I have in recent months seen a couple of videos in which some naturalist or atheist or etc. agrees that the Bible is well written. I believe one should never concede this point and it is a point that the defenders of delusion like to insist on. I want to first point out why they insist on it, then I will defend the thesis that the book called book about a god named god and his son named son of god is not a well written book.
The reason theists, apologists etc. want it to be agreed that it is a well written book is because if it is not well written, it argues against the book's being divinely inspired. The argument they are trying to dodge is this one:
1 If the Bible was divinely inspired, it would be well written.
2 The Bible is not well written.
3 Therefore, the Bible is not divinely inspired.
The apologist/church rhetor hopes no one will ever assert the second premise above. I urge all enemies of authoritarian irrationality to assert the second premise above often and in front of all persons. Say it in front of your neighbor's kids. Give people permission to admit to themselves that the Bible is in fact a poorly written document. They know this from what little they have read from it, or had read to them. They know it is bad writing in their hearts, but everyone is trained to call the whole book beautiful and inspiring and deep and wise and so on. It is actually none of those things.
There are no beautiful stories in the bible and hardly any beautiful feelings. Most of the stories are ugly if not outright gross. The ones that are not exactly ugly or gross are still far from beautiful stories. Sentences in the bible can be quite difficult to read, and whole passages can be opaque due to this problem. Wooden dialogue, stilted action, very little character development, especially in the New Testament.
As for the cast of characters, well, the bible only discusses believers, church goers, sots of god, dupes of the divine, etc. All of the characters exhibit the same vice: being religiously worried all the time. There are no unworried, relaxed, easy-going religious characters. And when you think about it, such a character could not be a religious character at all. To be a religious character, one must be religiously earnest, religiously bothered, religiously driven. A regular person, who does not take religion more seriously than a ball game simply cannot be a religious character.
At the ancient Olympics, there were bull sacrifices in which the sacrificial bull was not entirely burned to a cinder, but instead cooked for a feast. When the parts were distributed, the priests got the legs and tails. The feasters got the best cuts of meat. That is the proper attitude toward religion. The Greek attitude. When the priest is overvalued, religion ceases to serve a public purpose and begins to serve ever more exclusively private interests. The Greeks seem to know that.
Making religion overly important, raising priests above scientists, mathematicians, statesmen, doctors, lawyers, poets and philosophers -- this is madness, and it is pure bible.
Though I was raised Catholic, I am, at age 63, no longer Catholic nor Christian. This happened in a pretty natural way, I would say. I attended Catholic elementary school for 6 years, then went to public schools after that. I was pretty much an atheist by the time I started junior high school. I didn't use that word though. I just knew I didn't believe the religion stuff anymore. I kept up appearances, but eventually it became clear to some of the people around me what was going on. And after that, by the end of high school, I was no longer going to church with the family.
I understand what it means to take the other's burden on oneself. Imagine if I was your boss and you got a parking ticket while working for me, and I paid the ticket for you. I understand how that would help you. You understand how that would benefit you. But if I killed myself instead, it would not pay your ticket. I don't see how it would help you at all, really. Somehow Jesus' suicide by cop is supposed to help us all, but I don't see it.
He supposedly took on all of our sins, but how much do those weigh? You couldn't trade all the sins in the world for a plug nickel.
Remember that despite dying for everyone's sins, Jesus sends the wicked into the lake of fire in the book of the apocalypse, so, what are we to make of that? Didn't Jesus already accept the divine punishment for all those sinners? Why the double harm? First Jesus dies over it, then souls get the lake of fire for it, and that makes two divine penalties for every sin worthy of damnation.
That is just one of thousands of intellectual problems in the bible. It isn't just the absurdity of believing in the magic creation of mankind by the saying of words, or the talking donkey story in the old testament, or the talking snake, or the flying wheel, or the resurrections and virgin births. No, the entire New Testament story is hokum. It is badly written pure myth. And the way it is thought about, that is, the way the churches have interpreted the NT, is even more hokey than the original book. All of the world's sins all at once for all time? What on earth are you smoking?
For me there is also a kind of moral absurdity that is everywhere in the bible, such as the fact that I am supposed to respect rather than revile Abraham, Jeptha and several genocidal kings in the old testament.
Another thing that bothers me is the fact that the churchlies and theologians and apologists and holy historians respect and revere, rather than hate, the Roman empire.
May I just say this: if you don't hate the Roman empire, isn't there something wrong with you? Slavery. Empire building (stealing other people's land). Ethnocide. Religicide. Endless war. Animal sacrifices. Human sacrifices. Gladiatorial murder for sport. Strict control over public speech. Strict class system. Forced religion.
The beginning of the end of ancient culture was Julius Caesar, who destroyed the republic and installed himself as autocrat. After less than a century of Emperors, the persecution of the stoics began under Nero. Philosophers were expelled from the city of Rome by Vespasian. Then they were expelled from Italy by Domitian, which forced Epictetus to move to Greece, which in turn forced a young Hadrian to go to Greece to study with him.
It is sad to see the republic turned into a kingdom by those pigs Julius, Augustus and Tiberius. I truly hate the arch criminal Julius Caesar, but that does not mean I love the republic against which Hannibal fought. No, I hate that too. I especially love to hate Emperor Justinian in particular. Justinian is a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church. I also very much hate the wife and son killer, Emperor Constantine, another murderer made a saint by the Eastern church. His mother is a saint in the Roman Catholic church. They are quite a pair to despise, no? Mother and son saints in two different churches? Mother and the son who killed his wife and child, and who chose Christianity because the other priesthoods would not offer expiation for the sin? I figure his mom was just as evil as he was.
