Cultural Atheism
By
Roberto Diego
Excerpts Below
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Below you will find the Introduction and part of one key chapter from the book by Mr. Diego. Below there is also a link to a Secure Order Form for the book.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Religious Faith
Doing the right thing
Parental Discipline
Addiction
Pleasure choices
Divorce
Juvenile Delinquency
Government Programs
Liars for Leaders
Ritualized Man
Progressive Taxation
Nuclear Proliferation
Worldwide Poverty and Disease
Racism
Terrorism
Kantian Violence
Cultural Paradigms
Modern Cultural Paradigms
The Chorus
The Good/Evil Paradigm
The Suffering Savior
The Ritual Mask
The Principle of Progressive Benignity
Beyond Cynicism and Chauvinism
A New Tomorrow
The disenfranchisement of cultural leaders
The disenfranchisement of the Suffering Savior paradigm
The disenfranchisement of the good/evil paradigm
The disenfranchisement of the chorus (collectivism)
The refusal to display the Ritual Mask to others
The establishment of reason as paradigm – create yourself
Postscript – The Battle and the Battlefield
Foreword
There is an order hidden within man’s apparent confusion about the nature of our broadest and most fundamental ideas and beliefs, particularly those that involve moral choice; why man does what he does both in his personal life and through his social institutions. This confusion has created an aimless ritualized drifting of men and their societies that have characterized millennia of human history as products, not of reasoned choice, but of ritualism and human slavery. This book seeks to develop a foundation for an understanding of that order and, through this process, to enable men to free themselves from oppressive institutions that have offered and given only misery and exploitation.
This book is the result of several decades of study of a number of fields including anthropology, psychology, religion, mythology and philosophy. My goal is to offer a new perspective, a world-view, so to speak, that presents a number of principles, the sum of which leads to the proposition that religion and modern society are the products of ancient mythology and that their effect is psychologically harmful to man. One key principle (that I call progressive benignity) is the idea that, over the millennia, before what we consider human history, as man confronted the requirements of religion and mysticism, he progressed from early brutal practices, that might, for example, have demanded human sacrifice, and, in stages, moved human development to a more benign form of the original demand such as progressive taxation or other “giving” forms of sacrifice in order to thereby satisfy the demands of the gods and their “representatives.” Man’s inherent humanity as well as his ability to think leads him inevitably toward more personal, less destructive expressions of early brutal religious practices, from cruelty toward more benign rituals, a form of religion with which he can live.
This principle implores man to examine modern cultural paradigms as they exist in their more benign forms today, and by relating them to their sources and very real consequences, become enlightened about the dysfunctional natures of these paradigms, and hopefully, move away from religion and mysticism toward reason and a brighter day; toward freedom of action, individual rights and guiltless happiness.
We need not fear people who understand their intellectual source and release themselves from the shackles of faith and suffering. We need not fear people who use reason and knowledge to decide what they will do. We should fear a world of charlatans and politicians whose goals are to keep men ignorant through faith and poor through confiscation of property – charlatans that want to ensure that their inability to survive is made up for by “religious” people who have been trained to believe that their duty is to sacrifice their time and money for the sakes of those who tell them what to think.
For the first time in history, I believe, someone is saying: There is no guilt for mankind in loving life, pleasure, reason and the human animal. There is no guilt for mankind in learning to survive, to use intellectual abilities, to enjoy the vast array of pleasures that the human body and mind are capable of enjoying. There is no guilt, and no evil, in questioning the foundations of our societies: faith, self-sacrifice and illogic. There is no guilt in thinking clearly and in rising above the intellectual laziness that cultural leaders want for men. And finally, there is no guilt, indeed, there is courage and honesty and integrity, in looking at our cultural foundations; to finally, after centuries of acceptance, ask the questions: “Why?” “What for?” and “By what standard?”
Since you were born, a battle has been waging over the one thing of value in this world, the single, most important and crucial factor that no other entity except man possesses. This factor is volition-based human hubris, the ability to think and act upon that thinking, the ability of human choice and freedom of action. This one factor, hubris, to use the shorter term, is barely understood and barely acknowledged as a value for man. Yet, the battle for it has consumed the ages since prehistory. This is the battle that this book seeks to address and elucidate.
