. Thus more so in the desert. Thus the nihilist essence of Islam! Thus the attachment of Islam to the regions with a difficult, unforgiving, ecology.

The civil war in Syria followed a spectacular drought which starved Syrians massively. War in Syria has displaced at least 25% of the population, solving the ecological problem in a way few will find amusing, soon all over reproducing, if the greenhouse keeps on getting worse, as it will.

Nihilism of Islamism: religions for a devastated and devastating future?

Patrice Ayme’

RELIGIOUS IRRATIONALITY RATIONALE

Ruling Classes Subjugate Opposition With Irrationality, Not Just Human Sacrifices (And Their Variants: Killings, Jihad, Signature Strikes).

Say you are a tyrant, You want Your rule as absolute as possible. You may have ecological problems, and you may need to decimate your subjects, or make them work harder. What is the best way to do this? Controlling your subjects’ minds, and not just with fear. Notice the sheep: they follow the pastor who milks them, and occasionally, cut their throats. What is the difference between flock and pastor? The pastor is much more clever, much more rational. The pastor is endowed with reason. Actually more than one. The pastor is full of reasons. The sheep is deprived of reason. Irrational. So, as a tyrant, irrationality you shall preach.

So how are you going to turn simple folks into a flock deprived of reason? Well, human sacrifices are a way to do this. Notice the king in the drawing below, sitting under an umbrella, just like a US president under his White House. A study published in Nature, in April 2016, explains that “Ritual human sacrifice promoted and sustained the evolution of stratified societies”.

Sacrifice Of The Annual Customs At Dahomey. Drawing By Foulquier, 1776. Engraving In “Le Tour Du Monde, 1865.”

The “Annual Customs” in Dahomey were also tax day for the free citizens of Dahomey (only war captives and criminals were sacrificed). The massive (several thousands) sacrifices stopped when the slave trade became too irresistibly profitable (the empire of Dahomey provided roughly 20% of the transatlantic slaves).

Honored European guests were allowed to attend the Annual Customs, as Dahomey had guns made locally, a professional army, and was perfectly capable of defending itself against the white man (as the British army found out, in Ashanti next door, suffering a terrible defeat where all soldiers were killed, but two, and the Anglo-Saxon commander was eaten, cooked like Cook).

But the outrages of superstitious religion go well beyond just roasting people alive, and are otherwise subtle in their deepest forms. The Bible evokes the Golden Calf, and rejects its cult. But that may have been a red herring. What upper classes need to rule best is for the lower classes to:

ADORE IRRATIONALITY!

Adore irrationality, reject reason. Rejecting reason, makes one the master’s slave, because one becomes so stupid, one gets feeble-minded. Thus all enslaving religions trample reason, as reason is the weapon which could destroy them most. Reason, not love.

This is why all religions which help enforce plutocracy train their followers to obey senseless orders, such as not eating pig, crustacean, and only eating animals who were agitated by spasms, while experiencing anxiety and suffering as their throats were slit, etc.

Jared Diamond gives more examples in his book “The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies?”:

“Virtually all religions hold some supernatural beliefs specific to that religion. That is, a religion’s adherents firmly hold beliefs that conflict with and cannot be confirmed by our experience of the natural world, and that appear implausible to people other than the adherents of that particular religion. For example, Hindus believe there is a monkey god who travels thousands of kilometers at a single somersault. Catholics believe a woman who had not yet been fertilized by a man became pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy, whose body eventually after his death was carried up to a place called heaven, often represented as being located in the sky. The Jewish faith believes that a supernatural being gave a chunk of desert in the Middle East to the being’s favorite people, as their home forever.”

One should not forget a Prophet (Muhammad) who flew to Jerusalem on a winged horse, before ascending to heavens, just like that other guy had done before. (Curious that Diamond forgot the founder of the second most major superstition.)

Superstitious religions sound very stupid, but the cult of unreason has its reasons that only the masters understand. Some of these orders are not just irrational, they are lethal: if they can claim you insult(ed) their little godly doggie god in the sky the excellent Judeo-Christiano-Muslim authorities could, or would outright order you killed.

Hence irrationality did not just rule, it killed, and demanded the utmost respect, doing so, lest it would have another irrational reason to kill you.

Let me insist: the very irrationality of religious commands enables the authorities to exert power whimsically. So it is the reign of Sharia, not Human Ethology (the later been approached by Roman law).

