Utopia Religion Quotes

He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men's acts, even the terrible became banal.

Reading list (1972 edition)[edit] 1. Homer – Iliad, Odyssey 2. The Old Testament 3. Aeschylus – Tragedies 4. Sophocles – Tragedies 5. Herodotus – Histories 6. Euripides – Tragedies 7. Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War 8. Hippocrates – Medical Writings 9. Aristophanes – Comedies 10. Plato – Dialogues 11. Aristotle – Works 12. Epicurus – Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus 13. Euclid – Elements 14. Archimedes – Works 15. Apollonius of Perga – Conic Sections 16. Cicero – Works 17. Lucretius – On the Nature of Things 18. Virgil – Works 19. Horace – Works 20. Livy – History of Rome 21. Ovid – Works 22. Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia 23. Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania 24. Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic 25. Epictetus – Discourses; Encheiridion 26. Ptolemy – Almagest 27. Lucian – Works 28. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations 29. Galen – On the Natural Faculties 30. The New Testament 31. Plotinus – The Enneads 32. St. Augustine – On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine 33. The Song of Roland 34. The Nibelungenlied 35. The Saga of Burnt Njál 36. St. Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologica 37. Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy 38. Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales 39. Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks 40. Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy 41. Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly 42. Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres 43. Thomas More – Utopia 44. Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises 45. François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel 46. John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion 47. Michel de Montaigne – Essays 48. William Gilbert – On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies 49. Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote 50. Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene 51. Francis Bacon – Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis 52. William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays 53. Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences 54. Johannes Kepler – Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World 55. William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals 56. Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan 57. René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy 58. John Milton – Works 59. Molière – Comedies 60. Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises 61. Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light 62. Benedict de Spinoza – Ethics 63. John Locke – Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding;Thoughts Concerning Education 64. Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies 65. Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics 66. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding;Monadology 67. Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe 68. Jonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal 69. William Congreve – The Way of the World 70. George Berkeley – Principles of Human Knowledge 71. Alexander Pope – Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man 72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws 73. Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary 74. Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones 75. Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets

Humans think they are free, conscious beings, when in truth they are deluded animals. At the same time they never cease trying to escape from what they imagine themselves to be. Their religions are attempts to be rid of a freedom they have never possessed. In the twentieth century, the utopias of Right and Left served the same function. Today, when politics is unconvincing even as entertainment, science has taken on the role of mankind's deliverer.

Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise-- the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. Andre Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way, and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer.

Many great religions, Pagan and Christian, have insisted on wine. Only one, I think, has insisted on Soap. You will find it in the New Testament attributed to the Pharisees.

Wait and see whether the religion of the Servile State is not in every case what I say: the encouragement of small virtues supporting capitalism, the discouragement of the huge virtues that defy it.

America’s forefathers had a vision of a spiritually enlightened utopia, in which freedom of thought, education of the masses, and scientific advancement would replace the darkness of outdated religious superstition.

In intellectual terms the Cold War was a competition between two ideologies, Marxism and liberalism, that had a great deal in common. Though they saw one another as mortal enemies they differed chiefly on the question of which economic system was best suited to achieve goals they shared.

If you do not want to stop the wheels of progress; if you do not want to go back to the Dark Ages; if you do not want to live again under tyranny, then you must guard your liberty, and you must not let the church get control of your government. If you do, you will lose the greatest legacy ever bequeathed to the human race—intellectual freedom. Now let me tell you another thing. If all the energy and wealth wasted upon religion—in all of its varied forms—had been spent to understand life and its problems, we would today be living under conditions that would seem almost like Utopia. Most of our social and domestic problems would have been solved, and equally as important, our understanding and relations with the other peoples of the world would have, by now, brought about universal peace. Man would have a better understanding of his motives and actions, and would have learned to curb his primitive instincts for revenge and retaliation. He would, by now, know that wars of hate, aggression, and aggrandizement are only productive of more hate and more human suffering. The enlightened and completely emancipated man from the fears of a God and the dogma of hate and revenge would make him a brother to his fellow man. He would devote his energies to discoveries and inventions, which theology previously condemned as a defiance of God, but which have proved so beneficial to him. He would no longer be a slave to a God and live in cringing fear!

In the world union, prosperity is a science, self-interest a new religion, peace is at hand and the future has never looked brighter.

From whichsoever of these motives it might be, true it is, that many of them came over to our religion, and were initiated into it by baptism. 

By sanctifying History in order to discredit God, Marxism has merely rendered Him more peculiar and more haunting. You can stifle every impulse in humanity except the need for an Absolute, which will survive the destruction of temples and even the disappearance of religion on earth. The core of the Russian people being religious, they will inevitably gain the upper hand...

For the weeping warriors, for the savage saints, for the bleeding mothers with fire in their eyes, for the hidden mystics whose prayers keep the earth spinning, for the buddhas who'll use their teeth when their blades are broken and let their evolutionary ancestors howl through them, this one is for you, my lovelies.

