Reply #59: Nazis=DUALISM=Bush Terra=War on Drugs=Commie Witch Hunts

[McCamy Taylor]

Dualism is the real issue here. Everything you have posted is correct, but if you frame the issue as dualism vs. non dualism, I think it will be easier to explain it to people and to help them to recognize helpful religion versus dangerous religion.

If you keep harping on "Nazism is a kind of religion" then the dualists who hate religion will use that as an excuse to say "purge the world of all religions and we will have paradise." As if forcing native peoples to give up their millenia old traditions will in some way make their lives better or forcing the people of Burma to stop being Buddhist will make their lives better or forcing South America to give up Liberation Theology will make its life better.

I also have issues with the definition of gnosticism. I know what the official meaning is supposed to be, but I think it has historically included more kinds of religious thought than that (at least when the Catholic Church was doing its purges), and I do not want people to think that anyone who believes in the direct self realization of the divine must also believe in dualism. Lots of people's mystical vision is that there is no good and evil .

Nowadays, dangerous religion is dualistic. It says "I can spot evil and I can purge it from the world and create paradise." It says "Those people are evil and I can purge them from the world and create paradise." It says "Your basic human nature is flawed, because of the way you were born, and there is nothing you can do about it. You are going to hell and I hate you, and my religion praises me for feeling this way." It says "I am going to kill and oppress others to 'save their souls.'" I say nowadays, because it is possible that 10,000 years ago during the European ice ages, primitive humans had to be prepared to eat other humans to survive and maybe at that time a dualistic religion was the key to life.

Beneficial religion has as its bottom line "I love you as myself, and I love everything about you, because being born human, you are worthy of love. While I will restrain you if you try to hurt me or others, I will also try to understand and help you in your darkest hour, so that you can become a more loving person."

It is usually really clear which of these two classes a religion belongs to.


The corporations and the right wing enlisted the aid of the dualistic religious right because they can use them to create FEAR in people, which can be used to control them. Also, the second, non dualistic type of religion is the single most powerful force on earth when it comes to motivating people to ignore their own instinct for self preservation in order to resist government tyranny and injustice to protect the safety and lives of strangers. Witness Christian villages in Europe which saved Jews because they believed more in Christ than in their fear of the Nazis. Or the Liberation Theologists. On the monks in Burma. This is why China fears the Dali Lama. The left wing priests in the 60s and 70s hurt the right wing in the US, so now they want to co-opt religion. It is important not to let them do so.