On Religion

World religions are psychological techniques designed by humans to overcome hardships of life.

Think about it: the life of most people in antiquity was a harsh, unforgiving, exhausting exercise in overcoming physical hardships and poverty. You had to rise up with the sun, plow the field, milk the cows, herd the sheep, sow some clothes - and all of that like 9 days out of 10 (sorry, no 2-day weekends or 40-hour workweeks). And then disease or drought hits, and half your family is dead. And even in the good years, the king's men (more like armed bandits) come and take away any surplus you've managed to scrape up. And you'll never get an education or a chance to choose a job you like, in fact you'll probably spend your whole life in your village. How would you bear yourself through this kind of life? You would need psychological help to make you get up in the morning and not e.g. say "screw it all" and join up with Robin Hood to rob people in the woods.

Well, religions (I'm talking Christianity, Judaism and the like) are just that kind of psychological help, or rather technique. They instill a sense of purpose to your life, no matter how monotonous and bleak it is, and promise some sort of reward in some sort of afterlife. They say that all you need to do is love your family, work hard and respect your rulers, and you get an eternity of bliss. Your life isn't a worthless, dirty and short affair anymore, it's watched by an omnipotent super-being who will definitely reward you. When and how? Well, never, really, but you just have to believe in that invisible and ineffable reward (or a punishment if you start a rebellion against the king).

Regular, periodic communal ritual actions (going to church on Sunday, having weddings with a priest etc) served to solidify the psycho-technique. The imaginary "God" was more real when there were special people wearing uniform ("priests"). Everyday "prayers" served to train the mind to focus and strengthen the willpower to overcome the harshnesses of life.

Note also that the virtues of these religions are crafted to target the common man: hard honest work, servility to rulers, having lots of children, closely-knit communities etc. The aristocratic classes couldn't care less about these virtues because they spent their time indulging in leisure, making war, plotting against their rivals, satisfying their natural curiosities (which is what European science has developed out of: curious, vain rich & powerful who tinkered around in laboratories). Religion was meant for the common man, not for the upper class.

With the recent developments in technology and corresponding sharp increases in comfort of life as well as near-elimination of famines and epidemics in developed countries have led to a sharp decline in religiousness. The most atheistic countries are those of Scandinavia, where overall "quality of life" (i.e general comfort and peace) is the highest in the world. This is obviously in line with my theory: if religions are psychological training techniques, they're needed only when there are hardships to overcome. In the modern developed world, the most religious people are the poor and those who have suffered losses in their life. The worse your life, the more you need the "God" technique to focus your will.

Other religions follow the same suit, although some of them were crafted with a different purposes. For example, the Ancient Greek Athenic religion is obviously a technique aimed to cultivate the physically and intellectually perfect man, hence all the heroes like Heracles, Achilles or Odyssey, gods with beautiful physiques etc. Athens was a city of free men, trade and science that had to fight for its place under the sun against many enemies and rivals, hence the technique to stimulate free people to be strong and intelligent. In Sparta, religious psycho-cultivation was more focused on military might and patriotism, and so on. Looking at Islam, we see a focus on war, supremacy (won either through war or expansion and assimilation) and autocracy, which is obviously a technique for nomadic warriors making war on and dominating developed nations (surprise: this is exactly what the Arabs of the VIIth century did with huge success).

Every religion is made to help humans focus their willpower for some purpose even if it means living through insane hardships or dying for the cause.

One thing I respect about Islam is that they've started honor killing people that post on Facebook.

>>3
Islam's tenets were made for a warlike nomadic ruling class, not for settled-down urban life. That's why they have polygamy (a raiding warlord would want to take looted girls as concubines), that's why women aren't supposed to work (men can provide for them with all the loot and dhimmi collected from the conquered), that's why it's filled with oppressive rules and harsh punishments (aggressive nomads need to be heavily indoctrinated and strongly slapped for getting out of line, otherwise there won't be any military discipline) etc.
Hence the idiocy of murdering someone for drinking soft drinks in a "holy month".

>>4

that's why women aren't supposed to work (men can provide for them with all the loot and dhimmi collected from the conquered

That's pretty much true of all pre-industrial societies, whether rural or urban or nomadic. Women in the workforce (outside of things like housework or cottage industries) really didn't happen on a large scale until the industrial revolution, and even then only in the working class

>>5

really didn't happen on a large scale

Christians at least had an industrial revolution, and Christian women did finally start getting educations and jobs. Islam, on the other hand, is a religion actively forbidding those things. It says a woman can't go outside without a man controlling her. It's pretty hard to go to college and earn an income that way. In Christian history, on the other hand, you see lots of women in positions of power, from Joan of Arc to Mary I to Catherine the Great.