In the third century BCE, Chinese administrator Li Bing eliminated the sacrifice of young maidens to a river god during the conquest of Sichuan by the First Emperor. He called the bluff of a local racket in which families rid themselves of unwanted daughters while getting rich on the compensation they received. Thus “irrational” rituals bring all too rational, very prosaic gain.

Jared Diamond observes that embracing irrationality is the greatest divide between the fanatics and the rest (fanatics means: coming out of the FANUM, the temple):

“No other feature of religion creates a bigger divide between religious believers and modern secular people, to whom it staggers the imagination that anyone could entertain such beliefs. No other feature creates a bigger divide between believers in two different religions, each of whom firmly believes its own beliefs but considers it absurd that the other religion’s believers believe those other beliefs. Why, nevertheless, are supernatural beliefs such universal features of religions?”

As we just saw, “irrational” beliefs are something else reason to get ahead. Pure irrationality is rare. Searching the reasons behind apparent irrationality, what’s hiding in the Dark, oft reveals causality in full.

Jared Diamond rejects the explanation that believing in irrational things is just due to ignorance. Instead he views it as necessary for identifying in groups. There is no doubt that this is a factor. But one does not need sheer absurdities to identify in a group. Middle Age Muslims for example requested Jews and Christians to wear clothing which could identify them. So dressing in a special way can work.

In conclusion, Jared Diamond claims that “it’s irrational to be religious. Supernatural beliefs might not make sense, but they endure because they’re so emotionally satisfying.”

Well, sorry Jared, that’s mostly missing the point. There is a higher reason for imposing (the religion of) irrationality. The point is that irrationality makes people brainless, and thus easy to rule.

However, humans are naturally rational. So irrationality has to be taught, and preached. Some may sneer and ponder what’s in it for We The People. Why would We The People be so easily seduced by their own subjugation?

It is not as if the subjugation was a secret: Christianism brandishes “The Lord”, and compare people to “sheep” to be led (to slaughter?). Islam literally means: “submission”, from root of aslama “he resigned, he surrendered, he submitted.”

So what We The People get in exchange is… irrationality, a rest from the human condition. And just like the Lords themselves, brandishing irrationality to generate fear, cruelty, submission… We The People can do the same.

In almost all societies, killing “legally” within a tribe or clan is granted only to those with great authority. Thus ritual human sacrifice serves power structures—who sits at the top of the social hierarchy.

In a study published in Nature, Joseph Watts, a specialist in cultural evolution at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and colleagues analysed 93 traditional cultures in Austronesia (the region that embraces dozens of thousands of islands in the Pacific and Indonesia). The key was to analyze them before they were influenced by colonization and major world religions (generally in the late 19th and early 20th centuries).

Ethnographic records, show that the prevalence of sacrifice increased with increased social stratification: it occurred in 25% of cultures with little or no stratification, 37% of those with moderately stratified societies, and 67% of those with a pronounced hierarchy.

Mapping the evolutionary relationships between cultures, the researchers found that human sacrifice and social hierarchy co-evolved. Social stratification can change over time. However,  societies that practised human sacrifice were less apt to revert to milder degrees of stratification.

In other words, human sacrifice seems to bolster stratification: it helped to stabilize hierarchy, and conceivably, therefore, had a common role in the development of highly stratified societies that generally persist even today.

I hold that extremely lethal Jihadism is a form of human sacrifice, so this analysis carries to Literal Shia or Salafist Wahhabist Islam directly, and explained why these Muslim societies were unable to progress.

Human sacrifice is the privilege of priests or those who claim religious authority. Watts and colleagues say that this discloses a “Dark Side” to the social role of religion. (They have previously shown that belief in supernatural punishing agencies in Austronesian cultures encouraged moral observance, and thereby promoted the emergence of stratified, complex social structures).

Watts’s team reveals that human sacrifice wasn’t conducted for ostensibly religious reasons alone. Taboo violations, demoralization the underclasses, imposing class boundaries and instil fear of social elites, all build and maintain social control. In India, Untouchable touching higher caste individuals could suffer what are nowadays unimaginable punishments such as amputation, sitting in a red hot metal seat, etc.

