Why Religions Fail

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Why Religions Fail

fschmidt
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The founders of religions are always idealists.  No one but an idealist would undertake such a difficult task as founding a religion.  If they are successful then the religion will grow.  As it grows, it will develop a hierarchy.  This is inevitable even in the most decentralized religion because there must be people in leadership positions to make the religion work.  But leadership positions are positions of power, and power attracts sociopaths.  So the leaders of any successful religion will tend to be somewhat sociopathic.  Sociopaths are more concerned with power than with ideals.  So the sociopathic leaders of a religion will gradually reinterpret the scripture of the religion to increase their power at the expense of the original ideals of the religion's founder.  And so every religion will become corrupt over time.

Does this corruption mean failure?  Not necessarily.  What is required to prevent failure is a reformation which is a revolution against the corruption in favor of the original vision of the religion.  Unfortunately there aren't many examples of this but the obvious one is the Christian Reformation.

What is required for a successful reformation?  Clearly not the organization of the religion itself since the Catholic Church at the time of the Reformation had the worst imaginable structure.  And I seriously doubt that the scripture or content of the religion matter much since I see nothing special about Christianity in this regard.  My theory is that what is required is a group of people with the intelligence to recognize the corruption of the religion and to do something about it.

Medieval Catholicism was certainly very corrupt.  But the one good thing about it was that it was eugenic.  Those in power in the Catholic Church wanted to maintain order, so they enforced monogamy and they regularly killed petty criminals.  By doing this for centuries, they gradually raised the intelligence of Europeans until they were capable of a successful reformation.

It is worth considering other religions in contrast.  The Islamic Salafi movement is an attempt at reformation.  But no Islamic authority was as eugenic as the Catholic Church was, and therefore Muslims were never intelligent enough as a group to actually implement a successful reformation.  Salafism clearly isn't really a return to Islamic first principles in the way that the Christian Reformation was.  And so it doesn't work.

Ashkenazi Jews were an intelligent group within Judaism, so why didn't they reform it?  The problem here is that the Ashkenazi Jews benefited from the eugenic pressures coming from Christianity, not from any internal eugenic authority within Judaism.  By the time Jews became intelligent, the smartest one started leaving the religion as I described here.  So rather than a reformation, Judaism just experienced an exodus of its most intelligent members.

So should an intelligent individual within a religion attempt to reform it?  Absolutely not, because an individual cannot do this.  The masses are herd animals who will follow those with authority.  So any individual who attempts to reform a religion will just be considered crazy.  In contrast, a group of intelligent people constitutes an alternative herd with its own leadership, so they have a chance to implement a reformation.

So then what should an intelligent individual within a religion do?  The only sensible thing to do is to try to form a eugenic group within the religion.  This means a group that is designed for eugenic selection so that the intelligence of the group will rise over time.  It makes no difference what the original members of such a group believe because if their descendants are intelligent enough then they will be able to understand the original vision of the religion.

Naturally I will advocate my own solution to this problem, namely Arkian Ethnicity.  This is not specific to any religion, so any religion can from a group who are also Arkians.  But if you don't like my idea, develop your own.  The key point is that to save your religion, you must form a eugenic group who will eventually become intelligent enough to implement a reformation.
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Re: Why Religions Fail

Secular Koranism
fschmidt wrote
The founders of religions are always idealists.
How would you know?

Are you in fact an atheist?
Restoring Truth, Logic and Morality with Secular Koranism
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Re: Why Religions Fail

Secular Koranism
In reply to this post by fschmidt
fschmidt wrote
Ashkenazi Jews were an intelligent group within Judaism, so why didn't they reform it?
You must have heard of Reform Judaism.
Restoring Truth, Logic and Morality with Secular Koranism
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Re: Why Religions Fail

Secular Koranism
In reply to this post by fschmidt
fschmidt wrote
What is required for a successful reformation?
Why bother with reformation when you could just adopt another better religion?
Restoring Truth, Logic and Morality with Secular Koranism
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Re: Why Religions Fail

Secular Koranism
In reply to this post by fschmidt
fschmidt wrote
So should an intelligent individual within a religion attempt to reform it?
After half a millennium, it should now be clear Christianity is not capable of reformation.

