유일신의 폭력- 자본주의라는 유일신 종교의 폭력성

[논둑길맨발로]

이슬람교와 기독교 군대 (주로 미국인)의 지속적인 성전 전은 일신론이 인간의 본성과 지구상의 생명에 대립한다는 증거입니다. 유대교의 딸인 기독교와 이슬람교는 대부분 제국 처럼 행동하는 국가의 정치 세력입니다.
종교 자체와 국가 군주는 세계를 정복하고자합니다. 다른 어떤 것도 그 (것)들을 만족시킬 수 없을 것입이다.
이 제국주의적 태도는 자유, 민주주의, 인간 및 생물 다양성과 양립 할 수 없습니다.

The continuing crusades of Islamic and Christian armies (largely American) are proof that monotheism is antithetical to human nature and life on Earth. Christianity and Islam, daughters of Judaism, are largely political forces of states acting like empires. The religions themselves and their state overlords want to conquer the world. Nothing else will satisfy them.
This imperial attitude is incompatible with freedom, democracy, and human and biological diversity.


우리는 상품의 마술적 속성으로부터 감각적인 쾌락을 이끌어 낼 수 있다고 믿는 가운데, 우리는 상품에서 물신숭배를 만들어 냈습니다. 우리는 시장의 제단, 우리가 가장 깊은 충성을 빚지고 있는 신의 제단 위에 우리의 시간, 우리 가족, 우리의 자녀, 우리의 숲, 우리의 바다와 우리의 땅을 희생으로 바칩니다.
가난한 삶을 살기 위하여 소비자 낙원을 포기하거나, 빈 구걸 사발을 들고 방황하거나 타인의 곤경을 덜어주기 위해 삶을 헌신하는 것은 대부분의 (자본주의) 신앙 공동체 구성원에게는 거의 선택 사항이 아닙니다.

We have made fetishes out of commodities as we believe we can derive sensuous pleasure from their magical properties. We sacrifice our time, our families, our children, our forests, our seas and our land on the altar of the market, the god to whom we owe our deepest allegiance. Forsaking the consumer paradise for a life of poverty, wandering with an empty begging bowl or devoting one’s life to alleviating the plight of others is scarcely an option for most faith-community members.



1.기독교 유일신의 폭력적 성격

The first genocide in Europe

What the Christians did to the Greeks was the first genocide in European history. Their war against science included the burning of libraries, stopping of the Olympics, and wrecking of the material culture of Greece – smashing of hundreds of temples, government buildings, stadia, theaters and schools — precipitated the dark ages, turning off the lights of Greek learning and pushing humanity back by about 2,000 years.

Christianity forced on the Greeks soul-crushing, anti-Hellenic religious practices and way of life. It made Greeks palimpsests: scraping their Hellenic poetry, myths, philosophy, science and civilization and in their place inserting alien Judeo-Christian hymns and myths. Greeks found themselves foreigners in their own land.

Yet historians rarely if ever teach this barbaric and epoch-changing episode of European history. Writers either downplay the Christianization of Hellas or avoid it all together. In my medieval Greek history studies at the University of Illinois, my major professor, Deno Geanakoplos, spoke about a “smooth” transition from Hellenism to Christianity.

After graduate school, I dug into the original historical sources and discovered Christian terrorism and war, not smooth transition, undid the Greeks. This discovery weakened and severed my tenuous connections with Christianity. It did not bring me close to Judaism or Islam because they are made of the same cloth – monotheistic sister religions all.

Nature of one-god religions

These one-god faiths are still crusading against each other. On September 11, 2001, Moslem Saudis launched attacks against America. They became suicide bombers and drove highjacked airplanes against skyscrapers in New York and the Pentagon. President George W. Bush responded not by attacking Saudi Arabia, center of Islamic fanaticism against Christians and Jews, but by destroying Moslem Iraq that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks or the possession of “weapons of mass destruction,” as the State Department and CIA claimed. Bush said America was fighting “a war on terror.”

The continuing crusades of Islamic and Christian armies (largely American) are proof that monotheism is antithetical to human nature and life on Earth. Christianity and Islam, daughters of Judaism, are largely political forces of states acting like empires. The religions themselves and their state overlords want to conquer the world. Nothing else will satisfy them.
This imperial attitude is incompatible with freedom, democracy, and human and biological diversity.

Ceaseless wars go hand-in-hand with careless technologies and pollution. The broadest impact of this form of human development is the slow but steady warming of the planet.

Both wars and global warming are products of practitioners of capitalism — on steroids and monotheistic metaphysics.
In late 20thcentury, communist states changed heart and attached themselves to the ideology and application of capitalism.
The worshippers of capitalism are well aware of the destruction and suffering they cause. In fact, some of them among Christians (primarily in the United States), willfully are striving to end life on Earth because, they are under the delusion, such holocaust will trigger the second coming of Christ. These are fanatics that threaten America and the world.


