On Organized Religion and Prophets in History…
Zoroastrian Eternal Flame at the Fire Temple in Yazd, Central Iran. Photograph Source: Adam Jones – CC BY-SA 2.0
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” — Carl Sagan
Religious prophets, far from the nonsensical concoctions most have come to understand them as, were really radical dissidents—potentially militant given the times—and who supported, belonged to or led working class movements fighting for more egalitarian measures against tyrannical state power. All throughout organized human history, people have sought saviors whom they imagine will appear in the form of prophets, who will articulate our goals in clear language, and guide our practical action with such clear methods, that all we need do is surrender with a full heart, commit entirely to “the cause”, and then continue to act in accordance with a sense of the principles we have attributed to “the Prophet,” whose fulfilment guarantees us an eternal paradise.
This paradise can be here on earth, as in the case of Orthodox Marxism, or, more frequently, in a promised “afterlife”, as in the case of most organized religions throughout history. Regardless of the metaphysical or material presentation of the problem, the promise is the same–you can shed all the natural human reactions that arise in response to witnessing and experiencing the world in which we actually live–horror, disgust, disdain at the hypocrisy–and instead feel righteous, morally correct, and ultimately destined to be rewarded, if you contribute to the existing system of power, belief and justification in a manner that is sanctioned by the forces which dominate the sociopolitical system at a particular time.
PROPHETS: ANCIENT & CONTEMPORARY
To be believe this, though, is deeply ironic considering how past radicals—take Jesus and Muhammad as examples—tend to have have had their teachings bastardized throughout history. Interestingly enough, if one is looking for historical parallels between prophets of past and contemporary times, it’s easy to find them with how the work of people like Martin Luther King Jr. and Karl Marx has been distorted to serve the interests of power. In the US, and the Western world more generally, Dr. King is celebrated by governments and the corporate sector alike as a pioneering hero of social progress, given the victories of the Civil Rights Movement he helped bring to the forefront of public discourse.
Though there haven’t been as many advancements when it comes to the other messages in King’s work that he’s conveniently, and intentionally, less known for—anti-war, anti-poverty/establishment economics, etc. The military industrial complex and rampant inequality in the US, and indeed globally, has only worsened in years since during the neoliberal era. And whenever Lenin or any paramount leader of a Marxist or supposed “Communist” regime quotes or references Marx’s work to justify what they’re doing, we should be immediately reminded of how the words of prophets like Jesus and Muhammad have been misinterpreted, misrepresented and ultimately used as pretexts for public policies that serve the interests of state power rather than that of ordinary people.
Jesus, Muhammad and most other prophets were, in all probability, real people or combinations of several historical figures—most experts and historians agree on this—but they didn’t exist like we are *supposed* to remember them, nor do Marx or Dr. King at this point.
To quote historian and expert on religious studies, John Dominic Crossan: “Jesus called for nonviolent resistance to Rome and just distribution of land and food. He was crucified because he threatened Roman stability—not as a sacrifice to God for humanity’s sins.”
State sanctioned organized religion asks humans to sacrifice (to the institutions; the church/state) in the immediate for the hope of heaven and eternal happiness in the future, while the priesthood is charged as the guardians of sacred doctrinal truth. Rather familiar to how a dogmatic and fundamentalist belief in Marxism-Leninism asks you to do the same—sacrifice yourself to a miserable working class present for the hope of a free and socialist future, while the institutions maintain their power and control.
At this point most contemporary human societies have collectively come to worship “market” ideological principles rather than that of any state sanctioned religion. Instead of economic life centering around the church and state as its institutions, economies are now owned by handfuls of corporations who, in conjunction with corporate-funded politicians controlling the levers of power, dominate everything. All the while, citizens are urged to passively consume, work obediently and trust the supposed benevolence of the corporate state’s ideologues, all examples of human exploitation and pure faith.
ESCHATOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS
One often overlooked aspect of prophecy is what is known as ‘eschatology’. Eschatology is the belief in an apocalypse—the belief that the world is going to come to a cataclysmic end. Not all societies, nor all religions, are eschatological—Hinduism or the ancient Egyptian religion for example, as well as Chinese society, hold the view that time and the universe are cyclic in a never ending wheel. Whether a society is eschatological or not can make a massive impact on its outlook and its response to crises, and Western society is deeply eschatological. This includes even those who refer to themselves as atheists.
As an example of how drastically different societal responses to crises can be depending on their stance toward eschatology, take Ancient Egypt. They had two corollary concepts–Ma’at (balance, order, truth, justice) and Isfet (disorder, decay, chaos, lies). Its society actually collapsed twice—we call these the first and second intermediary periods. The collapses were brutal, as they often are—hunger, chaos, a third of the population dying—but the Egyptians saw this as a period of Isfet, which was bound to rejuvenate into another period of Ma’at. So you have a society that actually collapsed, but simply saw their condition as a part of the natural cycle.
Similarly, when Chinese empires have collapsed in history, and new dynasties took over—often times in bloody civil wars—no one thought of burning all the libraries and destroying all evidence of the preceding civilization. They simply felt the “mandate of Heaven” had passed to a new ruler.
Now where did eschatology enter into Western thought? There is little evidence of it in early Yahwist writings. They seem to have originated with Zoroastrianism, which posits that there is a good god (Ahura Mazda) and an evil god (Anra Maynu) who are locked in a battle over good and evil, and that there will be a final cataclysm. The contemporary way to interpret this belief is that human beings have a choice between righteousness and greed; it is our job as a species to make sure that solidarity and truth trumps evil and deception. This leads to a very different worldview. Contrast this with Egyptian beliefs—sure, sometimes Isfet might need to be employed to avoid greater evil, say, if a neighboring civilization keeps attacking you. But you can’t pretend destruction and enslavement are Ma’at; and so you must return to balance as soon as you can. On the other hand, in the Zoroastrian worldview, evil must be destroyed. But a problem arises—who defines what is evil?
The Zoroastrian prophet Mazdak believed it was the state that was evil, as it used violence to maintain its power; he believed ownership was evil as it represented greed; and he even believed marriage was a form of ownership. He advocated for a conception of what we might term polyamory, and a communal raising of children that would make parentage impossible to determine, and thereby eliminate the lines of succession that led to accumulation of wealth and power. One can imagine what happened to him—he and his followers were slaughterered. But to return to the question of how eschatology entered into western thought—the Judean elites were taken into captivity in Babylon in 597 BCE; then freed by the Persians, who were Zoroastrians, in 539. The Persian King Cyrus funded the rebuilding of the temple. It seems that this is where eschatology entered into Judaism, and from there into Christianity, and ultimately into broader Western thought.
In modern times almost everyone in the West is an eschatologist. Even, as mentioned, avowed atheists. The form this often takes is the belief that we are going to end the world in a nuclear apocalypse. While this is a most definitely a possibility, people have believed this before—in the 1920s and 30s, everyone was certain the Second World War would end civilization within weeks. After all, we had aircraft bombers and would flatten each others cities in days. Of course that didn’t happen, but in the chaos of the war the Holocaust—a horror no one had expected or foreseen—unfolded. The legacy of Thomas Malthus and the Malthusian catastrophe has haunted us like a spectre—Western societies still mostly fear we are running out of resources, and instead of slowing down our reproduction and consumption, we race against each other to make sure our own nation will be the one best fit to survive the inevitable catastrophe.
Of course in the US there are a large number of Christians who expect to be raptured in their lifetimes, but even the idea that a nuclear war would destroy the world is a tad overblown. There have been over 2,000 nuclear tests since World War II, and we haven’t seen any traces of nuclear winter. It is us, at the top of the pyramid, who are actually the most vulnerable as well. If we decided to go to nuclear war with each other, those who pick our bananas in tropical countries would likely be relieved that they could return to their previous lives of subsistence agriculture, fishing, and so on. The few remaining hunter gatherer tribes–the Khoi-San, the tribes in the Amazon–would see their biggest threat remove itself.