Here is the conclusion of Watts and colleagues:

“Religion has long been proposed to play a functional role in society and is commonly claimed to underpin morality. Recent evolutionary theories of religion have focused on the potential of pro-social and moral religious beliefs to increase cooperation. Our findings suggest that religious rituals also played a darker role in the evolution of modern complex societies. In traditional Austronesian cultures there was substantial religious and political overlap, and ritualised human sacrifice may have been co-opted by elites as a

divinely sanctioned means of social control. The approach adopted in this paper demonstrates the way causal hypotheses about major transitions in human social organization can be tested by combining computational models and language phylogenies with a wealth of cultural and historical data. Unpalatable as it might be, our results suggest that ritual killing helped humans transition from the small egalitarian groups of our ancestors, to the large stratified societies we live in today.”

Say You are a tyrant, You want all to understand that Your rule is absolute, global as the plutocracy you lead with relish. So You order “Signature Strikes”, thus telling the world that any wedding You can kill, if such is Your good pleasure, as long as it happens in a far away land.

Were the killing by drones in “signature strikes” personally ordered by president Obama for all to see a form of ritual killing, of human sacrifices for all to see? Certainly. The scariest part is that ordering kills for all to see is something that even Chancellor-President Hitler, a solid reference for human sacrifices, was careful not to be associated to! This means that the Obama administration developed momentum to change the public’s mind about human sacrifice.

Human sacrifices violate human ethology, the evolution-given morality humans come equipped with. In the small groups in which humanity evolved for millions of years, human life was most precious, because the life of others was necessary to pursue one’s life.

So this means that the rise of civilization and its accompanying religions comprised a violation of human ethology.

The main theme of this essay is even more general: it considers not just the violation of evolution given morality, by “stratified societies”, but the violation of reason itself. Violating reason itself compounds the preceding moral problem: human ethology does not come just from “instincts” (whatever that means), but also from the usage of rationality (within a culture, or the individual).

The superstitious religions associated to the rise of demonic upper classes, plutocracy, have attacked reason itself. They are as inhuman as one can get, and survive. They enabled war maximally, annihilating their competition fully (although secular Rome and Literal Islam have unfinished business). Superstitious religions come short, for the future. Their carefully engineered irrationality and willingness to kill at the drop of a hat, will decapitate us, if we do not decapitate them first.

Make no mistake: irrationality has its uses, it allows to jump out of mental boxes. However, irrationality in a religion is different; it creates a common box, and create common, shared respect for irrational elements. Adoration for the Golden Calf is itself a particular case of irrationality. Making irrationality itself an object of adoration is a generalization of the cult of the Golden Calf, to the point of adoring the whims of the satanic masters themselves.

Collective adoration of senseless ways is collective adoration for the mania of the crowd, intellectual fascism at its worst. It’s a moral duty, moral from the ways of Homo, moral to go back to the free ways of our genus, which have made us what we are, the crown of the creation of reason, by enforcing reason, and not its exact opposite.

Patrice Ayme’

Deluded Leaders: Eurogroup, Saudis, Netanyahu. Obama?

Obama is asking Muslim leaders to “do more to discredit the notion that our nations are determined to suppress Islam, that there is an inherent clash in civilizations.”

Sure, there is no clash of civilization. Civilization is one. Islam is just a religion. One of a great many. Islam itself is many variants, at war with themselves. To define a civilization from the religion(s) it harbors is not just abhorrent, it is silly.

There is no civilization but civilization, and reason is its messenger.

Verily, reason is not everything, experience is both its prophet, and its ground.

Some countries are led by savages. They can call themselves judges, kings, whatever. Savages them all. A savage judge, or a savage king, and a savage intellectual or doctor of the faith, are all, still, savages.

Can we share our small Earth with savages, in the age of nukes? Likely not a sustainable proposition.

Charlemagne Was Most Ferocious, But Magnus, Indeed

[Charles the Great, with his nephew, Roland, on the Parvis de Notre Dame.]

Saudi Arabia is owned by some of the world’s most savage Plutos. Raif Badawi was condemned to 10 years in jail, to be struck a thousand times with the whip, and a huge fine. His lawyer, for daring to defend him, got 15 years.

What is Raif’s crime? He wrote: “Muslims, Christians, Jews, Atheists are all equal”. Raif protested the religious authorities who wanted to condemn astronomers in general: in Islam, the Moon is not a physical body, but a signal from god (the savages got that from the Pagan religion in Mecca, before Islam; it was centered on the Moon, accompanied by 360 deities… hence the “Satanic” verses).

The Saudi authorities said that astronomers relativize everything (a charge made by the Christianofascists to burn, alive, after piercing his mouth, astronomer Giordano Bruno four centuries ago). Relativizing everything makes Sharia impossible to apply, whined the Islamofascists in Arabia..