So again let me point out that I was raised Catholic. What do I think of the Catholic church? I would like to say something nice, but I just can't really. I think it is a crime of some kind, this church.
The allegedly universal church came into being through a crime against humanity known as the destruction of paganism. This was an over 300 year long murderous and violent suppression of indigenous cultures throughout the empire. It was religicide, it was ethnocide, and it was a project of the imperial office, that is, of the emperors. It did not come up to the emperor from his governors and senators and consuls. No, it went down to them from the imperial office. Christianity was forced on the empire by Constantine and all of the emperors, except Julian, who came after him. This massive crime against humanity began around 313 and ran on for centuries. The Christians were still forcing conversions on newly discovered pagans in the 800s.
After the western Roman empire disappeared, the Roman Catholic church (and, after 1064, an Eastern version of it) continued the project of threatening, torturing and murdering heretics.
The Crusades (1096-1291) were a crime against humanity.
The Inquisition (1231-1908) was a crime against humanity. The last execution of a heretic by the Roman inquisition was in 1761. It was six years earlier, in 1755 that the Roman office of the inquisition put Casanova on trial for spreading libertine ideas, owning forbidden books, and practicing magic. The last execution by the Spanish Inquisition was in 1826. The office of the Spanish Inquisition was officially shut down by the Spanish crown in 1834. Napoleon abolished the French office in 1808, though it had become ineffective in the revolution of 1789 when the church lost its judicial powers. However, as recently as 1858 the office of the Roman Inquisition kidnapped a Jewish child who had allegedly been secretly baptized. This, they pretend, made the child a Christian and Christians cannot be raised by non-Christians according to some stupid papal law. The pope refused to return the child, who grew up to become a priest. The Roman office of the inquisition was converted to an office called Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1908. This is the office that still to this day harasses liberal theologians and tries to ban books. So, the ancient Roman impulse to resort to crime against opponents dies hard, it dies very hard. There is still an office for goading and depriving the opposition.
And it is easy to argue that those are not the only great crimes that the church has committed. The Malleus Maleficarum(Hammer of Witches) was published in 1486 by an official church inquisitor. It became the handbook for witch hunts and witch trials all over Europe for three centuries. The last witch trial and execution was in the 1780s. The witch trials in England and the Holy Roman Empire are not to be confused with the inquisition, which was an office of the Catholic church licensed to kidnap, imprison, maim and kill heretics. Witch trials, such as those in America, were not exclusively a Catholic thing. Anglicans, Lutherans and other sects joined in, with most of them using the Malleus as their manual.
During the middle ages, the Catholic church depicted Jews as heretics in league with the devil. This fueled the pogroms which the church occasionally denounced. There was an order from the pope to protect Jews from attacks after the disaster of the fourth crusade, in which Jews were attacked indiscriminately. There was a pope who denounced the idea that Jews were Christ killers. But this was pretty weak tea from Rome. The rights of Jews to live free of Christian harassment is not something the Catholic church recognizes.
The Church was two faced and ineffective on the matter of the treatment of indigenous peoples in the Americas in the 1500s and after. Remember 1492, when Isabella of Spain gave Columbus ships to sail the ocean blue? She also expelled the Jews from Spain in 1492. It was a big year for the holy queen. The church never denounced the expulsion of the Jews, and of course it never denounced the robbery of the Incas by Spain's Catholics. It also did not object to the enslavement of natives in the Americas. Instead they opened offices of the Inquisition in Mexico City and Peru.
The Catholic Church owned slaves from the Roman era until the 1840s --as many as 1400 years.* The Catholic church did not condemn the slave trade until 1839. Jesus explicitly preaches slavery, as does the old testament, so, it was a long time coming. American Jesuits sold off their last slaves sometime after 1840 (they did not simply emancipate them). Two decades later, the Catholic church declared itself officially neutral during the American civil war (1860-65). Meanwhile, the pope wrote a letter to Jefferson Davis, president of the confederacy, recognizing his new nation. I find the content of this paragraph utterly unforgivable.
Imagine what a better world this would have been if one of the ten commandments had abolished slavery! If god actually contacted some iron age tribe, why didn't he abolish slavery, or teach hygiene?
In the 20th century, a pope signed the infamous Concordat with Hitler's Germany, giving the church a tithe, a tenth, of the taxes paid by German Catholics, who represented around a third of the nation. So it was on the order of a tenth of a third of taxes collected by the Nazis that went to the Roman Catholic church to buy its silence, support and complicity. Hitler's birthdays were celebrated in all Catholic and Lutheran pulpits throughout the Reich.
The holocaust was, of course, a crime against humanity perpetrated by Christians of assorted denominations, including plenty of Catholics.
Today the Catholic church in America is a backward, Trumpist outfit, working to take away women's rights and ban books. They want to fight gays and queers and trannies and abortion, but not corporate polluters, pedos, rapists or fascists. Them they want to put in the white house.
The church is still paying out millions to children who have been sexually abused by its priests, and it still does not fully cooperate with communities on the matter of outing abusers and getting them permanently away from children. In the US they have paid out over $3 billion now. There are cases all over the world though. In France, there are estimates of 300k victims. Because the cases are in several languages and nations, it is difficult to find a full accounting of all the damage so far.
Meanwhile, in Africa, the Catholic Church remains the biggest obstacle to the use of condoms to prevent the transmission of aids.
It is a crime, this church. Its history is a history of the most abject moral failure, the most total moral abandonment! The pope is no better than Atilla the Hun or Genghis Khan.
