God of War

Over the years I have had many attempts at pulling the rug of religion out from under God's clay feet. Here's another.

I was sitting on the balcony today reading the newspaper. The headline was "something blah-blah senseless killing" And that got me thinking. The killing wasn't important so much as the senselessness of it. As if that adjective was necessary to drive home the evil of the whole business. That the killing served no obvious purpose, was wasteful somehow, achieving no sensible goal.

Then one of the cats that uses our small garden as a stomping ground and occaisional creche tootled by, and for some reason I remembered my vivisectionist/terratologist days. Myself and a bunch of variously snot-nosed kids straight out of highschool sat around a very clean table killing animals, disecting out their wombs and checking their near-term young for chemically induced mutations. That was killing too, but not senseless in that it served a purpose that outweighed its atrocity. And so protected by a sense of a greater good, our daily quota of death lost us not a wink of sleep.

Then I imagined the horror I would inspire if I were to catch that cat, and repeat now the process of disection I had undertaken a thousand times prior. And I wondered how doing it would effect me, without now being able to wear the handy justifying mantle of science. I decided I'd feel pretty bad. Lucky old cat.

Anyway. I then assumed that most people, if not all, have an (inate) aversion to killing not so much as an act in itself, but only in it as an act without some sanctioned or sensible purpose.

I think I'm pretty safe in that assumption. Afterall, I'm pretty sure that if I went up to some random bloke or blokette in the street and told them to kill another random person right then, they'd probably refuse.

But then I remembered an old conversation I had with a friend a long time ago. He related part of what I think was a diary of a German woman who had worked at one of the WWII death camps. She spoke of camp life, then blithely went on to describe how she was going to redecorate her kitchen with the money she'd earned there. It most certainly wasn't the writing of some evil psychotic madwoman, but just the hum-drum story of an average housewife in an extraordinary setting. She, like me and the poor stretched out cat-corpses, lost not one wink of sleep.

I then kinda made an another assumption - that anyone can do anything, given the right justificatory program. In fact, given enough justification, there is no such thing as evil. at least not within the sphere of people that justification encompasses, it becomes simply distasteful, but necessary. Sensible. Like taking out the trash lest it fester in the bin. Or cleaning the goop out of the fridge.

With killing people, beyond the already over-explored notions of kinship and empathy, there's something else to be taken into account - our predictions of consequence. Like Dr. Doolittle's Push-me-Pull-you, there's our natural aversion to kill-you-kill-me. We do not fear to kill so much, as fear to fail in the killing.

So, how to set things up so it becomes so sensible to kill others that it doesn't seem like anything in particular..?

First, you need some greater cause that the killing would serve. There are any number available - freedom, nationalism, protection, 'what about the children' etc. whatever, as long as it's fairly lofty, by whatever standards lofty is judged by given the sociopolitical umbrella of the day. I've an idea "lofty" started pretty low back in the old times.

Then second, some way of detaching fear of consequence from the act. Probability shifters like better weapons and armour. Insurance against the worst - a "retrieve our guys at all costs" policy. Anti recognition and retaliation devices - secrecy, masks, uniformity etc.

Nothing spectacular. Then I noticed that pretty much all the justifications, save nationalism, were reactive - they needed some threatening or oppressing force to render them sensible. Doable.

But then any good general knows that the safest and most effective strike is a pre-emptive one. Well, unless there are nukes involved. So, how to get harmless people to kill other harmless people without some kind of perceivable threat perpetrated by either group prior..?

It's not nice, but in terms of group prosperity, and given that after a certain point in our species' pre-history man became man's greatest predator, it becomes quite a good thing to kill everyone around you who isn't bound to you by blood.

Anyway, I've have tried various tracks to explain why religion could be so prolifigate, unless God was real. I've tried neuroscience - that human kind just naturally has a bit of the brain that for some reason renders us susceptable to visions of etheric and all powerful beings. We've tried theories of group coherence, and motivation. We've tried logical extrapolations of naturally percieved comparitive scales - Jack is stronger than Jake, John is stronger than Jack, leading to the assumption that there is *something* stronger than John, however strong he may be. We've tried a lot of things.

But anyway. Whatever the reason, pretty much every established culture alive has some kind of attendant religion. And the most established cultures, have pretty violent religions, especially those that have a history of intercultural warfare - unrelated group X against group Y.

