Finally look for my piece on “Inperfect Messengers, Perfect Art” dealing with divine grace in the works of flawed human artists.

If interested, please email me privately at cberger

Yes, there are monarchs who have acted within and in keeping with the moral guidelines of their religious systems.

Whether or not their morality overlaps or subsumes Hichens’ morality, is the real question.

In as much as his morality is derivative of Judeo-Christian morality, there is a significant overlap. In as much as it is a failure to live up this morality, entirely subsumed.

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Not all religions are equal. Islam is by far the worst. It allows taqqriqua, which is to say, sanctioned falsehood, and at a philosophical level, constitutes the most primitive theology available to man. I.e. what we do is the will of Allah. To the point that Ghazali seems to deny the physical effect of the guillotine, to the point that we must be slaves to Allahs will.

The entirely analy retentive nature of this religion is exemplified by its adherents nearly universal inability to even so much as use as synonym the word God, in place of Allah.

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Second to Islam comes Hinduism, and Judaism. As backward as they are old.

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By all means, Christianity is the most sophisticated, most hypocritical, most demanding, least realistic, and most soiled of them all. Its followers are preoccupied not with loving, but with talking about forms of love they do not care in the slightest to understand. If they were worth a trifling of their avowed values, they would be doctors, medics, and philosophers… not a bunch of pedantic, chatterbox intellectual dimwits. The Church is the greatest barrier to Christ, and to any normative divinity. It stands in the way of truth as much as Bush stands in the way of democracy.

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That said, what is worse than an uninformed atheist? One which reduces everything to formulations of game theory, Monte Casino outcomes, and reductionist rationalism? His only defence of his superficiliaty are the shells of empty concepts, democracy, freedom… for which he has neither time, nor any true interest, because he is too busy looking out for his gonads, his stomach, and his wallet.

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Basic message, don’t get carried away.

Scruton also scates around the other primary motif of religious myths, the sexual taboo, which causes untold individual misery throughout the world, with little benefit to show for it. In modern competitive merit-based societies, there is no longer any great need to ensure inheritance through legitimate progeny. And modern understanding of the phenomenon of homosexuality is causing a slow-mothion train-wreck as traditional religion tries to enforce the taboo.

Certainly the point about the contribution of religion as sublimated scapegoating to conflict-suppression within a social group is well-argued and fairly convincing. However, the obvious point that when the scapegoat is another social or religious group this can lead to amplification rather than suppression of violence remains the elephant in the room. At this stage, I’m still with Hitchens.

I found Scruton’s article illuminating–it helped me understand some of the aesthetic qualities I seek out in literature–but I think he makes a mistake if he believes he is talking about ALL religion. In fact, I see this essay as being a definition of one possible form religion can take, a potentially ideal form. It is one definition of religion, but it’s certainly not the definitive definition. When he writes, “Religion is not the source of violence but the solution to it” what he really should be saying is, “Religion, as I have described it here, could be a solution to violence and our other dark human impulses.”

Others, such as Hitchens, might argue, “Religion, as I have defined it, is one of the root causes of ignorance and violence.” And he ALSO might be correct.

Once these semantics are cleared up, many of the arguments simply disappear.

The necessity of killing of an innocent man to undo of one’s sins against him seems to be an awful perversion of human psychology and merely reflects some kind of a weird problem Scruton might have. What does Nietzsche have to do with any of that? Nietzsche’s hypothesis was at last that provacative. He entertained an idea, which is very compatible with the nature of a modern man, namely, who would do anything in order to promote his agenda and if it takes a posing as a sacrificed man, he will do it. Nietzsche was much more skeptical about man’s nature and it seems that Scruton misunderstood the latter. It happens in philosophy anyway.
In conclusion, it is very bizarre to read this piece, because on the one hand it might have some “explanatory power” of religion and on the other hand reveal pathology of it and necessity to do something about it.