The Prussian Heathen

Preamble

This investigation only covers religion as a group dynamic and not the personal aspects.

The Prussian heathen explains how the loss of traditional monotheistic religions created our new 20th century superstitions. Some movements resemble more and more full religions with prophets, practises, funding, etc. We start with the evolution of religion through our history and explore the biological factors responsible for all religious movements.

Religion comes from evolution

The concept of god emerged over thousands of years of human cultural development and changed throughout it. These changes are documented in surviving scriptures and archaeological finding. We will give several examples

To start things off with the question: “Is there a god?” Well, sure why else would billions of people talk about it. The second question is: “What is he like?” There a billion people give you a billion different answers. Plenty of them will be fairly similar and can be summarized into our religious groups of Christianity, Islam, Hindu, Buddhism. But since no answer is exactly the same, we can say there are a billion different gods. At least one per believer. One particular god’s existence doesn’t occur in another person, so his existence is restricted to a person’s mind or his imagination. Human imagination is the key to the very first spirits developed by early humans. Humans are a social species and have evolved to recognise faces from very rough features. From facial features we also assume this being has a personality which can get angered. This is not even unique to humans. It’s a trait in mammals. Humans are just highly tuned to this as a social species. As a side effect we even recognise faces in objects, landscapes, or a crater on Mars.

NASA's Viking 1 orbiter

In evolutionary terms it is more advantageous to occasionally misdiagnose an object as a face than failing to spot an enemy. A successful ambush tactic by a predator or an enemy often means the end of your life and therefore failure to pass on your traits to future generations. These traits are encoded in our genes. In this case evolution selects for false positives. (Things that are not true) For our case of avoiding threats the potential loss is small for false positives reactions, but huge for false negatives (Real things labelled not true)

The misdiagnosing of animal features is not restricted to sight. Sounds also offer huge clues about a creature’s mood, e.g., angry, pleased, happy, etc. This instinctive knowledge applies to most higher animals (hissing, growling, barking) and is deeply engrained into our behaviour over millions of years of evolution.

Now we already have the basis for some Greek gods. Zeus is the god of thunder. Ancient humans knew lightening can kill people, livestock and create fires destroying houses or crops. The sound of lightening also sounds like the sky is angry. A meteorological phenomenon just got attributed with an animal trait. Very similar is Poseidon, the god of the sea. A storm implies the god is angry and a calm sea means he is happycand relaxed. Over time we got countless of gods for phenomena we can perceive, but not explain. This resulted in polytheism.

Religion is a social coherent

Before we venture into the monotheism, we first must inspect a second aspect of humans more closely. The social species. Not unique to our species, but the most complex. Naturally the first people you support are your close family. Your children, siblings, and cousins. Then to a lesser degree your tribe. But who belongs to your tribe? How do you know that a particular person would support you in return?

In a hunter gatherer society, it can be someone you hunt with or someone who makes stone tools for you. Personal relationships work very well in small groups and even between species. Our social roots are the main reason we keep pets today and unsurprisingly other social species are our favourite companions. These social traits express themselves in the form of goodwill, trying to to something good for the people you live with.

As humans settled down and cities grew larger and larger you cannot know everyone in person. By the time of the bronze age humans completely dominated every other species. There was no way to proof yourself in a fight against a wild beast. Most food came from farming and herding livestock neither gives you much better results with extensive physical action. The one thing humans were still not mastering were natural forces. You cannot fight physically against a storm, a draught, or a flood. These events were thought to be controlled by spirits. In order to proof yourself to a community humans tried to appease those spirits. The question of how a bronze age human can appease a spirit capable of creating lighting, storms and earthquakes is written down in religious texts like the bible (and from archeological findings). We got stories like sacrificing livestock or even human lives. The following citations are important to understand to what extremes people are willing to go to appease a spirit and prove themselves to their community. Not just God based religions, the same fundamentals are true for modern superstitions. We still carry the same traits encoded in our genes as the bronze age people, only our problems are different.

Genesis 22:2,” Then God said, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.”

In this case killing your son, your genetic future would be acceptable to prove himself to his community. These are demand you cannot even negotiate with. Let us say you convince them to just chop of his arms. At the next opportunity, the community demands to sacrifice your daughter. In the story itself his son is spared by an angel, but then he really has to sacrifice his daughter. Still no real win for him.

The following numbers are for a bronze age/iron age civilisation. It does not matter if they were overreported by scholars, just that they felt they are adequate to represent a worthy sacrifice is enough prove that there is no limit to showing goodwill, even if you eradicate a huge portion of your country’s economy. Livestock wasn’t just used for food. Their bones make tools and jewlery. The skin was used to make clothing. The hit to quality of life would be huge.

1 King 3:4, “The king went to Gibeon to offer sacrifices, for that was the most important high place, and Solomon offered a thousand burnt offerings on that altar.”

