[quote]katzenjammer wrote:
[quote]Nominal Prospect wrote:
Religion provides that framework and therefore creates societal stability. That is its entire purpose.
[/quote]
Okay, now that is false. Thy beloved Pat Buchanan would think so too.
[/quote]
I can quote endless sources for you, including Greek philosophers.
What do you think religion is for if not to stabilize society and provide an acceptable, palatable worldview for the “common man,” the working class joe?
“… the literal meaning (of the Bible) is for the vulgar only.”
[Albert Pike ““Digest of Morals and Dogma,” p. 166 ]”
“What is True to the philosopher, would not be truth, nor have the effect of truth, to the peasant. The religion of many must necessarily be more incorrect than that of the refined and reflected few… The truest religion would in many points, not be comprehended by the ignorant… The doctrines of the Bible are often not clothed in the language of strict truth, but in that which was fittest to convey to a rude and ignorant people.”
[ Albert Pike “Morals and Dogma,” 14th Degree Mason, p. 224 ] "
Here’s what how the system works:
The common man has his religion and his church, which he goes to regularly.
The rich also go to church along with the poor. In this way, they publicly demonstrate their humility and “connection” with those less fortunate.
However, the rich also have their secret societies, which the commoners don’t partake in. That’s where the real action takes place. Trade guilds, masons’ lodges, etc…
This is how European society operated since the middle ages. It really isn’t an insult to religion to call it a tool of social control, and you shouldn’t construe my statements as such. Social control is one of the most necessary elements of a stable civilization. Religion provides that element. It is a great boon.
“Any philosophy that guarantees that those that adopt it will be gone within a few generations can only be embraced by nihilists. The patriarchal and god-fearing will inherit the earth, one way or another.” - Richard Hoste, an atheist, Twilight of the Godless
“Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”
Friedrich Nietzsche"
"The problem that I set here is not what shall replace mankind in the order of living creatures ( â?? man is an end â?? ): but what type of man must be bred, must be willed, as being the most valuable, the most worthy of life, the most secure guarantee of the future.
This more valuable type has appeared often enough in the past: but always as a happy accident, as an exception, never as deliberately willed. Very often it has been precisely the most feared; hitherto it has been almost the terror of terrors; â?? and out of that terror the contrary type has been willed, cultivated and attained: the domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick brute-man â?? the Christian." -Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ"
“Today, a particularly insidious obstacle to the task of education is the massive presence in our society and culture of that relativism which, recognizing nothing as definitive, leaves as the ultimate criterion only the self with its desires. And under the semblance of freedom it becomes a prison for each one, for it separates people from one another, locking each person into his or her own ego.” -Pope Benedict
"The long slow decline of the West can be attributed to the Catholic Church who erroneously taught that the logical syllogism is consistent with divine revelation. The Catholic church, being a Western church, has always contained that special feature of the Western mind: reliance on the logical syllogism. Having divinized human thought the decline was inevitable. In the scholastic Middle Ages, Christian theology became “systematised” and subordinated to logic. Logicalness becomes the first test of truth.
For this reason the Renaissance could only have happened in the West. Logic is a form of measurement performed by man, logically, man becomes the measure of all things, theology becomes “scientific method”; this follows to the “Enlightenment”, with its profoundly naive optimism in the unlimited progress of man’s reason. This logical “mechanicalness” also fired the ideas of mechanist thinkers like Newton and Descartes. Rationalism reached a dead end with Hume and Kant, who show that “pure reason” cannot exist by itself: all “truth” is subjective. Having dethroned God through the centuries and put reason in his place, Western man is now left with nothing–save himself. An infamous and disastrous attempt to regain order was attempted by Hegel, which Marx took and turned into “Dialectical Materialism” - a last attempt at trying to make the logical syllogism sympathetic with (material) objective reality-the “objective reality” that now serves as a God substitute (the divine true and beautiful higher future of humanity.). The pseudo-religiosity of Marxists, and the popularity of Marxism with lapsed Catholics (and vice versa) is well known and supports the above regard."
“In the time of spirits thoughts grew till they overtopped my head, whose offspring they yet were; they hovered about me and convulsed me like fever-phantasies – an awful power. The thoughts had become corporeal on their own account, were ghosts, e. g. God, Emperor, Pope, Fatherland, etc. If I destroy their corporeity, then I take them back into mine, and say: “I alone am corporeal.” And now I take the world as what it is to me, as mine, as my property; I refer all to myself.” - Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own
“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.” - Seneca the Younger
“A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and is turned out for what he knows.” - Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)
“Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.” - Anonymous
“The world holds two classes of men - intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence.” - Abuâ??lâ??Ala al Maâ??arri
“Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, even if religion vanished; but religious superstition dismounts all these and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men.” - Francis Bacon
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God? - Epicurus
The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead. -Aristotle
What proposition is there respecting human nature which is absolutely and universally true?", Macaulay, replies, “We know of only one . . . that men always act from self-interest.”
“All men are born with a nose and ten fingers, but no one was born with a knowledge of God.” Voltaire
“Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.” H. L. Mencken
“As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities.” Voltaire
“One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.” George Orwell
“I stood among them, but was not of them” -Lord Byron
“The concepts of reductionism, naturalism, and nominalism in their radical form lie at the base of most anti-religious scientific writing, lurking there at such a deep level that even the author in many cases is unaware of the metaphysics they represent. Reductionism, in its most radical form, is the theory (or belief) that all scientific knowledge can ultimately be reduced to basic physics. Thus, biology reduces to chemistry, and chemistry to physics of atoms of molecules, and these to particle physicsâ?¦and this includes human consciousness. Naturalism is the theory (or belief) that only natural forces and entities make up the world; the clear implication of naturalism is that, since science alone is competent to examine these things, there is no non-scientific knowledge of the world, or any non-scientific knowledge at all, for that matter, and no entities that science cannot examine. Nominalism is the theory (or belief) that only concrete things exist; abstract entities such as species do not. All three of these notions have immediate appeal, especially to a scientific mind.”
"If God, if mankind, as you affirm, have substance enough in themselves to be all in all to themselves, then I feel that I shall still less lack that, and that I shall have no complaint to make of my “emptiness.” I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but I am the creative nothing, the nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything.
Away, then, with every concern that is not altogether my concern! You think at least the “good cause” must be my concern? What’s good, what’s bad? Why, I myself am my concern, and I am neither good nor bad. Neither has meaning for me. The divine is God’s concern; the human, man’s. My concern is neither the divine nor the human, not the true, good, just, free, etc., but solely what is mine, and it is not a general one, but is - unique, as I am unique." - Max Stirner