Moreover, we have seen enough by now to know that technological changes in our modes of communication are even more ideology-laden than changes in our modes of transportation. Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type, and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene. Here is ideology without words, and all the more powerful for their absence. All that is required to make it stick is a population that devoutly believes in the inevitability of progress. And in this sense, all Americans are Marxists, for we believe nothing if not that history is moving us toward some preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind that movement.

The rationalistic faith of the Enlightenment has a view of God (Deism), revelation (general, not special), truth (known by reason alone), sin (Pelagianism), Christ (teacher of morality and example of love), atonement (via subjective theories only), salvation (through education and technology), the church (the scientific community), and eschatology (utopia on earth through progress). But most modern people who live their lives as though this set of beliefs were true dislike admitting that they follow a religion. They would rather it was a choice between religion and reason, which is why the myth of the warfare between science and religion was invented in the nineteenth century.

utopia is equal love, equal love between people of equal value, although value is an approximation for the word I want. Why is it so difficult? Assortative mating shows there has to be some drive in nature to bring equals together in the toils of love, so why even in the most enlightened and beautifully launched unions are we afraid we hear the master-slave relationship moving its slow thighs somewhere in the vicinity? It has to be cultural. In fact the closest thing to a religion I have is that this has to be cultural. I could do practically anything while he was asleep and not bother him. I wrote in my journal, washed dishes in slow motion if we hadn’t gotten around to them. I was emotional a lot, privately. I wanted to incorporate everything, understand everything, because time is cruel and nothing stays the same.

I despise the religions we have, nothing but flummery and manipulation based on texts and materials so reworked over time they’re all meaningless. I despise the division religions religions bring; humans have enough problems without that. I despise con men like Father Melly. And yet, and yet …

The foundation of morality on the human sentiments of what is acceptable behavior versus repulsive behavior has always made morals susceptible to change. Much of what was repulsive 100 years ago is normal today, and - although it may be a slippery slope - what is repulsive today is possible to be normal 100 years into tomorrow; the human standard has always been but to push the envelope. In this way, all generations are linked, and one can only hope that every extremist, self-proclaimed progressive is considering this ultimate 'Utopia' to which his kindness will lead at the end of the chain.

Mustapha Mond paused, put down the first book and, picking up the other, turned over the pages. “Take this, for example,” he said, and in his deep voice once more began to read: “’A man grows old; he feels in himself that radical sense of weakness, of listlessness, of discomfort, which accompanies the advance of age; and, feeling thus, imagines himself merely sick, lulling his fears with the notion that this distressing condition is due to some particular cause, from which, as from an illness, he hopes to recover. Vain imaginings! That sickness is old age; and a horrible disease it is. They say that it is the fear of death and of what comes after death that makes men turn to religion as they advance in years. But my own experience has given me the conviction that, quite apart from any such terrors or imaginings, the religious sentiment tends to develop as we grow older; to develop because, as the passions grow calm, as the fancy and sensibilities are less excited and less excitable, our reason becomes less troubled in its working, less obscured by the images, desires and distractions, in which it used to be absorbed; whereupon God emerges as from behind a cloud; our soul feels, sees, turns towards the source of all light; turns naturally and inevitably; for now that all that gave to the world of sensations its life and charms has begun to leak away from us, now that phenomenal existence is no more bolstered up by impressions from within or from without, we feel the need to lean on something that abides, something that will never play us false-a reality, an absolute and everlasting truth. Yes, we inevitably turn to God; for this religious sentiment is of its nature so pure, so delightful to the soul that experiences it, that it makes up to us for all our other losses.”’ Mustapha Mond shut the book and leaned back in his chair. “One of the numerous things in heaven and earth that these philosophers didn’t dream about was this” (he waved his hand), “us, the modern world. ’You can only be independent of God while you’ve got youth and prosperity; independence won’t take you safely to the end.’ Well, we’ve now got youth and prosperity right up to the end. What follows? Evidently, that we can be independent of God. ’The religious sentiment will compensate us for all our losses.’ But there aren’t any losses for us to compensate; religious sentiment is superfluous. And why should we go hunting for a substitute for youthful desires, when youthful desires never fail? A substitute for distractions, when we go on enjoying all the old fooleries to the very last? What need have we of repose when our minds and bodies continue to delight in activity? of consolation, when we have soma? of something immovable, when there is the social order?

When Lehman Brothers collapsed on September 15, 2008, and inaugurated the biggest crisis since the 1930s, there were no real alternatives to hand. No one had laid the groundwork. For years, intellectuals, journalists, and politicians had all firmly maintained that we’d reached the end of the age of “big narratives” and that it was time to trade in ideologies for pragmatism. Naturally, we should still take pride in the liberty that generations before us fought for and won. But the question is, what is the value of free speech when we no longer have anything worthwhile to say? What’s the point of freedom of association when we no longer feel any sense of affiliation? What purpose does freedom of religion serve when we no longer believe in anything?

Lenin did not write as eloquently about religion as Marx, nor did he write about it often. He wielded Marx's 'opium of the people' from time to time, but his own metaphor was alcoholic. In his 1905 essay, 'Socialism and Religion,' he wrote of 'the distribution of state-clerical gin' in which 'slaves of capital drown their human shape and their claims to any decent life.' His alternative metaphor suggests a shift from thinking of religion as anesthesia to thinking of it—much as Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov did—as a vice.