It is primarily those in the global north who would starve in the nuclear winter without shipments of food from tropical countries, and who would freeze without electricity infrastructure or imports of oil and gas from other nations. While the risk of nuclear holocaust is certainly real—being that humans possess enough weapons of mass destruction to blow up the world several times over—it doesn’t seem particularly likely given the existential consequences—which includes those with their fingers on the button. While those at the heart of crafting state policy in the apex centers of power are ruthless barbarians chasing power and profit, and while we are closer to a nuclear conflict than perhaps any time other than the Cuban missile crisis—we have to believe (hope?) they are at least wise enough to not start a nuclear war between opposing empires. But while full out nuclear war is, in all likelihood, not going to occur anytime soon, the same cannot be said for the trajectory of organized human civilization with regards to the rapidly evolving climate crisis that’s only just beginning to wreak havoc and destroy our fragile ecosystem. In this sense, the aforementioned eschatological atheists who view our impending doom as inevitable may have a point. After all, even non-western societies have largely been doubling down on policies that effectively kill the environment and the prospects of human survival.
THE NEW PHILOSOPHY
This approach has its roots in the expansion of consumerism and public relations over the last century-plus—which has now spread across the entire globe during the neoliberal era—and champions individual material gain as the driving factor of human life. Is it any wonder that our global “leaders” seem content to enact harmful environmental policies and ignore the existential threat staring us all in the face? Everyone is, more or less, worshipping market principles that are destined to destroy us. In the time of what anthropologist and activist David Graeber called the ‘Age of the Great Capitalist Empires’—roughly the last 500 years or so when Western culture, practices and thought essentially conquered the globe—capitalism and a strict adherence to market ideology seems to be humanity’s response to the failures of antiquity and the Middle Ages, as well as the discovery of modern science which freed us from theology but offers little hope in the empty void of space.
Consider a thought from English philosopher Bertrand Russell: “The ancient world found an end to anarchy in the Roman Empire, but the Roman Empire was a brute fact, not an idea. The Catholic world sought an end to anarchy in the church, which was an idea, but was never adequately embodied in fact. Neither the ancient nor the medieval solution was satisfactory—the one because it could not be idealized, the other because it could not be actualized. The modern world, at present, seems to be moving towards a solution like that of antiquity: a social order imposed by force, representing the will of the powerful rather than the hopes of the common men. The problem of a durable and satisfactory social order can only be solved by combining the solidarity of the Roman Empire with the idealism of St. Augustine’s City of God. To achieve this a new philosophy will be needed.”
If human coexistence is going to continue and flourish, then it’s an absolute necessity that people grapple with the fundamental reality of the human experience being both deeply individual and communal, which both Marxism and Fascism are at odds with. We all have individual tastes and desires, as well as a collective humanity, and it is often the need to fit in or belong in a shared sense of community that is exploited by powerful interests intent on maintaining their privileged position. It’s our task as human beings to remain intellectual free agents, who are critical and individual thinkers, while at the same time being acutely aware of our collective potential and circumstances. Our options at this point of globalized connectivity are a path towards socialism, egalitarianism and an assurance of human rights—at least as much as possible—or hyper-individualism, barbarism and a kind of neofascist groupthink that brings about the worst possible traits of human beings.
FINAL THOUGHTS
To suggest that there’s an all powerful force of morality (be it a God, King, state priest, radical revolutionary or corporation) controlling everything with benevolence is an exceedingly human thing to believe. And though these figureheads and religions that people have worshipped all throughout history are continually proven to be false idols, it never seems to stop humans in subsequent generations from creating their own hierarchal institutional structures and justifying the exploitive practices on the grounds of doctrines based on hope and faith rather than empirical evidence and truth. The idea of “God” was never supposed to be about religion, nor were the messages of prophets; they’re about a spiritual bond with existing and having compassion for your fellow humans. Call God the “Laws of the Universe” or even the “Grand Electron” to quote the great George Carlin. I don’t know of any long bearded and white-skinned male in the sky judging the actions of mankind but it would be sheer insanity to deny the existence of physical laws.
