Eric Hawthorne wrote:
6. Such an organised religion structure, or "god"-empowered government structure, if it succeeds in organizing
people for an extended period of time, as it seems they did, would naturally tend to take on a life of its own, a
self-reinforcing aspect, an "autopoietic" function as one of its functions. This self-preservation subfunction of
the "god"-empowered governance organization would take the form of religious education about the great history
of beneficial acts and mercies and wisdoms conferred on the people over their glorious history by the "god" via
the god-henchmen.
I should add that the other half of the autopoietic (self-preservative) subfunction of the
"god-fear-and-god-obeisance"-empowered organization is of course the enforcement branch: Mechanisms would
develop for enforcement-of-membership, rule-adherence, and enforcement that members conform to (express) the
orthodox forms (orthodox in that particular organization of course) of belief in the deity.
Thus we have "religious intolerance", we have "shunning, outcasting, excommunication", we have
dehumanization as "worthless infidels and enemies" of adherents to other (incorrect and defiant) religious orthodoxies,
and also, of course, stigmatization and de-valuing (not to mention torture and execution as an example) of those who
profess not to believe in the god (or any god) at all.
If I were living in the time (or a present-day place) of overwhelming and brutal dominance of "god"-empowered governance
organizations (e.g. everywhere before the beginning of the last century, and in a number of fundamentalist-Islamic
states (and southern US states? today,) I would have to profess belief in "God" to survive, and just hope that no-one heard
the quotation-marks in my statement which indicate belief in the power of the "god-myth" concept in human psychology and
thus in human society.
