nytimes: on religion and secularism

apr 2nd

thought this was quite an interesting review, and the book sounds interesting too. 'Earthly Powers'.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/books/review/02lilla.html?_r=1&8bu=&oref=slogin&emc=bu&pagewanted=all

the author's contention that forcibly created 'religions' are totalitarian is precisely what my critique of 'dravidianism' has been.

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But he is right to see radical French atheism setting the stage for the drama that unfolded just after the revolution, when the Jacobins went to war against Catholicism, destroying churches, imprisoning priests and nuns or sending them into exile, and brutally suppressing spontaneous Catholic uprisings that took place across France. Yet it turned out the Jacobins were not opposed to religion as such, just to the Catholicism that had sanctified centuries of tyranny. Having studied Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "Social Contract," they were convinced that a strong republic would need some sort of civil religion to establish a spirit of self-sacrifice and belonging, and so they tried to create one, organizing public festivals modeled on pagan cults and remaking the calendar. Burleigh, like so many historians today, sees in these Promethean efforts a premonition of the theatrical mass meetings of the 20th-century Bolsheviks, Fascists and Nazis.

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this is the contribution of good old evramaswamy naicker -- a totalitarianism, like marxism, fascism (hard to distinguish between the two, actually), and nazism.

more, on the creation of marxism-like totalitarianisms:

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And so the utopians took out their rulers and compasses and set to work. Saint-Simon imagined the creation of an autocratic technocracy run by industrialists and bureaucrats, and maintained as an organic whole by a new religion of reason. Some of his followers formed a commune outside Paris, where they wore special uniforms and performed secret rites. Comte wrote pamphlet after pamphlet laying out a new "positive" system for society, which would include a "religion of humanity," complete with ceremonies, saints and high holy days.

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i have long held that whenever a new religion is invented, it tries it damnedest to differentiate itself from the existing ones.

thus, when christism was invented, its differentiation was "we don't allow graven images (other than the crucifix and the bible, of coruse), because they offend god (why, our book says so, so it must be true)"

when mohammedanism was invented, its differentation was "we don't allow images of any kind because they offend god (why, our book says so, so it must be true)"

when marxism was invented, its differentiation was "we don't allow the idea of god, because it offends marx (why, marx says so, so it must be true)"

so when 'dravidianism' was invented, its differentiation was "we don't allow god, (but we will make exceptions for the gods of the semites because we're scared of them)"