Except its interesting that in the late/ongoing gulf conflict the Catholic church actually said that US aggression on Iraq was evil. Interesting. In any case, my mother who would consider herself a devout Catholic ignored this control channel and found herself obeying the other more insidious control channel -- mass media. They have weapons of mass destruction. Tomorrow they could be gassing all of NYC. blah blah blah. They have spurned the UN long enough!!! Nothing about oil companies shutting down Saddam because he was funneling Russian Caspian sea oil through his pipeline. The rules say Saddam couldn't pump his own own (except for oil for food). They don't say anything about him moving someone else's oil. jb On Tuesday, June 24, 2003, at 09:35 AM, Tyler Durden wrote:
Morlock Elloi wrote...
It all boils down to getting masses to farm out the inquisitivness and then servicing it.
Well, I think this is the case 99% of the time, but I don't think it has to be. When most of the earlier scriptures were written, they probably served a function vaguely similar to modern Journals now....a place were insights were recorded so that others could build on the knoweldge base (if we ignore considerations of whether the 'insights' correspond to reality, the analogy with Journals is even more apropos.
Mostly, though, I agree. No wait, maybe I don't. Modern organized religion is more about stegoing control commands into 'religious' teaching so as to get the masses to support the status quo. For instance, "God wanted us to invade Iraq because he loves us and our Christian country and hates Saddam because he is evil". Actually, more than control signals there are messages that inform the pious that their self-interest is at stake, and they don't need to bother themselves with the morality of the war on US foreign policy, etc...
-TD
From: Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@yahoo.com> To: cypherpunks@lne.com Subject: Re: Senators from Utah being Southern Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2003 19:59:05 -0700 (PDT)
Religions are essentially collections of stories about the latter method
Religions are artificial shortcuts to "knowledge" and excellent method to neutralize congenital human curiosity. If you can't comprehend it, fake it. They all offer explanations of various phenomena by using familiar human memes (fathers, mothers, children, birth, death.) It works most of the time.
The major difference between politics and religion is that politics is streamlined, it doesn't count on the internal consistency (and related effort to grasp it) but instead uses (via media) brute force of repetition.
It all boils down to getting masses to farm out the inquisitivness and then servicing it.
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