So Raif got 50 lashes of the whip. He has only 950 lashes to go. That’s lenient, if the authorities had decided he was an apostate, he would have got death.

Is somebody in Saudi Arabia culprit of adultery? The punishment is stoning to death. Don’t fear for Jihadists: they can grab and rape whoever they want. They just call their prey a “battlefield bride”.

Hey, Muhammad, the “Messenger of dog god”, showed the way: he took many “battlefield brides”. Including the seventeen year old Safiyaah, and the twenty-year-old, Juwayriya, both Jewish girls.

Islam is not a civilization. It’s just a superstition.

So what is Obama talking about? A clash of civilization with a superstition has happened before: twice Christianity had to be crushed into submission. The first time by the Franks, over a period of four centuries, which culminated when the Pope “surprised” Carolus Magnus (Charlemagne) on Christmas 800, by crowning the imperator of the Franks, Roman Augustus (“Roman emperor”) in Rome.

(As Constantinople did not have an Augustus at the time, Charlemagne was technically single emperor of the entire Roman Empire, a feat that infuriated leaders in the Greek speaking part, the Pars Orientalis.)

Juncker, the organized criminal who heads the EC, has received the letter from the democratically elected Greek government. Juncker transferred, over the years, trillions of euros of tax evasion from We the Peoples of Europe, to plutocrats and their private jumbo jets, islands, foundations, palace, etc.

“If we break our mutual trust, we break Europe,” croaked German finance minister Schauble. He added, trying to sound perfidious: “I have compassion for the Greeks as they have an irresponsible government.” Me, I have compassion for Schauble, and want to push his wheelchair around the Grand Canyon’s rim, as I discuss the error of his ways.

Inside the Eurogroup. Varoufakis screamed to the Dutch finance minister that he was a liar. Ministers of the Eurogroup feared that the two were going to come to blows.

Is the Dutch finance minister a liar? Certainly so. The Dutch finance minister probably wants a cushy job offered by Wall Street, as all his peers and predecessors did, so he would say whatever it takes to please Goldman Sachs, a plutocratic USA government entity which got 60 billion dollars from the government of the USA in 2008 (which it later reimbursed with more money given under the table by another agency of the government).

The European leadership is crawling with High Finance employees, past and future. It should be as high a priority to put them in jail as Jihadist. Indeed, they caused the later. Hey, even president Obama said this!

Obama said that poverty alone doesn’t cause terrorism, but “resentments fester” and extremism grows when millions of people are impoverished.

“We do have to address the grievances that terrorists exploit including economic grievances,” Obama said.

And who has caused the global economic crisis? Foremost, High Finance. Fundamentally, it’s the same mood that brought us slavery, and the worst imperialisms and colonialisms, let alone holocausts.

Obama also revealed one of my favorite themes: no single religion was responsible for violence and terrorism. By this he means that, in the fullness of causality exposed, the violence of Islamism is just an amplification of the one that made the fortune of Christianism.

Obama wants to lift up the voice of tolerance in the United States and beyond, he said. Well, there is a name for that: Laicity.

***

THE ELECTED MOISE OF THE ISRAELI GHETTO?

Israel PM, Netanyahu wants all Jews to come to Israel. Apparently his model for the future of Judaism, is something in between the Warsaw ghetto and Auschwitz. Maybe one should present to Netanyahu another part Jew (suggested the governor-general of Poland, Hans Frank).

Netannyahu does not know history enough.

There were Jews in Gaul, three centuries before the first Christians showed up. Later, for something like seven centuries, in the empire of the Franks, and the “Renovated Roman empire” that followed it, people were free to convert from Catholicism, to Judaism. As Catholicism was rather ferocious, entire European villages converted.

Thus Judaism is more of a European religion than Christianism itself.

After the mad return of Christian fascism around 1095, with the First Crusade, which started with massacring Jews in Germanic lands, many Jews converted to Catholicism (whether voluntarily, or not). Thus many Europeans have Jewish ancestors.

To say that “the majority of Europeans were complicit in the attempted annihilation of the Jews,” as Roger Cohen did in the New York Times, is a heavy accusation. My own family saved more than 100 Jews, at enormous risk, barely escaping a hunt by the Gestapo, and I just don’t believe that, at least not in Western Europe (for complicated reasons, Eastern Europe, with the exception of Poland, was different).

Most French Jews survived: of the 75,000 Jews deported and killed in France, most were central European refugees, that the USA had refused to admit.

