RE: The use of Religion to control, manipulate, and gain power
September 20, 2014 at 8:38 pm
(This post was last modified: September 20, 2014 at 8:39 pm by Cyberman.)
Religion is a great way to obtain wealth, power and status while doing the least amount of work to earn it. From a tribal perspective, you get different castes radiating down from the tribe's focal centre, the leader. As (usually) the strongest, fiercest warrior called upon to protect his people, he and his immediate family get the best of everything: food, clothing, possessions, shelter and so on. However, suppose you want some of that status for yourself, but don't have the clout to get it. One thing you might do, to earn yourself a seat at the top table, is take advantage of people's primal fears - death, the dark, thunderstorms etc - and the superstitions surrounding them. Control the populace by controlling their fear.
As far as xtianity is concerned, borrowing from the Ancient Egyptian model no doubt, or even earlier, the game was perfected in the Middle Ages. Here, you have the overwhelming majority working constantly in the shittiest conditions, to provide comfort for a single family and their retinue of advisors, toadies and similar hangers-on. What you don't want happening is for the peasants to get ideas above their station, to get jealous of all that food, wealth and power, or spending precious hours enjoying sex when they could be tilling the fields and waging war. You most certainly don't want them to realise that those big and pointy farm implements might just have a secondary function; especially as there's far more of them than there is of you.
Enter the priest. Which is not a phrase I get to use in a sentence very often, so make the most of it.
Now normal, human conditions such as lust, envy, even independent thought, are all 'criminalised' and punishable, if not by literal torture and death, then by the post mortem equivalent. And eternity is a bugger of a long time.
All that is understandable in a culture that is still growing up and finding its place in the cosmos. What baffles me more is that people in the modern era, in the most so-called civilised nations, would willingly shackle themselves body and mind to such a parasitic pyramid scheme.
As far as xtianity is concerned, borrowing from the Ancient Egyptian model no doubt, or even earlier, the game was perfected in the Middle Ages. Here, you have the overwhelming majority working constantly in the shittiest conditions, to provide comfort for a single family and their retinue of advisors, toadies and similar hangers-on. What you don't want happening is for the peasants to get ideas above their station, to get jealous of all that food, wealth and power, or spending precious hours enjoying sex when they could be tilling the fields and waging war. You most certainly don't want them to realise that those big and pointy farm implements might just have a secondary function; especially as there's far more of them than there is of you.
Enter the priest. Which is not a phrase I get to use in a sentence very often, so make the most of it.
Now normal, human conditions such as lust, envy, even independent thought, are all 'criminalised' and punishable, if not by literal torture and death, then by the post mortem equivalent. And eternity is a bugger of a long time.
All that is understandable in a culture that is still growing up and finding its place in the cosmos. What baffles me more is that people in the modern era, in the most so-called civilised nations, would willingly shackle themselves body and mind to such a parasitic pyramid scheme.
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'