Perhaps you see where I'm going with this.

To uphold freedom, someone must first be attempting to take it from you, or indeed have already taken it. To fight terrorism, there must first be terrorists. To defend your honour, someone must first have infringed upon it.

But - religions, by having a metaphysic component, require no physical action on the part of another for the believer to percieve, or concieve of them, as a threat. They are first strike mechanisms.

Wouldn't it be ironic if the principle socio-political advantage of having religion at a cultural level, and having a tendency to be easily inspired toward blind faith in some kind of God(s) at an individual level, was to make it easier to personally achieve the degree of justification, and the accompanying neurochemical states involved in overcoming our natural aversion to violence and killing, that would enable pre-emptive strikes on other neighboring tribes/cultures, without any prior physical threat on their part, by lifting the perception of threat (and consequence) into a more metaphysical realm..?

ie. The cliché of "All established cultures have religions" is autocatalytic - in that cultures with religions kill cultures without.

Which leaves us with God as a social tool to inspire atrocity, rather than alleviate it.

Iz funny, no..?



Of course there are other seemingly equally abstract social institutions and concepts that spur violence - like a sense of honour, property, even football.

All that is required for honour to mean anything at a visceral level is a girlfriend. Or property, or a good reputation - and despite there being abstracts involved in anything, there is a dividing line.

Sexual 'honour' is an abstract combined with a concrete physical anchor - a woman or a man.

Property: the first thing, and perhaps the only thing I truly 'own' is my body. The first fence I errect - this side mine, that side yours - is the one that dilineates my personal space. The distance to which you can approach without me getting antsy. All other structures I may purchase later, all other conceptual spheres I may demark as my territory, mental, social or physical at some time in the future, remain, at base complexifications of this initial physical state of being, and as such, remain predictable, intuitive.

A reputation - the most abstract of the three - is still a communal thought object that is built up around the real and physical actions and orations of the one bearing that reputation through time. A 'real' possession, despite its intangibility.

And this is the level of foundational physicality that religious abstracts lack, giving them a dangerous flexibility of what can be interpreted as threat. If you step over my fence, trespass is obvious - even if the concept of 'real' ownership, and what it means is not, beyond the mundane level. Where is the similar fence to my belief set..? And how can you ever know which side of it you are on..?

Tthere is a difference between thinking about real events and linking them to abstract generalisations of conduct, and thinking - even if using 'real' experiential terms - of unreal events and linking them to similar behavioural codes. Reality - being constrained by the finite - carries with it its own natural system of checks and balances.

On a purely realist basis the level of threat someone or something may pose can be assessed with reasonable accuracy, how big it is, how well equipped it is, how fast it can move etc. Logistics. And according to this criteria of threat, or actual infringement, you can plan a response which invests enough force to be effective without being inefficient or punishes with enough thoroughness to provide a deterrent without being 'injust'.

Unreality, however has no such constraints, save imagination. Which upsets the balance. The Pharohs prove intractable and *boom* - it's raining frogs. God gets pissed with mankind and suddenly Noah's packing elephants into a big boat.

Or some guy writes a book, armed with a pen, and suddenly a whole bunch of people declare war upon him.

In reality, of the non-magical type, I can judge the consequences of both my actions, and yours with a reasonable degree of accuracy. But chuck miracles and magic into my concept of 'reality' and suddenly I have no such guarrentees. I don't know about you, but that would give me a really twitchy trigger finger.

Say some kid with a spray-can writes "KID X ROOLZ" all over the side of my house, and I see him. I run that kid down, grab him by the ear, and make him clean it up. My house, my decision about punishment.

Now say that same kid does the same thing to my sacred place of worship, and again I catch him. Here, I am not the owner, even if I built the place. God is the owner. So now, regarding punishment, I'm left with second guessing God's will. And since he's:

a) Not around in any concrete form to ask.
b) Has been also known to punish his own devotees for not punishing other people sufficiently...

I'm going to err on the heavy side. So spray-can kid gets flayed, and gets to clean the paint off the wall with his own skin.

A magical system of behavioural governance both over-reacts, and reacts in an unpredictable fashion in response to hidden and unfathomable stimulus.



Illustrative example time: The starving men, and the dellusional sociopathic killer.

