Hong Wu wrote:Solar Cross understood what I was trying to say. I would go so far as to add that if the separation of church and state didn't exist, we might have seen actual officiated religions of leftism in the west because to many of them it is a religion in everything but name, so why did they stay away from naming it a religion and officiating it? I suspect people didn't put much effort into that because they knew it would be a legal minefield more than anything else.
All of these "the Old Testament shouldn't be in the Bible" people could have just made a derivative of Christianity that is liberalism + liberal arts Jesus and it would have probably been great for them.
Yeah there is something in that. There was more than just the 1st amendment blocking them from just making a "derivative of Christianity that is liberalism + liberal arts Jesus" though but first I think it would do to spell out who "they" are. They are the people who in other centuries would have taken divinities and become a pastor, priest, rabbi or brahmin.
In those centuries they could make a nice position for themselves as community leaders, enjoy some status and even wealth without having do much except remind everyone that they held the keys to heaven. Sometimes they could even get kings to do their bidding. They had it good, they had it
really good.
Then science happened. Well proto-science had been around since the some apeman figured out how to make fire but until say Galileo and then Darwin, proto-science was no serious threat to them. From Galileo to Darwin a seismic shift began, as the merchants and warriors increasingly fell out from the spell of the religionists and declared for science and secularism instead. From Darwin onwards the shift was all but complete and the worse thing is they, these people of priestly mind, knew it would
never swing back in their favour, their gods were actually dead, killed by science and by association killed by the merchants and warriors who had consequently dumped the priests as their spiritual gurus.
From Darwin onwards it just gets worse and worse, the warriors and merchants make science sing delivering real world miracles, from atom bombs to auto-mobiles, miracles likes of which no priest could ever hold a candle to.. They were outclassed and humiliated by people that they had hitherto liked to consider their inferiors.
So what happens to a priestly mind that can't be a priest because such a thing is ridiculous in the Age of Science? He will try to adapt, to fight back, he will concoct and espouse a pseudo-religion that is sufficiently lacking in supernatural decor to pass as compatible with science but which serves as a proxy for the full blooded religion he could have wielded before Science: socialism, communism, anarchism, left-liberalism, gender theory, all are meme-ological weapons crafted to thrive in a post-supernatural world for regaining control from (and also for punishing) the merchants and warriors whom had betrayed them for science.
Priests are mind hackers, that is their power,
their only power, and they aren't going to give up that power just because the supernatural was denied them.