In early childhood, we are taught the importance of “being good,” doing what god says, what our parents say, what our teachers say. All moralistic exhortations to the good are intended to make us control hubris. Because of the negative nature of the messages each of us receives regarding hubris, we learn to fear our own natural hubris, the impulse to pursue values and succeed in achieving them. We even learn to develop a hatred of other people’s hubris. That this hatred of hubris is a ritual practiced for centuries and encouraged by religion has barely been noticed or questioned.
Most people live their lives afraid of their own hubris, afraid to do what they want to do. They’ve never been taught the role of reason as a guide to aid them in doing what they want to do (to ask the questions “Why?“, “What for?” and “By what standard?”) because religion forbids it. They also fear the ire of others, the ritual mask of religion, over doing anything “selfish” and, as a consequence, avoid doing what they want to do. The entire issue is denied to the subconscious and the individual spends his life wondering why he can’t do what he wants, and also feeling jealous and angry with others for their freedom and wanton sinfulness. Such individuals live their lives in a struggle within to do something so they can survive and find joy in life.
Our cultural leaders, in pursuit of the war against human hubris, believe that they must tie anything you do to their motives and presumed needs rather than your own. It is a battle over what you do and what you think. You are the treasure, the unique focal point that they want to control and manipulate for their own goals. The question I ask is “What are your goals?” Is your answer the pursuit of their goals? Or is the answer, “I don’t know?” I hope to help you find a different answer than these.
We live in a macrocosm of mediocrity where the prevailing view fostered by religion is that the “average” man is perfectly content in his present way of life. The “mystery” of the average man, in their view, is that his foibles, irrationalities, blind choices and whims have brought him to his present state – as if his present state is the best possible state. In my view, this is an error. When decisions of monumental importance are made by subjective choice, random chance, eclectic borrowings of prevailing ideas, “knowledge” gleaned from the bible (or Koran) and by early harangues from parents, teachers, etc., the result will not be truth but conjured repetitive lies. Though it is considered a truism that the better informed person can make better life choices, it is also considered a truism that in the realm of humanity, life is perfectly fine for the individual without something so rigid and tyrannical as logic and clear thinking. Is man really suffering little because of his prevailing views? What are the causes of his unhappiness and of many of his sicknesses? We will see.
Many people make value decisions based upon the method of learning what is valued by the culture (others) instead of identifying a proper value by the standard of what is good for the individual. In my view, the world of eclectic and random decision-making is not as random as we believe. Within the culture there are undercurrents or forces that motivate and influence individual and social decisions, ritualized responses that are conditioned by culture, given to the individual from early childhood. This undercurrent has barely been explored, especially its power to create unhappiness, war, tyranny and slavery, not to mention mediocrity and confusion. Let us look at some of the problems of the modern world to see if we can glimpse the very real consequences of this method of learning.
If you were to tell people that most of the things each does is ritual and based upon subconscious mythological reenactments of the stories of the ancient gods, most would be shocked at the preposterous idea. That they are not acting willfully is one of the key leitmotifs of this book. Indeed, the author will be accused of over-generalization in directly connecting such concepts as ritual human sacrifice with altruism. Nevertheless, we will see if it is such a preposterous idea.
Modern man has organized his ideas into categories such as metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, etc. Though these divisions are helpful for an understanding of ideas and their development over time, they often disconnect philosophy from its sources in myth, allegory, epic stories and poetry. The idea that mythology and its magical aspects could be the source of much of human thought is considered nonsense. Yet, the earliest thinkers of man’s past were not philosophers but storytellers, tribal leaders, prophets who taught and ruled man by means of powerful stories and iconic images that had deep meaning and import for the “average” man of the past. We find a better understanding of the history of ideas, and how these ideas have influenced our modern age by analyzing how cultural paradigms are influencing us today.
Many people today merely possess the capacity for reason, operating, for the most part, upon a foundation of ancient cultural paradigms, thinking and acting, like ritualized automatons, avoiding logic, seeking the “good” that is defined by others, depending for survival upon the reason and logicality of economic “organizers” and corporate managers, while at the same time engaged in a political battle to exploit and destroy the very people upon whom their survival depends. Most people operate upon principles they barely understand, the sources of which are lost in prehistory, the solutions to which they have barely considered—since they are not aware that there are problems with their modes of thinking. Yet, those problems, stemming from the illogic of their cultural paradigms, are the very problems that plague them incessantly and keep them unhappy.
