The Tyranny of Faith: Reflections on the Death of a Patriarch

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Prudential Morality

The Abrahamic religions have existed since 600 BCE (Judaism, founded on the codification of the Torah under King Josiah), 33 CE (Christianity, founded on the fable of the god-man, Jesus Christ) and 600 CE (Islam, founded on a book attributed to a male “prophet” whose authority exceeds all others), and humanity may not be getting any better for them. The trajectory of these 2600 years is one long jagged plunge into terror and destruction. Whatever good has been achieved in the name of these religions (and may well have been achieved without them, if we believe in the basic goodness of humanity – more below) has been massively overruled by the behavioral insanity demonstrated through the ages by believers, behavior that is now culminating in the threat of a global holocaust, eagerly awaited, and perhaps deliberately precipitated, but a great number of the faithful.

Things in the world stand today as they have for a long time already: the most violent, threatening developments on the planet are driven by religious beliefs drawn from the three Abrahamic creeds. The worst hatred confronting humanity is, and always has been, “sectarian” hatred. Why?

One explanation is: Abrahamic religion is the supreme expression of patriarchy, and patriarchy, by definition, is a program of control by covert psychological coercion and overt violence. Patriarchy has been called dominator culture or domination culture. Discussing this term in an interview for The Sun Magazine, Marshall Rosenberg closely relates the act of domination to “salvationism.” He uses this term in the context of research conducted by Milton Rokeach:

Rosenberg: Social psychologist Milton Rokeach did some research on religious practitioners in the seven major religions. He looked at people who very seriously followed their religion and compared them to people in the same population who had no religious orientation at all. He wanted to find out which group was more compassionate. The results were the same in all the major religions: the nonreligious were more compassionate.

("Beyond Good & Evil: Marshall Rosenberg On Creating a Nonviolent World," in The Sun, Issue 326, February 2003. Rosenberg is an author, and founder and director of the Center for Nonvolent Communication: www.cnvc.org.)
more alternative viewpoint[/div

[TRYPHO]

1. One slight correction...

The trajectory of these 2600 years is one long jagged plunge into terror and destruction.
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A) before these religions there was some serious fucking murder rape and pillaging going on, and you didn't stopped till you had killed, raped and robbed every flipping one of the enemy.
B) the names of prior religions may have been long forgotten, but they brought the same results on.
C) percentage wise, we are currently living in the most civilised of times, and (again percentage wise) the deaths from religious causes are (with some exceptions which have run amok these last few years in central europe and africa) also living in the most civil of religious conflagration periods.

Anyway, dont blame the religous, blame the people running the religion.

TRYPHO