>>6
I see it as social factors causing a change in religion, rather than the other way around. Western Christianity was forced to abandon its more regressive aspects when society modernized, while modernization hasn't yet really occurred in the Islamic world (they have industry, mostly based on raw materials rather than manufacturing and services, but it hasn't really led to their society as a whole becoming modern and "Westernized" like it has in the US, Europe and Japan). And Christian third world countries are still pretty much backwards like the Muslim world is. It's not really that Islam is holding these countries back, it's more that a backwards culture sees no reason to modernize their backwards religion. It'll really take industrial development affecting the whole of society (not just the upper class getting rich off of exporting oil) for those countries to modernize and move beyond that.

>>7
You are right, but only up to a point. Christianity did not cause modernization, but it also didn't quite contradict it. Christianity has permitted a Protestant (liberal-ish, anti-Church, work and money-oriented) interpretation and that has paved the way for the Industrial revolution etc. However, even then there were wars fought over that and the conservatives (Catholics) did cut some Protestant heads (which also made Protestants emigrate to US). So the religion did affect society in a powerful way.

Christian third world countries are still pretty much backwards like the Muslim world is

I never said Christianity is a religion of progress. Au contraire, it's a religion of peasants and backwards rural areas. However, it also more conducive to progress than a religion of warlike nomads which is Islam. And we can see today that the Middle East is where the vast majority of casualties of war happened in recent years. Plus most of terrorism today is Muslim terrorism. That is religion affecting socium.

it's more that a backwards culture sees no reason to modernize their backwards religion

Culture of Islamic countries is centered around Islam, because Islam is so oppressive. Of course they aren't going to create a culture of modernization. You see islamists win in Egypt, in Turkey - those used to be the wealthier and more democratic of the Muslim countries! Those are the countries where everyone has a cell phone and half the people have a Facebook page! They tried to modernize and secularize, and the recent coup attempt was an anti-islamist uprising (because Turkish army stands for a secular state ever since Kemal Ataturk), but Islam just keeps pulling them back again! Christianity is more malleable, Buddhism is more malleable, Hinduism is very malleable, but Islam is hard and harsh a strike of a leash because it was made to keep aggressive nomads in line. Now it's used by over a billion of settled-down, agrarian or urban people, and no wonder it leads to sad and undesired consequences where e.g. a random guy in France chops someone's head of in the name of "jihad".

Christian third world countries are still pretty much backwards like the Muslim world is

I never said Christianity is a religion of progress. Au contraire, it's a religion of peasants and backwards rural areas. However, it also more conducive to progress than a religion of warlike nomads which is Islam. And we can see today that the Middle East is where the vast majority of casualties of war happened in recent years. Plus most of terrorism today is Muslim terrorism. That is religion affecting socium.
I don't think it's accurate to say Islam CAUSES so-called "Islamic terrorism". The ultimate motives are still political, the role of religion is that of propaganda. The individuals carrying out violence may say they're doing it in the name of their religion, but ultimately the leaders make decisions based on politics, and convince the people that their god wants them to go to war. This is what pretty much what all "religious wars" are really about.

Culture of Islamic countries is centered around Islam, because Islam is so oppressive. Of course they aren't going to create a culture of modernization. You see islamists win in Egypt, in Turkey - those used to be the wealthier and more democratic of the Muslim countries! Those are the countries where everyone has a cell phone and half the people have a Facebook page! They tried to modernize and secularize, and the recent coup attempt was an anti-islamist uprising (because Turkish army stands for a secular state ever since Kemal Ataturk), but Islam just keeps pulling them back again! Christianity is more malleable, Buddhism is more malleable, Hinduism is very malleable, but Islam is hard and harsh a strike of a leash because it was made to keep aggressive nomads in line. Now it's used by over a billion of settled-down, agrarian or urban people, and no wonder it leads to sad and undesired consequences where e.g. a random guy in France chops someone's head of in the name of "jihad".

I'd say Islam is basically in roughly the same state as Christianity was in Europe before the reformation. Back then, Christians were going off to war for allegedly religious motives (the crusades), people were persecuted for being heretics, and so on. It was the Reformation that transformed Christianity to the Protestant, "anti-Church, work and money oriented", as you call it, form that was more compatible with modern, industrial society. And the Reformation didn't occur in a vacuum, it was not something that was caused purely by happenings within the religious sphere, but had social and political causes as well. So the modernization and change of culture was about secular and religion aspects happening side by side, influencing each other. That's really the sort of thing that needs to happen in the Islamic world for modernization to happen.