As the centrality of religion declined during the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, romantic love was inevitably carried along by the new wave of secularization. The themes of selflessness, sacrifice, and idealism were more and more brushed aside. Romantic love ceased being presented in the terms of religious discourse, at the very same time it started playing a central role in the culture at large. In face, in the view of some historians, romance replaced religion as the focus of daily life.

A society whose experts would be priests, two thousand bankers and technicians ruling over a Europe of one hundred and twenty million inhabitants where private life would be absolutely identified with public life, where absolute obedience "of action, of thought, and of feeling" would be given to the high priest who would reign over everything, such was Comte's Utopia, which announces what might be called the horizontal religions of our times. It is true that it is Utopian because, convinced of the enlightening powers of science, Comte forgot to provide a police force. Others will be more practical; the religion of humanity will be effectively founded on the blood and suffering of humanity.

You might suppose that this would merely inject a note of pietism and make us then avoid the real issues—or, indeed, to attempt a theocratic takeover bid. But to think in either of those ways would only show how deeply we have been conditioned by the Enlightenment split between religion and politics. What happens if we reintegrate them? As with specifically Christian work, so with political work done in Jesus’s name: confessing Jesus as the ascended and coming Lord frees us up from needing to pretend that this or that program or leader has the key to utopia (if only we would elect him or her). Equally, it frees up our corporate life from the despair that comes when we realize that once again our political systems let us down. The ascension and appearing of Jesus constitute a radical challenge to the entire thought structure of the Enlightenment (and of course several other movements). And since our present Western politics is very much the creation of the Enlightenment, we should think seriously about the ways in which, as thinking Christians, we can and should bring that challenge to bear. I know this is giving a huge hostage to fortune, raising questions to which I certainly don’t know the answers, but I do know that unless I point all this out one might easily get the impression that these ancient doctrines are of theoretical or abstract interest only. They aren’t. People who believe that Jesus is already Lord and that he will appear again as judge of the world are called and equipped (to put it mildly) to think and act quite differently in the world from those who don’t.

The religious utopian hides his pride behind the mask of humility; he recognizes God alone; he does not recognize ministers or sacraments since he puts himself in place of both. He ministers his own religious needs and he consecrates his inner self as a place of worship more worthy of receiving God than the churches. He substitutes his own sentiments and emotions for doctrine, because doctrines are man-made speculations unable to comprehend God's essence. He considers the sacramental, ceremonial and generally institutional aspects of religion as rigid and expendable molds which are adequate for the unthinking who need strong sensations and impressions to sustain their faith. He, on the other hand, puts his trust in his own individual inspiration, strengthens his faith through direct and permanent contact with the divine and so rises as a pure spirit to the level of a "truer" religion. The secular utopian also displays excessive pride. He believes that societies of the past were based on error since they yielded to the political principle of organization and hierarchy. The goal of the utopian is to create a society in its pristine purity, as it were, unsullied by laws and magistrates, functioning through its members' natural good will and cooperativeness. Laws, institutions, symbols, flags, armies, disciplines, patriotic encouragement and the like will all be abolished because, for pure social beings, their inner motivation of social living - togetherness - is quite sufficient and because they would serve to anchor the citizens, bodily and emotionally, in the soil and reality of the State just as pomp and ceremony, rules and institutions anchor the faithful in religion.

The possibility of an ideal society became impossible from the moment of creation, the moment of the "humanization of man." From that moment on, man has been faced with eternal conflict, disquiet, dissatisfaction, drama. "Get you down, all (you people) with enmity between yourselves" (Quran, 2:36). The ideal society is a monotonous and infinite succession of depersonalized generations which bring forth, produce, consume, and die, and so on to the "wrong" eternity. The fact of creation and of God's interference in the human existence made this "mechanism" impossible and illusory; hence, the fanatic opposition of all utopias to God and religion. So, while prophets of utopia proclaimed society and its interests to be the supreme value, God wanted that role to be man's. He gave freedom in order to make this world a temptation and to affirm man and his soul as the highest value.

History shows us we need labels to help define our place. For hundreds of years, people have categorized others as less so they could feel like more. Color, gender, class, religion, physical handicaps, sexual orientation, and pedigree are just a few ways in which one group is divided from another. For every person who stands superior, another must be inferior. But what does it say of us as a human race when we push others down for our own needs? Does it accomplish the intended goal or simply give rise to a pattern of behavior that can never be broken? What if we all stood equal in one another’s eyes and felt pride at our reflection? I speak of utopia and chance being ridiculed, but sitting in a village thousands of miles from everything, I will roll the dice. For one day only, maybe we could put aside our differences and come together in our sameness. For one day, we could see that past all the variations, we are all the same with similar hopes, dreams, fears, strengths, and weaknesses. For one day, we could stand together, not apart, and treat others as we would hope to be treated.

