Howdy MOQers: Arlo said: ...Now, "the new view" of the AoG crowd is that those who suffer do so because God is punishing them. They are unworthy and deserving in their suffering. YOU, on the other hand, have every right to that shiny new Lexus because God loves you. ...the only real God they actively worship is money and wealth, a wealth that accrues BECAUSE OF God's love NOT in opposition to God's commands.
dmb says: If Max Weber is right, Capitalism was born out of an ascetic Protestant ethic, out of Calvinism and Puritanism in particular. If he's right, the kind of prosperity theology you describe here has been a part of Capitalism and Christianity since the Reformation. As he explains it, this ethic grew out of their harsh doctrine of predestination, where your eternal fate was already decided before you were born. All you could do was hope you were among the few of God's "elect" - and that it showed outwardly. Wealth was no longer frowned upon as avarice, as it had been when Catholicism reigned unchallenged. Now it was considered a sign of God's favor. But the prohibitions against hedonism and self-indulgence still held, so that this became a new sort of wealth. The idea was to get lots of cash, but you couldn't spend it either. It was okay to accumulate riches but not okay to consume them. And that's what the Capitalism does even now. He doesn't spend money, he invests it. Even now, the name of the game is to die with piles of unspent cash. The workers absorbed this too. For their part, this Protestant ethic shaped their attitudes so that a job wasn't just a job, "a calling". See, it's all part of God's plan. The divine will wants you to show up on time to clean those toilets. As Weber point out, this ethic was already secularized by the time Ben Franklin was saying pithy little things like, "Time is money". A guy wants to say, "No Ben, time is life and I'll be damned if I'm gonna spend mine chasing that mechanical rabbit". It's worth pointing out that his book, "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism", was written at the turn of the century at the height of the Victorian era, when social Darwinism reigned and little kids worked in coal mines and sweatshops 12 hours a day. In one sense he turns Marx on his head. Marx thought religion was a response to the misery wrought by exploitation, the opiate of the masses. Weber wasn't a militant atheists like Marx and was concerned that "the disenchantment of the world" was going too far beyond the liberation from a magical world view, but you can also see how this ethic makes exploitation morally justified for the Capitalist and it makes the workers readily exploitable. And throughout all these explanations, he keeps coming back to the idea that this ethic entails a kind of asceticism. It takes self-discipline to show up on time, to eat lunch after the bell rings no matter what your stomach says about it, to put that money away in an account, to wear uncomfortable clothes, to smile at people when their shitting on you. The whole rationalization process of industrial culture is steeped in this asceticism. What did Pirsig say? We do these things because they're rational and so we do them even when they aren't any good. And we forget to ask how rational it is to be chasing a mechanical rabbit in the first place. It's our version of the pearly gates, of the rapture, the beautiful eternal reward - the one that never actually arrives. Arlo said: Manly Hall ...says outright that the vast majority of people will always be sheep, always need the "exoteric" dogma to believe in, always flock to the simplistic, pandering, and anti-intellectual words of children's readings of the mysteries. ...I want to believe that all people can achieve the "esoteric" understandings he goes on to write about, but as time goes on I am more and more wondering if Hall was right, if the majority of the world's population will always be aggressive sheep following authoritarian dogma. ..That we are now electing politicians who see our army as "God's Army" and actively believe that Armageddon is coming IN OUR TIME, pushes my ability to dismiss Hall to the limit. That people continue to send money to preachers who described Hurricane Katrina as God punishing gays and infidels, to preachers who see those who perished as the damned laid waste by God's Mighty Wrath finalizes it for me. dmb says: The difference between a conventional believer and a seeker of esoteric mysteries can pretty well be explained by the "deprivation theory", as it's called in the psychology of religion. Marx and Freud would be among the first and most extreme proponents. These days, psychologists are more likely to say that this theory pretty well explains a certain set of behaviors, emotional motives and psychological effects with respect to religion. Simply put, this theory says that religion appeals most to those who are deprived, who have very compelling emotional needs. And in this respect, the difference between cults and mainstream exoteric religions is only a matter of degree. They're both built to appeal to people who have these needs. In the same way that a high sensitivity to fear correlates with conservative political ideology, a low tolerance for uncertainty and insecurity correlates to religiosity. There are other, more difficult ways to get these needs met even for those who have these tendencies, but apparently conservatism and religion are the drug of choice among people of that orientation. These are the safest and most obvious options and so they're a likely choice for a fearful, uncertain person. But none of this applies to you, of course, dear enlightened reader. Nor to me, ha, ha. Now if a person has "faith" for these reasons, and I suppose these ARE the reasons for most religious people, then what do you suppose is going to happen when that faith is challenged or questioned? Let's say there's a guy who drinks for a couple decades and screws up his life but he then finds Jesus and gets it all back together. Let's say there's a woman who never got married and always weighed three times pi but then she hears the promise of God's eternal love. Let's say a high school kid feels like a total loser but then discovers the youth group at church, where everybody thinks he's very cool. What's going to happen when you ask a person like that how the world could only be 6,000 years old or point out that the Bible is a collected, selected, invented, translated thing? A calm, thoughtful debate about the validity of their beliefs is unlikely because now you've tapped into their complex or rather threatened the mechanism by which they manage that complex. If they are religious for emotional reasons, these questions will strike them as threatening and hurtful. Unconsciously, if not overtly, the drunk will start to feel his life fall apart, the woman will start to feel unloved and a big "L" will start to appear on the loser-kid's forehead. It's not about what adds up. It's about what feels good - or rather it's about how horrible it feels to be without those comforting beliefs. And of course its not just about drunk, fat, losers. These are just the stark cases, the people who get sucked into cults and into fundamentalism. John Walker Lynnd, the American Taliban was my favorite example in class yesterday. But everybody has emotional needs. And who isn't afraid of death? Again, there is a spectrum. It's a matter of degree so that we can see the same basic dynamic within "normal" religion too. The professor used the hero's journey as the counter example. The seeker of esoteric meanings, in the deprivation theory, would be working with a different motivation. She's not satisfied with the safe and obvious answers and so makes a deliberate effort to go beyond them. Course, seeking is sometimes more like restlessness, curiosity, adventurism, or even just escapism. It ain't necessarily more noble but... Well, actually, scratch that. It's a hellavu lot more noble. _________________________________________________________________ See how Windows Mobile brings your life together—at home, work, or on the go. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/msnnkwxp1020093182mrt/direct/01/ Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
