What I've referred to as the (mono)theistic 'command to love' seems akin to masochistic rape-fantasy or self-abnegation: — 180 Proof

Masochism is a distortion of spirituality, not the other way round.

Isn't the smalltown preacher the real face of religion? — TheMadFool

Maybe it is for you. Maybe that’s why you see it as you do.

Maybe it is for you. Maybe that’s why you see it as you do — Wayfarer

What, in your opinion, is the right view of religion then?

there is no single 'view'. When I did comparative religion (sub-discipline of tilting at windmills) the very first class was devoted to coming up with a definition of religion. To my surprise, we failed. Every attempt had major exceptions.

My interest in it was always centred on the idea of enlightenment. As I pursued that, I discovered it did have connections with Christian ideas as well, albeit pretty underground. I used to joke that Comparative Religion ought to have been called 'the school of mysticism and heresy.' But I resisted being 'a believer', I thought 'believing' was for those not intelligent enough to investigate for themselves.

I suppose one thing I could usefully say is that there are ways of understanding religions in terms of archetypal psychology and the hero's journey. Myths represent deep structures in consciousness that unfold over millenia. That doesn't invalidate religion, but it also doesn't simply validate it either (have a read of this article.)

I sense you're wrestling with a spiritual issue - don't let your image of what you think religion means stop you from pursuing it.

Is belief in god then a symptom of slave mentality? — TheMadFool

That was Marx's economic-class-based view. But a more general view of the god/man relationship might be Dominant/Submissive. In other words, the gods represent human leaders who are both feared and respected. And in polytheism, the gods had hierarchies of their own.

As societies grew larger and more complex, the egalitarian hunter-gatherer tribes --- whose gods were mostly ancestors (i.e. family) --- evolved into Chieftainships, with a top-down hierarchy. Then city-states & empires formalized their bureaucracies into even more rigid differentiation between Nobles & Commoners. At each step in the development of political bodies, the separation between Dominant leaders and Submissive followers was widened, until the human leader was regarded as a god or a son of a god. Since some gods seemed to be able to punish disobedience with sickness or death, the leaders were deemed to also have absolute life or death authority over their subjects. Thus, commoners who wanted to solicit favors were expected to approach their mercurial leaders on their knees or prostrate --- demonstrating their non-threatening submissiveness.

This submissive prayer posture was required even of lower-ranking nobles. So it was not only slaves who had to bow and scrape before their masters, but the whole hierarchy had a politically defined pecking order. And, when Monotheism emerged, the top-god was viewed as being the Lord even of Kings. In that sense, all of humanity was enslaved. But since the remote universal god leaves most day to day regulation to his human administrators, the religious-political system allowed varying degrees of freedom, based on the official or de facto hierarchy of the society.

So, the mentality of political & religious subjects is not simply that of abject slaves, but of bureaucratic role-playing that can change as the political structure changes. For example, after one society has been absorbed into a new empire, its hierarchy can shift dramatically. A former king may be put in the stocks, as a laughing-stock. And a former slave could be promoted to a position of authority, as in the stories of Joseph and Daniel in the Bible.

Humans are instinctively like wolves or sheep or chickens, in that they have dominant/submissive relationships that vary all the way down to the rank of powerless slaves. And human leaders, including priests, take advantage of that submissiveness to leverage their personal power by claiming divine authority. Hence, us commoners are not just slaves of gods, but slaves of everyone above us in the chain-of-command. :gasp:


PS___Some might view their relationship to their god more positively, as good soldiers following orders from above.

Ok. :roll:

Sexuality is spirituality in bodily terms. Sexual distortion is spiritual distortion. Think about it...

:yawn:

Sexual distortion — EnPassant

What is?

What is? — tim wood

That depends on one's subjective point of view.

That depends on one's subjective point of view. — EnPassant

So it doesn't mean anything?

So it doesn't mean anything? — tim wood

Isn't child abuse perverse? I don't see why one's subjective point of view needs to be meaningless. The sadist is acting out evil. The masochist wants freedom from self - without giving up self.