Oh, vote for me, my noble and intelligent electors, and send our party into power, and the world shall be a new place, and there shall be no sin or sorrow any more! And each free and independent voter shall have a brand new Utopia made on purpose for him, according to his own ideas, with a good-sized, extra-unpleasant purgatory attached, to which he can send everybody he does not like. Oh! do not miss this chance!” Oh! listen to my philosophy, it is the best and deepest. Oh! hear my songs, they are the sweetest. Oh! buy my pictures, they alone are true art. Oh! read my books, they are the finest. Oh! I am the greatest cheesemonger, I am the greatest soldier, I am the greatest statesman, I am the greatest poet, I am the greatest showman, I am the greatest mountebank, I am the greatest editor, and I am the greatest patriot. We are the greatest nation. We are the only good people. Ours is the only true religion. Bah! how we all yell! How we all brag and bounce, and beat the drum and shout; and nobody believes a word we utter; and the people ask one another, saying: “How can we tell who is the greatest and the cleverest among all these shrieking braggarts?” And they answer: “There is none great or clever. The great and clever men are not here; there is no place for them in this pandemonium of charlatans and quacks. The men you see here are crowing cocks. We suppose the greatest and the best of them are they who crow the loudest and the longest; that is the only test of their merits.” Therefore, what is left for us to do, but to crow? And the best and greatest of us all, is he who crows the loudest and the longest on this little dunghill that we call our world!

Towards the end of the last century the pursuit of Utopia entered the political mainstream. In future only one kind of regime would be legitimate: American-style democratic capitalism – the final form of human government, as it was termed in the fleeting and now forgotten mood of hubris that followed the Soviet collapse. Led by the United States, western governments committed themselves to installing democracy throughout the world – an impossible dream that in many countries could only produce chaos. At the same time they launched a ‘war against terror’ that failed to distinguish between new threats and the normal conflicts of history. The Right was possessed by fantasies, and like the utopian visions of the last century – but far more quickly – its grandiose projects have crumbled into dust. In the twentieth century it seemed utopian movements could come to power only in dictatorial regimes. Yet after 9/ 11 utopian thinking came to shape foreign policy in the world’s pre-eminent democracy. In many ways the Bush administration behaved like a revolutionary regime. It was prepared to engage in pre-emptive attacks on sovereign states in order to achieve its goals, while at the same time it has been ready to erode long-established American freedoms. It established a concentration camp in Guantánamo whose inmates are beyond the reach of normal legal protection, denied the protection of habeas corpus to terrorist suspects, set up an apparatus of surveillance to monitor the population and authorized American officials to practise what in any other country would be defined as torture. Under the leadership of Tony Blair, Britain suffered, in a more limited way, a similar transformation.

I want to begin my fight for the future of our world with the sharing of a vision. Everyone has, or should have, a vision. This is mine. It is a simple vision, really. It begins with the creation of a single, sane, planetary civilization. That will have to be very much like a utopia. People will deny the possibility of such a dream. They will say that people have always been at each other's throats, that this is just human nature, the way of the world. That we can never change the world. But that is just silly. That is like saying that two battling brothers, children, will never grow up to be the best of friends who watch each other’s backs. Once, a long time ago, people lost their sons and daughters to the claws of big cats. In classic times, the Greeks and the Romans saw slavery as evil, but as a necessary evil that could never go away. Only seventy years ago, Germany and France came to death blows in the greatest war in history; now they share a common currency, open borders, and a stake in the future of Europe. The Scandinavians once terrorized the world as marauding Vikings gripping bloody axes and swords, while now their descendents refrain from spanking their children, and big blond–haired men turn their hands to the care of babies. We all have a sense of what this new civilization must look like: No war. No hunger. No want. No very wealthy using their money to manipulate laws and lawmakers so that they become ever more wealthy while they cast the poor into the gutters like garbage. The wasteland made green again. Oceans once more teeming with life. The human heart finally healed. A new story that we tell ourselves about ourselves and new songs that we sing to our children. The vast resources once mobilized for war and economic supremacy now poured into a true science of survival and technologies of the soul. I want this to be. But how can it be? How will we get from a world on the brink of destruction to this glorious, golden future? I do not know. It is not for any one person to know, for to create the earth anew we will need to call upon the collective genius and the good will of the entire human race. We will need all our knowledge of history, anthropology, religion, and science, and much else. We will need a deep, deep sympathy for human nature, in both its terrible and angelic aspects.

The crimes of religion pale in comparison to those of secular regimes. This doesn't justify wrongs done in the name of Christianity, but it does undermine unchecked enthusiasm for a godless utopia.

In other words, the atheist bloodbath is the product of a hubristic modern ideology that sees man, not God, as the creator of values. In rejecting God, man becomes scornful of the doctrine of human sinfulness and convinced of the perfectibility of his nature. Man now seeks to displace God and create a secular utopia here on earth. In order to achieve this, the atheist rulers establish total control of society. They invent a form of totalitarianism far more comprehensive than anything that previous rulers attempted: every aspect of life comes under political supervision. Of course if some people—the Jews, the landowners, the unfit, the handicapped, the religious dissidents, and so on—have to be relocated, incarcerated, or liquidated in order to achieve this utopia, this is a price the atheist tyrants have shown themselves quite willing to pay. The old moral codes do not apply, and ordinary atheist functionaries carry out behavior that would make a church inquisitor quake. The atheist regimes, by their actions, confirm the truth of Dostoevsky’s dictum: if God is not, everything is permitted. Whatever the cause for why atheist regimes do what they do, the indisputable fact is that all the religions of the world put together have in three thousand years not managed to kill anywhere near the number of people killed in the name of atheism in the past few decades. It’s time to abandon the mindlessly repeated mantra that religious belief has been the main source of human conflict and violence. Atheism, not religion, is responsible for the worst mass murders of history.

