Religion

Religion is blasphemy. It is the systematization of dreams. Truth cannot be derived from traditions, because traditions are communicated through words and words are corrupted even the first time they are spoken—and in this case it’s even worse, because most of those who transmit traditions don’t even understand what they’re talking about. Most religious people are atheists. Jesus knew something about reality, but already by the time of Paul, his insight had been corrupted. However, I don’t blame Paul, because he could not have done anything differently; attempting to interpret the words spoken by a god will always fail.

Those fascists (and others) that want to “return to tradition”—I mean the ones that read Guénon and Evola and so on—are quite funny, but also deeply pitiable. In a way I understand what they are yearning for, but they are going about it in completely the wrong way. Every step they take into “tradition” is leading them further astray. One could also comment on how these thinkers’ ideas were not in any way traditional but actually highly derivative of the milieu of the 19th and early 20th centuries—but I’m not here to ridicule anyone.

Monotheism is especially odd. Shouldn’t all monotheists also be solipsists? Otherwise, if the god is what gives us our souls, we should be able to share in each others’ experiences, but this is not possible, so either there must be different gods or aspects of one god, or else I am the only one with a connection to the god and everyone else is illusory. Monotheism is a form of reductionism—historically, the rise of monotheism also coincided with the rise of reductionist ways of thinking about the world, as opposed to pluralistic, animistic modes of interpretation.1 Eventually, this developed into to atheism.

  1. This includes what is now characterized as “polytheism”, but talking about polytheism and monotheism as though they are variants of the same thing, feels a bit like those TV-debates between a real scientist defending the theory of evolution against some random person off the street that believes in creationism. Polythesim used to be the default opinion, and the popularity of atheism following the rise of monotheism proves that polytheism should be the default opinion. ↩