Let us imagine that I'm on an island with someone else, isolated, with limited food supplies. We're not stupid, so we begin to ration what food we have strictly. Now, I feel hungry. And because hunger is a physical thing, something pretty much pan-human, I can feel pretty certain that the other guy is too. My state, reflects his state. I get hungrier, and I again surmise that the other guy does too. I do not *know* for certain, but I'm pretty sure. No help comes.

We start to catch each other looking at each other's staches. I know he's thinking about taking mine, because I'm thinking about taking his. Only the degree of seriousness differs. Maybe he's only idly day-dreaming, maybe he's already sharpening a stick while I sleep. I begin to starve, and guess that so does he.

But because hunger is universally shared, as a motivator toward behaviour, violent or otherwise, it is transparent. Understandable. And as such, can be planned for. I have other choices except violence. I could:

* Just talk about it. Ritualise the business of eating. Cement some kind of agreement.
* Just scoff all my food right now, and remove the temptation, at least until we turn cannibal.
* Wait till he's asleep, and go hide my stache, then subsequently eat only at times when he's not conscious of it.
* I could, if the island allows, just bugger off on my own. Hiding my trail.

And with violence, I could pre-empt him, and bash in his brains first. All of these alternatives are available to me, and available prior to necessity, because we share common physical motivations.



Now, say I am a man with some weird fetish for bow-ties. I have a vast collection, and wear a new one every day. Completely harmless, if a little eccentric. Now, say I get a new neighbor. What I don't know is that this man is a recovering psycho-killer, who complulsively slaughters anyone wearing a red bow-tie with yellow polkadots. Unfortunately, I have such a bow-tie, and it's on the rack for friday. Today's Monday. I see this guy everyday, because we share a mailbox, and for some reason, check our mail at the same time every morning - 7am sharp.

Monday - 7am - "Hi neighbor." "Howdy."
Tuesday - 7am - "Yo, howzitgoin..?" "Eh - same ol' same ol'.'"
Thursday - 7am - "Hi man..." "Sup dude..?"
Friday - 7am - "Mornin'..." "ARRRGGGGHHHH" [hackslashstabstabtwistgonadstomp].

I couldn't plan, because his core motivator, being arbitrarily conceptual, not to mention wholly personal and irrational - with no root in any shared physical state I could have used my own experience to predict, did not allow it. It was untransparent, hidden from view. The only outcome was abrupt and cataclysmic violence, or no violence at all.

Admittedly, these are highly polarized examples, but I hope they illustrate why I'm trying to emphasize the difference created by the lack of an intuitive physical basis to religious behavioural codes, when compared to behavioural codes based around real physical states, shared, to a greater or lesser extent, by everyone.

I think that due to the nature of humanity, any given religion must inevitably possess certain common traits - the promotion of group coherence, the castigation of those outside, and a system of punishment and reward defined within those terms, in order to prolifgate through, and persist in, the group mind.

With regard to group conceptualizations of right and wrong, one advantage of a group's religion - prior to any more rigorous and secular version - is to codify and make consistant certain laws within that group/society - Rather than retaining a more sporadic and conflicting system of the patriarch of family X enforcing one set of laws, and the patriarch of family Y, over in the next valley, another.

But this is also part of its danger, because in unifying an entire society behind a set of common laws/rules/moral guidelines, especially when part of that coda contains magical/arbitrary taboos which remain undistinguished from those more reality-based, it runs the risk of suddenly mobilizing the whole society at once if one of these unituitables is broken by a neighbor in ignorance.


Once a religion takes off, especially if that religion is invasive of the daily functioning of life, then it becomes more and more sensible for any member of that group to first act in the ways required by the religion in question, even if only paying the equivalent of physical and mental lip-service to it, which will in time, provoke a budding of true faith to remove the psychic niggling of having to adhere to an imposed order. People buy into it, because the cost of maintaining skepticism, in a regime where skepticism goes unrewarded or punished, becomes increasingly too higher cost to pay.

And because over time - as people begin to invest, both on a conscious and neurological level, some or all of their wellbeing in a belief set that is not internally consistant or robust - should someone threaten the integrity of this thing that they now depend on for a sense of well-being, however logically, however irrefutably this 'threat' may be presented, believers instinctively respond at an illogical and irrational level.

