Divisive Versus Inclusive Religious Worldviews
All the pejorative ‘isms’ — racism, sexism, ageism, etc. — derive from hierarchical religious ideology, specifically polarized purity and pollutions discourses in patriarchal ideologies, which tribally dehumanize the ideologically ‘impure’ as pariahs or the Polluted Other. Thus dehumanized, the subjected peoples are then found deserving of persecution, enslavement, haremizing, cultural or physical genocide or other abuses and exclusions. The wholesale murder of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was possible because the non-Caucasians victimized were on some level otherized.
This accurately describes the fundamental religious ideology of the Three Main Orthodoxies comprising the Judeo-Christian systems of the Abrahamic stem, which include Islam. It is why homosocial self-styled Christian or Muslim Cattle Cult raider societies are harrying socially disintegrated regions in Africa, justifying their rapaciousness as ‘holy,’ ordained by the idea of deity as a local, tribal god of war against impure ‘others,’ which includes women and children designated as subject peoples. Being closed to others’ beliefs, the creation of the ideological-Other as mentally inferior or in ideological error, is itself a form of violence.
Dogmas function in aid of ideological “purity.” Dogma, as a thing, began with and for religious ideology — within Zoroastrianism, to be precise, the ancient Persian state religion and precursor for the Three Main Orthodoxies or three major Abrahamic Judeo-Christian faiths. Zoroaster (or Zarathustra) instituted dogmas in order to shore up and justify the absolute power of the monarch, said to have been appointed ruler by the Good God, Ahura Mazda, and granted divine right to rule by this highest of gods. Sound familiar?
“Dogma,” as a formal discipline, was birthed within monastic scholasticism, part of the Trivium and Quadrivium of the monastery schools that became the first universities. The seven disciplines of the Trivium and Quadrivium became the Humanities, also known as The Liberal Arts. There is, to this day, no way to evade the stratified Aristotelian hierarchies, or categories, that crept into Western ideology, theology and culture, including the notion of racial or sexual Others’ pollution, including feminine pollution, menstrual malice, and the millennia-old notion of “feminine defect.” Dogma is still a subject and discipline taught in seminary schools, historically the specialty of the Dominican Order, the ideological watchdogs of the Church, and their monastic offshoot, the Jesuit Order, along with Apologetics, Polemics and Rhetoric. Science is the child of the meta-science of Philosophy, which began in the Mystery Schools, and — despite its claim to empirical objectivity — is imbued with the biases of its successive ages, from Aristotle onward, with his extremely biased ‘categorizations.’
Zoroastrianism grew out of a sort of nomadic-pastoralist, shamanistic, animal-husbandry spirituality that served as its matrix. Patriarchal religio-political dogmas were more on the order of god-king PR, that is to say constructing popular narratives about the king that stressed his godly nature and divine right to rule (by associating him with Gilgamesh or Hercules, for instance), and spreading the tale of his magical super-hero hunter/warrior abilities through art and story. It wasn’t a matter of required belief, as in the Catholic Inquisition for example, the failure to subscribe to which meant expulsion, purge, or burning at the stake. It was more a matter of constructing a winning popular narrative.
The problem isn’t religion, per se, or the fact that there ARE religions. The problem is that the violent, dualistic, black and white polarized purity and pollution exalted in Abrahamic traditions is statistically the dominant religious ideology on the planet. The reason religious ideology is the culprit for violent divisiveness today is because the major religious institutions or cults are black or white in their adherence to a dualistic purity and pollution dichotomy, the dominant and predominant case-in-point being the violence record of Judeo-Christianity (including Islam) in the current era.
My ‘Old Religion’ doesn’t share any of the above-mentioned characteristics. But my religion, proportionately, is tiny, even when the numbers of its adherents are added to similarly shamanistic belief systems’ numbers. It was once one, simply human, planet-wide, shamanistic religiosity. Discernible through the artistic record, a sort of chronicle of co-creative consciousness circulating among the human population of Earth, shamanistic religiosity (whether you perceive this as Witchcraft, Mysticism, Celtic Shamanism, Indigenous Medicine Traditions, or other natural belief system) is one that, like human sexuality, seems to be hardwired into the human brain.
If my “religion” (from Latin religeo: “the relinking”) were more widely understood, as it once was, there could not be the organized violent divisiveness and violence against perceived Others. Why? Because my spirituality has no purity and pollution discourse, no hierarchy, no externalized authoritarianism, no dominance-ranking, male or otherwise, and no sexual, racial, age or gender exclusivity. Such violence simply couldn’t be supported, ideologically or conceptually. At a deep level, in this Earth centred, non-linear, spherical or circular, all-inclusive worldview, there are no perceived (racial, ideological, sexual, alien or polluted) ‘Others.’
This is fundamentally a multi-cultural, pluralistic, non-hierarchical, anti-dogmatic Path, with no particular common ideology, no power exclusivity. Everyone within its embrace perceives, interprets, and expresses its tenets and principles differently, uniquely, personally, by their own lights. As all of us reading here will know, it is more like a convention of spiritual anarchists. Coordinating organized hostilities would be like attempting to herd cats. This isn’t to say that it’s better or worse, or any such black and white distinction on a polarized scale of values. It’s just to say it’s a whole lot less violent and divisive. It is a matter of personal preference as to what kind of world we care to live in.
