what i would ask is; do those people who ‘really’ worship x actually understand what they worship, and, what would ‘understanding’ amount to? is there something exclusive to those who ‘really’ worship x that is inaccessible to those who don’t ‘really’ worship x.
when you strip away all the cultural contingencies, you find all peoples doing the same thing with and through their metaphors. if that’s the case, we should look at what they have in common… which will be something lying behind all the superfluous religious rituals and customs… things that actually work against their understanding of each other by alienating them from one another.
feuerbach couldn’t have said it better himself. well done, lad.
this is the part where you google feuerbach and then say ‘oh cool, this is very informative and something i’ve always thought, myself.’
what the world is ripe for is the third and final stage (comte); the deification of man and the spiritualization of his positivism and science. but this won’t happen until all the little cultural pests scattered across the planet still holding on to their religious relics and worshiping imaginary gods, will let go of such nonsense.
i’ll tell ya what man needs. he needs an alternative enemy. see it was the love of the fight and the virility that war gave to the spirit of man, that kept him divided and encouraged him to draw lines in the dirt; this is my land… you stay over there and get your armies ready. we’ll meet at dawn and have it out. this is what strengthened peoples and cultures; having an enemy to distinguish themselves from. but we’re past that stage in the history of the world. these imaginary lines in the dirt are no longer as definitive. what we’ll have to find, once they completely disappear, is a new enemy to give us that lust for life and power.
we’ve got two options. we need to find an extraterrestrial threat, or focus all our energies on the radical expansion into outerspace. the new enemy needs to be the threat of natural disaster, the problem of finite resources, the rapidly evolving viruses and bacteria that roam the planet, and the extremely difficult task of terraforming the moon and mars. these things will surely keep us occupied as a species, and we’ll have no time arguing over who’s gods or customs are cooler.
but to get this show on the road, there is one more pest that needs to be eliminated. you guessed it; the capitalist. until that weasel is exterminated, the things that divide us and keep us at cultural odds with each other will only be strengthened. that’s what he needs in order to thrive; he needs us to be religious, he needs us to commodify our cultural identities, he needs us to maintain our class antagonisms so that we feel pressured to enhance our social mobility by buying the things that define us as individuals.
we’ve got to stop him, godammit! we’ve got to wage the war that will end all wars, artimas!
you’ll do fine, son. you just follow my lead and we’ll bring mankind into a new era together.
hail artimas! champion of the new technocratic vanguard and democratic proletarian space colonization program!
jesus christ, i think i did this whole thing too fast. even i’m dizzy after reading it. i can’t help it, man. this shit gets me all giddy.