>>9

I don't think it's accurate to say Islam CAUSES so-called "Islamic terrorism". The ultimate motives are still political

Islam doesn't cause Islamic terrorism? Wow, some hoops your mind must have jumped through. Conquest and subjugation of other countries is obviously a political agenda and that's what Islam has been about since its inception. It is a political religion. It says you're a slave to God but it also says God wants you to make war on "infidels" and advance Islam in any way possible. Once upon a time this put Arabs (hitherto unknown tribes from some god-forgotten desert corner of the world) on the map in a huge way. They conquered lands from Spain to India in just a matter of decades, destroying what was left of a couple of once-great empires (Western Roman and Persian) in the process. They couldn't and wouldn't accomplish that without a strong political brainwashing technique (i.e. an ideology). Now some people wrongly interpret this religious, political ideology as just another religion. If Islam were about purely religious, metaphysical things, then it wouldn't be about waging war and conquering and overpowering other religions.

Islam is basically in roughly the same state as Christianity was in Europe before the reformation

It has been in that state the last thousand years while Christianity has allowed people to evolve and modernize. Muslim people attempted to modernize too, but the even the best of their attempts has been pretty much a failure as Turkey is ruled by islamists in 2016 (Kemal Ataturk must be rolling over in his grave).

it was not something that was caused purely by happenings within the religious sphere

Correct. But Christianity had to be permissive enough to allow Protestantism to take root. Even then, it wasn't permissive enough from the standpoint of all the people killed in the multitude Catholic-Protestant wars!

That's really the sort of thing that needs to happen in the Islamic world for modernization to happen.

Needs to but doesn't happen no matter how hard they try. Islam doesn't bend. It holds or breaks, but it doesn't bend, not the religion that says apostasy must be punished by death.

Look, most modern Middle Eastern countries were created by the Western, secular powers. Their rulers for most of the XXth century cavorted with secular Western or Soviet governments. Turks wouldn't be using the Latin alphabet if it weren't for that. Putin wouldn't cover up for Assad if his father hadn't been a friend of the USSR, etc. Yet everywhere in the Middle East we see islamists winning the power back again. The Arab Spring brought more Islam, not less. ISIL is a resurgence of the idea of Arab Khalifate that happened in the XXI century. Islam is simply such a powerful psychological technology that it doesn't let itself be opted out of.

Oh and by the way

Christians were going off to war for allegedly religious motives (the crusades)

Where did you read that? The motives were purely political: to help Byzantines repel the invasion of Seljuk Turks who didn't respect religious freedom to put it mildly. And since the Crusaders were victorious at first, they also grabbed up some land in the Middle East. But it wasn't a war to spread the Christian religion as they never went beyond Palestine.

ISIL

That's anti-Semitic, it's IS now.

Islam doesn't cause Islamic terrorism?

Did propaganda posters cause the World Wars? That's why I take issue with the term "Islamic terrorism", because the religion doesn't, on its own, just decide to kill a bunch of people. The religion is a propaganda tool used by leaders to manipulate people into carrying out a political agenda.

Look, most modern Middle Eastern countries were created by the Western, secular powers. Their rulers for most of the XXth century cavorted with secular Western or Soviet governments. Turks wouldn't be using the Latin alphabet if it weren't for that. Putin wouldn't cover up for Assad if his father hadn't been a friend of the USSR, etc. Yet everywhere in the Middle East we see islamists winning the power back again. The Arab Spring brought more Islam, not less. ISIL is a resurgence of the idea of Arab Khalifate that happened in the XXI century. Islam is simply such a powerful psychological technology that it doesn't let itself be opted out of.

And that's why the only real long-term solution is for Islam to go through a sort of Reformation. Islam isn't just going to go away, and having secular states in a highly Islamic region is inevitably going to lead to conflict. Until we get to the point where Islam is okay with there being a secular state, these conflicts will continue.

Religions naturally associate what they already consider good with god, so it is just an institutionalization of what the society that it exists in already values. In polytheistic religions, there are several gods and goddesses to choose from to worship, though all respected. There was almost always the fertility goddess, the warrior god, the harvest god, etc, that represented the things various aspects of society. Even Judaism, one of the very few monotheistic religions, Yahweh is pretty erratic in his personality, and usurps all the roles of gods that would have existed anyway. But the way that it does so is powerful because it unified all the tribes as one, rather than several tribes each worshiping different gods in a loosely related pantheon.