The popular religion and culture of peasants in a complex society are not only a syncretized, domesticated, and localized variant of larger systems of thought and doctrine. They contain almost inevitably the seeds of an alternative symbolic universe—a universe which in turn makes the social world in which peasants live less than completely inevitable. Much of this radical symbolism can only be explained as a cultural reaction to the situation of the peasantry as a class. In fact, this symbolic opposition represents the closest thing to class consciousness in pre-industrial agrarian societies. It is as if those who find themselves at the bottom of the social heap develop cultural forms which promise them dignity, respect, and economic comfort which they lack in the world as it is. A real pattern of exploitation dialectically produces its own symbolic mirror image within folk culture…. The radical vision to which I refer is strikingly uniform despite the enormous variations in peasant cultures and the different great traditions of which they partake…. At the risk of over-generalizing, it is possible to describe some common features of this reflexive symbolism. It nearly always implies a society of brotherhood in which there will be no rich and poor, in which no distinctions of rank and status (save those between believers and non-believers) will exist. Where religious institutions are experienced as justifying inequities, the abolition of rank and status may well include the elimination of religious hierarchy in favor of communities of equal believers. Property is typically, though not always, to be held in common and shared. All unjust claims to taxes, rents, and tribute are to be nullified. The envisioned utopia may also include a self-yielding and abundant nature as well as a radically transformed human nature in which greed, envy, and hatred will disappear. While the earthly utopia is thus an anticipation of the future, it often harks back to a mythic Eden from which mankind has fallen away” (1977:224–226).

Revolutionary theory also enshrined the living utopian hope that the State would wither away, and that the political sphere would negate itself as such, in the apotheosis of a finally transparent social realm. None of this has come to pass. The political sphere has disappeared, sure enough - but so far from doing so by means of a self-transcendence into the strictly social realm, it has carried that realm into oblivion with it. We are now in the transpolitical sphere; in other words, we have reached the zero point of politics, a stage which also implies the reproduction of politics, its endless simulation. For everything that has not successfully transcended itself can only fall prey to revivals without end. So politics will never finish disappearing - nor will it allow anything else to emerge in its place. A kind of hysteresis of the political reigns. Art has likewise failed to realize the utopian aesthetic of modern times, to transcend itself and become an ideal form of life. (In earlier times, of course, art had no need of self-transcendence, no need to become a totality, for such a totality already existed - in the shape of religion.) Instead of being subsumed in a transcendent ideality, art has been dissolved within a general aestheticization of everyday life, giving way to a pure circulation of images, a transaesthetics of banality. Indeed, art took this route even before capital, for if the decisive political event was the strategic crisis of 1929, whereby capital debouched into the era of mass trans politics, the crucial moment for art was undoubtedly that of Dada and Duchamp, that moment when art, by renouncing its own aesthetic rules of the game, debouched into the transaesthetic era of the banality of the image. Nor has the promised sexual utopia materialized. This was to have consisted in the self-negation of sex as a separate activity and its self-realization as total life. The partisans of sexual liberation continue to dream this dream of desire as a totality fulfilled within each of us, masculine and feminine at once, this dream of sexuality as an assumption of desire beyond the difference between the sexes. In point of fact sexual liberation has succeeded only in helping sexuality achieve autonomy as an undifferentiated circulation of the signs of sex. Although we are certainly in transition towards a transsexual state of affairs, this has nothing to do with a revolution of life through sex - and everything to do with a confusion and promiscuity that open the door to virtual indifference (in all senses of the word) in the sexual realm.

Heaven and utopia are buckets in a well: when one goes down the other goes up; when religion declines Communism grows.

That Orwell should uphold a Marxist view of religion appears to have struck his earliest Russian admirers as his most dangerous flaw, a fatal streak of naiveté. And that was, in part at least, because atheism and Bolshevism were so closely linked in their imaginations..... Moses did not make it to Russia until more honest admirers picked up on the deception during glasnost. Such was the all-consuming logic of the Cold War. Orwell was to be sainted as an anti-communist, but western propagandists superstitiously erased his atheism in order to wield him against the godless utopia. The Bolsheviks, they seem to have reasoned, had launched their struggle on the spiritual battlefield, and it was there that the West had to finish it.