Also worth mentioning is the subdivision that exists within Christianity: Constantinian and Prophetic. The Roman empire co-opted the Christian Movement when it couldn’t control it and at that point it became a defanged tool of the state known as Constantinian Christianity, the dominant form. Prophetic Christianity, on the other hand, draws on the prophetic legacy of Jesus; humility, loving your neighbors, helping the poor, social justice and dissent. Think of Cornel West, Chris Hedges, William Barber II, Martin Luther King Jr., John Brown, etc. Christianity wasn’t intended to be a religious cult with a deified figure (neither were Communism and Karl Marx); as Crossan said, it was a movement based around ideas that threatened the interests of the Roman ruling class. Which is why it had to be stopped. As power so often does, the elites of Rome adopted it and exploited the nature of the movement, weakening the real intent and threat to power that came from its prophetic tradition. This also sounds rather familiar to how “Communist” leaders adopted the socialist movement and destroyed its ideals immediately while consolidating their own power.
Prophets, as mentioned, are really best understood as ancient radical dissidents and intellectuals, with the word ‘prophet’ itself a poor translation of the Hebrew word ‘Navi’. Including Moses, Amos, Muhammad, etc. They gave geopolitical analyses, argued that the acts of ruling elites were going to destroy society, condemned evil kings, had a more humanitarian vision of social organization and engaged in their own versions of what we would call “theory” today. And these types of people weren’t praised or honored, as dissidents never are. They are imprisoned or assassinated like Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Debs, Gramsci, Dr. King, Malcolm X, etc. These people were hated by privileged interests, condemned and driven into the desert, or martyred. However, there were flatterers of the court, intellectuals treated very well, as there always are. Centuries later these types would come to be known as ‘false prophets’. Think of intellectuals you’ve seen in the public sphere praising the status quo or those who seized and serve state power (Thomas Friedman, Salman Rushdie, John F Kennedy, Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, etc) for your modern view of a false prophet.
It’s also worth remembering that Jesus was the most quoted prophet in the Quran, while Muhammad was the most mentioned, though Constantinian Christianity wants desperately for us to think of them as holding entirely separate ideals. Interesting contexts often left out of these discussions when considering who these people really were.
Throughout history most of the intellectual class serves power. This has been true since the days of Sumer or Egypt’s United First Dynasty all the way through the Romans and up to the British, Russians and Americans. However, prophets were radicals whose teachings went against the status quo or prevailing order. When their challenges go too far, they are often killed or relegated to the dustbin of history, and their messages co-opted by the exact powerful state and moneyed interests that they’d been preaching against. But Western prophecy and culture contains another danger—eschatology.
When societies believe in a cyclic universe and experience collapse, they simply feel they are in a phase that will inevitably return to the positive. On the other hand, when those who live in eschatological societies (and we’ve, more or less, managed to become a single globalized society the last couple centuries) see so much as a crack in the wall, they believe the end is nigh and this actually causes them to behave in ways that bring about catastrophes which may otherwise have been avoided. In the postmodern philosophical era we are living through, it is often this nihilistic attitude that permeates intellectual discourse regarding human history and our nature as a species.
There seems to be a real continuity with postmodernism, the modern propaganda system inducing people to become pointless consumers while annihilating truth, and the policies enacted by modern states that are championed by public intellectuals intent on serving the interests of economic elites and their paid-for political mandarins. Any complex and organized society in human history has a fringe of dissidents who go against the state and are met with force, often death. If people like Dr. King, Malcolm X and Marx existed back in the days of Jesus and the Romans, they would likely have met similar fates. Especially when considering how the lives of so many modern prophets have ended in tragedy and their work twisted or left intentionally incomplete to serve corporate and state power.
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