Each and every time and culture have had their legends and myths. The Greeks had their Mount Olympus, the Jews their Horeb, the Christians their Tabor and those that adhere to John Frum gather at Tukosmera. When people demand an explanation to everything they seek out mounts, perhaps it is because in any landscape the higher grounds is the place where one can scout it all and be seen by all, maybe even by the gods. Taking the higher grounds used to ensure victory in battle and even so in spiritual struggles “I’m living, Hallelujah / Living on higher ground / I know I’m saved and with my Jesus glory bound”.

So when did Homo sapiens start to ascend in order to greet her gods? Apparently she did so already some 70 000 years ago in Africa. But most likely our lack of earlier evidence of this practice is not due to the recency of our divination in the domains of theology but to the transient traces those early priests left. It must have started in the very infancy of our species, when we first acquired symbolic thinking and a language to communicate those symbols. Most likely it happened some 170 000 years ago, when the fossils of Homo becomes undistinguishable from the anatomy of modern man.[i]

After this point in time all there is between us and them is time and culture. Given a time machine any of them could have become successful quantum physicists and cognitive scientist and many of us well known entrepreneurs in the hunt and gathering business under the gazing sun of Kalahari. Yet it would take approximately 170 000 minus 180 years before quantum theory hit the field and 170 000 minus 50 years before cognition became a science. How could this be, if man during all this time has been the same? The answer, as noted earlier, is culture.

Blogodidact is of the opinion that culture bears the mark of the transcendental and just as a Paleolithic priest in Botswana he seeks out the commanding heights to perform his worship. Though his mount is not one made out of stone but words and concepts. Gods, he writes, are the sum of human understanding; they are the king of concepts, the folder which collects all the files. Without this unifying concept we are stranded on the flatland of unconnected facts, or so he fears. Without it we will lose our ability to coherently communicate and will be degraded to anarcho-leftist. And let us not forget that Christianity was the final update in man’s cultural upgrade; that which gave birth to the idea of individuality. This is what Blogodidact had to say in this matter and this is how I will reply: -Bogus!

The talk about files and folders is just a rephrasing of the Quinquae viae of Thomas, to be precise the “ex gradu” argument. This argument states that since everything in this world comes in degrees there must be a highest degree from which the lower categories derive their meaning and this king of categories must be god. Ex gradu is an odd bird in the Thomistic cage science it is derived not from Aristotle but from Plato and found its way into the Christian tradition through the writings of the platonic Augustine. I think Thomas shrugged a little when ecclesiastic tradition forced him to squeeze this into his otherwise perfectly Aristotelian qadroune.

What about the validity of ex gradu? Well, it takes only a single object to form a concept (we know of only one Europe, Tellus and index finger) and it takes only two to form a category (we know of dualities that consist of opposing pairs – lateral symmetry that consists of complementing pairs) and comparative demands that we deal with one attribute at a time, and we need no infinite series of degrees to make the graduality of two or more objects meaningful in its own right. To establish the existence of higher and lower order we need induction and not deduction. To infer a higher or lower category we must observe one, either directly or indirectly. The mere fact that things are connected doesn’t by itself imply any meta-connection beyond that which is observed.

As certain as the search for connections and interplay are the driving forces of discovery and intellectual exploit, is the fact that the mere assertion of a higher order connection will be their undoing. I need not resort to history to find evidence for this because it is clearly stated in the very post Blogodidact himself has written “It is from those literally unknown times, when humanity consisted of the associations of packs of clever apes, that is the level of humanity which is discoverable by, and no further, through studies such as biological and experimental psychology”. There you found it, stop the search, the matter is settled! You might discern that the earth is a sphere but to detect spots on the sun is impossible! This is one of the chief dangers with the religious mindset, it halts science and stop progress and thus shrink the knowable world within the narrow confines of ancient mythology.

There is also a taint of creationism in this thinking, well okay, not just a taint but a big blot that covers the whole darn thing. There is always the question about causation and emergence. Can it really be that the watchmaker is blind and the horseshoe made the blacksmith? Does not our discovery of higher orders negate the primacy of the lower? Must it not be the regular way around that a big fancy thing made the less fancy thing? Yes, it must be in the same way those old books so ardently assert. Must it not? No, it neither must nor can! If we accept that life and consciousness are emergent properties it will by necessity follow, from the laws of causation inherent in a space time continuum, that the emergent properties cannot be their own cause. And if we not accept that they are emergent properties, well then we are just a bunch of hillbillies.

The death of god does in no way make your understanding of reality fragmental or incoherent. On the contrary, it is only by killing god we can make sense of science and everyday experience. Since no mountain is stamped with “MADE IN NEVEREVERLAND” and no movement in time except that made by intentional systems (i.e. organisms) display a direction, each and every hypothesis that involves a god will be in demand of more explanation than one that lacks this being. By explanation in reference to god I mean explaining away and not integrating new facts into an already existing system with predictive power so as to increase that power. Consequently all theological categorization of reality will be a distortion of that which exists. It will make false analogies and lead to the wrong conclusions. Sometimes, that I grant, it might lead to the right conclusion (like the story in Genesis about the snake who lost its legs) but always for the wrong reasons and thus it is doomed to at its greatest be a distortion of the truth.

