The New Faith

I may act like I'm an authority on a great many subjects in this blog, but theology and religious studies are not my forte. Now having said that, I'm going to give a dissertation on the nature and origin of American religious tendencies in this perplexing year 2007 Anno Domini . One fact that must be pointed out is that no religion is static. They, like everything else man made, are a constantly changing phenomenon that is perpetually being reinterpreted and reconfigured to better suite peoples needs. I'd go on to defend that statement, but sometimes history just speaks for itself. So what do you get when you combine a strange reclusive monotheistic Semitic cult with the madness of having a god for every conceivable desire? In a word- Catholicism. Out of respect for that saintly man, the one and only JC, I must point out that at no point in its 2000 year history, has his teachings played any significant part in the organized religion ironically called Christianity. In fact, it is almost as if they tried to do the exact inverse of everything he said. The book burning campaigns, the Inquisition, taxation, crusades and conquests; hypocrisy just simply doesn't get much more profound than that. The fact of the matter is that from Constantine to Clinton, no ruler took any of this seriously. The state and the ruler know only one law- self preservation. Well, how do you continue a religion when your ruler is clearly just looking out for himself and his power structure? Answer- create a new god that enough of your subjects will worship. Since roughly 1648 the real god in the western world has been private property. In feudal times private ownership was the luxury of only the nobility and the church. After the split of Catholicism caused by the 30 years war a new state religion had to be found for rulers like Charles V and countries like England that had more than one Christian sect in large quantities. The whole God-said-I'm-in-charge thing only works if there is a unanimous state religion. So ok, back to the drawing board, what can we all agree on? What they came up with was truly genius, and our modern world proves its evangelical efficacy. 'We can all agree that people are selfish opportunists and care only about material possessions', thought the elite. They then began spreading the faith by telling everyone that they are working for themselves, that the sacred result of this individual labor is property and that your leadership exists as part of a social contract to ensure your freedom to own things. With a little social Darwinism, make believe morality and a whole lot of academic bullshit, the new religion gave birth to the Juggernaut of colonialism and took the new faith to every corner of the planet. After all, what is the fun of having a religion if it doesn't negate and destroy all the other ones? So, long story short, the new faith spread like panic and everyone had to either sign on or fight against capitalist crusades that were just as happy to kill as to convert. The head of these states/congregations naturally had to have a lot of property; to prove their holiness. Thus our leaders have almost always been very wealthy. It is all a matter of faith, if for no other reason than this religion works because we all have pieces of paper saying what is ours issued by the Church/Government and we can call the goon squad to brutalize anyone who tries to take our precious property. We even have a sort of religious ceremony, very much like the Inquisition, in the court system which handles the pious matter of figuring out whose is what and if anyone has committed blasphemy (aka offended our God of private ownership). Communism tried like hell to rival this persuasion, but in the end humanism and sharing couldn't overcome materialism and narcissism. Bakunin noticed the one glaring flaw in this revolutionary faith almost 150 years ago- "The masses will never own property". This is a very good point, only so much property to go around and people procreate like crazy given the chance. America's contribution to this religion was the ingenious theory that answers this question. The only reason you don't own lots of things is that you aren't working hard enough and haven't compromised enough of your ideals. Low and behold, they all bought it. It is for this reason that America is in the drivers seat of Geopolitics. Every war is now a holy war because we are in essence only looking out for our collective economic interest, which in the mysticism of American Capitalism, is equated with personal property. Back in the day I'm sure an occasional peasant would look around and think, 'I'm not so sure about this whole God thing, my life is pretty much hell and those noblemen don't do shit'. If a poor man starts to question his lot today everyone will tell him he is lazy and to start working, otherwise he's a heathen/bum. We even send children to a sort of religious seminary called 'education' in which they are steeped in dogma and are given more pieces of paper that guarantee their right to more private property. It is rather remarkable that with all the cultural commentary there is these days, no one seems to question the fundamental belief structure. Which is in essence apathy towards others and obsession with ourselves, or at the very most our nation (see Patriotism and Jingoism). No doubt the fact that in this dynamic faith we are all too busy trying to stack paper to go and intellectualize why we are doing it is a cornerstone of its efficiency. Unlike the old faith, in which we had to spend an hour or so in Church a week to be considered a member, Capitalism requires on average 40 hours a week in the US. Luckily you are given currency with which you can spend all your spare time buying various things made by other religious zealots that makes your whole life sacred, because you do nothing but maintain the economy through consumption. For that is another tenant of this faith, by working you gain the inalienable right to consume anything you can. As a student of history I'm far too baffled and impressed by the success of this new variant of organized religion to go and condemn it. The fact of the matter is that it's proving very popular and large segments of the planet are practicing it with a passion that is paramount to fanaticism. One interesting result from the supremacy of this faith is that we are now approaching a world in which we all worship the same God (money) and speak the same language (money, and to a lesser extent English). I sincerely hope this is just another step on the dialectic path of mankind and that we will soon move on to something else. However, if this is the end of the road, what an anticlimactic Apocalypse.
Where did it start?
I just showed.
Where does it go?
Nobody knows!