Here in the USA our jails are full of Christians. The hoodlums and bigots who attacked the American Capitol on Jan 6, 2021, were Christians. Christians did America's lynching too. The KKK is a Christian outfit. Christians did the Indian killing, the western slaving, the holocaust, the pogroms, the witch murders, the Inquisition, the Crusades and the slow, centuries-long torture-killing of paganism. Christian inhumanity, Christian bigotry, Christian violence, Christian crimes against humanity.
Xns come in every variety. No general rule about them can be set up. They are not particularly good or bad, talented or dull, etc. Christianity started out as a veil for evil and it remains a veil for evil to this day. I do not believe all Christians are evil. No, there are good and bad people in every avenue. There are good and bad people in sports, in the arts, in public service and in every industry. That is just human nature. There are plenty of nice people going to church. There are also rotten people going to church. To deny this is to confess total ignorance about society. The rotten people at church are there for the veil effect, the good people provide it. That is how it has always worked, and the whole scheme still works, it just has lots of competitors today.
I dare you to scrutinize Christian history looking for happiness. The church is not about happiness, they do not even study it. After the long rule of religious ignorance in the west, happiness itself had to be reconquered by enlightenment, along with science and scholarship. We are still reconquering happiness today. People are afraid to be happy. They think its a sin.
Religion is a costly enterprise that will squander anything and everything for no gain. It serves the interest of the priest/church and no other. Religion is a self-perpetuating game in which all doctrine, all practice, and all statements are intended to protect and strengthen victimizers at the expense of their victims. This goes for monotheism as well as polytheism and Buddhism -- the main parts of religion are the reward of priests/elites and the exploitation of believers/dupes.
Of all arts, the art of exploiting religious feeling is the most worked out and subtle art in the human arsenal. Procession, recession, presentation, adoration, oratory, music, dance, magic, color, light, darkness, architecture, image, text -- religion uses it all. By the time the Roman Empire was toying with Christianity, the priestly charade had been working for over 3 thousand years. Christianity represents the harvest of the ancient world in precisely that area, the harvest of at least three millennia of practice and repetition in the subtlest of elite arts.
From 313 onward, however, it was brute force that protected and promoted it. Every night, all over the empire, so-called monks formed gangs and broke into the homes of well to do pagans. They destroyed all of their pagan materials, statues, images, symbols, books, etc. Some of these people had extensive holdings, meaning they had dozens of statues if not hundreds. They had grottos and shrines on their properties. They had paintings and dinnerware with motifs that recall myths. They had writing too. All of it was destroyed. People all over the empire lived in fear of these mobs of "monks" for around three hundred years.
The mobs only destroyed sacred buildings. They did not destroy the Parthenon in Athens because it was not a temple. But the mobs were illiterate. When it came to written words, they could not be expected to discern what the writings were about. So, they simply destroyed all of a homeowner's written holdings. Whether it was a medical text, a ship-building plan, a love letter, or a poem to Dionysus did not matter. The mobs burned the written word indiscriminately. Because they systematically raided every pagan property, they, and the laws they operated under and the terror of the times, managed to burn the national literatures of three continents.
After 300 years of systemic crime against their enemies, Christian barbarians ruled the ashes of the ancient world. Literacy and craft were dead. Serfdom awaited the masses, ignorance and superstition were everywhere, but there was one church, one emperor, one god. Yeuch. The years of Justinian and the dark ages that soon followed were abysmal times to be alive.
The destruction of the ancient world, the destruction of everyone else's religion, the destruction of other people's possessions in the name of your filthy, barbaric superstitions? Your stupid religion gives you the right to break into your neighbor's house and smash their possessions because their gods are demons and yours is not? No, sorry, your god is the demon. Fuck Jesus with a broomstick!
If I had a religion, it would not authorize violence, slavery, genocide or religicide.
If your religion is Christianity, then your religion not only authorizes but practices those things.
If your church is the Catholic church and you live in America, your church probably needs to be de-nazified.
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* How long the church owned slaves depend on its time of origin.
When did the Catholic Church actually begin? The church likes to lie about this, so look into it critically and independently.
If by Catholic church you mean early Christianity, then it begins in the 1st century with the apostles, but this really does not resemble the Catholic church.
If by Catholic church you mean a heirarchical institution based in Rome with a pope and canon law, you are talking about something that forms gradually between 313 and the 800s, and becomes fully distinct by 1054.
If by Catholic church you mean the fully developed system of papal supremacy and doctrine, it takes this full shape between 1054 and 1500.
Almost every Catholic I have ever known answers the question as to when the Catholic church began by saying it starts with Peter in Rome, that he is the first pope, and so on. Don't believe any of that. There were no popes at that time, and no bishops of Rome either. It was the the bishop of Rome known as Victor I, in the 190's, who first tried to impose his decision on other churches. He tried to impose uniformity on the date of Easter. His effort failed because the other bishops ignored him and churches continued to celebrate Easter on various dates. So, if a central authority over many churches is required as a criterion for saying that the Catholic church existed, it did not exist in the time of Victor I, and so the Catholic church did not yet exist. Constantine legalized Christianity in 313 and convened the council of Nicea in 325, but this was an imperial enterprise, not a papal one. The bishop of Rome known as Damasus I, in the 360's, pushed an idea called Roman Supremacy, which upped the status of the bishop of Rome. The Catholic church still calls Victor I and Damasus I popes, but they were no such thing. With the fall of the western Roman empire in the 470's, the bishop of Rome became notably more important -- the only authority figure still standing in the west. In the 590's, a bishop of Rome known as Gregory I expanded his office to include political activity. He too is not really a pope yet, but the church pretends he is. The bishop of Rome gained temporal power in central Italy only in the 700's. And when the great east-west schism came in 1054, the bishop of Rome got free of the Byzantine emperors in Constantinople, and the independent pope was finally at hand. What we think of as a pope, namely a man at the head of a world wide church that is independent of all governments, only comes into existence then.
