Enormous confusion surrounds the discussion of religion. The term ‘religion’ seems to encompass some extremely different, even contradictory, attitudes and ideas. This essay argues that a major conceptual division needs to be made: between spiritual religions and political religions.
A spiritual religion is a doctrine that, if followed, will alleviate spiritual suffering. The alleviation of suffering is as close as this world gets to a universal moral good. As such, spiritual religions are seen as something holy. So both spiritual religions and political religions claim to be spiritual religions.
But in the same way that visiting a prostitute and having sex is not really making love, even though it appears similar, political religions are not really spiritual.
A genuine spiritual tradition is not concerned with the will for temporal and material power. A doctrine such as Buddhism teaches its adherents that gratifying such desires will not lead to happiness. And it is correct – once a person has met their basic physical needs, further happiness comes not from physical excess but from meeting social, intellectual and spiritual needs.
A political religion is a doctrine that is primarily concerned with temporal and material power. The authorities of a political religion are not concerned with alleviating suffering – they want power, money, fame, prestige. For them, suffering is a good thing, because it gives them a chance to portray their political enemies as the ones responsible, and themselves as the saviours.
The difference between a political religion and a political non-religion (such as Communism) is that the non-religion doesn’t attempt to cloak itself in the shroud of divine morality. Communism was happy enough teaching that consciousness is extinguished upon the death of the physical body. Political religions, by contrast, admit that consciousness survives the death of the physical body – but there’s a catch.
The catch is always this: your consciousness will reincarnate in a place of suffering in the next world unless you obey the political religion in this world. So the political religions demand that you give them money, time, labour and devotion in this world on the threat of suffering in the next.
The foremost examples of political religions are the Abrahamic cults, in particular Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Each of these has aped the spiritual wisdom of their age to create an ideological monster. Each of these teach that only by submitting to the priesthood can one achieve the cessation of suffering. The priesthood speaks for the divine – a power granted only to them. Therefore, obey or suffer.
The characteristic sign of a political religion is that they cause suffering in order to gain power. Relentless, grinding misery causes people to look to higher authorities for solace, which is why Abrahamism is doing so well in Africa and the Middle East. To this end, political religions usually support the persecution of women, homosexuals, prostitutes and drug users.
Also characteristic of political religions is that they drive out other authorities from cultural space, a kind of memetic brood parasitism.
All political religions decree that no other religion may co-exist with them. The Hebrew Bible states that “He that sacrificeth unto any god, save unto Jehovah only, shall be utterly destroyed” (Exodus 22:20), and the Koran commands follows to destroy non-believers at numerous points (2:191-193), (3:56), (4:74), (4:89), (5:33), (8:12), (8:39), (9:5), (9:73), (9:123), (47:3-4), (47:35), (48:29), (66:9).
Following this imperative, political religions do everything they can to destroy spiritual religions in any territory they control. In much the same way that criminal gangs of narcoterrorists don’t allow outsiders to operate on their turf, neither do criminal gangs of spiritual terrorists. True spiritual religions don’t need to aggress against other religions, because they know that the falsehoods of other doctrines will reveal themselves.
All spiritual religions understand that accumulating earthly power and wealth, gratifying as it may be to the ego, doesn’t provide spiritual solace. As such, true spiritual religions never have a “prosperity gospel” in which it is taught that material wealth is granted by God as a reward for righteousness. Neither do they hearken back to past times of military dominance as golden ages.
Buddhism, for example, doesn’t care if people don’t follow it. Anyone is free to reject the Buddha’s doctrine and indulge in sensory pleasures. But when a person tires of such indulgence, and they feel that it’s time to strike a balance between indulgence and abstinence, then the Buddhists are there to explain their methodology.
Islam, by contrast, cares a lot. Thirteen countries impose the death penalty for apostasy, all of them Muslim ones. This means that children are considered to be Muslim when they are born, and if they don’t like it as adults, they are killed. At the time of writing this essay, almost 1,000 people had been killed in the past 30 days in Islamic terror attacks. All of the killers were following the admonition of their religion to expand its political influence.
The irony, of course, is that all this makes spiritual religions look spiritual, and political religions look material, and this pushes all genuinely spiritual people towards the former, and all genuinely base people towards the latter. This explains why hedonistic self-aggrandisers, when they discover religion in adulthood, tend to discover political ones.
The clash between spiritual and political religions has defined much of the world’s history, and may define much of its future. There are many signs that suggest the Abrahamic cults are slowly uniting under one banner, and, when they do, they will inevitably try to conquer the world or be destroyed in the attempt.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, Abraham was probably the world’s first true psychopath. The cult he started developed into the greatest collective evil the world has ever known. This evil reflects Abraham’s sadistic desire for total control and dominance, something shared with all his followers. Indeed, Abraham could be said to be the father of political religion.
On the Mithraic ladder, Abrahamism is equivalent to the lead, the basest possible frequency. The spiritual religions, on the other hand, are equivalent to the gold. They are akin to divine radiance beaming down on us. Thus, although political and spiritual religions may appear very similar on the surface, it’s necessary to draw a sharp distinction between them. Ultimately, they reveal their true interests by their actions.
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