This is an excellent article that clearly identifies the problem and uses an understandable label. Coming from a rural fundamentalist background is really the only way to get a full understanding of the frightening reality of these systems of direct personal control. I’ve come to see these religions (Abrahamic and Hindu) as malignant and I don’t think they can be understood in any other way. Historically they originated in ancient folk knowledge then were shaped into early cultural moralities tied to classical empires. Once formal logic, empirical knowledge and cultural diversity were factored in they began to die surviving only as justifications of conquest.
In the Chinese world religions were divided up into formal ethics and morality with structured popular belief systems that met the ritual needs of the broad population. Education was clearly the route to knowledge with contemplation of spiritual concerns maintained as an occupation for retirement years. All the authoritarian abuses were there but with the malignancy considerably better controlled than Europe and the west.
The horrors of the religious wars distorted Europe but the religions were fading back into folk tradition through the scientific revolution and the spread of human rights. By the 18th century our founding fathers were Deists with the religious traditions isolated. The maintenance of slavery, I think, was the source of new life to the old malignancy hence the source of its worst forms in the south. This also explains its dependency on racism, willful ignorance, and hate. These disease vectors are clearly visible historically right to today’s neo-Fascism embodied in Bannon in one form and Pence in another. Trump is unable to understand any of this other than as justification for greed so is irrelevant.
Yes, I grew up with many kind and good people who spent Sunday mornings singing and nodding along to how everyone else was going to spend eternity burning in hell in screaming agony. Then it was time for a good Sunday dinner (lunch to you folks) lamenting why those colored people can’t just stay in their place where they belong. It was not clear where “their place” was but it was very clear it wasn’t anywhere that “decent” people would want to be. I don’t think the disease vector is hard to see here either. Bannon built Trump for these people.
There were good Nazis also. Fortunately people mostly pay lip service to the surviving religious mythology and try to be decent and true to our tradition of secular rights and civic decency. But they are badly compromised and, with poor philosophical or scientific education, have nothing to stand against their family, friends, and neighbors who are taught active ignorance and hatred as required by faith. This must be reduced to folk tradition or museum study to escape the real religious hell. Yes, we must fight and destroy the ‘christian taliban’. I suggest that it is not necessarily American but very clearly christian.
But what about our spiritual health? Yes, I write about that, too. See the OtherLeft.