Enter Christianity. Pretty unimportant until Constantine, who attracted by the middle Eastern absolutism as much as Alexander. After Rome got a hold of Christianity, they had to play the game of "my god is stronger than yours" leading to the unrestricted comprehension of Yahweh today. It also brought with it the slave-morality, as Nietzsche would put it, which was a drastic change from anything else, but that's not really all that important. Anyway, the Great Schism was inevitable. The church was not unified just because Caesar said it was. The east, Orthodoxy, still kept the culture of absolutism and considered themselves slaves to God (the entire worldview much more inline with Islam, for instance), and Europe still kept the more individualistic culture and considered themselves servants to God. The two cultures could not reconcile these two opposite values, thus couldn't come to a unified picture of what was the Good. Even in the darkest of the dark ages^[1], absolutism didn't flourish in the west, and the Pope's power was basically limited to threatening excommunication, while the Ecumenical Patriarch had a much more thorough authority (so long as it didn't piss off Caesar)^[2]. Those values that are associated with the West were not actually the product of the Renaissance, they were the always there, they were just more fervently asserted in that time. Christ was just some rambling homeless man who had his brains fried when he wondered the desert for forty days, so it is understandable that the framework he produced was little more than "be nice to people guys~". Another advantage was Paul saying "lel, fuck the Jews, God told me that you can eat what you want now, all that old testament shit about no cheeseburgers is overruled". It leaves for the broad interpretation that has allowed Christianity to be imposed upon any other culture with very little of the message fundamentally changed. The malleability of Christianity why the browns in South America can cut your head off with a chainsaw they had blessed by a priest and not see any problem, the Germans having a warrior Jesus smiting his enemies with Thor's hammer, or the pre-modern Japanese Christians worshiping at a Shinto shrine. It was actually pretty amazing that the Catholic church was as unified as it was for so long. Europe is prone to devolving into autonomous regions. It's a very hard place to maintain an empire, and absolutism didn't really take hold until religion was replaced with nationalism as a way to maintain social cohesion (also a product of the Enlightenment, though I doubt Descartes would like to take credit).

Meanwhile, in the desert, Muhammad was not a stupid man. The Arabs hadn't been relevant in thousands of years and were a fractured and fighting tribes. As a warlord, he was able to unite all the sandpeople to his cause with the time-honored tradition of "lel, god told me to". Unlike Christ, his religion was much more thought out and includes an entire cultural framework and government system to go along with it. He took a lot from Orthodox Christianity and the absolutist worldview, but was smart enough to not declare himself a god, only a prophet. No one seriously believes that a god-emperor actually embodies everything good, but they are much more likely to believe that he communes with a god that is. The canon is closed and is not up for interpretation. The values are what they are, and any who do not obey must be removed. Though to be honest, that IS the correct and logical behavior if you believe that you have the objectively correct morality, especially if that objective morality does not tolerate aberrant behavior. Islam suffers from the same flaw as Plato's Republic. It has locked the society in time, and forbids any change. The wars between Muslims are not like the protestant reformation. They are as different as the US abolitionist fights are from Spartacus's slave revolt. The abolitionists fought to abolish slavery (a Christian, slave-morality, where the poor are the virtuous), while Spartacus fought to change who was a slave (master-morality, where the masters are the virtuous). Likewise, the Shia-Sunni split was primarily about changing who got to control the Caliphate, not about fundamentally altering the doctrine of the faith (despite the motivations that modern apologists try to impose on either side, every revolt had a pretender who claimed linage from Muhammad).

That said, Islam can also be bent into a more practical form. In the beginning, it was much more lenient. Christians and Jews existed in great numbers and even served in governments. The Muslim rulers (much like Muhammad, really), were open to making up exceptions to allow things that they liked, and they enjoyed a pretty civilized time, relatively on par with what was going on in Byzantium and better than most of Europe. Then there was the Crusades and the Mongols, which drove them to religious dogma, in a way that was evidently much more traumatic than the fall of Rome. I'd speculate that it was exactly because the religion and cultural values were so intertwined. The next relatively tolerant example Ottoman Empire is the example of this. They fancied themselves as European as Arabic and the successor to Rome. Being a successor to the Abbasids or Umayyads or Persians or whatever was a secondary. They were largely successful in keeping all the sects from fighting most of the time (though they did still have problems with being flexible and modernizing, in the same way that the orthodox Russia did) until map was shattered after WWI. Now, since the only mechanism for social unity in Islam is through religion, all the states that were carved out of that empire try to do that. Well, that or through brute force. But sadly, the West refuses to realize that culture is more than clothes and food, and is a complete framework for interpreting the world, and keeps knocking over mostly-secular dictator who maintain stability and then can't understand why extremist religious movements keep popping up to fight for control. Islam is incompatible with democracy because morality is objective to them. The capital-t Truth is never up for a vote (which isn't to say it isn't up for debate), and the idea that the capital-r Right way can be decided by men is as foreign to them as their rejection of that is to us.

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^[1] Not that they were really all that dark, it only appears that way because it happened between Pax Romana and the Enlightenment, both very bright ages; the dark ages were still huge advancements over what any group outside of Europe, the Middle East, India, and east Asia would ever accomplish in their brightest moments.
^[2] Even the western kings themselves were not absolute and relied a great deal on their lords, who likewise relied on the good will of their underlings, right down to the peasants, which were not as easy to control as the current narrative makes them out to be. They were never able to fully stamp out the local religions and customs completely, so the Church just made them saints, which is probably sacrilegious, but shows how practical the Church had to be to herd everyone in a single direction.}

Why are there so few monotheistic religions?