What is important to notice is that the church only gets its chance to lead when the western emperors disappear, and it gains its strength as more and more of the old pagan world is destroyed.
That the Catholic church was born out of the destruction of paganism is pretty undeniable. What we know as Christianity has its roots in Roman cruelty and tyranny.
The ms is not fully legible, but notice the final lines: "before Jesus Christ bend all knees: the heavenly ones, the earthly and the subterranean, and every tongue confess (to Jesus Christ)". This is pure totalitarianism, and it comes from 40 years before the office of the emperor of Rome took the Jesus cult under its protection in 313, which began the process of trying to force every knee in the empire to bend to the one god.
Me: I think that AI ought to be applied to the new testament and Josephus to see if he wrote parts of the new testament. I sometimes suspect that he did. Could there be an AI application created to test that hypothesis
ChatGPT said:
Yes, AI could certainly be applied to test the hypothesis that Josephus contributed to parts of the New Testament. Here's how such an AI application could be created and what it would involve:
1. Collecting Textual Data
Corpus of Josephus's Writings: Gather a comprehensive and digitized version of Josephus's works, including The Jewish War, Antiquities of the Jews, and his other writings.
Corpus of New Testament Texts: Include all books of the New Testament in Greek and possibly other languages for cross-linguistic analysis.
2. Stylometric Analysis
Stylometry involves analyzing linguistic and stylistic features to identify authorship. AI models could:
Detect patterns in vocabulary usage, sentence structure, and syntax unique to Josephus.
Compare these patterns with those found in various books or passages of the New Testament.
Features to Analyze:
Word frequency and choice.
Sentence length and complexity.
Use of rhetorical devices, idioms, and phrases.
3. Semantic and Thematic Analysis
Content Comparison: AI could identify parallels between the themes and topics Josephus covers (e.g., Jewish history, Roman politics) and the narrative content or theological messages in the New Testament.
Shared Historical Context: Look for references to events, cultural attitudes, or political dynamics in the New Testament that overlap with Josephus's historical framework.
4. Machine Learning Models
Supervised Learning: Train a model on known works of Josephus and other authors from the same period. Then test the model on New Testament texts to predict authorship likelihood.
Unsupervised Learning: Use clustering techniques to see if certain New Testament texts naturally group stylistically with Josephus’s works.
5. Cross-validation with External Data
Comparative Analysis: Compare Josephus and the New Testament against other known contemporary writings to control for shared cultural and linguistic norms of the period.
Historical and Source Criticism: Combine AI results with scholarly insights on historical plausibility.
6. Challenges
Collaborative Authorship: The New Testament may have multiple authors or editors, complicating single-author attribution.
Shared Literary Conventions: Josephus and New Testament writers shared the same cultural and linguistic environment, which could lead to coincidental similarities.
Bias in AI Models: Training data must be carefully selected to avoid introducing biases or circular reasoning.
7. Outputs
AI could produce:
Authorship Probabilities: Likelihood scores for specific passages being written by Josephus.
Similarity Metrics: Quantitative measures of stylistic and thematic resemblance.
Visualization: Graphs or clustering diagrams showing textual relationships.
Feasibility
Such an AI application is feasible and would offer new insights into authorship questions. It would require collaboration between:
Computer Scientists: For model development and implementation.
Biblical Scholars and Historians: For expertise in source criticism and historical context.
Linguists: To ensure accurate textual analysis.
This approach could validate or challenge traditional hypotheses about the composition of the New Testament, shedding light on how its texts emerged in their historical context.
Me: Joseph Atwill seems to think that Josephus' Jewish Wars book has passages that mirror events in the gospel of Mark. Can AI test that?
ChatGPT said:
Joseph Atwill's hypothesis, presented in his book Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus, argues that the Gospels, particularly the Gospel of Mark, were crafted as Roman propaganda and intentionally echo events described in Josephus's The Jewish War. Atwill suggests these parallels are deliberate, implying a shared authorship or influence, possibly by Josephus himself or someone familiar with his work. Here's an outline of this argument and how it might be tested:
1. Atwill’s Key Claims
Mirroring of Events: Specific events in Mark seem to parallel episodes in The Jewish War. For instance:
The destruction of Jerusalem is prophesied by Jesus and described in detail by Josephus.
Certain parables or teachings of Jesus, such as those about the "end times," resemble Josephus’s depictions of real historical events during the Jewish-Roman War.
Satirical Undertones: Atwill argues that some Gospel passages are ironic or satirical commentaries on Jewish resistance, subtly mocking Jewish beliefs and leaders while promoting Roman authority.
Imperial Propaganda: The Gospels, under this view, are tools to pacify Jewish populations by promoting a messianic figure who preaches submission to Roman rule.
2. Analyzing the Hypothesis
AI Applications for Testing Parallels
Textual Overlap Detection: Use AI to systematically identify similar phrases, motifs, and narrative structures between Mark and The Jewish War.
Example: Look for thematic parallels in battles, sieges, or portrayals of leaders.
Narrative Mapping: Compare story arcs, key events, and character roles in both texts to find structural correspondences.
Sentiment Analysis: Assess whether passages that seem similar also carry the same tone, rhetorical function, or underlying message (e.g., satire, critique, or prophecy).
Historical Contextual Analysis
Dating the Texts: Determine if the Gospel of Mark was written after Josephus's works (typically dated around 75 CE), which would make influence plausible.
Audience and Purpose: Analyze whether Mark’s intended audience and themes align with Roman political goals of pacifying or re-educating Jewish populations after the war.
