The Cause Of Materialism

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david
Senior Member

Posts: 450

The Cause Of Materialism Sept 14, 2020 16:26:24 GMT

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Post by david on Sept 14, 2020 16:26:24 GMT

Dear friends,

Rationalism and materialism seem associated. When we experience something that may or may not be supernatural, we call the materialist explanation the rational explanation.

Rationalism received an upsurge in the Enlightenment, which tried to reduce the influence of religion. They demanded the separation of the Church and the State. It seems that rationalism is materialistic.

Looking at it in the historical context, it seems a little more complicated. Christianity is a religion that raises more questions than it answers. Why the Divine Incarnation? The explanation for the crucifixion is that it absolved us from the sin of Adam, but how can we be absolved by an action which we did not accomplish ourselves? Why are we guilty of the sin of Adam when we did not commit it ourselves? Why did the absolving not take place immediately after the sin was committed?

Christianity is not really satisfying to an enquiring mind, so this would cause inquisitive people to look to the study of material properties for knowledge, but there's more to it than this. Christianity was hostile to enquiring minds. There were Inquisitions to prevent it, and they acted with great cruelty. We like to think that England was a more liberal country, but a bookseller was fined for selling a copy of Thomas Pain's book The Age Of Reason. There was not freedom of thought in England.

Intelligent people must have pondered over the questions raised by Christianity. Thomas A Kempis, in The Imitation Of Christ, says that we should not speculate about matters relating to God, because he knew of cases where this led to doubts. People must have felt angry that they could not discuss doubts openly.

It was better to study the properties of matter because that was safe. Even theoretical science could be dangerous, as Galileo found out. It was safest to stick to mechanics. Nobody was ever hauled before an Inquisition for inventing a machine. The reason why rationalism was anti-religion was because religion was antirational. It must have seemed to a lot of people that the rational approach to religion was to kick the whole thing over. Materialism is the revenge of rationalism against religion. It acted in self defence.

There is the question of the supernatural in religion. How does the supernatural happen?

All patriarchal religion falters on the inability to imagine Creation as a masculine thing. Even the rationalistic religion of Hermetism had difficulty with this, and decided that the Father is beyond all conceptualisation. Logically, if this is true, then spiritual development is impossible by any method, because it implies that there is no quality in us which reflects the spirit. It requires a denial of the principle of Divine Ideas being reflected into the world, which means that it is impossible to see the world as an outer manifestation of the Divine. The world and the spirit must therefore have nothing to do with each other. It led to the belief in what is called the Clockmaker God, that is a God Who created the world, wound it up, and left it to run like a clock. In this perspective, there can be no manifestation of the supernatural in the world, and no way that ritual and ceremony can work. This made it possible for Atheists to discredit Christianity by pointing to its supernatural element. It is why the Protestants abolished the Mass, and declared the principle of transubstantiation, by which the bread is transformed into the body of Christ, to be mumbo jumbo. The hostility to ritual has led to a lot of people believing that marriage is wrong. "Why this ritual?" I am asked.

Some Christians have gone so far as to declare priests an evil, and there are some modern sects which don't have priests.

We are left with a religion that makes it necessary to believe many things without any reason for supposing them to be true. This makes it necessary for people to have an irrational mind to practie religion without doubt. So, when the materialists claim to have a monopoly on reason, the religious leaders do not dispute it. They urge it, because they want to discredit reason. Having reached this state, we find that the material sciences have given us explanations for things that religion did not. We come to the conclusion that science is the basis of understanding, and the basis of civilisation, ousting religion from the position of making this claim.

And now comes Evolution. We know that the fossil record proves that Genesis is not true, but does that prove that all Creation explanations are not true? The problem is that Christianity had a monopoly on religion. If you were religious, you were Christian. If you were not Christian, you were not religious. Christianity discredited Pagan religions by making people think they were more primitive. They persuaded people that the Pagans believed the statues of the gods to be the gods. Anybody familiar with Classical religion will know this is not true, but many people believed it. Ironically, this put Christianity into an evolutionist perspective, and so gains credit for Evolutionism. It enabled Frazer, in The Golden Bough, to argue that civilisation is an evolutionary progress from magical thinking, to religious thinking, ending in scientific thinking, implying that materialism is the truth. Christianity fell victim to its own propaganda.

The problem that Christianity has it that it cannot create an explanation of Creation by explaining that all organisms are manifestations of Divine Ideas falling into matter, and that the simpler organisms fell first to give an impression of evolution. This is consistent with the fossil record, but is not acceptable because of lack of understanding of Divine Ideas, and because Christians don't want a rival explanation to Genesis. The Christians have adapted to Evolutionism by declaring that the Bible is not literal truth, which leaves the question of Creation unresolved, and adds credence to materialism. Evolution is unquestioned, making the origin of life explained by materialism.