I think basically, in a secular society, which, having a set of laws written and devised by wholly earthly forces, it always remains possible, however difficult to challenge, review and change those laws, should it become productive to do so, in terms of economics or diplomacy.

Religious codes, by having no earthly available court of appeal, remain static, rapidly becoming anachronistic to a larger or greater degree. And over a long enough time frame, stasis is death.

Another quick visual example of how an interpretive magical system can screw things up. Is that a tongue in my cheek..?

Magical systems like symbols. Impressive ones. A star is a good example of a common symbol that invokes a certain celestial magnificence.

For example - a star.



Pretty harmless. But then we never just leave a symbol alone. We gotta interpret it, give it some kind of mystical meaning. Let's first link the star-shape with God. From that flows goodness, righteousness, power etc.

We also like to anthropomorphasize pretty much everything. So let's get a human figure in there somewhere.



(Forgive the artistic licence). Whaddya mean they ain't that big..?

Anyway - wow - mystically - a male form - having six rough 'points' matches the holy star. What a coincidence..! Suspicious. Not coincidence - divine intervention. Hell yeah.

Whoa - we must be made in God's image right..? Damn straight.

"Husband!!! HUSBAND - STOP DICKING AROUND AND GO GET DINNER !!!!"
"Look wife - get off my goddamn back - I'm inventing religious symbols here."
"Who gives a shit - can you eat them..?"
[grumble grumbel bloody women grumble grumble]

Aha !!!. I thought so.



You see - women do not fit the holy star. They are damned by their unholy abscence of a sixth point. In fact, where holy man has a sixth point they have its opposite, a crevice. And if a point is holy, then a crevice must be unholy. A device of the devil !!!!

AHAHAHAHA!!!

"Hey - woman - from now on, you have to do what I say. Cos I'm holy, and you are steeped in sin, and horribleness."

"You what..?"

"Shut up and do the dishes, or I shall flagellate the living daylights out of you, and God says that's okay."

There'll always be sexism. What about the other 'isms'..?

Racism for example does not spring fully formed from the communal forehead of Zeus. Cultures only become racist after exposure to other races. For example in my hometown, for a long time it was principly white and well-to-do. There were few immigrants. But recently a lot of Poles moved in and started taking the classic occupations of taxis, service-industry etc. something harder to stomach after the recent economic crisis. Only after that, did the first incidents of clashes between the disgruntled white youth, and the increasingly frightened immigrant populace begin to emerge.

It is competition for a shared resource that spurs racial hatred. Prior to that there is distrust, and sometimes revulsion, alongside curiousity, and a strange attraction, but no widespread violence. Look at my life here, in Turkey, I am a foreigner, and yet in almost 15 years I've yet to even hear a racial slur, let alone experience violence. I am rare, and I do not feed from the same trough as my friends the Turks. We do not compete, therefore I am no threat, therefore they do not fear me.

Homophobia again, is all about physicality, in its most base form of sex. The queerbashers are scared, insecure. Or perhaps it is the homosexual's simple stereotype of being efemminate - weak. A weakness that the agressor fears is within him too - that's enough to bring out the playground bully faster than anything. Lack of consequence attracting violence from the bored and insecure.

But religion. Perils of the soul. Crusades, evangelical conversions. Missionary work. The missionaries you see, like Jehova's witnesses, they come to you. While your culture is metaphorically sitting indoors, innocently reading the newspapers, there's a tap at the door and you're faced with this weird guy with fire in his eyes and pamphlet in his hand. Have you heard the news brother, have you heard the news..? Because in his eyes, you are a heathen to be pitied, to be shown the light, wether you like it or not - take your medicine boy, it's for your own good. Hold still, I'm doing you a favour, don't you understand..? It'll only hurt for a second, then you'll be one of us.

He bothers you so much, you kill him. Then all his mates come round, burn down your house, impale all your neighbors and steal your wife's lipstick.

The important thing is however, they came to you, not for work, not for food, not because they were fleeing their country or any other understandable reason, they just came.

But sometimes the pamphlet they carry is a decree from some guy in Rome which says "To whom it may concern, God said that this part of the globe belongs by divine right to the glorious kingdom of Spain. Please fuck off out of the way Sambo. Thanks in advance, yours, The Pope."

...Continued...