3. Challenges to Atwill’s Hypothesis
Coincidental Parallels: Both texts are set in a shared cultural and historical context, so some similarities might naturally arise without direct borrowing.
Theological vs. Historical Intent: Mark is primarily a theological work, while Josephus’s The Jewish War is historical. Alignments may be unintentional or symbolic rather than conspiratorial.
Lack of Scholarly Consensus: Atwill’s theory is widely regarded as fringe within mainstream biblical studies. Critics argue that it overstates connections and overlooks the diversity of early Christian traditions.
4. Testing the Hypothesis with AI
To rigorously test Atwill's claims:
Corpus Comparison:
Create a dataset of passages from The Jewish War and the Gospel of Mark.
Use natural language processing (NLP) tools to identify shared vocabulary, sentence structures, and narrative elements.
Motif Analysis:
Identify recurring themes, such as destruction, prophecy, leadership, and rebellion.
Use AI to classify these themes and measure their frequency and significance in both texts.
Contextual Verification:
Examine whether the parallels are unique to Josephus and Mark or appear in other contemporary texts (e.g., the Dead Sea Scrolls, other Gospels).
Stylistic Profiling:
Use stylometric techniques to detect whether Josephus’s distinctive writing style appears in the Gospel of Mark.
5. The Results
If AI finds substantial, consistent, and unique parallels, this would strengthen the case for some level of influence or shared authorship. However, such results would need careful interpretation to distinguish between direct borrowing, cultural overlap, and coincidental similarities.
Testing Atwill's hypothesis with AI could provide a fascinating exploration of ancient texts but would also need to be combined with traditional historical-critical methods to produce a nuanced conclusion.
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I'm not going to comment on this. I'm 63 years old. I hope somebody does this kind of thing some day.
Below is the actual response to my actual question to ChatGPT, followed by brief comments. You can look at this and decide for yourself whether the American Republican party wants totalitarianism or mere authoritarianism.
Is authoritarianism the same as totalitarianism?
ChatGPT said:
Authoritarianism and totalitarianism are related but distinct concepts in political science. Both refer to systems of governance that concentrate power in the hands of a leader or a small group, but they differ in the extent and manner of control they exert over society.
Authoritarianism:
Authoritarianism is a form of government characterized by strong central power and limited political freedoms. Key features include:
Centralized Control: Power is concentrated in a single leader or a small group.
Limited Political Pluralism: Political opposition is often restricted or suppressed.
Control Over Civil Society: Some control over the media, public discourse, and civil society, but not total.
Limited Political Participation: Citizen participation in politics is restricted; elections, if they exist, are often not free or fair.
Rule by Law: The government operates under a framework of laws, but these laws may be manipulated to maintain control.
Examples of authoritarian regimes include various military juntas, absolute monarchies, and one-party states.
Totalitarianism:
Totalitarianism is an extreme form of authoritarianism that seeks to control every aspect of public and private life. Key features include:
Total Control Over Society: The government seeks to dominate all aspects of life, including the economy, education, art, science, private life, and morals of citizens.
Ideological Uniformity: The regime promotes an official ideology that is intended to penetrate and control all aspects of society and individual life.
Extensive Use of Propaganda: The state uses mass media, propaganda, and misinformation to control public opinion and behavior.
State Terror and Repression: Widespread use of terror, secret police, and surveillance to eliminate opposition and enforce conformity.
Centralized Economy: The government often controls or heavily regulates the economy to achieve its goals.
Examples of totalitarian regimes include Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler, the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, and North Korea under the Kim dynasty.
Differences:
Scope of Control: Authoritarian regimes exercise broad but not total control, often allowing some personal freedoms and private enterprise, while totalitarian regimes seek to control every aspect of life.
Use of Ideology: Totalitarian regimes rely heavily on an official ideology to legitimize their rule and mobilize the populace, whereas authoritarian regimes may or may not have a strong ideological component.
Level of Repression: Totalitarian regimes employ more extensive and systematic repression and surveillance to maintain control, often using state terror as a tool.
Similarities:
Concentration of Power: Both systems centralize power in the hands of a few.
Suppression of Political Opposition: Both seek to suppress political dissent and limit political freedoms.
Lack of Democratic Processes: Both lack free and fair elections and restrict political participation.
Understanding these distinctions is crucial for analyzing different political systems and their impacts on societies.
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So there you have it. It's a nice response, and one that a person can use and remember. I'm sure there are theorists with finer things to say. This is not an exhaustive list of distinguishing marks. But it allows one to ask intelligent questions about what is going on around us in the USA.
Do the MAGA Republicans want the more granular level of control implied by totalitarianism, or do they just want arbitrary power that they can keep forever?
In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
About the worst and most fruitless idea humanity ever had is the idea of the gods. Of course, religion has convinced most people that the gods were one of the best ideas humans ever had.
Monotheism has this way of reversing values. Nietzsche wrote about it. Whatever the world finds good, religion will eventually demean. Whatever the world reviles, religion finds a way to redeem. Shall we look at some examples together?
Death. What could be of less importance to us than what happens after we die? Predictably, the churches insist that the most important consideration in life is what happens after we die.
The Individual. Religion does not recognize your right to privacy, or your right to yourself, to "autonomy". Religion has its source of glory and power in death, not in life -- in the fear of death, in mummery about death, in fake wisdom about death, in fake knowledge about death. Religion and death are inseparable. Your death is not something religion fears, in fact, it is something religion can quickly use to glorify itself.
Orgasms. The world finds them to be pleasant and very good. Religion does not care about pleasure, and deems orgasms bad, insignificant, maybe even subhuman.
