Over the years myself and JT have had many attempts at pulling the rug of religion out from under God’s clay feet. Here’s another.
I was sitting on the balcony today reading the newspaper. The headline was “something blah-blah senseless killing” And that got me thinking. The killing wasn’t important so much as the senselessness of it. As if that adjective was necessary to drive home the evil of the whole business. That the killing served no obvious purpose, was wasteful somehow, achieving no sensible goal.
Then one of the cats that uses our small garden as a stomping ground and occaisional creche tootled by, and for some reason I remembered my vivisectionist/terratologist days. Myself and a bunch of variously snot-nosed kids straight out of highschool sat around a very clean table killing animals, disecting out their wombs and checking their near-term young for chemically induced mutations. That was killing too, but not senseless in that it served a purpose that outweighed its atrocity. And so protected by a sense of a greater good, our daily quota of death lost us not a wink of sleep.
Then I imagined the horror I would inspire if I were to catch that cat, and repeat now the process of disection I had undertaken a thousand times prior. And I wondered how doing it would effect me, without now being able to wear the handy justifying mantle of science. I decided I’d feel pretty bad. Lucky old cat.
Anyway. I then assumed that most people, if not all, have an (inate) aversion to killing not so much as an act in itself, but only in it as an act without some sanctioned or sensible purpose.
I think I’m pretty safe in that assumption. Afterall, I’m pretty sure that if I went up to some random bloke or blokette in the street and told them to kill another random person right then, they’d probably refuse.
But then I remembered an old conversation I had with Polemarchus on ILP a long time ago. He posted up what I think was part of a diary of a German woman who had worked at one of the death camps. She spoke of camp life, then blithely went on to describe how she was going to redecorate her kitchen with the money she’d earned there. It most certainly wasn’t the writing of some evil psychotic madwoman, but just the hum-drum story of an average housewife in an extraordinary setting. She, like me and the poor stretched out cat-corpses, lost not one wink of sleep.
I then kinda made an another assumption - that anyone can do anything, given the right justificatory program. In fact, given enough justification, there is no such thing as evil. at least not within the sphere of people that justification encompasses, it becomes simply distasteful, but necessary. Sensible. Like taking out the trash lest it fester in the bin. Or cleaning the goop out of the fridge.
With killing people, beyond the already over explored notions of kinship and empathy, there’s something else to be taken into account - our predictions of consequence. Like Dr. Doolittle’s Push-me-Pull-you, there’s our natural aversion to kill-you-kill-me.
So, how to set things up so it becomes so sensible to kill others that it doesn’t seem like anything in particular…?
First, you need some greater cause that the killing would serve. There are any number available - freedom, nationalism, protection, ‘what about the children’ etc. whatever, as long as it’s fairly lofty, by whatever standards lofty is judged by given the sociopolitical umbrella of the day. I’ve an idea “lofty” started pretty low back in the old times.
Then second, some way of detaching fear of consequence from the act. Probability shifters like better weapons and armour. Insurance against the worst - a “retrieve our guys at all costs” policy. Anti recognition and retaliation devices - secrecy, masks, uniformity etc.
Nothing spectacular. Then I noticed that pretty much all the justifications, save nationalism, were reactive - they needed some threatening or oppressing force to render them sensible. Doable.
But then any good general knows that the safest and most effective strike is a pre-emptive one. Well, unless there are nukes involved. So, how to get harmless people to kill other harmless people without some kind of perceivable threat perpetrated by either group prior…?
It’s not nice, but in terms of group prosperity, and given that after a certain point in our species’ pre-history man became man’s greatest predator, it becomes quite a good thing to kill everyone around you who isn’t bound to you by blood.
Anyway, me and JT have tried various tracks to explain why religion could be so prolifigate, unless God was real. We’ve tried neuroscience - that human kind just naturally has a bit of the brain that for some reason renders us susceptable to visions of etheric and all powerful beings. We’ve tried theories of group coherence, and motivation. We’ve tried logical extrapolations of naturally percieved comparitive scales - Jack is stronger than Jake, John is stronger than Jack, leading to the assumption that there is something stronger than John, however strong he may be. We’ve tried a lot of things.
But anyway. Whatever the reason, pretty much every established culture alive has some kind of attendant religion. And the most established cultures, have pretty violent religions, especially those that have a history of intercultural warfare - unrelated group X against group Y.
Perhaps you see where I’m going with this. 
Wouldn’t it be ironic if the principle socio-political advantage of having religion at a cultural level, and having a tendency to be easily inspired toward blind faith in some kind of God(s) at an individual level, was to make it easier to personally achieve the degree of justification, and the accompanying neurochemical states involved in overcoming our natural aversion to violence and killing, that would enable pre-emptive strikes on other neighboring tribes/cultures, without any prior physical threat on their part, by lifting the perception of threat (and consequence) into a more metaphysical realm…?
ie. The cliché of “All established cultures have religions” is autocatalytic - in that cultures with religions kill cultures without.
Which leaves us with God as a social tool to inspire atrocity, rather than alleviate it.
Iz funny, no…?
