Re: More on qualia of consciousness and occam's razor - tiny addendum

From: Eric Hawthorne <egh.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Sun, 01 Feb 2004 14:57:02 -0800

Eric Hawthorne wrote:

> 6. Such an organised religion structure, or "god"-empowered government
> structure, if it succeeds in organizing
> people for an extended period of time, as it seems they did, would
> naturally tend to take on a life of its own, a
> self-reinforcing aspect, an "autopoietic" function as one of its
> functions. This self-preservation subfunction of
> the "god"-empowered governance organization would take the form of
> religious education about the great history
> of beneficial acts and mercies and wisdoms conferred on the people
> over their glorious history by the "god" via
> the god-henchmen.

I should add that the other half of the autopoietic (self-preservative)
subfunction of the
"god-fear-and-god-obeisance"-empowered organization is of course the
enforcement branch: Mechanisms would
develop for enforcement-of-membership, rule-adherence, and enforcement
that members conform to (express) the
orthodox forms (orthodox in that particular organization of course) of
belief in the deity.

Thus we have "religious intolerance", we have "shunning, outcasting,
excommunication", we have
dehumanization as "worthless infidels and enemies" of adherents to other
(incorrect and defiant) religious orthodoxies,
and also, of course, stigmatization and de-valuing (not to mention
torture and execution as an example) of those who
profess not to believe in the god (or any god) at all.

If I were living in the time (or a present-day place) of overwhelming
and brutal dominance of "god"-empowered governance
organizations (e.g. everywhere before the beginning of the last century,
and in a number of fundamentalist-Islamic
states (and southern US states? today,) I would have to profess belief
in "God" to survive, and just hope that no-one heard
 the quotation-marks in my statement which indicate belief in the power
of the "god-myth" concept in human psychology and
thus in human society.
Received on Sun Feb 01 2004 - 18:03:16 PST