On Politicized Religions
Jul. 26th, 2020 12:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
causticusOne of the great tragedies of the Kali Yuga period we live in now (which probably began about 5000 years ago) is the act of powerful kings and emperors interfering in the religious affairs of the people; so often creating artificial state cults which syncretize and innovate doctrinal elements for the purpose of social control and political expediency, almost always at the expense of Truth, clarity, and genuine social harmony.
The late-stage Roman Emperor Constantine "the great," the ultimate creator of the religion we all recognize today as Christianity, was by no means the first to do this; in fact, he was likely just copying what Ardeshir Babkan, the founder of the Sassanian dynasty of Iran (his successor Shapur I tried to fix this via his patronizing of the prophet Mani, but to no avail), had done just 100 years prior as he stamped out all cults and priesthoods in existing in his empire that did not conform to a strict, dogmatic Zoroastrian orthodoxy; and thus Ardeshir empowered a centralized and power-hungry priesthood to control the social affairs of his empire (sound familiar?).
About 400 years prior to that in India, King Ashoka of the Maurya empire consolidated the various Buddhisms into a state-sanctioned religion with a centralized doctrine (some of which could be said to be a deviation from the Buddha's original teachings) and used this new religion as an instrument of his own foreign policy ambitions.
By this, we could maybe speculate that Ashoka was the first political actor to patronize an overtly salvationist missionary religion, and that centuries later Constantine was merely syncretizing Ashoka and Ardeshir's grand schemes together into the most ghastly of Chimera-like state religions ever to see the light of day. So if we're to believe the pious Catholics, and Orthodox (and even Protestants, funnily enough) at face value, the ensuing logical chain of statements would reveal something like this:
Jesus died so Constantine could use his name/brand to institute a totalitarian state cult with a monopoly on all forms of religious belief, practice, and expression. Yeah, sounds legit.
In reality, Constantine and his well-paid scribes merely renovated the old Roman polytheistic state religion into a vastly more centralized and ideologically intolerant system. Peer behind the new name plates on all the important offices and you might find a Triad Cult of Zeus/Jove, Helios/Mithras, and Dionysus/Osiris re-branded as "The Holy Trinity" to be worshiped using exclusively Christian semantics. And of course the feminine consort to this Holy Triad being Isis and her perma-baby Horus. And so to take Martin Luther's sentimentalism to its logical conclusion, we must ask the burning question: "Why must I worship these divinities through the intercession of this middle-man of semantic obscurantism? Why not simply evade this entire mess and go straight to the Gods?" Good question indeed; as one can quickly learn through direct experience, you can venerate the gods without the need of a centralized priesthood or a convoluted rat's nest of self-contradictory dogmas.
Lastly, we would have to call into question Judaism's founding narrative, which is most certainly not a reflection of what actually went down. Like the other religions mentioned above, Judaism mostly likely came about through a series of political acts. When we go digging deep enough, we might come to the conclusion that absolutely nothing resembling Judaism in modern form existed prior to the Babylonian exile-return period. And that period was an era of monumental geopolitical faultline shifts. And ditto for Islam.
The late-stage Roman Emperor Constantine "the great," the ultimate creator of the religion we all recognize today as Christianity, was by no means the first to do this; in fact, he was likely just copying what Ardeshir Babkan, the founder of the Sassanian dynasty of Iran (his successor Shapur I tried to fix this via his patronizing of the prophet Mani, but to no avail), had done just 100 years prior as he stamped out all cults and priesthoods in existing in his empire that did not conform to a strict, dogmatic Zoroastrian orthodoxy; and thus Ardeshir empowered a centralized and power-hungry priesthood to control the social affairs of his empire (sound familiar?).
About 400 years prior to that in India, King Ashoka of the Maurya empire consolidated the various Buddhisms into a state-sanctioned religion with a centralized doctrine (some of which could be said to be a deviation from the Buddha's original teachings) and used this new religion as an instrument of his own foreign policy ambitions.
By this, we could maybe speculate that Ashoka was the first political actor to patronize an overtly salvationist missionary religion, and that centuries later Constantine was merely syncretizing Ashoka and Ardeshir's grand schemes together into the most ghastly of Chimera-like state religions ever to see the light of day. So if we're to believe the pious Catholics, and Orthodox (and even Protestants, funnily enough) at face value, the ensuing logical chain of statements would reveal something like this:
Jesus died so Constantine could use his name/brand to institute a totalitarian state cult with a monopoly on all forms of religious belief, practice, and expression. Yeah, sounds legit.
In reality, Constantine and his well-paid scribes merely renovated the old Roman polytheistic state religion into a vastly more centralized and ideologically intolerant system. Peer behind the new name plates on all the important offices and you might find a Triad Cult of Zeus/Jove, Helios/Mithras, and Dionysus/Osiris re-branded as "The Holy Trinity" to be worshiped using exclusively Christian semantics. And of course the feminine consort to this Holy Triad being Isis and her perma-baby Horus. And so to take Martin Luther's sentimentalism to its logical conclusion, we must ask the burning question: "Why must I worship these divinities through the intercession of this middle-man of semantic obscurantism? Why not simply evade this entire mess and go straight to the Gods?" Good question indeed; as one can quickly learn through direct experience, you can venerate the gods without the need of a centralized priesthood or a convoluted rat's nest of self-contradictory dogmas.
Lastly, we would have to call into question Judaism's founding narrative, which is most certainly not a reflection of what actually went down. Like the other religions mentioned above, Judaism mostly likely came about through a series of political acts. When we go digging deep enough, we might come to the conclusion that absolutely nothing resembling Judaism in modern form existed prior to the Babylonian exile-return period. And that period was an era of monumental geopolitical faultline shifts. And ditto for Islam.