Philosophy limps. It dwells in history and in life, but it wishes to dwell at their center, at the point where they corne into being with the birth of meaning. It is not content with what is already there. Since it is expression in act, it cornes to itself only by ceasing to coïncide with what is expressed, and by taking its distance in order to see its meaning. It is, in fact, the Utopia of possession at a distance. Hence it can be tragic, since it has its own contrary within itself. It is never a serious occupation. The serious man, if he exists, is the man of one thing only, to which he assents. But the most resolute philosophers always wish the contrary--to realize, but in destroying; to suppress, but also to conserve. Always, they have an afterthought. The philosopher pays attention to the serious man--of action, of religion, or of passion--perhaps more acutely than anyone. But precisely in doing this, one feels that he is different...The philosopher of action is perhaps the farthest removed from action, for to speak of action with depth and rigor is to say that one does not desire to act.

He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary.

And no amount of “deconstruction” helps here: the ultimate formof idolatry is the deconstructive purifying of this Other, so that all thatremains of the Other is its place, the pure form of Otherness as theMessianic Promise. It is here that we encounter the limit of decon-struction: as Derrida himself has realized in the last two decades, themore radical a deconstruction is, the more it has to rely on its inher-ent undeconstructible condition of deconstruction, the messianicpromise of Justice.This promise is the true Derridean object of belief,and Derrida’s ultimate ethical axiom is that this belief is irreducible,“undeconstructible.” Thus Derrida can indulge in all kinds of para-doxes, claiming, among other things, that it is only atheists who trulypray—precisely by refusing to address God as a positive entity, theysilently address the pure Messianic Otherness. Here one should em-phasize the gap which separates Derrida from the Hegelian tradition:It would be too easy to show that, measured by the failure to establishliberal democracy, the gap between fact and ideal essence does notshow up only in . . . so-called primitive forms of government, theoc-racy and military dictatorship....But this failure and this gap alsocharacterize,a prioriand by definition,all democracies, including theoldest and most stable of so-called Western democracies. At stake hereis the very concept of democracy as concept of a promise that can onlyarise in such a diastema(failure, inadequation, disjunction, disadjust-ment, being “out of joint”).That is why we always propose to speak ofa democracy to come,not of a futuredemocracy in the future present, noteven of a regulating idea, in the Kantian sense, or of a utopia—at leastto the extent that their inaccessibility would still retain the temporalform of a future present,of a future modality of the living present.15Here we have the difference between Hegel and Derrida at its purest:Derrida accepts Hegel’s fundamental lesson that one cannot assert theinnocent ideal against its distorted realization.This holds not only fordemocracy, but also for religion—the gap which separates the idealconcept from its actualization is already inherent to the concept itself:just as Derrida claims that “God already contradicts Himself,” that anypositive conceptual determination of the divine as a pure messianicpromise already betrays it, one should also say that “democracy already139 contradicts itself.” It is also against this background that Derrida elab-orates the mutual implication of religion and radical evil:16radical evil(politically: “totalitarianism”) emerges when religious faith or reason(or democracy itself) is posited in the mode of future present. Against Hegel, however, Derrida insists on the irreducible excess inthe ideal concept which cannot be reduced to the dialectic betweenthe ideal and its actualization: the messianic structure of “to come,”the excess of an abyss which can never be actualized in its determinatecontent. Hegel’s own position here is more intricate than it may ap-pear: his point is not that, through gradual dialectical progress, onecan master the gap between the concept and its actualization, andachieve the concept’s full self-transparency (“Absolute Knowing”).Rather, to put it in speculative terms, his point is to assert a “pure”contradiction which is no longer the contradiction between theundeconstructible pure Otherness and its failed actualizations/determinations, but the thoroughly immanent “contradiction” whichprecedes any Otherness.

When Lehman Brothers collapsed on September 15, 2008, and inaugurated the biggest crisis since the 1930s, there were no real alternatives to hand. No one had laid the groundwork. For years, intellectuals, journalists, and politicians had all firmly maintained that we’d reached the end of the age of “big narratives” and that it was time to trade in ideologies for pragmatism. Naturally, we should still take pride in the liberty that generations before us fought for and won. But the question is, what is the value of free speech when we no longer have anything worthwhile to say? What’s the point of freedom of association when we no longer feel any sense of affiliation? What purpose does freedom of religion serve when we no longer believe in anything? On the one hand, the world is still getting richer, safer, and healthier. Every day, more and more people are arriving in Cockaigne. That’s a huge triumph. On the other hand, it’s high time that we, the inhabitants of the Land of Plenty, staked out a new utopia. Let’s rehoist the sails. “Progress is the realisation of Utopias,” Oscar Wilde wrote many years ago.24 A fifteen-hour workweek, universal basic income, and a world without borders … They’re all crazy dreams – but for how much longer?