Is belief in god then a symptom of slave mentality? — TheMadFool

I then realized that theism is, at its core, a belief that there is a being whose commands one has to obey without question. Isn't this slavery? A slave must obey his master's command and the master makes it clear that he has zero tolerance for any disobedience. - Is belief in god then a symptom of slave mentality? — TheMadFool

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this quite similar to the lines of Nietzsche?

Slave morality came with Christianity and wrecked the master morality of Antiquity and so on...

The concept of men being slaves to the gods or being slaves to the city state temple priests who commune with the gods is very ancient
— christian2017

Islam isn't ancient, in fact it's the very latest incarnation of religion we know of and it means "surrender" or "submission". — TheMadFool

I was trying to say that the whole god(s)/slavery thing predates Islam. I actually didn't bring up Islam. Hammurabi goes back to ~1800bc and that god(s)/slavery thing predates him.

As I wrestled with the idea of the divine, a thought crossed my mind - should I just take the plunge, make the leap of faith, and just believe in god, a benevolent creator who will unfailingly look out for me no matter what? — TheMadFool

You were contemplating a rational voluntary belief in a debatable concept. But that's a calculated cost/benefit approach; it's a gamble. It's the rational pragmatic solution that Pascal came up with. The problem with that kind of belief is that it can be swayed by a change of circumstances. For example, many Christians & Jews in Europe became practicing Muslims or Christians, when it was the lesser of two evils : death or conversion. Yet, when the dominant political entity changed, some of those pragmatic folks switched their allegiance to a different god-concept.

Ideally, true Faith is involuntary and irrational. It's based on feelings, not reasons. Or at least, that was what I was told when young and impressionable. So, I suspect the emotion you felt while imagining a benevolent god, was only half of the Faith calculus : Hope plus Trust. Hope is a felt need for succor, but it can be fleeting. Trust, though, comes with positive feedback. If you pray to god for something that can be confirmed, and it comes to pass, your Hope will be augmented. Ironically, irregular reinforcement of Faith is more effective than when every prayer is answered. That's why Gambling is so addictive. The faithful, and gamblers, reassure themselves that they are betting on an almost sure thing. :nerd:


Pascal's Big Bet : Pascal's wager was groundbreaking because it charted new territory in probability theory,[4] marked the first formal use of decision theory, existentialism, pragmatism, and voluntarism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager

Succor : assistance and support in times of hardship and distress.

Intermittent Reinforcement Schedule : Gambling is an example of intermittent reinforcement.
https://www.alleydog.com/glossary/definition.php?term=Intermittent+Reinforcement

One of the elements Kierkegaard introduced in his Works of Love is the idea that what is taken as examples of the highest discrimination of pagan Love actually requires another ingredient.

That the interest in another person is not just a bundle of instincts but a kind of emptiness of self. Not as a exemplar of perfection but as a means to a way of seeing.

P.S. This isn't a comprehensive analysis but is just an exploratory effort on my part into how theism maybe a reflection of a slavish instinct within us all. — TheMadFool

Formal Theism is a late development in human religion. For thousands of years, Neanderthals and primitive Homo Sapiens were "slaves" of Nature. They had no control over natural events, including life or death scenarios. So, all they could do was pray to whatever powers might be for some very practical interventions : recovery from illness, rain for crops, a healthy baby. But as people began to form complex societies in bronze-age civilizations, they also formed more specific images of the gods : one god for each major aspect of Nature & Culture --- weather, success in battle, etc. Eventually Universal Montheism, of the sort you seem to be contemplating, was devised to reflect the all-powerful emperors & courtiers of the Iron Age earthly empires, wherein everybody was a slave to his superiors in a rigid top-down hierarchy. Some modern liberal Christians and New Agers, though, seem to imagine God as a sort of democratic president in the sky, so all men are free, and subject only to the beneficent laws of reason.