Polytheism

The alternative to monotheism is polytheism. The Greek version of polytheism had no holy books, priesthood, and desires for crusades.
I returned to Greek polytheism because of what the Christians did to my ancestors. Second, Plato said the Earth was the oldest of the gods. Seeing the Earth as sacred and alive is essential for the survival of life. Polytheism is also democratic.

원문 출처

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/06/12/on-superstition/



2. 자본주의의 종교화

‘”One can behold in capitalism a religion, that is to say, capitalism essentially serves to satisfy the same worries, anguish, and disquiet formerly answered by so-called religion.”
— Walter Benjamin


David R. Loy, a professor of international studies at Bunkyo University in Japan and a Zen Buddhist teacher, offers us a compelling viewpoint on why we ought to understand our present economic system as the West’s dominant religion. In A Buddhist History of the West (2002), Loy argues that, although religion is “notoriously difficult to define,” if we “adopt a functionalist view and understand religion as what grounds us by teaching us what this world is, and what our role in the world is, then it becomes evident that traditional religions are fulfilling this role less and less, because that function is being supplanted by other belief systems and value systems.”

This is a shocking statement for those of conventional religious sensibility. Certainly the monotheistic faith-traditions have not just disappeared into the thin air of modernity. One could make a solid case that Islamic cultures still contain strong currents of resistance to Western consumer individualism (perceived as decadent and nihilistic).
But in the West, Christianity in particular, has lost much of its power to resist the new god that has (and is) conquering the old ones (just like Christianity did in its displacement of Roman deities). Although the monotheistic religions contain many different streams and tendencies (including ascetic and contemplative traditions), these minority anti-materialist traditions have not been able to prevent the market from becoming our “first truly world religion, binding all corners of the globe into a worldview and set of values whose religious role we overlook only because we insist on seeing them as secular” (Loy).
Economics is the new theology of this global religion of the market; consumerism its highest good; its language of hedge funds and derivatives as incomprehensibly esoteric as Christian teachings about the Trinity. “Accumulate, accumulate! This is Moses and the prophets! Marx cried out in the first volume of Capital.

Loy wonders why we acquiesce in the appalling realities of global inequities and sleep so peacefully at night. He finds his answer in Rodney Dobell’s explanation that “lies largely in our embrace of a peculiarly European or Western [but now global] religion, an individualistic religion of economics and markets, which explains all of these outcomes as the inevitable results of an objective system in which … intervention is counterproductive.” Any intervention in the “world of business” is perceived as a threat to the “natural order of things,” a direct challenge to the “wisdom of the market.” He claims that: “The hegemony achieved by this particular intellectual construct—a ‘European religion’ or economic religion—is remarkable; it has become a dogma of almost universal application, the dominant religion of our time, shoring up and justifying what would appear to be a patently inequitable status quo. It has achieved an immense influence which dominates human activity” (“Environmental degradation and the religion of the market.” In H. Coward (ed.) Population, Consumption, and the Environment[1995]).

We have made fetishes out of commodities as we believe we can derive sensuous pleasure from their magical properties. We sacrifice our time, our families, our children, our forests, our seas and our land on the altar of the market, the god to whom we owe our deepest allegiance. Forsaking the consumer paradise for a life of poverty, wandering with an empty begging bowl or devoting one’s life to alleviating the plight of others is scarcely an option for most faith-community members.


3. 자본주의의 폭력성

Today we can scarcely find a moral perspective resident in the old world religions to challenge the hegemony of the religion of the market. The latter is ascendant; the old religions shunted to the sidelines. Indeed, globalizing capitalism seems the perfect fit with our human nature as essentially greedy and self-interested beings continually at war with one another over scarce resources. But economic historians (Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology [1946]; Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism[1926]; Polyani, The Great Transformation [1944]) inform us that in pre-modern societies pre-capitalist man valued material goods only as long as they served moral ends (such as enhancing social status and reinforcing social obligations).

Beginning in the late middle ages and reaching its first plateau in the late eighteenth century, the capitalist market began to assume an autonomous, god-like existence. As Max Weber understood so well (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism [1946]), gradually the inner world ascetic impulse to know and serve God, who would reveal himself in the silence of the prayer chamber, evaporated. Protestant believers began to measure God’s favour by their economic success. Economic success was the means to achieve the end of God’s favor and eternal salvation.
But this fragile link could not abide centuries of unrelenting capitalist achievement and success. Eventually, the means, economic blessings, displaced God himself. God was now The Market–the Source of all Hopes. Who disputes the gospel of sustained economic development? Even Jesus would drive an S.U.V, we can believe the late Rev. Jerry Fallwell, the once formidable American leader of the Christian Right.

Eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment thinker Adam Smith warned us over two centuries ago (in his Theory of moral sentiments [1759]) that the market was a “dangerous system because it corrodes the shared common values it needs to restrain its excesses” (Loy). Two hundred years later, Polyani inveighed against a system that annihilated “the human and natural substance of society.” These are prescient words that echo in Habermas’s raging against the “colonization of the lifeworld.” Doesn’t everyone know that the god we serve requires clear cut forests, depleted oceans, empty oil wells, toxics dumped into the biosphere? “A direct line,” Loy observes sadly, “runs from the commodification of land, life, and patrimony during the eighteenth century to the ozone holes and global warming of today.”

Everyone also knows, deep down, in their heart of hearts, that the god we serve actually has no life of its own. In Capital,volume 1, Marx imagined that the god of the market was like a vampire who “lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” This monster feeds on the life force of the natural and human worlds. It needs men and women as slaves who have energy and the motivation to work endlessly with others to produce the goods. Even prolonging the working day, says Marx, “only slightly quenches the vampire thirst for the living blood of labor.”

Serving this monster (capitalism produces lots of them!) generates endless sickness amongst the workers and eternal problems for the biosphere and human lifeworlds, which it depletes of life shamelessly. The money-code is at war with the life-code (John McMurtry, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism [1999]. Ironically, if the money-code (another name for the religion of the market) wins out in the end, that, indeed, is the end. As David McNally expresses it in Monsters of the Market: zombies, vampires, and global capitalism (2011), “If vampires are the dreaded beings who might possess us and turn us into their docile servants, zombies represent our haunted self-image, warning us that we might already be lifeless, disempowered alien powers.”


4. 자본주의 소비문화에 의한 인간성의 교란

In the high intensity market settings, individuals are taught to “identify states of feelings systematically with the appropriate type of commodities” (Leiss). This is an insidious and dangerous catechetical learning process because individuals are being carefully led away from finding satisfaction in active citizenship, good work and aesthetic self-expression‎‎. The job of advertising within the religion of the market is, as journals like Adbusters proclaim, to miseducate us incessantly to image that there is a real link between an impulse and the sacralized (or fetishized) commodity. To illustrate: advertisers prey upon our authentic needs for self-respect and respect for others by decomposing the body into various parts. Then the authentic need for self-respect is channelled towards the consumption of various chemical mixtures that promise a pleasing appearance and recognition from others.

The religion of the market can maintain is grip on its devotees only by constantly destabilizing the categories of human need.
Corporations spend billions of dollars on advertising designed only to make us feel dissatisfied, unsettled, and ill at ease, without any deep harmony between our inner and outer worlds. We must be willing to believe there is something fundamentally defective (sinful?) with our bodies, minds and souls. We must also believe that the act of consuming—both simple and exquisitely executed products—will meet our needs, fulfil our heart’s desires and make us happy (at one with our god).
But fulfilment channelled through consumption is mainly a delusion. Leiss observes, tellingly, that, “The constant re-division and recombination of need-fragments renders its increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for individuals to develop a coherent set of objectives for their needs and thus to make judgments about the suitability of particular goods for them” (Leiss). Thus, having displaces being as the core value of the religion of the market.


5.소유욕의 허구성- 소유보다는 존재가 귀중하다

The iconoclastic Buddhist scholar Stephen Batchelor offers penetrating commentary on “having and being” in Alone with Others: an Existential Approach to Buddhism (1983). “Having,” he observes, “is characterized by acquisitiveness. Our worldview is dominated by the notion that the aim of personal existence is fulfilled in proportion to what we are able to amass and possess.” Craving, the source of endless suffering for Buddhist teachers, impels men and women to possess material objects that appear to “offer protection, security, and social status through their tangible and starkly present solidity.” The old God of the Hebrews is faint and wispy, a vague cloud-trace in the sky.
We are also impelled to possess people—husbands, wives, children, friends, acquaintances—“all arranged in a circle around us connected to the center by threads of attachment and possessiveness.” We can also crave immaterial things, like thought, acquiring “new possibilities” for further knowledge acquisition. Batchelor argues that “even our bodies and minds are regarded as “things” we “have.” For Batchelor, “having always presupposes a sharply defined dualism between subject and object. The subject thus seeks his or her well-being, as well as his or her sense of meaning and purpose, in the preservation and acquisition of objects for which he or she is necessarily isolated.” “I am what I have” is the way Fromm (1976) puts it in To Have or to Be.
But any “sense of fulfilment will necessarily be illusory, because there is nothing one can have that one cannot fear to lose. Absorption in the horizontal dimension of having is the origin of all states of ontological insecurity.” Buddhist social philosophers like Loy and Batchelor believe that compulsive motivation to have things attempts to fill the lack in people’s lives. In fact, this motivation to fill the lack through possession has penetrated our consciousness so deeply that the traditional sphere of religion—the “receptacle for the traditional symbols of being”—are approached as “another region of having” (Batchelor). One can possess eternal life, immortality, enlightenment, and the kingdom of heaven.

원문출처

https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/05/08/capitalism-is-the-wests-dominant-religion/