Overcoming Religious Irrationalism

The continuous progress of human civilization was suddenly interrupted at the end of antiquity with the rise of Christianity to the head of the Roman Empire and its subsequent fall. No other event was so disastrous for the intellectual evolution of mankind. It was followed by an Age of Darkness that lasted more than a thousand years, until humanity began slowly to recover from the catastrophic effect that Christian monotheism had brought over it. It was the Renaissance (= Rebirth) of antiquity and its culture followed by the Age of Enlightenment that put an end to the decline of humanity.

However the cause of the decline is not dead yet and we can again see the deteriorating effects of this dangerous religion on the progress of humanity. Religion is again on the rise during the last decades, and it is accompanied by a visible stagnation of science and technology, a retrocession of humanist values and basic human rights and a resurgence of barbarism and violence all over the world. The disease of Christianity (including the Mohammedan sects) has not been eradicated while there was an opportunity for it. It will now continue to cause problems for mankind and obstruct any further progress.

The mistake was the attempt to jump from a monotheist religion right back to the path of reason and logic. Such an attempt was doomed to fail. Once you have taken a wrong road, you cannot just jump from there back into the right direction, when you realize that you have taken a wrong turn. You have to take all the way back to the point where you have left the right path and from there continue into the right direction.

There is no direct path from monotheism to reason. A Christian atheist still has tacit Christian doctrines implied in his thinking. For example whatever answer he gives to the simple question “Do you believe in God?” - whether “yes” or “no”, he already strays away from the path of reason and surrenders to multiple Christian fallacies. The preposition “in” makes no sense in conjunction with the verb “believe”. Why is the noun “God” capitalized? Where is its article?

Such an irrational question cannot be answered rationally and could only be countered with another question: Believe what about which god? Any answer would imply the concept of an omnipotent creator and the affirmation that such a concept is even thinkable. The whole question of the existence of “God” is meaningless from a rational point of view and commits the fallacy of presupposition (Plurium Interrogationum) since it presupposes statements that have not been agreed upon (that an omnipotent creator is a valid hypothesis, that the world has a beginning, that there can be a logical distinction between natural and supernatural).

Whenever such a Christian atheist makes a statement about ethics, he is also unaware that he implies tacit Christian values. He also uses a language polluted by Christian terminology that makes it difficult to express himself without falling into the mental trap of Christian concepts.

For a monotheist to embrace reason, it is indispensable to return to the pre-Christian concepts of thought first and at least formally learn classical mythology and adopt the customs and language of polytheist antiquity. This is the point in history, after which mankind strayed away from the path of intellectual progress.

Only a classical polytheist is able to overcome religious superstition. From monotheism there is no direct shortcut to rationalism. First all false concepts of Christianity and its spiritual predecessors like Zoroastrism have to be totally erased from the mind, before it is possible to advance on the path of reason.

Politics VI: The Constitution

The administrative mechanisms as well as every law of a country are based on its constitution. It is the constitution that gives authority to the government and to the laws and decrees that regulate the state affairs.

But where does the constitution derive its authority from?

According to the modern understanding of a state, which is based on the philosophy of the Age of Enlightenment (especially Jean-Jacques Rousseau), the constitution of a state is a social contract that its citizens have agreed to. This means, a constitution is only legitimate, if it is based on the voluntary agreement of the citizens.

In our modern democracies, this agreement is formally done by a majority vote of the citizens who either approve or reject a draft of a constitution. If the constitution gets the majority vote, it is considered to be legitimate and binding for all citizens and all branches of the public administration and the government.

However this is not how a contract works. A contract is only valid, when it is signed by all involved parties, not just by the majority of them. And it is only binding for those who signed it. 

Or would a contract be valid if a group of people signs it in order to justify a hostile action against some other people or to make regulations for people who have not agreed to the contract? Of course this would not be possible, not even if the group who signed the contract is more numerous than the other group that it is applied to against their will. Such a document would not be a contract, rather it would be a conspiracy.

