Karl Popper on Religion

[pbrower2a]

(07-10-2016, 08:31 AM)radind Wrote: Joseph Bottum tries to show that most mainline Protestant churches now have a veneer of Christianity, without Christ and without God.

Quote:https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volo...f-america/
… "The collapse of this religious-moral consensus has been most pronounced among American elites, who have turned largely indifferent to formal religious belief. And in some leftist elite circles it has turned to outright hostility toward religion”…
… “it seems that often their religious dogma is reverse-engineered–they start from wanting to make sure that they hold the correct cutting-edge political and social views, then they retrofit a thin veil of religious belief over those social and political opinions.”…

The Religious Right in contrast offers God and Jesus -- but God as an enforcer of the will of economic elites and Jesus as Pie in the Sky When You Die. Such is consistent with an eternal 3T except without the mass hedonism. Most people are to live miserably by material standards, heavily in debt and thus in thrall to plutocrats and their bureaucratic enforcers. The Religious Right offers traditional values on economics (if without the overt racism -- minorities are mostly to be oppressed because they are poor... but most white people are also to be so oppressed because of their poverty).  The Religious Right is compatible with a high birth rate, all the better for churning out cannon fodder in the wars for profit and copious cheap labor for the economic equivalents of the 'dark satanic mills' of the early-capitalist era that Karl Marx used as his strawman for the vile capitalist order that he saw as doomed as well as despicable. Other religions can't push the high birth rate. Catholic families used to have high birth rates to support a society partially parallel to the WASP world -- the ideal family large enough to provide a priest (likely the brightest male mind in the family, one ill-suited to mindless toil once characteristic of fresh immigrants and their families), a monk, two nuns (one of those the brightest female mind in the family, most likely dedicated to teaching in a Catholic school or nursing in a Catholic society), and a daughter who would be a caretaker for the decrepit elders. Most sons would become laborers and support it all. That was Polish-American life (where I live the Catholics were largely Polish-American) eighty years ago, and it is no longer like that.

Such a middle class as exists exists largely as technicians and enforcers -- the school teacher, the cop, the engineer, the accountant, the tax collector, the salesman -- who is to be underpaid and heavily in debt. A little privilege is to make some modern form of debt bondage tolerable. The middle class is smart enough to recognize the mindlessness of the Religious Right as a sham, the privilege being a white-collar job that allows one to use one's mind instead of one's muscle. Its education must be practical, and not for its own sake, as such education must be financed with heavy debt.

Mainline Protestantism has gone from attempt to perfect morality to letting people do what they can within the economic milieu. Consumerism (which includes entertainment, mostly mindless), and not religious faith, has become the equivalent of Marx' opiate of the masses. Its members pay little attention to theology, but theology has become largely a practical exercise for clergy.  The Religious Right offers a simple theology of command and control characteristic of a chain restaurant.

The economic elites may promote the Religious Right for the masses, fully understanding that the material deprivations that it demands are not for the economic elites who demonstrate hedonism at its most lavish as the reward for being the economic elite. They also recognize that the mindlessness of the Religious Right is incompatible with technological competence and even the creativity necessary for churning out advertising (most creative people who earn a living from their creative talent work in advertising) and entertainment. If fear of Hell can control the semi-literate, under-educated masses, fear of poverty can control the middle class.

The biggest break in the Old Morality is the recent acceptance of homosexuality into the mainstream. The economic elites may have found homosexuality incompatible with a high birth rate that fosters low wages, resource depletion, high rents, and copious troops (for wars for profit and control of foreign markets) -- but nobody can explain why it exists and why it is otherwise 'harmful'. Gays and lesbians fit their desires for marriage and children to the parallel in the 'straight' world, and they won mainstream acceptance when they proved as hostile to the exploitative perverts as the rest of us. But even the acceptance of homosexuality comes in a time that is otherwise increasingly repressive on sexuality, especially involving minors.

...Our economic order is both vile and despicable. We have the means for a post-scarcity society, but we have a dominant ideology in most of America best described as hierarchical, repressive, and exploitative, an acceptance of the Marxist stereotype of early capitalism. That reactionary ethos supports growth, but growth that relies heavily upon population growth which creates greater hardships for most people -- higher rents, more fuel use in commutes, and lower real pay. Elites can profiteer from the economic competition that they compel upon non-elites, perhaps even returning to the economic realities of the early capitalism that Marx saw largely for its depravity.

...If God is plutocracy, then what is Jesus? The reward. Cheap grace for the nastiness that one does in the dehumanizing competition that is American life. Pie in the Sky as the ultimate purpose of a deprived and precarious existence.