Reform Judaism has also failed to reform Judaism because the answer is not to dilute the principles of Judaism, but simply to adopt the scripture of a later and better revelation from the same Abrahamic God ie the Koran.
Restoring Truth, Logic and Morality with Secular Koranism
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Re: Why Religions Fail

Secular Koranism
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fschmidt wrote
So should an intelligent individual within a religion attempt to reform it?  
It is not enough simply to be intelligent, one must also have the requisite moral and divine authority to do so. In any case, one's intelligence can always be disputed by those with greater seniority and authority.
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Re: Why Religions Fail

Secular Koranism
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fschmidt wrote
So then what should an intelligent individual within a religion do?  The only sensible thing to do is to try to form a eugenic group within the religion.
Eugenics is the process of creating desirable heritable traits in the next generation.

Marriage for the purpose of good parenting is eugenic.

Married parents are more likely to give their legitimate offspring the heritable trait of marriageability than unmarried parents their illegitimate offspring.

Illegitimacy is therefore dysgenic.

If there is an anxiety about people getting stupider, weaker and poorer, it is because of the state's failure to respect the institutions of marriage and the family.  

The solution must be to resolve to do so by adopting a religion that would specifically and explicitly require extramarital sex to be punished.

http://quran.com/24/2
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Re: Why Religions Fail

umit
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Re: Why Religions Fail

Secular Koranism
umit wrote
What problem? first define the problem please
The problem is feminism.
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Re: Why Religions Fail

Allen
Are you female? If so, how about striking a blow for patriarchy by shutting the hell up with your silly nonsense.
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Re: Why Religions Fail

Secular Koranism
Have I said anything untrue, illogical or immoral?
Restoring Truth, Logic and Morality with Secular Koranism
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Re: Why Religions Fail

Allen
Yes, but if you are female then you shouldn't be speaking in public in the first place. That is part of the modern disease.
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Re: Why Religions Fail

Secular Koranism
Nothing in the Torah or Koran requires women to be silent. The "modern disease" you refer to is feminism, and feminism operates through bribing men with extramarital sex and corrupting their morals. You can hardly accuse me of doing this since I have made you no such offer.
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Re: Why Religions Fail

fschmidt
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In reply to this post by umit
umit wrote
True religions do not have a founder in the first place because it is Gods words. The prophet only spreads Gods word around and is not the founder of a religion.
Jesus is not the founder of Christianity, nor Moses the founder of Judaism or Mohammed the founder of Islam.
Religions with a founder (the ones you speak about appearantly) are just human invented religions and are not worth following them anyways...none of them, because it has no meaning...no purpose.
This is semantics.  I mean if you are looking for first cause, then God is the first cause of everything which would make God the "founder" of everything which would make the word "founder" meaningless.  So better to define "founder" is the person whose role was starting something.  Most people don't have the necessary attributes to be a prophet, and God wouldn't choose an unqualified person to be a prophet.  So prophets deserve credit for the role they play.

a human invented scripture is a scripture with flaws...totally far from being perfect...so it needs countless of rewriting, reinterpretation and reformations...so this part is just natural.
Besides, there is nothing wrong with changing a human invented scripture...because it is not Holy...so, you can change it as much as you want.
Corruption? the original scripture was already corrupt when it first got invented...so what are we talking about?
This distinction between "invented scripture" and "holy scripture" is overstated because it is a continuum.  Returning to Newton's laws, can any idiot change them as much as he wants?  No, because Newton's laws are based on reality (God's actions), so they must be approximately right.  What comes purely out of the human mind is just nonsense.  So there is a continuum of how right something is, and making something less right is a bad idea.  This applies to scripture just as much as to science.

no? the whole religion is a failure complete with its reformation because it misses its purpose.
reformation or no reformation, that wont prevent that.
How can one objectively judge religion?  The only objective judgement that I can think of is how successful were the societies that they produced.  And based on that, the Christian Reformation was successful.

No. that does not work that way. It has nothing to do with intelligence. We follow Islam because we believe that it is the only pure religion in existence. The scripture is the unchanged words of God and the religion is as God had intended. the People themselves won't allow any reformation on that.
Clearly today's Muslims do not follow Islam as God intended.  If they did, then they would be more successful here on Earth.

a reformation means a change in Gods words, so it is not pure anymore...therefore it will immediately experience resistence and is doomed to fail.
No, a reformation does not mean changing the scripture.  It means looking critically at the baggage that was added to a religion after scripture.  If you study the Christian reformation, you will see that this is what they did.  From what little I know about Ibn Taymiyyah, he also headed in this direction.