For this reason the constitution of a state cannot be subject to a majority decision. It requires the consent of every single person that it is supposed to be applied to. A constitution cannot have any authority over any human being who has not personally signed it showing his consent. Otherwise it is not a constitution but a conspiracy pact.

It might be objected that it is impractical to try to get the signatures of every citizen under the constitution, but this is how a contract works. If you don't have the signature of all involved parties, the contract is void. If it is not possible to get the signatures of every single citizen of a state, then the terms of the contract, i.e. the constitution, have either to be changed or the reach of its authority needs to be limited into smaller units. If it is not possible to get the signature of several million citizens, then probably the political entity is too big and needs to be divided into smaller units (e.g city states), which are able to agree to an unanimous consensus among them.

A very important principle of a constitution is that it must be limited to the smallest common denominator. Therefore it cannot have too many terms, since it would be impossible to reach a consensus over them. 

Second, a constitution must not include any controversial issues. We know that topics like abortion, family laws or religious references are controversial. So there is no place for them in a constitution.

It needs also to be considered that future generations of citizens must be willing to sign the constitution, so it needs to be free from temporary political trends. 

A constitution is only valid, when every citizen has signed it and it is only applicable on the citizens who have signed it. Therefore it has to consider what to do with people who refuse to sign it. And even if a consensus is reached among all citizens at the moment, it is possible that people reaching adulthood and citizenship in the future might not be willing to sign it.

A person who has not signed the constitution is not subject to its regulations. This will have certain disadvantages, because the person will not have the protection of its laws, but nobody can be forced to give his consent and nobody can be forced to fall under the authority of a law whose legitimacy he has not agreed to.

A state, which is based on such a constitution, has to leave these people in peace. It has no authority over them. It cannot force them to anything, but it also has no obligations towards them. 

However it is in the interest of a state to make the terms of its constitution as agreeable as possible for everyone in order to avoid that too many people refuse to give their approval to its constitution and therefore to its legitimacy.

Since these requirements of a legitimate constitution are not fulfilled by any modern state, no existing country has a legitimate constitution and any legitimate authority.We need a radical change of the political system and the understanding of what constitutes a state. All authority is derived from the citizens. And without their signature and consent to the constitution, the state has no legitimate authority over them. The state has to respect its citizens, not only their majority, but every single one of them.

Every human being is free to agree to the authority of the state or to reject it. No government institution can claim authority over a human being from any other source than this particular human being himself.

The age when state authority was derived from divine mercy or some kind of profane substitute of it (e.g. the "will of the people", the "common good", the "national security", the "proletariat" etc.) needs to be over once and for all.

Proof of Impossibility of Monotheism

While any attempt to prove the non-existence of the gods is frequently eluded by changing the definition of what constitutes a "god", the existence of a single god is easier to disprove.

For empirical reasons the entire concept of a single god is rather counterintuitive. There is no example of anything, of which only exists one. So it is rather odd that anybody could even come up with such a concept that contradicts everything that can be observed in the world.

However there is also an argument from logical deduction that sufficiently proves the theoretical impossibility of the monotheist main doctrine:

If certain preconditions allow the existence of one thing, they would also allow the existence of others of its kind. Since existence of two or more things can be totally independent from each other, the existence of one thing is not necessarily able to affect or prevent the existence of another.

If something (e.g. the existence of a god) is possible once, it is also possible twice. The only alternative would be that it is not possible at all. It is either possible or not. There is no in-between. 

Infinity is incompatible with singularity, and there is no reason thinkable that would limit the possibility of independent existences (i.e. separate worlds). The concept of infinite possibilities necessarily requires that everything, which is possible, exists in an infinite number.

In short: If there is one, there must be more of them.

Therefore depending on the definition of a god (Some define it as nature itself, others deify humans as gods. The existence of neither can be denied.), either polytheism or atheism are valid options. Monotheism is no rational option at all.