Now as far as the Great Leader’s ardent invitation to all Jews, the following problems arise:

1) Where to put them? In the rest of the occupied Left Bank of the Jordan river?

2) The inhabited part of Israel, so far, is very small. Half a dozen H bombs would annihilate all the population there. Thus, if the Great Leader assembles there all the World’s Jews, he potentially creates the ultimate ghetto, the ultimate extermination place for Judaism.

Supporters of Chelsea football club (7 to 8 blacks, owner, a Jew) ejected from a Paris subway carriage a French citizen, Mr. Souleymane, because he is black. They started to sing: We are racist and we like it. Other black passengers left the carriage, including a woman.

Souleymane brought a formal complaint, Scottland Yard and the French police are inquiring. Meanwhile a group of teenagers were arrested.

Meanwhile Obama said: “We have to confront the warped ideology, [the “extremists”] attempt to use Islam.” He added: “it’s not a clash of civilization. That the West is in war against Islam is an ugly lie.”

Indeed, there is no clash of civilization. Please, don’t tire me by calling the Greco-Romano-Frankish civilization “Christian”. It’s ignorance to do so. The Imperium Francorum had no state religion. Nor did the Renovated Roman Empire, starting in 800 CE (nor does the USA, by the way).

The Franks picked up what they wanted, or invented, in Christianism. Two centuries, but a universe, separate emperor Constantine, and Consul Clovis.

Christianism was never the state religion of the West. OK, not quite: the deluded plutocrat Louis XIV (War Be Upon Him! WBUH!) established a state religion in France, Crapolicism Catholicism, while destroying the country, and his name ought to be dragged in the mud, and burned through the sun of Enlightenment,  five times a day, by Western civilization patriots. (Instead of gawking around some monuments the maniac erected, with gaping mouths.)

Even Saint Louis, who ejected the Jews, had to admit he could not kill the unbelievers as he wished, because that was against the law. Even Louis XI, two centuries later, who cracked down on the heliocentric theory of Buridan (1320 CE), protected the Protestants, using his soldiers and force (yes, that was before Luther’s birth).

On day one of Islam, Muslims started to kill each other about what Islam exactly was. That’s when the divide between Shia and Sunni started.

Well, civilization has an answer: Islam can be all it can be. As long as it is compatible with civilization.

Patrice Ayme’

Santa Claus A Good Superstition

We all need superstition, because by defining what is “super“, it helps to define the ground we stand on (the mathematical model is sheaf theory: reality id the base space, superstition, the sheaf).

We can teach Santa and a few other things to children, just so they know about lying, even from the most trusted, and that even lying, can have some positive aspects (although transparency is better).

The Santa Claus legend also teaches that there are innocent superstitions and magic… And the Santa Claus legend, or the like, imprints children upon a higher order of things, a just universe rewarding the good. And that point, a superstition, is a good superstition, which helps society, and which is even correct, evolutionary speaking.

Thus some superstitions, have got to be much less welcome. And it teaches to reject appearances, however nice.

To help children discover what is real, we have to teach them what is unreal and even lead them to gently believe, sort of, what is not. Discovering where reality lays, by discovering what is not true is not a science reserved to science. It’s something we discover in childhood. Santa Claus, and his ineluctable dismissal, teaches skepticism, a good thing. Learning the magic of giving and receiving is also a good thing.

This being said, I have not talked much about Santa Claus to my own 5 year old daughter. Why? Because I continually tell her about the many marvelous and magical things of the real world, such as wild life documentaries, or imagined versions of the real world (many cartoons, some of them prize winning Japanese, or movies, some Indian, some Chinese, some Star Wars, etc…)

Nevertheless the 25 centuries old tradition of the Solstice Tree and feast, and the gifts it brings ought to be most respected and important. And it’s also an occasion of learning about the Solstice, that is the heliocentric system and the magical ecliptic.

How do I reconcile my tolerance for Santa Claus with my crackdown on Christianism and Islamism? Well, Santa Claus is not a myth full grown men are supposed to believe in, and go kill people in his name. It’s a myth to grow out of, all the wiser.

Christianism, and Islamism’s moral systems, reduced to the parts compatible with human ethology, are fine with me. Actually I am ready to admire some of their practitioners.

Actually the present Pope just made an excellent blast against the diseases of the Church, which I totally approve. (And said blast can be generalized well beyond the Church.)

