The Malignancy of Religion

Dean Sayers

Religion has been, by and large, one of the most self- destructive activities of man. It has invoked terror of all sorts and magnitudes, blindness of all sorts of self-destruction and hatred for ideas and people based on the most arbitrary of distinctions. It has also been the cause of great unity, humanism and even the advancement of sciences in societies. It has been a powerful revolutionary force, encouraging the dawn of a penetrating humanism under Christian ideals, acting as a force which brought about the revolutionary American spirit and even the advancement of capitalism against the feudal lords. However, at each turn it has also had a profound crippling effect on the nature of man’s activity and his spirit, encouraging him to ignore facts and retain submissiveness encouraged by the state and church. Religion is a link in a chain which must be shrugged off by humanity in order to achieve freedom and unity.

Religion is an “activity” not only because it goes beyond a simple state of mind and constitutes a basic ignorance of fact and nature, but also because it’s Latin root (religio) means “ritual.” In fact, this excessive ritualism was used and promoted by the Roman state in order to stifle dissent and form better followers by taking up their time and making them feel at one with the institution of religion, which generally supported the state. This early period of religious activity was characterized by a more reasonable and humanistic religiousness which appealed to human qualities as expressed in the different forms that each god took in the polytheistic religions, and in the morals that the religion herself expressed. Even religiosity that encouraged people to encroach onto the rights of others was often still based in a more intrinsic humanism than can be found in most modern religions, as they tended to encourage communalism on some level.

Still earlier religions were generally Matriarchal, which generally led to a very peaceful, communal lifestyle. Though the idea is controversial, there is a basic logic to this development – men did not know they had anything to do with childbirth, and it was generally unacceptable to mate within one’s own group or clan – therefore, children grew up with mother figures and no specific father figure. It therefore became a lot easier to submit to the wisdom of a woman as opposed to a man in one’s later years. The basic nurturing effect of the mother became the norm in society, creating no need for private property and the subsequent brute force to attain and preserve it. Even early Christianity was a humanistic lie; after the Catholic Church took its malignant hold onto the doctrine in Europe, Jesus’ word took a backstage; in this way the word of a true fighter for freedom and brotherhood was undermined to make way for an authoritarian religious dogma. For instance, a fundamentalist activist would today be liable to quote Leviticus in distaste for homosexuality, or even to murder abortionists – all the while ignoring that this type of hatred and manipulation of the Bible was in fact the very thing that Jesus fought against. A classic symbol of his humanism lies in the story of his capture – when his comrade cut off the ear of a capturer, Jesus replaced it, promoting the mantra of “love your enemy.” For Jesus, no man was truly beyond salvation; no man was doomed, and so he restores the ear of his capturer, symbolically dissolving the alienation between men by restoring his ability to hear. At best, the actuation of this kind of moral was a trend amongst the earliest Christians, and was only given lip-service under a fully statist church. The development of Christianity for its state use is suggested in the following passage regarding Martin Luther’s reformation of the church: “The individualistic relationship to God was the psychological preparation for the individualistic character of man’s secular activities” (my italics). He further goes on to describe the Catholic fight against capitalism as malignant in saying “…the Catholic Church allied herself with those groups which had to fight the liberation of man in order to preserve their own privileges.” While the second passage is basically self – explanatory, it is worthy to note that in the first passage Fromm is attempting to show that certain aspects of the reformed church were alienating in a capitalist sense, that is, they alienate the individual from the product of his secular activities by making him “face God alone,” as opposed to holding a “God” common to that his peers face, and that religion was used to prepare, or control, the people. (Fromm 1969, pgs. 129 & 143)