To state that Christianity gave birth to the individual as a category or idea is false but even if it were true it would have no bearing on the question if god exists or not, let alone the myth of the Jewish space-zombie god.[ii] I believe that the standard line of argument goes like this: “the concept of individuality is derived from Christianity and since modern society rests so heavily on this concept a nullification of Christendom would equal a nullification of the very foundation of our culture.”

While the idea of an independent individual with unique talents, desires and responsibilities is amply known through ancient sources what is lacking is an idea of individual rights; that the individual has an uninfringeable and immutable freedom and what is more, that civil society should be founded upon this freedom. It is a fact that this idea was born in the west and that the west was Christian while other parts of the world were not. However, it is not a fact but that the Christian ideology was the effective cause of this development. Let’s bear in mind that it took more than 1500 years for the most rudimentary precursors to individual freedom to make an appearance in the Christian mind. 1200 years of total Christian hegemony and not a single word uttered about this supposedly Christian idea. It was not in the monasteries nor in the pulpits were this allegedly Christian idea were first articulated but among the secular rules who in 1555 at the peace of Augsburg ensured for themselves the right to choose their own religion independent of their emperor. The man behind this idea was the jurist Joachim Stephani. Stephani blew life in the ancient dictum Cuius regio, eius religio that stated that each prince should have the right to choose what kind of worship should be allowed in his dominion. In ancient time this principal had lead to several decrees of religious freedom, the oldest I know of is the that of Cyrus from 539BC (alas, Christian freedom 500 years before Christ!). But the most famous one is probably the edict of Milan in 313CE, decreed by the pagan emperors Licinius and Constantine (later to be baptized), that ended the persecution of Christians throughout the Roman Empire. It was not until 1573 when the Warsaw Confederation made a similar universal declaration of religious freedom that someone in the Christian west followed suite. Fiercely contested by the catholic church of cause!

In Europe no new states could be founded on the principle of religious freedom, or freedom of conscience as it were to be known. The nations were already founded on theocratic principles (i.e. divine right to rule) and this was universally agreed among the theologians to be the only way a state could be ruled. They had the precedence of the theocratic rule of the Old Testament and the words of both Jesus and Paul to back this claim up. It is very instructive to do a thorough reading of Martin Luther in this regard. He was a dissenter in matters of faith but not in matters of state. He relied upon a divine intervention to the effect that the princes should be converted and not in a human intervention to the effect that individual freedom should be established throughout the land.

In the eighteenth century the theocratic dogma began to be questioned. Not by ardent believers but by skeptics such as John Lock who threw doubt and ridicule over the claim that the royal house in England was descended from King David. Many of his contemporaries were to follow suit. Having dismantled the theological framework for political thinking new and truly modern ideas could take form.

What was to follow in the establishment of the US of A and the overthrow of European monarchies is another story. What I’ve aimed to show is only that there is no direct connection between the Christian ideology as such and the rise of civil liberties. Correlation doesn’t per se imply causation. Christianity as it had been know an practiced for well over a thousand years were reinterpreted in terms of its political implications and other (pagan) sources were rediscovered and aided in this process.

When the Christians were thrown to the lions (though not to the extent popularly believed) the reason was not that they worshiped another god than those the pagans did but that they refused to take part in the common lip service to them and show up at the festivals. The offerings held to the imperial Genius were an act of patriotism as were the participation in the festivals. It was widely believed that the survival of the empire depended on this lowest common denominator, the cult of the state. Religious pluralism was accepted but only within the confines of this over arching ideology.[iii] This belief in belief had a long and prosperous future in the Christian west and it would take nearly two millennia before some brave men threw of this yoke of servitude and founded a state where freedom could reign. I find it tragicomic that an citizen of this nation built on the very denial of belief in belief (“E Pluribus Unum” in 1782) should so easily fall prey to the recently introduced denial of the same (“under god” in 1954 and “In god we trust” in 1956).

Surely men need to gather around something and it is not a science book I’m talking about but a vision, though not one based on evident falsehood or fragile metaphysical speculations. Given the long dark history of human ignorance and bigotry, in many ways not yet a closed chapter, what man need and ought to crave for is a novo ordo seculorum. This vision in itself with the promise it holds for its citizenry of a free pursuit of happiness of one’s own design seems to offer exactly such a common ground. No detours needed.

[i] Futuyama, D. 1998. Evolutionary Bilogy 3^ed. Sinauer Associates, Inc.

[ii] “No law shall be directed against an individual without applying to all citizens alike” (Andocides, Speeches speech 1, section 87); “At the same time Nature, by this cycle of changes, fulfills her purpose of perpetuating existence; preserving the type when she is unable to preserve the individual.” (Aristotle, Economics book 1, section 1343b); “It is his own dishonesty, his own crime, his own wickedness, his own audacity that deprives each individual of sense and discernment.” (M. Tullius Cicero, Orations: for his house, Plancius, Sextius, Coelius, Milo, Ligarius, chapter 20, section 46);

[iii] The Jews are a remarkable partial exception to this practice but their uneasy acceptance into the roman society is a different story.

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