Harris’s basic arguments are hardly original, but they have an unfortunate pedigree. For more than three hundred years, from the French philosophes to Marx, Lenin, and the “death of God” theologies of the 1960s, we have been assured that, freed from the superstitions and imbecilities of organized religion, rational secularists could make the world into a utopia. The results have invariably been horrific—from the Terror of the French Revolution to the terrors of Nazism and Communism. Contrary

It is my argument that American liberalism is a totalitarian political religion, but not necessarily an Orwellian one. It is nice, not brutal. Nannying, not bullying. But it is definitely totalitarian--or "holistic", if you prefer--in that liberalism today sees no realm of human life that is beyond political significance, from what you eat to what you smoke to what you say. Sex is political. Food is political. Sports, entertainment, your inner motives and outer appearance, all have political salience for liberal fascists. Liberals place their faith in priestly experts who know better, who plan, exhort, badger, and scold. They try to use science to discredit traditional notions of religion and faith, but they speak the language of pluralism and spirituality to defend "nontraditional" beliefs. Just as with classical fascism, liberal fascists speak of a "Third Way" between right and left where all good things go together and all hard choices are "false choices". The idea that there are no hard choices--that is, choices between competing goods--is religious and totalitarian because it assumes that all good things are fundamentally compatible. The conservatives or classical liberal vision understands that life is unfair, that man is flawed, and that the only perfect society, the only real utopia, waits for us in the next life. Liberal fascism differs from classical fascism in many ways. I don't deny this. Indeed, it is central to my point. Fascisms differ from each other because they grow out of different soil. What unites them are their emotional or instinctual impulses, such as the quest for community, the urge to "get beyond" politics, a faith in the perfectibility of man and the authority of experts, and an obsession with the aesthetics of youth, the cult of action, and the need for an all powerful state to coordinate society at the national or global level. Most of all, they share the belief--what I call the totalitarian temptation--that with the right amount of tinkering we can realize the utopian dream of "creating a better world".

Love was central to Victorians' sense of self because through it they learned to know not only their partners but themselves. Love was a template for authentic, albeit restrained, expression of their inner self, but it was also a means to attain spiritual perfection, as was made clear by the consistent association of the romantic discourse with the values and metaphors of religion.

The transformations undergone by the meaning of love are characterized by: 1) the extrication of love from religion, that is, the secularization of the discourse of love 2) the increasing prominence of the theme of love in mass culture, especially in film and advertising 3) the glorification of the theme of love as a supreme value and the equation of love with happiness 4) the inclusion of 'intensity' and 'fun' in the new definitions of romance, marriage, and domesticity

Communists are also, curiously, utopians—secular utopians. They sought a heaven on earth—for them, an earth without religion. They did so without realizing that utopia is not only elusive but such a literal self-contradiction that it does not exist. The Greek roots of the word are ou topos, or “no place.” In other words, there is no utopia, at least not in this world and realm. And yet, communists would pursue this no place with religious-like zeal.

Such a depressing religion!' I cried. I directed our conversation into the area of Utopias, of what might have been, of what should have been, of what might yet be, if the world would thaw. But Bokonon had been there, too, had written a whole book about Utopias, The Seventh Book, which he called 'Bokonon's Republic.' In that book are there ghastly aphorisms: The hand that stocks the drug stores rules the world. Let us start our Republic with a chain of drug stores, a chain of grocery stores, a chain of gas chambers, and a national game. After that, we can write our Constitution.

Please don't compare me with your militant atheists - in their intellectualist world there is no place for anything that cannot be logically explained, whereas the world I dream of, is built upon a healthy interaction between facts and fairytale. I want it to be a living planet for living beings, not a giant data center packed with computers with feet. If all we needed was facts, the world would've become a utopia the moment computer was invented. Likewise, if all we needed was fairytale, the world would've turned into a paradise the moment sanskrit, hebrew or klingon was invented. There can be no lasting peace and harmony, until facts and fairytale work hand in hand, while boldly rejecting blind superstition, as well as cold logicality.

Before the twentieth century, ideology - as opposed to religion - did not kill people by the millions and tens of millions. The stakes were not thought to be worth it. Such enthusiasm for mass murder awaited the combination of aristocratic militarism, really-existing socialism, and fascism. Thus it was only in the twentieth century that utopian aspirations about how the economy should be organized led nations and global movements to build dystopias to try to bring the utopian future closer. And then they turned around and justified the dystopia: compromises must be made, and this is as good as it is going to get. My view is that too much mental and historical energy has been spent parsing differences between movements that are justly classified as dystopian, and even totalitarian, in aspiration. Time spent on such a task is time wasted, given their commonalities - if not in formal doctrine, then at least in modes of operation. The guards of Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, Dachau, and the rest were very like the guards of the Gulag Archipelago. Rather, mental and historical energy should be focused on where these movements got their energy. Why was the world unable to offer people a society in which they could live good lives? Why was a total reconfiguration necessary? Karl Polanyi saw fascism and socialism as reactions against the market society's inability or unwillingness to satisfy people's Polanyian rights. It could not guarantee them a comfortable community in which to live because the use to which land was put had to pass a profitability test. It could not offer them an income commensurate with what they deserved because the wage paid to their occupation had to pass a profitability test. And it could not offer them stable employment because the financing to support whatever value chain they were embedded in also had to pass a profitability test. These failures all gave energy to the thought that there needed to be a fundamental reconfiguration of economy and society that would respect people's Polanyian rights. And the hope of millions was that fascism and really-existing socialism would do so. Instead, both turned out to erase, in brutal and absolute ways, people's rights, and people's lives, by the millions. So why were people so gullible? The German socialist Rosa Luxemburg in 1919 could see the path Lenin was embarked upon and called it 'a brutalization of public life: attempted assassinations, shooting of hostages, etc.' The German liberal Max Weber, writing in 1918, could also foresee what would become of Lenin's sociological experiment, saying it would end 'in a laboratory with heaps of human corpses.' Similarly, the British diplomat Eric Phipps wrote in 1935 that if Britain were to take Hitler's Mein Kampf seriously and literally, 'we should logically be bound to adopt the policy of a "preventive" war.' The dangers of a fascist turn were clear. The unlikelihood of success at even slouching toward a good society of those who took that turn ought to have been obvious. Utopian faith is a helluva drug.

