Eli Harman
June 20, 2016 · (repost)
I take a dim view of monotheism because it necessitates conflict which isn’t actually necessary.
Some conflict will always occur, because there are genuine conflicts of interest. But mere differences, whether in interests, culture, language, race, rituals, traditions, customs, doctrine, dogma, values, preferences, opinions, etc… need not result in conflict.
People can coexist and cooperate through exchange, although sometimes necessarily from a distance.
However, in monotheism, there is one god, one truth, one law, and they are universal. They are for everyone. If anyone disagrees, they are wrong, and not just wrong but evil, morally tainted.
A more reasonable approach would be to accept that the truth is “out there.” We can test ourselves and our beliefs against it. But none of us has access to the whole. And any of us may be mistaken. Moreover, there is always more than one way to skin a cat, different bundles of trade offs or strategies that people may employ to achieve their values, or live in accordance with their preferences.
These may be incompatible. But that doesn’t mean they *must* necessarily clash.
The monotheistic mentality is exemplified by the Jews. The Talmud is 6200 pages of Byzantine nonsense written by hundreds of different rabbis. But it’s all revealed truth. It derives straight from the one true god, who is infallible, and therefore it’s not supposed to contain a single contradiction. Of course, it does. It must. So that’s why the Jews have evolved pilpul, casuistry, (basically, postmodern deconstruction) in order to square the circle, to reconcile the irreconcilable.
They’re such good lawyers because they’ve been lawyering for thousands of years; so long in fact, that they’ve forgotten there is a truth “out there” to compare themselves to (if they ever knew to begin with.)
That’s what religious jews do all day, every day, they dispute. Of course, sophistry is infinite in its variety, but because of monotheism, there must be one “correct” bullshit interpretation. They have to determine whose sophistry prevails. Their status heirarchies are based on cleverness in disputation, which is aimed, not at discovering truth, but at causing rivals and adversaries to relent from their wicked and unholy errors, and to accept the one true sophistry as their own.
Because status confers reproductive advantages they are now literally bred for totalitarian bullshitting and moralizing. And these tendencies are notably evident, also, in secular jews who have abandoned the religious tradition entirely.
Christianity is not as bad, but its cuckery was assured by its universalism. Is anyone surprised that the Catholic Church has become anti-western when the bulk of its flock, its constituency, is in the third world? The only thing surprising about it to me is that it’s taken this long.
Nor is it any surprise that the Church spawned protestant spinoffs. Of course people are going to differ in opinion, interpretation, or emphasis. And the bigger your tent gets (in this case, by conquest) the more of those differences there will be to serve as internal fault lines. Eventually, they will become irreconcilable. But since only one can be correct, conflict must result. The only options are to suppress the heretics, to succumb to heresy, or split. There was a great deal of heretic suppressing at first but when the heretics became too numerous and too powerful to be easily suppressed, the splits were accepted (if not exactly endorsed.) But now we’re almost back to polytheism. Because in effect, the various, mutually tolerant, christian sects are worshipping subtly or even radically different gods, though they call them by the same name.
Islam is just a parasitic, dysgenic mess that’s only good for belching forth conquering hordes of desperate, expendable, young men, to take over better cultures and begin consuming them in turn. It’s like a metastasizing religious cancer. It is more riven by internal division and conflict than any of them, due to the practice of inbreeding, which results in clanishness and tribalism. But you can see the distinct imprint of their monotheism in the ceaseless sectarian violence they take with them wherever they go.
The “dar-al Islam” is not marked by peace even in submission, for everyone must submit in exactly the same way. But naturally, they differ as to what, precisely, that means.