In the modern world, the material sciences are the only thing that encourages enquiring minds, except for a few who read philosophy, and a few who study the occult. We think that scientists are the most intelligent people, but do not expect clerics to be more than reasonably intelligent. We look to science for the answers. Most people do not believe that meditation can lead to a higher understanding. There has been a decline in the regard for science of late, and this is is accompanied by a decline in the regard for the intellect. We see that science harms the ecology and threatens the survival of life, and conclude that intellect harms the ecology. We see science and intellect as the same thing. People cannot find satisfaction for enquiring minds in religion. We are moving into the Age of Aquarius, when people will value knowledge above all. Religion must provide that if it is to survive. That requires that religion be based on the principle of Divine Ideas, which requires acceptance for the feminine nature of religion. Most people find that unacceptable. Better the end of the world.

May She be with you,

David.

david
Senior Member

Posts: 450

The Cause Of Materialism Sept 22, 2020 17:20:11 GMT

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Post by david on Sept 22, 2020 17:20:11 GMT

Dear friends,

Since posting my last message on this subject, other points occurred to me.

One is that I have to explain why the Industrial Revolution began in England, which is supposed to be a liberal country. There would have been more freedom of discussion, which seems to prove that it is rational stimulus which creates materialism. Enquiring minds would have been stimulated, but religion was still restrictive enough, and lacking in intellectual stimulus enough, to make enquiring minds look to material properties.

Another point is that resentment of religion would have made rationalists attracted to revolution, and this would make them more aggressive with intolerance of religion, creating the dogmatic rationalists of the French Revolution . This would have made rationalists open to demagoguery, with its simplistic and cliché arguments, making rationalism a superficial and self contradictory pose. It made materialism easier to understand because it enabled people to dismiss the irrational side of human nature as not needing to be understood. This led to Marxism with its dogma that only change in the social order is unimportant, and changes in human nature need not be considered. It has this which led to the restrictive nature of Communist countries, so we are back where we started: a society lacking scope for enquiring minds with punishment for enquiring.

A third principle is that relating to "the Clockmaker God". There are people in the modern world who say that God is beyond all conceptualisation. This is not just a Christian principle, but a problem for all patriarchal religion, because they cannot conceive of a male creative principle. If this is true, then there is no spiritual element in our consciousness, because it means there is no way God can impinge on human consciousness. It requires a concept of existence in which there is no relationship between the world and the Divine. The Clockmaker God gives such an explanation, and it means that nothing in the world or human nature can be explained by religious principles, but only by material ones.

There is also the matter of the Liberal Christian who respects the religious beliefs of non-Christians. This is the result of the influence of the Enlightenment rationalists, and proves that rationalism can have a good effect.

It's important to note that the Christian claim to spiritual superiority has difficulty with the cultural contribution of the Greek Pagans. This is an influence causing the belief that intellect and spirit are not related, so that we can believe that the Greeks had intellect, but the Christians have spirit. This enables people to admire Plato without it occurring to them that he undermines the Christian claim of spiritual superiority. Similarly, admiration for Homer's creative ability does not undermine that claim. To maintain belief in this superiority, we have to believe that our faculties are not related to the spirit, which logically must lead us to believe that we are not spiritual beings, and from that to believe that there is no such thing as the spirit.

It may be asked that, if intelligence is a spiritual quality, why was Aristotle so materialistic despite being so intelligent? The explanation is degeneration. He previously lived on a higher level of existence than ours, lost his spiritual awareness, but retained the mental qualities that went with it.

All this is the logical consequence of the first step in believing that the ability of women to give birth is not related to the spirit. That was the first step to Atheism. We did not make that step in one jump, because we wanted to hold onto belief in the spirit, but we have declined towards it. The Greeks wanted to hold onto the intellect, because they could not see how we can understand without it, but the Christians try to use faith as a means of distinguishing true from false. This leads to a devaluing of the intellect. An illustration of this principle is in The Imitation Of Christ by Thomas A Kempis:

"do not fight your thoughts, or attempt to answer any doubts that the Devil suggests: trust in God's word, believe His Saints and Prophets, and the wicked enemy will fly from you..... Go forward, then, with simple, undoubting faith,"

This quote is in the last two pages of the book, so you don't need top read the whole book to check it out. You can look for it in a large library, and, if they haven't got it, you can order it from the librarian. You will find further confirmation that Christians try to use faith to distinguish true from false in The Creed by Luke Timothy Johnson.

May She be with you,

David.