Erections. All men know they feel good. Some folks find them attractive. Religion reviles erections, and men all over the world feel guilty about this natural source of pleasure and pride. Those who find them attractive are ashamed of their taste.
Sex. The most satisfying part of life has to be crimped and clipped and hushed and pushed way to the back of every mind so far as the church is concerned. What life teaches is its foundation, and which it shows us is life's greatest pleasure, the very wine of wines, has to be reviled and restricted to a narrow, moralistic baby-maker's schedule by the tyrannical church. Everything sexual that does not aim at procreation is reviled.
Women. Over half of humanity is female, and that is good. The female differs from the male, and that is also good. But the church does not see things that way. Women are harder to control than men, and that too is good. But the church disagrees with the world at large on this too. Women must be demeaned, stopped, stunted, hushed and neglected so far as religion is concerned with them at all.
Love. Something that comes in myriad forms and fills hearts in thousands of different ways is reduced by the church to a narrow path from hello to marriage. Anything that veers from the path is slandered and reviled. Brief affairs, friends with benefits, paramours, lovers, serious but never going to marry, trying it out for a while -- such relationships are of no interest to the church. Every encounter of the heart is either trash or a step on the ladder to marriage. Nothing else can be recognized or discussed even though our hearts and minds and all of the arts show us there are hundreds of things to be discussed here.
Church/Worship. There is almost nothing in ordinary daily life that is worse than sitting in church. In fact, almost everything you can think of is better than church. Cleaning the garage is better than church. So is a root canal. At least they are not boring or preachy. My dentist might harbor iron age beliefs, but he probably won't preach them at me. That alone makes him or her better than the Christian cleric. However, the church holds that there is nothing better or more important than church, and they want to make that evaluation imperative. To that end they condemn everything that competes with church. Sport, wealth, fame, career, self-discovery, health, love, sleeping late -- you name it. If it competes with church for attention or pocket change, the church throws shade on it.
The State. Religion does not recognize the authority of the state, and thinks instead that the state has to come to religion for legitimacy. Religion recognizes no authority other than itself, and when it is strong enough it will supplant the state.
For most of history, other cults are tolerated and interpreted favorably by the priests of a home cult. For example, if we have a temple of a goddess of fertility, and a temple for a sea god is built nearby, the priesthood of the goddess will for the most part look favorably on the sea god and his cult, and the new sea god ministry will look favorably on the goddess cult and its ministers. This is the normal way things go. A cult is strengthened by the existence of other cults.
Occasionally, however, a cult arises that looks unfavorably on another cult, or on several of them, or on all of them. Wherever a cult arises that looks at all other cults unfavorably, a nascent monotheism is afoot. It should be nipped in the bud immediately. It is a mistake for the other cults to allow this one cult to thrive because its reason for existence is to discard other gods and to appropriate the authority and glamor of their cults. The priesthood of a monotheism is a mortal threat to the priesthoods of all other cults. They should always be eliminated, but in Rome, fascination with danger was endemic, and nascent monotheisms grew. Sol Invictus, Mithras, Jesus -- all of them were mortal threats not only to the cults of Jupiter and Minerva, but also to the authority of the state.
Science. The greatest cultural achievement of mankind is the greatest threat to the priest's power. So, of course, the church hates and reviles science. One way they attack science is to lie about its foundations. Christian apologists like to claim that science could only get going because of religion. But religion is falsehoods all the way through, and a crucial part of science is simply the rooting out and rejection of falsehood. There is no way that something as false and partial and narrow as religion could be the foundation for something far broader, truer and more impartial. Religion as a foundation of science is like lies as a foundation of honesty, or murder as a foundation of love. It just ain't so. Religion came into the world long after learning was fully established.
Entertainment/culture/art. People spend an inordinate amount of time with the arts these days. In the past, one did not see drama or hear music unless it was done live. A hundred years into the era of recorded sound, people commonly spend the bulk of their free time with TV drama, movies, music, writing and images. The more the burden of work has been reduced, the more entertainment with art has increased to the point now that some people feel incomplete without music or visuals. Art is good sayeth the people. Art is good sayeth the advertisers. Art is good sayeth the cinemas and dance halls. What say the churches? "Art that does not promote our world view is bad. Art that does not moralize as we wish is bad. Art that does not obey the priest is bad." Of course, they have little choice but to hate the freedom of art. Like science, independent art is a huge threat to the power of priests.
Self-delusion. Much ink and wood pulp have been devoted to the topic of self-deception since the enlightenment. It is one of the greatest enemies of progress and a complete stop to self-improvement. But despite this, the churches insist on faith, that is, on belief without reasons, a form of self-deception, as the measure of a soul and the very foundation of moral goodness.
The Hero. Jesus' main claim to fame is his lineage, and his entire life is devoted to what his father wants, unto the point of dying as a human sacrifice because his daddy wants him to. There is nothing heroic in failing to separate from the parent. There is nothing heroic in a man of thirty odd years who blindly does whatever his father wants. There can be nothing heroic in such an extreme degree of subordination. While the acts and sayings of Jesus are another matter, there is no denying that the raison d'etra for Jesus is to glorify daddy. All the life of Jesus can teach is obedience. It has no other lesson in it. There is nothing heroic (or moral) in that teaching.
Morality. Nature provides the powers of reasoning about which our monkey brains are sometimes a little too proud. It also provides plenty of morally significant data and feelings (such as pleasure, pain, desire, aversion, embarrassment, pride, shame, etc.). Moral teachings surely go back much further than any of the holy books or scriptures that are believed in today. The reason to accept this proposition is that humans have interests, but they also have the power to make very general, rule like statements. Thus we can expect them to make general, rule like statements that address their interests. You can also expect them to have done this throughout the ages that preceded the existence of religious texts (i.e. prior to the bronze age). Hence, morality (general moral rule making) is a natural product of human life, and far older than religion or worship of any kind.
