Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Religion of the Cathedral-PC-Progressive Left

I’ve composed a list of dogmas that define the religion of the Cathedral-PC-Progressive Left.

Any suggestions?

1) Poverty causes crime.
2) Progress is inevitable.
3) Greed and hate are the roots of all evil.
4) People can be born gay but they can’t be born violent or stupid.
5) Race and gender are social constructs but racism and misogyny are ever-present social realities.
6) There is no such thing as human nature, natural law, the natural order, or normal human behavior.
7) The only human action that can be judged is judging others.
8) Diversity is strength.
9) No culture is superior to any other culture.
10) All religions are equally valid.
11) There are no significant behavioral or biological differences between different groups of people. Stereotypes result from irrational biases and prejudices. Inequality results from oppression or luck.
12) There is no such thing as a harsh truth. Any statement that offends someone is false.
13) Happiness is the natural human condition. Misery always results from injustice or mental illness.
14) MLK and Nelson Mandela are the greatest human beings to ever walk the Earth.
15) Universal acceptance of these dogmas is the key to the perfectibility of the human race. People who question them should be smeared as enemies of progress, censored as hatemongers, fired from their jobs, burned as heretics, or sent to re-education facilities.
I am not sure about the usage of "Cathedral" here. It suggests some sort of rigid doctrine that is mandated by our elites and must not be questioned.

The above is not any ordinary religion, as no genuine religious believer would ever argue that all religions are equally valid. And yet if a politician were to say that his religion is superior, then he would be branded a bigot.

A. J. West defends the Cathedral:
Here's a big problem for HBD-ers to resolve.  For thousands of years, western European societies were full of superstition, religion, religious bigotry, and religious (and other) violence.  To be a heretic, or to agree with heresies or heretics, was sufficient cause for arrest and brutal murder, meaning that religious belief and religious orthodoxy were actively selected for.  To disagree with the imposition of the death sentence for a heretic, to seem unorthodox, to not rejoice at the discovery and burning of witches - all of these could lead to execution.  This went on for hundreds of years, was extremely widespread, and was strongly selected for.  This is the kind of selection that, if such things were possible, would certainly lead to higher levels of superstition or religious hatred encoded at some genetic level.

Western Europe nowadays, of course, is one of the least religious, least violent, and least superstitious places on the planet.  Murder rates in most of western Europe hover around 1 in 100,000 and a tiny proportion of the European population is killed deliberately by another person.  The death penalty is entirely absent from Europe (aside from Belarus) and torture and witch burnings are no longer practiced.

This all changed incredibly quickly, within a couple of hundred years, and it happened in clear and obvious defiance of strong selective pressures to conform to the prior pattern of violence.  Natural selection in favour of such things meant nothing in the face of expanding trade, strong states, reason, improving hygiene, and the expansion of knowledge about the universe.
This is nonsense. Europeans were not executed for those things. Yes, some witches were executed, but they could have been mentally ill, and killing them might have improved European genes.

More to the point, Christianity is the least superstitious religion on Earth. Christianizing Europe had everything to do with it becoming less violent and less superstitious. There was no strong selection pressure for greater violence, unless it can be shown that violent criminals had more offspring. I doubt it. Criminals were punished. It sure seems to me that the Europe was selecting for a more civilized people, while other continents were less effective at it.

Religion is not the same as superstition. Japan has been called the least religion nation on Earth, but it is very superstitious, as Tsunami's Ghosts Haunt Japanese Earthquake Survivors. And most of the leading anti-religion avowed atheists contend that true atheism requires various leftist political dogmas.

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