Carl Jung further indicates the Psychoanalytical criticism of religion as a controlling force by stating that “[religion] …is a dynamic existence or effect, not caused by an arbitrary act of will. On the contrary, it seizes and controls the human which is always rather its victim than it’s controller.” Though it may be argued that this statement does not hold up in regard to individuals which use religion secularly, that is, in a manner which does not imply their own belief and submission to religious dogmas that they use to control others, it is arguable that the very act of controlling others leads to submission. By basing one’s own lifestyle on the act of extra-personal control, they can no longer appreciate their own development, but must rather focus on the actions of others as an unrealistic measurement of their own achievements. (Jung 1937, p. 4)

It is also in the realm of social analysis that religion is shown as a malignant force of dominance. Karl Marx writes, “…[that] the process of production has mastery over man, instead of the opposite, appear to the bourgeois consciousness to be as much a self-evident and nature – imposed necessity as productive labour itself. Hence the pre-bourgeois forms of the social organization of production are treated by political economy in much the same way as the Fathers of the Church treated pre-Christian religions.” So, to Marx, the Christian Church was comparable to capitalist economy in that it acted to self create and re-create, and further imposed the idea that not only was it historically evident that it must prevail against other social orders, but that it was abstractly evident to the same end. (Marx, 1867, pg. 175)

Conflicting the idea that conventional religion is in itself a destructive force, John Polkinghorne writes “…religion is a part of a broad spectrum of personal encounter with reality. In that domain of our experience, testing has to give way to trusting. We know this is so in our relationships with each other. If I were always setting little traps to see if you were my friend, by these very acts I would destroy the possibility of friendship between us.” Here Polkinghorne not only explains that faith is a necessary aspect of successful human activity, but through his definition of religion shows that all ideas which are not reflective of a strict scientific basis – that is, ideas which are not falsifiable – are religious by nature of their basis in faith. As a man of science, Polkinghorne fails to recognize the obvious flaw with this implication: any metaphysicist would be happy to explain that the implication of falsifiability has nothing to do with worldly truth – in fact, this common definition for science can in this way defeat itself by expressing the base scientific logic that consciousness does not implicate truth. In fact, the very scientific process, by necessitating multiple trials for a single proof, shows that a single trial is not to be trusted – by the same logic, is not an entire group of atomized trials similarly untrustworthy? To what degree must a trial be isolated from certain variables until it can be considered truly scientific?(Polkinghorne, 1995, pg. 2)

Pseudosciences generally rely on realistic assertions stemming from analysis of events which cannot be scientifically tested or proven false, but which have been shown to be useful tools in understanding the world, even conventional science. In lieu of this, one can see that the very definitions of ‘science’ and ‘religion’ are facades. This shows that science is not only an impossibility by its own right, but that religion itself does not exist: there are only different systems of interpretation and different experiences which lead to different worldviews. As such, each idea must be considered not based on its own falsifiability, but based on the logic it employs and its use and importance to humanity. As we have seen religion in the conventional sense used both as an engine of mind control and revolutionary productiveness, it can be concluded that it has no objective use for man in and of itself: it is only in its human manifestations that it develops true power and effect. Therefore, the only good reason to hold a belief in any of these religions is for its proof as an inherent force of good or in its objective reality, neither distinctions of which hold up except in the case of certain eastern religions which do not indicate deities or other baseless ideas in their foundation. Even if the belief in a religion leads one to uncommonly good deeds, it should not be ignored that the belief can in itself be a lie, nor that the system has potential both for abuse and to be morally malignant in itself. It’s also critical to note that this submission can in itself be self-destructive for the believer because it can put the individual in a state of mental stasis, for a belief, as an a priori idea, is irrevocable, or as the biology professor Greg Graffin once said, “I don’t like to have beliefs because they can’t be changed.”

Works Cited Fromm, Erich. Escape From Freedom. New York: Avon Books, 1965 Jung, Carl. Psychology and Religion. Oklahoma: Yale University Press, 1960 Marx, Karl. Capital Volume 1. London: Pelican Books, 1976 Polkinghorne John.Serious Talk: Science and Religion In Dialogue. Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1995

Originally 12/12/2005