Religion views morality much differently. They tend to treat humanity as too inferior a race to have thought up any useful moral rules on our own. Our morality must therefore have come from a superior source, something super human must be its origin.
Christians like to pretend that all of morality is perfectly condensed in a single statement. Church writers have filled many, many volumes with debates on moral rules, so we know that the churches do not officially believe that all of morality can be reduced to the imperative to love your fellows as you would have them love you. But the church is perfectly satisfied letting its sheep believe that all of morality can somehow be found in that one remark. The church is all about cultivating believers in miracles, you know. And if all of morality could in fact be captured in a few words, would that not be miraculous? So, let 'em believe, thinks the priest.
When they are forced to face moral reality, the Christian moralist resorts to divine command theory, a version of deontology. According to this view, as long as there is a divine command relevant to your conduct, you should follow that command. Where a divine command is lacking, there can be no sin/immorality because immorality just means violating a divine command, so far as these theorists are concerned.
Now, it is questionable whether there is a divine command against rape. Also against lying. Also against insider trading. Also against cloning humans. Also against AI generated deep fakes. Holy books say nothing about stem cells, intellectual property, brain surgery, computers or microplastics. Thus divine command theory seems a rather threadbare moral system on the one hand. On the other hand, there clearly are divine commands in the holy books that no one intends to follow, and which, in fact, many believers find morally wrong (i.e., immoral). A good example of this is the bible's divine command to stone to death all disobedient children. Another is the divine command to stone to death all brides who are not virgins. Another is the divine command to abort all fetuses that were conceived in adultery. Another is the divine command to completely disallow female teachers ("Suffer not a woman to teach" preaches the mean old clod known as St Paul). Another is the divine command to not marry a divorced woman (Jesus preaches that this is adultery). Now if a believer finds one of these views morally repugnant, to what biblical rule are they appealing? They must be relying on their innate moral sense, not on what they are reading.
Thus, divine command theory is simply inadequate. There are not enough commands in ancient lore about the gods to govern modern life, and there are too many divine commands in that lore that are quite simply morally wrong. Divine command theory cannot explain the wrongness of a divine command, but modern approaches to morality can.
In the end, divine command theorists do not fully believe in divine command theory. They believe in something else, which they rely on to select from among the the set of all divine commands a smaller set which they treat as authoritative. This something else is their actual morality in a very important sense, and they don't get that morality from their allegedly authoritative text. There is no remark in the bible, for example, telling us to reject St Paul's lesson on women as teachers, nor a sentence advising us to reject Jesus' harsh view of divorced women. Something outside the text drives us to it.
This is what religion does, it turns morality backward. Rather than rely on ourselves, which is the source of morality, they want us to rely on a book. And when the book proves inadequate, we are supposed to pretend that the adequate sounding parts are all there is to morality, and that these preferred scraps of the book cover all relevant moral problems.
Moral blindness has no greater friend than religion.
For more thoughts on the inadequacy of biblical morality, I recommend this video.
On the foolishness of religion and of religious morality, I recommend this one with Julia Sweeney.
My earlier post on this topic has generated some questions, so, I am going to explain this matter again, and this time I will explain it like my readers are kindergarteners.
"Proving a negative" means giving compelling reasons to accept a negative proposition. Negative propositions are the ones that include negations in them, such as the words not and no. In categorical logic we distinguish four proposition types, A, E, I and O.
A propositions are universal and affirmative: All S is P.
E propositions are universal and negative: No S is P.
I propositions are particular and affirmative: Some S is P.
O propositions are particular and negative: Some S is not P.
One way to define what we mean by "proving a negative" is based on these proposition types. We could say that proving a negative means providing compelling reasons to accept a proposition of either the O or E variety.
It is often rather easy to think up ways to provide compelling reasons for accepting O type propositions. Here are some examples.
Some men are not happy.
Some birds are not brown.
Some clubs are not participating.
Some people are not old.
Compelling reasons to accept one of these propositions merely require pointing out examples that support the assertion, such as a creature that is definitely a bird and which is also any color except brown, or at least one man who is unhappy, etc.
Finding compelling reasons to accept a statement of the E variety is another matter. These statements deny that there are any shared members between two classes. For example:
No fish are birds.
No man is an island.
Nobody is happy.
Nothing is wrong.
To deny one of these statements is much easier than proving one. The denials of E propositions are always propositions of the I variety. One would assert that there is at least one fish that is also a bird, that there is a man who is also an island, that there is some person who is happy, and finally that there is at least one thing that is wrong.
But giving good reasons to accept an E proposition is another matter. Am I supposed to pick up every fish and examine it to make sure it is not a bird? Or should I check every bird to make sure it is not a fish? Do I have to check every island to make sure it is not a man?
The trouble here has to do with universality, not with negation. The proposition that all bachelors are unmarried cannot be demonstrated by examining all bachelors, because that is impractical. On the other hand, the meaning of the word bachelor is simply an unmarried male. So, it would follow that when the term is used with that meaning, all members of the set of bachelors are in fact unmarried. So, we can know about the truth of universal propositions, at least sometimes, by knowing about the meaning of the words they employ.
That would be at least one way to give good reasons for accepting an E proposition. If you know enough about the meaning of words like fish and bird, you can demonstrate convincingly that no fish is a bird just by examining their definitions.