When the House Rules Committee chair during the debates over the bill, Howard Smith (D-VA), proposed the amendment adding “sex” to the list of protected categories, he was at least half-joking, and it was not liberal Democrats but southern Democrats and Republicans who approved it, 168–133. Courts decided that the “sex” part of the prohibition could not have been intended to stand on an equal footing with the others, and did not require that possible discrimination be scrutinized as strictly as in cases where race, color, or religion was at issue.

In many ways, then, the history of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior is an allegory for the fate of religion and atheism under Soviet Communism. The Bolsheviks saw the destruction of the symbols of the old world as a powerful statement about their vision for the future. But while their destruction of religious spaces, symbols, and traditions clearly transmitted the antireligious message, it did little to strengthen the people’s bond to Soviet Communism. The fact that the cathedral had been destroyed ostensibly to make room for the Palace of Soviets, but that the palace never materialized, underscored the empty space that had been left behind. That the space remained empty for decades, only to be filled by a swimming pool—a space of modern leisure, but hardly a monument to the utopia promised by the revolution—speaks to Soviet atheism’s struggle to fill the empty space it had created with its own meaning.

The environmentalist notion about a “Mother Earth” or “delicate balance in nature” is no more sophisticated or based on empirical evidence than is a belief in the “Garden of Eden”. All evidence points to a violently chaotic universe, where our “Mother Earth” is nothing buy a piece of phlegm spat out and being whirled around by our Sun. We are at the mercy of whatever catastrophe is unleashed upon our little piece of Sun hocker, and by no means living in some utopian conception of Eden.

The history of the American civil religion is a history of the conviction that the American people are God’s New Israel, his newly chosen people. The belief that America has been elected by God for a special destiny in the world has been the focus of American sacred ceremonies, the inaugural addresses of our presidents, the sacred scriptures of the civil religion. It has been so pervasive a motif in the national life that the word ‘belief’ does not really capture the dynamic role that it has played for the American people, for it passed into the ‘realm of motivational myths’“ (Cherry, 129).

Since in the world you imagines, a world without power and money, with no prohibitions, with no pain or death, each man would be God, and God therefore would not be possible. He would be a lie, because His attributes would be those of every man, woman and child: grace, immortality and supreme good.

Andrew Grenville’s tailored polling reveals Cascadians tend to be less trusting of religion and more tolerant of marijuana (see above) and homosexual relationships than others across the continent. Even though Cascadians’ individualism could harm their chances of building strong communities, Grenville believes that their live-and-let-live attitude, optimism and self-responsibility could create a culture that serves as a beacon to the planet.

When an ideology conveys such universal meanings and commands such obedience, it has become, in fact, a religion, and its imperatives have the dynamic force of a myth. Those who would question its principles or defy its orders do so at their peril, as groups of rebellious workers continued to discover for the next three or four centuries. From the nineteenth century on, this refurbished religion united thinkers of the most diverse temperaments, backgrounds, and superficial beliefs: minds as different as Marx and Ricardo, Carlyle and Mill, Comte and Spencer, subscribed to its doctrines; and from the beginning of the nineteenth century on, the working classes, finding themselves helpless to resist these new forces, countered the capitalist and militarist expressions of this myth with myths of their own-those of socialism, anarchism, or communism-under which the machine would be exploited, not for a ruling elite, but for the benefit of the proletarian masses. Against this machine-conditioned utopia only a handful of heretics, mostly poets and artists, dared to hold out.

Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.

Cascadia has never had a dominant religious reference group. Historically no group has ever gained the political, religious or cultural traction to be “the” established religion in Oregon and Washington. In British Columbia neither the Catholic, Anglican nor United Church of Canada denominations succeeded in overcoming the disinterest in institutional religion of most people in the province (Burkinshaw).

It is not so much that he is economical with the truth as that he lacks the normal understanding of it. For him truth is whatever serves the cause

When Schmitt and Shulsky rejected empirical inquiry they confused a critique of scientism with a rejection of evidence

Globalization is more than a process of corporate expansion, free trade, and instant communications; it is also about a radical ideology, a humanist religion, an effort to replace national sovereignty with global governance and deliver great wealth to the few elite. It is empowered by progressivism and other nefarious societal engines like Marxism, communism that promises utopia but results in massive vulnerabilities for most people and robs those citizens of their basic freedoms. Do you want to understand this sort of chaos that is now threatening every corner of our world? Then you better investigate globalization and all its prickly tentacles.

If all the energy and wealth wasted upon religion—in all of its varied forms—had been spent to understand life and its problems, we would today be living under conditions that would seem almost like Utopia.