But there has always been a less hierarchical minority view of god. By that I mean the "god of the philosophers", which is now known as Deism, in contrast to Theism. This is a god, generally identified with Nature, and knowable via Science, but not assumed to intervene on behalf of supplicants. The Deus does not inspire fear, and doesn't require slavish behavior (except for obeying natural laws), but it also doesn't appeal to the emotions, inspiring feelings of comfort & peace, or fear & dread. As a rational person, you could easily make the leap to faith in a Cosmic Nature God, but you'll have to find emotional support and salvation elsewhere. :cool:

:up:

You were contemplating a rational voluntary belief in a debatable concept. But that's a calculated cost/benefit approach; it's a gamble. It's the rational pragmatic solution that Pascal came up with. The problem with that kind of belief is that it can be swayed by a change of circumstances. For example, many Christians & Jews in Europe became practicing Muslims or Christians, when it was the lesser of two evils : death or conversion. Yet, when the dominant political entity changed, some of those pragmatic folks switched their allegiance to a different god-concept. — Gnomon

What I'm trying to do is, firstly, investigate my suspicions that a desire to believe in a god might be a telltale sign of a [subconscious] desire to be enslaved/dominated.

Secondly, if you're going to take a Pascalian approach to this then don't forget that Pascal's thoughts on what the stakes are. Pascal was of the opinion that the stakes were just too high for a person to lay his bet on god's nonexistence - eternal hellfire - and believing in god who didn't exist is not disastrous - just a minor inconvenience. In essence, Pascal considered it an extremely dangerous affair not to believe in god - that's fear and fear is precisely what sustains the beast of slavery.

One of the elements Kierkegaard introduced in his Works of Love is the idea that what is taken as examples of the highest discrimination of pagan Love actually requires another ingredient.

That the interest in another person is not just a bundle of instincts but a kind of emptiness of self. Not as a exemplar of perfection but as a means to a way of seeing. — Valentinus

:chin:

In essence, Pascal considered it an extremely dangerous affair not to believe in god - that's fear and fear is precisely what sustains the beast of slavery. — TheMadFool

Yes. Christianity and Islam have made unbelief, and especially apostasy, into a one-way ticket to Hell. That embedded fear may be why I was so slow to make a clean break from Theism, long after my disbelief in the Bible was rationally confirmed. Actually, I still believe in what I call "G*D", but I'm not afraid of Mother Nature. She may punish violations of natural laws, but everlasting fire is not a natural punishment. It's a sadistic torture device dreamed-up by religious rulers to keep the unruly in line with the stick of awe & fear, because the carrot of promised blessings is so mundane by comparison, and also because mere Death happens even to fervent believers. :worry:

PS__As mentioned in my prior post, I suspect that what you call the "desire to be enslaved" is merely our herd animal instinct to follow the leader. Most of us timid souls are not aggressive and ambitious enough to challenge the top-dog, or the top-god. As human societies grow larger and more complex, the hierarchical power structures become more rigid. But we still have romantic notions of the individuality and freedom enjoyed by Noble Savages, which may have inspired our occasional experiments with Democracy, that usually revert to Fascism when the herd is threatened by outside forces. The god of monotheism is a Fascist Fuhrer who "makes the trains run on time", but requires absolute obedience to official commandments, and has prepared a "Final Solution" for those who don't conform.

I then realized that theism is, at its core, a belief that there is a being whose commands one has to obey without question. Isn't this slavery? A slave must obey his master's command and the master makes it clear that he has zero tolerance for any disobedience — TheMadFool

I think if you take the fundamental tenet that God is an ideal state of being... then the consideration of whether you're submitting to slavery or not is null and void. Would you consider subordination as ideal? Would he/she/it/them consider tyranny as ideal?

Be careful when you attempt to contemplate God/ Gods as you like everyone else likely have a lot of preconceptions and misconceptions that we are unaware of. Most of which have an origin not in the divine but in human manipulation, power play, authority and politics - using a state of ideal (using a gods name) in vain -for their own agenda.

I also dont believe God, if one exists, is benevolent at least not by the narrow definitions of what a human considers good or bad....as our concept of good is at the very least always centred around our privilege as a species and self entitlement, or "the world according to us." Which will be inherently biased and changes constantly through history. Consider that benevolence on the scale of a God would apply to things beyond what we can even know or imagine yet.

Also I'd imagine benevolence would disallow for freedom of choice. He would always be intervening by moral imperative and giving us no choice to commit grave errors or mistakes. Then we could not learn.

For me the closest association I can make to a God that exists is energy. A phenomenon/substance from which all things arise. Energy is the the core concept underlying omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence as it is the propagator of action.