The Dark Side is strong, such is its main asset, the ability of doing what is necessary. And if it means using Christianism and Islamism, or the Pope, to advance correct human ethology against plutocracy, that’s all right with me.

The ends certainly justify the means, if they are incommensurate in the right way.

Patrice Ayme’

Religion, tribalism, Extermination

Ce sont des Mots Qui Vont Tres Bien Ensemble

This is a follow-up on the essay I wrote on the debauch of demons in Christo-Islamism. One of the reasons for which I do not like novels much, is that the human psychology therein represented is all too often a caricature, something all too simple. Why so trite? Because a novelist wants to sell books. Those who are successful, that is the most read, are most read precisely because they are familiar, and flattering, to the masses.

The Politically Correct (PC) is not just most followed, it’s what sells (and reciprocally). Nietzsche sold only a few hundred books when he was conscious.

A real philosopher does not caress, but stings the masses. Nietzsche sold books only after several famous intellectuals sang his praises.

I had a most curious upbringing, mostly, but not exclusively, in Africa. Although (it turned out) in “Muslim” lands, I was unaware of Islam. I grew up under the vast umbrella of what is called “Sufi” Islam.

In some ways that “Sufi” Islam was more secular and progressive than secularism in, say, Europe. (“Sufi” is a label which covers many completely different religions; yet they all tend to be less sexist: Kurdish females have been dying as soldiers in combat in Kobani).

Many of the religiously obsessed claim that elaborate religious rituals are innocent, because they represent a long tradition. The Jews, in particular, are prone to make this reasoning. That’s rather incongruous, after centuries of pogroms: any practice which brings lots of death to the practitioners ought to be viewed, clearly, as not innocent!

Others identify religion and civilization. For example they talk of the “Islamic” civilization. Really? As there is more than one hundred types of Shia “Islam”, does that mean there is more than a hundred Islamic civilizations?

How do the simplistic theory: Islam = Civilization… survives the war in Kobani? There, in a few miles, three versions of “Islam” are in an extermination fight: Wahhabis against Kurds against Turks. Clearly both non-Kurdish Turks, and Wahhabis want to exterminate the Kurds.

About 25% of the population of Turkey is Kurdish (but many are in hiding). That the government hates them is nothing special: in a full blown plutocracy, the 1% hate the 99% (aristocracy, in France’s old regime was 2% of the population).

I know Turks who hate Erdogan and his ilk: the ancestors of those “Turks” were Armenian (thus Christian), or Kurds (and some of the Turks I know are mixed Armenian-Kurdish). To save their children, they had to bring them up as the kind of Muslim Turks who are kosher in Ankara. So now they feel that their children are not really their children anymore. That’s the Australian method of genocide (bring up the children of Bushmen without their parents, or their culture).

Kurdistan is about 3,000 years old, and Armenia was the first Christian land. Saladin was a Kurd.

Too much respect for tradition is an error. Tradition to a great extent, is in opposition to “secular” (which means of the age). Hence tradition is a religion.

This meditation is about religion, it can only hurt those who feel it is right, it is their right, to feel very strongly about the metaphysics they believe in. But metaphysics is never innocent. After all, it’s about the foundations of minds one talks about. One can’t get more intimate than that. Or more penetrating and violating, should one get into metaphysics, that is, other people’s minds. Potentially.

Religions tie people together. (Re-ligare.) This is what religious means.

Religion does not have to have a metaphysical element. Some people practice an art or a sport, as if it were a religion. It is a religion. Many young people get tied together again by activities such as being soccer supporters… And only by them. And they seem ready to die for it.

Zen, Taoism, forms of Yoga, nationalism, tribalism, are all religious in character. After all, these bounds are often so strong, people are ready to die for them. The SS had: “Gott Mit Uns!” on their belts buckles (“God With Us”; that inspired the American Congress to follow suit and adopt a variant of that slogan for the entire USA.)

Yes, any nation worth its salt, is, to some extent, a religion.

In other words: Religions generate tribes. That’s what they do. It’s very important, because human beings are nothing, in nearly all ways, if not in a tribe. (Or then they are philosophers.) The religious instinct cannot be distinguished from the tribal instinct.

Nice tribes, or nasty tribes, that is the question. Inclusive tribes, and inclusive religions, are nice. (To conclude the “Social War”, Rome learn to become inclusive, and so are its descendant regimes.)

Religions, nations who exclude are nasty, and bring blood. Exclusivity, alienation, is always (ethologically perceived as) an aggression. That has been observed in chimpanzees.