What problem? first define the problem please
The problem is having the intelligence to properly understand and apply scripture.

By the way, this thread is somewhat outdated.  My latest thoughts on this topic are here.
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Re: Why Religions Fail

Secular Koranism
fschmidt wrote
The problem is having the intelligence to properly understand and apply scripture.
If both the Torah and the Koran are claimed to be from the Abrahamic God ie the most powerful being conceivable, then if you were being rational, you would choose the book of rules with the fewest restrictions and capital punishments. That would be the Koran.


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Re: Why Religions Fail

Secular Koranism
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fschmidt wrote
How can one objectively judge religion?  The only objective judgement that I can think of is how successful were the societies that they produced.  And based on that, the Christian Reformation was successful.
Religion is judged by its fitness for purpose.

Religion comes from "religare", the Latin of "to bind" (society).

If the purpose of a religion is to bind a group and Jews are the world's most ancient and powerful tribe enjoying the protection of the most powerful being conceivable, then Judaism is arguably the most successful but exclusive religion.

If it is true that God made a second and better revelation for mankind through the Koran, then why would we be choosing anything else?

Christianity suffers from an inferior scripture which is only the word of mortal and fallible men testifying that they met an executed blasphemer.  

Islam is therefore for gentiles who wish to worship the Abrahamic God without being guilty of the idolatry and blasphemy of Christianity.

Christianity has clearly failed because it is the weakest link to patriarchy having been replaced by liberalism which in the 21st century means nothing more than sexual liberation from the rules of marriage and good parenting with the consequence of widespread bastardy, which is clearly dysgenic.

Not only is Christianity kaput, its replacement of liberalism has now rotted into the moral sewage of intersectionality.  

 
Restoring Truth, Logic and Morality with Secular Koranism
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Re: Why Religions Fail

umit
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Re: Why Religions Fail

fschmidt
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It seems we are mostly in agreement now.  I will just quote areas of difference.

umit wrote
With modern understanding of science (medical and technical) and technology, any society can be successful...even though 99% of them are just dumb tiktok followers...so that is definitely not objective.
The success of societies today varies greatly even though they all have access to the same science and technology.  In the long term, the success of a society depends on its ability to enforce good morals.

an objective method would be for example to look for verses in the scripture that obviously contradict science or each other...or which are otherwise unreasonable.

a nice example of this is King David being called the 7th son of Jesse on one verse in the Bible and 8th on the other.
Given possible reasons for this either death of one of the sons, or adoption...but no one tries to find out which son then apparently died or was adopted.

The Quraan is completed in 20 years from the revelation of the first verse to the last one, but does not contain similar contradictions.
Okay, I agree that this is objective, just not the method I would choose.  So which objective criteria one uses to choose scripture is itself subjective.

Just to explain how I view the Old Testament - I view the Torah (first 5 books) as being the core of it, somewhat equivalent to the Quran, and I view the rest as being somewhat equivalent to Hadiths which do have contradictions.

OK but that page is huge...besides, it is not a thread I can reply on like here.
There is a whole subforum where you can reply.  I hope you eventually have time to read it.  I am maintaining this page as the core of my views.
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Re: Why Religions Fail

umit
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Re: Why Religions Fail

R.C. Christian
umit wrote
I think that the correct way is to see it as a whole...a continuum. Christianity is not copied from Judaism, the Quraan is not a bad copy of the Thorah and Gospels...the stories of Abraham, and Noah, and Solomon, David are not bad copies of each other in the Thorah, Gospels and Quraan. They are the same stories because they are actual historical events...(not because I can prove that, but because of the fact that those stories form the core of the holy message that God gives us over and over again in different scriptures)
I'm glad to see someone else trusting their intuition to actually notice this.

On the other hand, all religions originating from Middle Eastern civilizations are necessarily dumbed down versions of a kind of ancient knowledge; religions are from the masses to the masses. To really get to the ancient knowledge, one has to dig deeper, before civilizations emerged, to times when there was no langue, no religions and no large, urbanized populations.

I think Varg Vikernes is correct regarding civilization: https://www.burzum.org/eng/library/about_civilization.shtml
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