Ancient cultural paradigms are ideas or examples that developed as a consequence of man’s efforts to interpret the meanings of major pre-historical events. Traditional human social relationships, at points in man’s past, served as bases for understanding allegories and stories that today provide cultural foundation and influence ideas and actions. Out of early man’s relationship with father came god; out of that with mother came the virgin mother or Venus; out of that with animals in the hunt came the animal deities, etc.
Somewhere in prehistory, man interpreted global and cosmic events as expressions of these traditional relationships and created powerful and timeless moral messages that have been embedded in culture. Each paradigm has a prototype or source that is most often lost in antiquity and is expressed, for the most part, in ancient religious themes and modern moral lessons. The modern manifestation of a cultural paradigm is a subconscious set of morals and actions that are seen as imperatives (rituals) by a large number of people (i.e., Jesus as paradigm) and social institutions. Further, somewhere in the past, man was instructed by cultural leaders to perform “rituals,” repetitive acts that achieved a number of social goals. These rituals were reenactments of those early events and provided a sort of social cohesion and expression, catharsis. Early rituals involved reenactments of the lives of suffering heroes, some even requiring human sacrifice, where men learned to participate in the cosmic struggle between good and evil through propitiation of the gods. The principle of progressive benignity, over the course of millennia, enabled man to turn early cruelty and warfare into social control, moral imperatives and “moral” acts. Men eventually turned the ancient religious reenactments into more benign and even life serving ritualized behaviors. In fact, some ancient ritualized practices have become today’s benign cultural institutions such as movies and competitive sports.
Cultural paradigms are based upon the experience of the culture and develop into conscious and subconscious thought patterns that function as knowledge. As such they form the foundation for the values of the culture and of individuals and thereby provide support for individual decisions. Most importantly, they replace the normal role of logic in decision-making. Their most profound impact is in the every day decisions and judgments made by individuals and institutions.
Our culture has a submerged, or subconscious, source of knowledge that comes from pre-history. Some information is known about it because of the mystery religions that dominated the world prior to Christianity’s dominance. Indeed, much of Christianity has incorporated the fundamental paradigms found in the mystery religions, especially the Suffering Savior, Good/Evil and Chorus paradigms that are the subject of this work.
Cultural paradigms are passed to us primarily from and through the culture by means of the child’s early capacity for emulation and incorporation of parents and peers. The are created by a desire on the part of the child to think and do the “right thing” as exemplified by significant others. Since the parents were, early in their lives, “taught” in the same way, a particular paradigmatic method of thinking and acting tends to perpetuate itself generation to generation, without critical analysis and without change – straight from pre-history into modern times with the subconscious minds of millions of individuals as the conduit.
When a religious person attempts to understand an issue or face a question of dire import, most often he resorts, by habit, to the influence of a cultural paradigm rather than to facts, logic and true solutions. In spite of the fact that much of historical human knowledge has developed as a challenge to ancient authority and generalized ideas, most of mankind is still culturally, subconsciously influenced by ancient cultural paradigms. As we investigate the most important paradigms we will bring to the fore many of the modern manifestations of these paradigms and the modern problems they ritualize.
Ancient cultural paradigms are the causes of most of modern man’s psychological problems and are a scourge to humanity and human progress even while wrapped in the moral authorities of progress and justice. As such they represent a destruction of individual integrity and create a pretense that expresses, as a matter of necessity (social survival), a concern for the views and welfare of others, a cynical and democratic acceptance of all other men regardless of the value of any one individual. Ritualized actions and catharsis give a form of satisfaction because they are culturally and morally approved, but, and this is key, these rituals give a false sense of satisfaction because they reverse the relationship between the mind and reality, giving only the appearance of rational action and self-esteem to the actor. They have moral, social, institutional and psychological impacts that work in a hidden manner to control and regulate modern man and history. They are used by authorities to regulate and focus human action on behalf of approved social goals as wells as to harness human energy. Their harm is found in social leveling and the psychological confusion they engender.
In my studies, I have found no thorough analysis of the personal or social psychological consequences of prevalent cultural paradigms. That such consequences must surely proceed from the illogic of these obsolete paradigms has barely been noticed. Obsolescence in this context refers to paradigms that guide and function in current cultural, political and personal events yet have no foundation in reality, no validation. How they have persisted is more a function of their “presumed rightfulness” and subconscious acceptance rather than their functionality. If a paradigm possesses, within its premises, a view of reality and man that is inadequate or inappropriate for modernity – for the way the world (reality) is – then it can have no functional value and may actually be doing significant harm in the world. Later we will see that the Suffering Savior paradigm has an improper view of man as a flawed and unworthy creature; the chorus paradigm elevates the opinions of others to a position above the individual and the good/evil paradigm establishes a premise of intrinsic good and evil within objects and the universe. I submit that these paradigms, however they were formed, are no longer (and may never have been) functional and are detrimental to our survival.