Tribes are not just about being strong together, they are about group selection. Thus, so are religions. Deadly aggression, even war, was found to be “adaptive” in chimpanzees:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140917131816.htm

Religion is war according to the most fundamental means. The deepest ways of the minds. Maladaptive religions get exterminated: Rome and its descendant regimes annihilated all human sacrifices religions (starting with Rome’s, Carthage’s and then the Celts’).

It’s not a good sign, when a religion is full of demons (as Christianity and Wahhabi Islam are). Or when it’s so nasty, it needs a god of evil (Hades, Satan, etc.)

Another dichotomy is between rational religions, and irrational ones. That one is roughly equivalent to that between religions which are organized around superstition, and the supernatural, and those which are not.

Nasty has to do not just be about mistreating others directly, but how they lead others to react.

Often tribes get dressed in black, claiming to be somehow elected by god. Example: Catholic “men in black”, those monks of the Fourth Century destroying books and intellectuals. Jesuits followed suite (and suits!), a millennium later, and then, Orthodox Jews, themselves copied in more ways than one, by the Hugo Boss black tailored SS, etc… The alienation was deliberate: it became a hatred multiplier, and hatred was the goal.

Another way to alienate is by advertising wildly irrational beliefs, constituting a religion, defining a tribe. The more irrational, the more flaunted, the more alienating to other groups, the more it leads to hatred in reply, and the more hatred one is submitted to, the tighter the tribe that creates the alienation will be.

It’s this advanced calculus of hatred, fear and alienation which is at the root of all too many religions and their associated tribalizations.

Ever since men have roamed, religions have clashed. And the better ones have won. Time for the best, the most ethologically correct religion, the one ultimately granted by 50 million years of evolution: direct democracy.

Patrice Ayme’

Why Christianism Fosters Demons

The Christo-Islamist god does not do with just Satan, but a whole army of demons, fallen angels, or “djinns”. This is not an accident, but its core strategy.

An excellent essay in Scientia Salon: an official guide for demon hunters with a helpful advice from philosophers and witch hunters illustrates this. History is how philosophy ought to be done. No history, no philosophy.

Why? Because philosophy is about the deepest reasons. The deepest reasons have to be hunted down in history always. (Yes, even in science, see note.)

I will explain why the extreme cruelty and terror found in several famous religions are not accidental by-products, but essential to the core of these superstitious systems.

Notre Dame Gargoyles Watch Over Paris To Make Sure Of Extirpating Whatever Needs Extirpation

Some have the religion of religions. They worship the idea. The idea of religion. Of course, they have an agenda; it could be Tibetan Buddhism (with its demons), or the Christo-Islamist god, who absolutely needs a fig leaf. And the name of that fig leaf was Satan (or Shatan, namely Hades, Pluto, or Ba’al, refurbished, with a fresh Dark Side coat).

There is a funny passage in the Qur’an where Allah (Arabic word for the Christo-Islamist Jewish god) warns about asking him questions about his business with Shatan and Djinns. He hints darkly that those who ask too many question will end in the fire (where they will be burned until their skin falls off; then their skin will grow back, and they will be thrown in the fire again; apparently the Qur’an anticipated stem cell treatments yet to come!)

There are religions, and religions. Generally, when talking to some primitive about religion, she or he assumes, naturally, that one talks about her, or his religion. But maybe 10,000 religions are known. 99.99% of them grossly violate human rights, and are criminal systems of thoughts and mood. Once again, that’s no accident: religion is all about plutocracy, and plutocracy all about the demonic side of man.

When religious people talk about “religion”, and request respect, they don’t mean that we should respect the Aztecs’ religion: they never heard of it. Or, if they did, they don’t realize what it means.

Religion’s idea comes from the Latin “religio”, itself contained in re-ligare: to bind together again. We The People, bound again together. To what? To whom? To us again?

Religions basically come under two variants: those which bind to rationality, and those which bind to irrationality, that is, to madness.

By “madness” here, I mean any altered state of consciousness. I am a mountaineer and a mountain runner. I have run very long, say in Iran, at 10,000 feet, in a one way solitary run I had to complete to save myself. The heat was great, blood was seeping through my running shoes. I felt nothing. This sort of altered state of consciousness, evolution given stoicism, is routine for tough mountain climbers, who are familiar with slipping out of cracks from blood seeping out of their bodies, while keeping a happy smirk on their faces.

Why would one bind to rationality? Because, without rationality, there is no survival. Homo has been mostly selected for increasing rational performance over the last 5 million years.

