THE COMPLETE ANSWER
I have come to understand that the abrahamic religions are the cause of the dark age, the cause of more deaths than the plagues, and the continuing cause of human suffering, and the greatest threat to human transcendence (evolution).
RELIGION AND MINDFULNESS
We all require mindfulness outside of hunter gatherer lifestyles where we know our ‘place’ with everyone around us. We need Personal mindfulness. Interpersonal Mindfulness. And socio-political mindfulness. We evolved as pack animals. A strange mixture of chimp and wolf. We all long for the security of some aspect of the elation, power, comfort, and security of pack. Yet the more advanced our civilizations the more isolated we are as individuals. This was the problem religions solved, and religions solved them by evolving all at about the same time, in response to the needs of living in greater numbers with less certainty in our relations.
We fail to grasp that religions are vast lies that provide mindfulness. We can achieve mindfulness through intentional discipline, a variety of rituals, participations in feasts, dances, parades, sports, celebrations, and especially in oration, ‘theater’, and Myth.
But we can obtain that mindfulness by truthful, half truthful, or entirely untruthful means. And there are profound consequences for any people given the means of mindfulness they choose.
GOVERNMENT AND COMMONS
As far as I can tell, government is necessary for the production of increasingly complex commons. And mindfulness is necessary for cooperation in those increasingly complex commons.
But that said, both politics under democracy and religion regardless of political structure are constituted of very little other than utter falsehoods, because both seek power over us and profits from us, by lying.
If we lived under rule of natural (common) law (of tort), where we extended warraty of due diligence from goods, and services, to political speech, and houses of government were but a market for cooperation between the classes (as in the old english monarchic model) except that we used direct democracy or direct economic democracy, without representatives, and each voted on each issue individually, it is very hard to imagine we would have much use for politics.
If we were all taught mindfulness like we are taught table manners, reading-writing, arithmetic – even if we had to teach it by half a dozen different means in order to satisfy the needs of peoples with different brain structures, then we would have little need for religion.
The problem is…. we all love our little lies.
And in my world, it is the lies that cause all the world’s problems, and justify all the world’s crimes, and encourage all the world’s evil.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
https://www.quora.com/What-are-your-thoughts-on-politics-and-religion