Continuation on the last post

I was going to discuss the viability of ecological terrorism, but what was represented in the movie was not terrorism. The goal of the perpetrators was not to frighten or demoralize, it was to gain money.

Let me first state that I am an atheist. I am probably the most atheist atheist you will ever meet. Now then.

So lets talk about morals, and religion. Are they mutually exclusive? Of course they are, shut your god damn mouth, they are and always will be exclusive. I will fight to the death for that belief, that morals do not have to be religious. But I'd be wrong. We've made them mutually dependent, and we've completely screwed ourselves. Here's the timeline I believe we've been living in.

Prehistory. Morals are defined by religion. Up until this point morals were an abstract idea only enforceable by brute force. A large organization is required to uphold these morals, or we have anarchism.

I realize my audience here. I've been reading the posts on this site closely. I can't tell if you're all anarchists or just think you are, but I will come out and openly say that anarchism is as likely as communism to work, ie. not at all. Anarchism cant work for the same reason unorganized farming cant work. Food production dwindles, people die. The same thing happens without organization of society, laws and rules. Production fails, the economy comes unglued. People can no longer feed their families. Worse, pretend we survive this turbulent transition. Pretend (and I mean pretend, because it will never happen) that we have become an anarchist society. We're back at square one. Does anyone actually believe that barter and helping your neighbor works? What the hell do you think we did BEFORE government? Picked flowers? We brutally killed and tortured each other.

Here's my theory on government: it crystallizes. A lot of otherwise intelligent people think the universe is organized by an outside force. I believe it organizes itself through chemical and other scientific means, but I do not believe outward input is required. A self evident form of this is bees. Who decided a hexagon was the best shape for a cell? God? No. Each bee in each hive slowly but surely evolved a way to work with this shape. There is no organization. This is chaos theory at its most practical. The behavior that causes these shapes, just like salt forming a crystal, grew from otherwise "nothingness" by additive evolution. Each element piled on another element until a general 'hive' idea was formed. They just know how to be efficient. Efficiency creates itself.

A government is the most efficient way to keep people happy, to keep them productive. You can say what you want about oppression, but we have never been as free as we are now, and we have never been as efficient as we are now. We will get better.

Time-line step number 2. We have morals. Unfortunately, the group that could create enough hysteria and fear to crystallize was religion. Religion also crystallizes. You put enough humans together, fear of the unknown will create doubt in themselves. They will seek alternatives, and religion almost always fills the void. Religion becomes at this stage both hammer and sickle. It becomes the law and it becomes the provider. It crystallizes into a hive of humanity, feeding off fear. But we have morals. We have superficial morals that can be bent, but they are literally written in stone (after a few millenia) and that leads us to stage three.

Step three: we question religion. How can any person not? When science became a unified movement towards knowledge (I would love to say it was Darwin, but my hunch says it first became really important and free from religion in either early, early Greece or more likely Mesopotamia). That was the root. Obviously freedom from religion has not occured yet, and it never will. Freedom from religion is a false dichotomy. There is a spectrum of freedom from religion, right now I'd say we're at about 60%.

Now we're at this stage where we realize we've let a group of people run our lives. At one point in the middle ages it's safe to say they were an influence in every single aspect of our lives, and in many middle eastern countries I'd be surprised if someone contradicted me. So is this bad? Is religion inherently bad? I don't think anyone believes that. I can make a fairly short list of reasons I believe religion is necessary.

1. A large group of strong, powerful and charismatic people are initially needed to reform the moral system of society. Religious founders are righteous people who generally want to help people, so more the better.

2. Without a large unified group that says "don't question us" we wouldn't know we had to question them. We don't realize we dont like living in our parents house until we start questioning their rules.

3. They set societies up, they get farming working. This is not to say that an atheist society cant sort this stuff out, but historically they havent.


Now the last step (my fingers hurt from typing so I'm starting to trail off) is the point where we don't have to think about religion any more. It hasn't stopped existing, it has simply stopped mattering. As long as we have zero, AND I MEAN ZERO openly atheist politicians in the leading countries of the world, I don't see this happening.

Sounds sweet right? Step four, the last step, is where society will fail. People are starting to really get behind this anarchism bullshit. People HATE the police. I can't stand them, not because of what they are, but because they are simply annoying. Some people hate them for enforcing morals, they see them as a symbol of the old world. They want to brush them aside, get rid of them, live free and peacefully like hippies thought they were (the idea that hippies were free living is at minimum the most retarded thing anyones ever thought). Bad move. Bad, bad move.

The anti-religious people are playing a dangerous game. They have finally succeeded in lumping morals in with religion, and forgetting they're doing so. They're fighting religion, as they should, but they're fighting the upstanding moral values they created as well. They're questioning some very important societal rules that to be honest, I have no desire to live without. Communal living leads to theft. Polygamy leads to rape, murder and for some reason, sexual deviency. I don't believe this is a fact of life, but again, history says otherwise.

So what if the anarchists win, what if they destroy this religiously saturated society? Reform? Ha! We start over. The steps I've outlined, are in my opinion, set in stone. Anarchy leads to religion, which leads to atheism, which leads people to question religion, which leads to anarchy, which leads to religion and so on.

Again, I don't believe this, but history has taught us otherwise.