Religion and Abstraction: Part Three

We move to the summation and final evaluation of the material covered. The question arises: Why write an essay on religion and abstraction? After all religion is concerned with emotion and abstraction is about information. The answer is simple: emotions carry the information. Religion is the cultivation of emotions. As I said earlier religion is the palliative for alienation. It does this by trying to unify the emotions carrying the information. Let us examine how emotions carry information. The easiest example is phobias or irrational fears. Information that is inappropriate to the situation that the emotion is called up for. For example it is appropriate to be scared of lions in the wild, but not house cats in a civilized society. The phobia is fear carrying information that should not evoke fear. We can also explain fetishes and Freudian slips with this theory. Fetishes are information that has been attached to sexual desire that are not usually associate with sexual desire. Freudian slips are accessing the wrong emotion for the information. More that one emotion can carry the same information. This is why we can look at two identical objects and yet not recognize they are identical, because they are attached to two different emotions. An example: archaeologists can not distinguish between toys and magical implements except by the context of the find. The emotion of western religion is love. Love is meant to be the controlling emotion of western civilization. We see this in Hegel, Green, Kierkegaard,and Maximus. All of the above want to unify the information on the emotion of love. In Hegel and Green it is a general benevolence for society,and all that entails: compassion, empathy, etc. They believe humans can take a God's eye view and conceive a general love for humanity. Kierkegaard and Maximus do not believe that humans as limited as they are can ever come to a God's eye view, so the alternative is a loving relationship with God. Another thing that Hegel, Green, Kierkegaard, and Maximus share in common is that love must be cultivated it does not arise naturally. Even totalitarians such as Engels and Benito Mussolini believe that society should be founded on love. This is the reason they have any respectability in modern society. Any experiment or movement that killed a one hundred million people in a century would be totally abandon by a rational society. The difference is that they believe love shall arise spontaneously that it does not have to be cultivated. That we can reach the unity of love without the homunculus. We shall now take a brief look at the totalitarian vision of Engels and Mussolini. Mussolini has never been given credit for his contributions to political theory, but it was Mussolini that coined the term "totalitarian." I am using ''totalitarian" for a catch all term to include all those movements that want to reform society into a classless whole without distinctions. So totalitarian includes: Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and American Progressives. It is to Mussolini and Engels that we have to look to, to understand this movement. Most of the ideas in Marxism are from Engels; so much so that Marx could claim at the end of his life that he was not a Marxist. So let us examine the soteriology of Engels. And his philosophy is a soteriology; it involves saving humanity. This whole essay is of course about soteriology; soteriology is the function of religion. If humans did not need to escape their alienation there would be no religion. Religion is always a prescription for alienation. All the thinkers we have examined have a prescription for alienation,and they are all working in the Christian tradition. What makes Engels and Marxism different from the thinkers we have examined so far is all the thinkers examined in this essay believe the homunculus must be built and built to Christian standards. Engels and Marx had an original if flawed vision. That to create the perfect society that we must not build the homunculus or the conscience. To get an idea how many movements fall under this vision let us see what different totalitarians have to say about conscience. Adolf Hitler thought conscience was a Jewish invention. Nancy Pelosi famously said that "the trouble with Catholics was their conscience." Marx hated the idea of conscience. The question now becomes why? In totalitarian thought whether it is Hillary Clinton or Mussolini, the conscience is thought to divide people. The totalitarian wants society to have no distinctions to be one unified whole. This is the vision of all totalitarians; it must be admitted they all have different methods to bring about this Utopian vision. Hitler wanted conformity even in phenotype while Hillary Clinton wants ideological conformity. Totalitarians also have different methods it is not to be thought that Hillary Clinton would use Hitler's methods; the point is it is the same vision they are all trying to bring about. Compare H. Clinton statement "everything in the village, nothing outside the village" with Mussolini's statement "everything in the state, nothing outside the state." This does not mean that H. Clinton read or studied Mussolini, but that they have the same vision of society, but different methods to bring the vision about. Now we can see why justice had to be redefined as equality from reciprocity. Judgments make distinctions, and distinctions divide people and society. Justice is antithetical to a totalitarian society. Justice means society wants to build the homuculus; the conscience. For Hegel and Green this was done by making the reason within and the reason without the same. Now we must answer the question: why would anyone think this could work? The answer is that traditionalists and totalitarians base there ethics on different categories. The traditionalists bases ethics on reciprocity, while the totalitarian bases ethics on compassion. This is an inheritance from J.J. Rousseau. Rousseau was Marx"s intellectual hero. The totalitarian thinks humans if divested of the Homunculus would be naturally compassionate. They do not understand that compassion like all other emotions is generated by the desire to expand. Compassion lide most emotions must be cultivated. Compassion is the mark of the Saint, not the mass of humanity. Totalitarians do not understand that when they break down the conscience you do not have a blank slate, but the default setting of humanity which is tribalism, or as we call it today gangs. In countries where there is no government they are ruled by militias: gangs or tribes. Compassion if it is to be a force in a person's life must be cultivated. This is why Maximus was included in this essay. He was an opponent of the Monothelite heresy, and totalitarianism is a form of the Monothelite heresy. The dialectical spirit that Engels saw an moving through history is a will not an intelligence. Maximus saw deeper into human nature than the Monothelites that the will of humans cannot be trusted; instead compassion like all other emotions must be cultivated it is not good enough to have good intention. One must work on being compassionate. This work is done through asceticism and ritual; the monastic life. This brings us to our final point. That in Western Civilization love is thought to be the supreme emotion. It is time that we recognize that the supreme emotion is the desire to expand. The desire to expand generates all the other emotions. After all if there is no God than the only worthwhile goal is to be God.