Civilization blossomed this in the idea of democracy. The republic is the fundamental religion, as it effectively was for the Romans, for centuries (in co-existence with superstitious cults, such as the original Roman one).

Why would one bind to irrationality? Because, once We The People has become irrational, in other words, dumb, it can easily be manipulated into subservience.

Hence superstition. “Superstitio” was used derisively by the Christians against Pagans as early as the Fourth Century. However, the concept is “what stands above”… the world. In other words, what cannot be objective.

Superstitious religions are there to terrify people, and force them into abject subjugation, so they all have demons, as the Punic religion did, or the Aztecs.

The Aztecs, thanks to tearing the hearts of their live prisoners out, had kept the nations around them in a state of fear of these “flower wars”.

Just as Islam is about peace, Christianity about love, the Aztecs’ gods were about… flowers. (Once, to inaugurate the greatest temple so far, they tore 80,000 hearts out, in five days, a remarkable pre-industrial feat.)

The Aztecs were horrified by the torture of the Christians. As far as they were concerned, Christianity was a torture religion, perfectly symbolized by the torture instrument the Christians brandished, the cross. Christians will be surprised to learn this. Of course. Gods, imagination, and machinations go very well together.

Christian minds have been well engineered together into the herd instinct.

Terrified people obey their masters well. And if that is not enough, the Christians, later imitated by the Muslims, would exert what (“Saint”) Augustine referred approvingly as “great violence”. By the time Augustine recommended “great violence”, the executions of those-who-had-chosen (= “heretics”) were routine.

This is how the Christians took an empire which was mostly Pagan and Neo-Platonic by storm: by killing millions. And this is also why, ever since, they speak of the persecutions they suffered before that: because the later were relatively puny: only 6 Christians were executed under Marcus Aurelius. Some emperors may have been closet Christians, well before Galerius executed 3,000 Christians, in the worst persecution, around 306 CE (which he rescinded later)..

Christianity and its parrot, Islam, have killed tens of millions, in their names.

Now they don’t want their names to be their names, a bit like homosexuals don’t want to not be called gays, otherwise they would be rather sad.

That’s why their sacred texts enshrine the power of ultimate violence, when they do not call to exert it, outright. That’s why they are, under the guise of fearing them, a cult of demons.

The Cathars said nothing else. So the Christians exterminated them, millions of them, down to the last one. And also all those who lived in the same cities, just to make sure:

“Dieu reconnaitra les siens!”: kill them all, God will recognize his own, the commander of the Crusade is alleged to have ordered. This most ferocious of all Crusades happened on French soil. Don’t expect the masters to remember that. Although not respected as much as Islamism, Christianism is still up there in the pantheon of values in the West (go ask people what they think of Saint Louis or Luther: they will express reverence for these master thinkers of Hitler.)

Superstitions such as Christianism and Islamism, who include divinely mighty demons are demoniac, it’s a fact. And that’s why Allah does not want to talk about it, lest we ponder his bloody hand, and the company he keeps.

We have seen demons. They helped the Caliphs kill those who did not believe. They helped emperors love the church demoniacally.

You don’t want demons? Bring back reason.

But not any reason. Before he decided to invade Ukraine, Putin’s approval rating was 65%. Now it’s 86%: Russia has become mad with war frenzy. One of the reasons why religions full of demons are popular, is that demonic behavior itself is popular: people with nothing better to do, will get on the warpath. Not just for the spoils (material riches, eternal life) but also because that’s the way people are.

All the way to viewing irrationality as a right. Right as a vacation from the human condition.

Patrice Ayme’

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Note about history and philosophy: Many problems more or less scientifically solved recently have their roots in Ancient Philosophy, which first brandished them. An example is the incompleteness theorems in logic (they grew from the Cretan Liar paradox, as I have explained in the past). Zeno’s paradox is another. Or even Archimedes’ infinitesimal method.

I could make here a digression in physics. Physics, ultimately, is about history. The lab tests what has been determined, historically, as important. Roughly all of the physics system of thought, articulated around equations, superficially observed, is actually historical: even the axioms of Quantum physics have their ultimate justification in history, not experimentation as all too many naïve physicists… believe. Yes, believe, as a Jihadist believes: closing one’s mind is not the exclusive province of superstitious fanatics.

Tribes is where the power lays, and not just in the Middle East. Those who are viewed as brandishing the right ideas climb up the hierarchy of power.