The characteristics of a cultural paradigm are the following:
· Belief: The cultural paradigm is a belief system that involves a culturally approved way of thinking about and seeing the world. It permeates decisions before investigation of the facts relating to any important issue and sets the pattern for beliefs before conclusions are reached. Such a belief system provides ready-made solutions to cultural and social questions that often go unquestioned.
· Ritual: The cultural paradigm invokes a set of reenactments (acting out) that are designed to achieve catharsis for the individual engaged in them. Catharsis is defined as a state of satisfaction that proceeds from involving the individual as an actor in a primordial or pre-historical allegory where the events of the play reenact events in the lives of the gods. In early days these rituals were more organized and prescribed and catharsis may even have had an orgiastic aspect. Today, through the principle of progressive benignity, they have become ethical responses that are approved of by cultural authorities, the completion of which indicate the “goodness” of the actor. It creates a lessening of consciousness and awareness away from reality (the world out there) and toward repetitive acts. Expressed in other terms, ritual involves acting out a set of automatic values that develop into a trance-like state, trance-like behaviors and daily repetition that enables a pretense of “goodness.”
· Control: The cultural paradigm requires the willful subjugation of the individual in favor of group-approved norms of self-identification as opposed to self-objectification and self-authorization. The individual defines himself as one who performs a set of rituals and believes a set of ideas willingly, but in fact, the ideas are mere rationalizations designed to assist in cathartic self-satisfaction – a sort of cultural reward system, a reversal of cause and consequence (in the area of character development) that gives the individual the opportunity to pretend that he is good.
· Authority: Cultural paradigms and their ritual reenactments have the power of authority and are deemed unquestionable (though seldom verbally identified except through cultural rationalizations). Their authority gives power to those who presume to take the positions of cultural leaders. They also permeate social, cultural and governmental decisions that tend to subjugate, control and manipulate the individual who is often totally unaware of his position.
In the field of psychology, a concept called “incorporation” provides a clue about how cultural paradigms become entrenched in a society. When a young individual assimilates objects (usually people) into his personality, he seems to become the objects (parent and authority figures). The child literally absorbs all that is implicit in the ideas, opinions, body language and actions of the significant adults in his life as if they were valid and unquestionable. He incorporates these people into his newly forming personality and accepts, by implication, all the culturally induced premises previously absorbed by the adults when they incorporated the attitudes of their parents.
We will now make an analysis of why the world is in the present state of malaise. Why do people do the things they do and why do they continue to think the same thoughts that created some of the 20th Century’s most virulent movements, racism, fascism, socialism and political gang warfare? Why is religion still appealing to people who suffer so much in their lives?
I define a cultural paradigm as a fundamental example that is rooted in the culture and functions subliminally as a foundation for subsequent cultural and social development. I believe that a combination of three of the most powerful cultural paradigms have controlled and decimated world prehistory, history, philosophy, parental influences, the whole population of mankind that exists, has ever existed and may ever exist. It is indeed a most lethal combination. They are the Chorus, the Good/Evil paradigm and the Suffering Savior paradigm. These three modern cultural paradigms breed individual and cultural failure because they are not now functional; they don’t work in this world but belong to an entirely different, undefined or lost context. They are today the passport to mediocrity and inefficacy for every man influenced by them.
The chorus in ancient drama was
invented by the Greeks and is seen in some of the oldest plays of the Greek
civilization. To modern man it seems like an incongruous and unnecessary
dramatic device that later generations of Greeks discarded. It functioned in
these plays as if it were a person though comprised of a number of people saying
(or singing) the same thing; thus the name chorus. It was designed as a
dramatic device to enhance the emotional involvement of the audience, to bring
the spectators into the emotions of the characters. The chorus was able to
predict the future, understand the vicissitudes of fate, read the minds of the
chief protagonists and understand the deeper meanings of the events of the
play. The chorus was the collective universe, all knowing and wise, emotional
and involved in events.
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