Another way is by differentiating qualities. For example, you say "All fish have gills, but no birds have gills, therefore no fish is a bird". If gills are in fact crucial to counting as a fish, then not having gills would prove that something is not a fish. Similarly, if having human DNA is crucial to being human, then you can prove that no robot is human by arguing that all humans have human DNA, but no robots have human DNA, therefore, no robots are human.
The argument form here is either EAE or AEE. That is, from two universal propositions, one of which is an A and the other an E proposition, you can validly derive a universal negative proposition, that is, an E proposition.
But if we can validly derive E propositions, then we must be able to prove negatives. I have defined "proving a negative" as giving compelling reasons to accept a negative proposition. Valid deductions are compelling reasons, in fact, they are among the most compelling kinds of reasons known to human minds.
Because we can in fact give compelling reasons to accept some E propositions, it is false to say that "you cannot prove a negative". That irritating and ignorant sentence should be rejected by all thinking beings. Of course you can prove a negative. You can prove that no robot is human. You can prove that no bird is a fish. You can also disprove gods by arguing that all living things are mortal, but no gods are mortal, therefore no gods are living things.
So, one way to prove a negative is by using AEE or EAE deductions.
Another way to prove a negative is called modus tollens. The insight behind this type of argument is that false consequences falsify, or that all propositions with false consequences are false. The scheme of the reasoning is this:
If P, then Q
Not Q
Therefore, not P
In this scheme, variables stand for whole propositions. So the argument asserts that if the first proposition (P) is true, the second one (Q) would be. But the second premise asserts that proposition Q is not true, and the argument concludes that therefore neither is proposition P.
To explain this let us start small and discuss what we mean when we say that propositions have consequences. By a proposition's consequences we mean that if a proposition is true, certain other propositions have to be true as well. For example, if the proposition that Peter is in Berlin is true, then the proposition that Peter is in Paris cannot be true, and the proposition that Peter is not in Paris must be true. In addition, the proposition that Peter is not in London must be true, along with the proposition that Peter is not in New York, etc. These are real consequences that follow from the truth of a single proposition. Because you know the names of hundreds of places, you can think up hundreds of sentences that must be true if the statement that Peter is in Berlin is true.
The truth of a proposition forces other propositions to be true or false. In particular, if a proposition is true, then its denial has to be false. For example, if Zebras are mammals is true, then "Zebras are not mammals" has to be false. And if the proposition that John Elway won two superbowls is true, then the proposition that "John Elway won zero superbowls" has to be false, while the statement that "it is not the case that Elway won zero superbowls" is true.
Now let's talk about false consequences. I've just said that one of the consequences of a proposition's being true is that assorted other propositions have to be true while others have to be false.
When we say that false consequences falsify we mean something specific: we mean that a consequence that should be true turns out to be false. When this happens, the proposition being tested is falsified. Let's look at an example.
Someone says John Elway won five superbowls. If this statement was true, records of superbowls would show it. But the records do not show it. They show that Elway played in five superbowls, but lost three of them. He won two. Again, if he had won five, records would show that he won five. More explicitly, if the proposition that he won five was true, then the proposition that the records show he won five would also be true. But it is not. Therefore, the consequence is false, and the initial proposition is falsified. Let's look at the scheme for all of this.
If Elway won five superbowls (P), then the records show him winning five (Q).
The records do not show him winning five. (not Q)
Therefore, Elway did not win five superbowls. (not P)
What we mean when we say that "false consequences falsify" is that when a consequence that should be true fails to be true, the proposition it is a consequence of has been falsified. When we say that "all statements with false consequences are false," we mean that when the truth of P necessitates the truth of Q, and Q fails to be true, P has been falsified. In other words, we mean modus tollens. A better way to put it is that "all propositions with false consequences are false" is a beautiful miniaturization of modus tollens.
It is thought that all instances of disproof can be represented as uses of modus tollens reasoning.
Now, if you are an atheist like me, you might want to use one or more of these forms of reasoning to throw hard balls across the theist's plate. This is not so much to change the theist's mind, as to give your audience permission to change theirs. Try proving a negative by using modus tollens:
If the bible was inspired by a god, it would be an extremely well written book.
It is not a well written book at all.
Therefore, the bible was not inspired by a god.
If there are any gods, there would be signs of them.
But there are no signs of them,
Therefore, there are no gods.
If heaven is real, there would be souls coming back to earth.
There are no souls coming back to earth.
Therefore, heaven is not real.
Or try using EAE or AEE reasoning to prove a negative.
All living things are mortal.
No gods are mortal.
Therefore, no gods are living things.
All gods are immortal.
No living things are immortal.
Therefore, no gods are living things.
All existing things are natural.
No gods are natural.
Therefore, no gods are existing things.
No existing things are unnatural.
All gods are unnatural.
Therefore, no gods are existing things.
Bonus:
I found this on the internet. It is another deductive argument for the non-existence of all gods.
To prove that Eric does not exist would require proving a negative. So, one has to prove a negative to save God here.
One might try to prove, say, that an invisible magic power did not exist. But if you do that, you will provide a way to prove the non-existence of all invisible magic powers, including the god of the three Levantine monotheisms.
Here is a disproof of Eric:
No living things are magic.
But Eric is magic.
Therefore, Eric is not a living thing.
I've just proven that Eric does not exist. My argument is valid and based on true propositions, therefore, it is what logicians call sound, and it does disprove Eric.
But my argument invites the substitution of God for Eric, and so will any other disproof of Eric.
No living things are magic.
But all gods are magic.
Therefore, no gods are living things.
So, unless you can prove a negative, that is, prove that Eric does not exist, no gods exist. But if you prove that Eric does not exist, then you will disprove God too.
