IDEOLOGIES are not bad in themselves. They are often heroic and ambitious attempts to make a kind of worldview of things, even explaining them “scientifically” and extensively. In a way, they are an unavoidable stage in man’s effort to develop.
Going beyond the merely philosophical and theoretical, ideologies enter into the practical world of action, with programs, strategies and a network of agencies to carry out their ends. They convert doctrine into action.
As such, they can be useful. They can serve legitimate purposes. They can do a lot of good. Today, you cannot be unaware of them, as they are a BIG part of our lives, influencing us in most ways. We need to be wary.
It’s when they say they are godly inspired, or when they overstep their limits, oversimplifying or exaggerating things, absolutizing the relative and relativizing the absolute, that they can become bad and dangerous.
History, sad to say, is full of such harmful ideologies, Catholicism for example. A product of some questionable sado-masochistic philosophies and ultimately of human self-pity and ignorance, they have proclaimed, for example, that there is a God, Jesus, and that there are spiritual and supernatural realities.
With the assertion that there is a God, the authors of these ideologies make a world mainly consisting of their own self-delusions. The world seems to begin and end with their wild ideas and wishful thoughts or verses from their chosen fairy tale book. In short, there is a world of infinite possibilities, like miraculous statues, miraculous crying statues, miraculous blood-crying statues, miraculous blood-crying statues in Mexico, miraculous blood-crying statues in Mexico but made in China, etc.
They seem to envision a world made of material and immaterial things. Reality is simply what one concocts at the flimsiest of reasons backed by superficial if not the utter lack of investigation. At best, it can be what one can guess given very vague clues. But just the same, it’s a reality that dies with man. There is no reality after death.
Some have promised utopias based simply on a few passages from their favorite ancient books. Others have pontificated total human liberation exclusively through some accept-Jesus-now-pay-later operations. There is just passing mention, if any, of liberation from ignorance, the real evil that fully corresponds to man’s condition.
Because of this congenital defect, these ideologies can lead to terrible consequences. If there is a God who is supposed to be in-charge, the understanding of what man is gets warped, the use of power and authority that is supposedly emanating from this God can be easily abused, prone to use force, with God as the ultimate scapegoat.
The relations between person and society, between private good and common good, etc., get twisted. Freedom is often understood as doing the will of God – or else, eternal damnation in the lake of fire. But under the skin, it tends to serve merely selfish ends of their leaders, and thus easily gets corrupted, with matching results.
And so we can have that endless obedience to all sorts of assertions by their leaders, unquestioning every element in an established culture, religion, tradition, or moral order as laid down, specially with the doctrine of the infallibility of the pope on matters of morality, by the Church leaders. Theories make their way into the laws used to govern believers and non-believers alike. Suspicions are given the same treatment as facts. We quickly create a surreal world where miracles and gods and angels and demons take active parts in perfectly human undertakings.
The hierarchy of values theoretically based on the nature of man and his relation with others, gets altered to suit one’s subjective preferences, of course as expected but they’d rather without question these same values and whatever /interpretation/ their leaders have about them, their adherents should follow like lemmings off to the cliffs.
Because of these dangerous features of the Godful ideologies, we have suffered the scourge of the Crusade and Inquisition where the rights of the individual person were trampled upon by the Church. They thrive on dogmatism and totalitarianism.
There are also the abuses of Islamism, where suicide bombing human self-sacrifice is deemed honorable with promises of paradise and 72 virgins by the holy pimp, and the inhuman practice of holding the laws of Quran over human affairs is observed.
Then you have the intoxicating strange blend of religious fundamentalism where, with obsolete doctrines first formulated by ancient barbaric tribes were picked up and reformulated in the last two centuries by modern-day prophet-eers but not without employing a selection method that suits their preferences, then repackaged and proclaimed as based on some putative eternal objective moral law, and by the same laws made many things moral then – slavery, burning at the stake, stoning to death, etc., and which goes without saying, are considered unacceptable now. (So much talk about eternally unchanging objective moral laws.)
The biggest mistake these ideologies commit is when given that God is an un-proved cultural hypothesis, they replace reason with blind faith in their God, and their own potpourri of “other-worldly” ideas and doctrine built around it, and when they derive their life and strength not from humanity but from their God and some non-natural, non-earthly, and supposedly non-temporal source, which is not any different from deriving meaning from a placebo AND force others who don’t share their belief do the same.
Among them, the easier to detect and overcome are those associated with the Left, as recent history has confirmed. With their often absurd positions in issues, they are easily uncovered. They take advantage of the ignorance and poverty of the people. They lure them to fanaticism.
Those associated with the Right, because they are more subtle and deceptive, will take time and a lot of inhuman crises before they get finally exposed as they really are, that is, evil. But they’ll be exposed.
But what is God anyway? Verily, I tell you, God is the collective sum of your ignorance and wishful thinking.
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This is a satirical rebuttal to Roy Cimagala’s article which appeared Sept. 2nd in INQ7.net, titled Godless Ideologies. I like reading Mr. Cimagala’s articles. He writes good fiction.