1 King 8: 62-64, “Then the king and all Israel with him offered sacrifices before the Lord. Solomon offered a sacrifice of fellowship offerings to the Lord: twenty-two thousand cattle and a hundred and twenty thousand sheep and goats. … he offered burnt offerings, grain offerings and the fat of the fellowship offerings, because the bronze altar that stood before the Lord was too small to hold the burnt offerings, the grain offerings and the fat of the fellowship offerings.”

Rise of a clergy

As cities grew, we get two problems with physical sacrifices. The first is that people specialised into professions. A smith or potterer cannot burn a sword or jug as a sacrifice to a god. Even if they were to buy a goat or other animal cities already had a few thousand people. If everyone sacrificed an animal the city would simply become a hotspot for vermin and diseases. A better solution is to have a single chosen person appeal to the god like a priest and individuals just contribute some money. This transfer of responsibility and in turn power meant that priests from now on decide what a worthy sacrifice constitutes.

The second problem in a polytheistic religion is that you can’t appease every god equally. There are simply too many (e.g. Greek mythological has 12 major gods). Some cities or regions concentrated on only one God. A coastal city might focus on Poseidon, the god of the sea and an inland city on the God of earth or mountains. In times of war when one side lost, their god would typically loose as well as the defeated were either all killed or forced to accept the victor’s god as the superior. Genesis 19:24-25 is an example of total destruction, “Then the Lord rained down burning sulphur on Sodom and Gomorrah—from the Lord out of the heavens. Thus he overthrew those cities and the entire plain, destroying all those living in the cities—and also the vegetation in the land.”

Or if they didn’t kill everyone, young woman were usually taken as slaves or wives and had to adhere to the customs of their captures. Judges 21:11; This is what you are to do,” they said. “Kill every male and every woman who is not a virgin.”

As a sidenote this practise selected for woman who are sexually submissive. They managed to pass on their genes whereas woman who resisted were either killed or they themselves took actions against giving their capturer children.

Over a long enough timespan only a few gods survived, their associated practises were the most successful and are today known as our traditional monotheistic religions. We can still find proof of this preference to only one God in the bible.

Exodus 20:2-3; “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me.”

1 Kings 11:10; “Although he had forbidden Solomon to follow other gods, Solomon did not keep the Lord’s command.”

These are acknowledgements by god himself that there are other gods beside him. According to him they are simply not relevant. If he were truly the only god to have ever existed there would be no need specify that you should only follow him.

Sacrificing animals or crops still creates a significant burden on a society. In times of war every advantage you get over your enemy is important. Burning your food supply makes you weak and increases the chance to get conquered. To solve this issue the clergy came up with the genius idea to only appeal to god in verbal form through prayer. It stopped the societies burden of physical sacrifices, but still retained a community by requiring everyone to partake in this activity.

Beliefs change during the Enlightenment

With the age of enlightenment and its scientific advances human discovered alternative explanations for natural forces other than God. They were even able to create some powers themselves like lightning. Previous disasters like floods and draughts became less and less devastating. Transportation technology allowed shipments of food across the world to regions of need. Diseases were kept in check by modern medicine. Step by step humans gained the final abilities to control their lives and there was no reason to pray to God anymore to ask for mercy. The people (scientists, engineers) who gave us more and more power over our own destiny were idolized and encouraged other people not getting hung up on simply praying for better times. The spirits of religion were finally shown to have no power over us.

The second aspect of religion however was not replaced by science. Without religion telling you who belongs to your tribe people came up with alternatives for this need. Early forms were nationalism and socialism in the 19th century. Instead of the church setting social guidelines governments set them. In Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, your tribe was basically your entire country. Other countries were rival tribes and tensions resulted into the first World War. The war however ended because people were sick of fighting and not because a solution to tribal rivalries was found. Additionally, to the country tribe now there was also a deep political divide within countries between nationalists and communists. We got the Spanish civil war, then the second world war and the cold war. In the cold war it was fairly easy to claim to be part of the tribe by simply rejecting the opposing side.

With the fall of the Soviet Union the western tribe lost its major enemy and a simple opportunity to signal support. The free market captured part of it e.g., rival sport teams, but generally people drifted further and further apart. The abundance of basic and luxury goods meant no one depended on a particular group of people. Group loyalty was very low. This is not a natural situation for a social species. It is part of our DNA to look out for each other and bond socially.

With such a deficiency in social bonding people are desperate to express some goodwill to the group. Besides the free market solution of local sport clubs there was also a more global option since the second world war. The academic funding system. Research funding includes writing a research proposal. If you want to get funding from the government, you of course come up with something beneficial to the government (and possibly the people they are responsible for). This funding system at its core has nothing to do with empirical truth. It is about giving a perceived benefit to a group. It could be scientific advances as a prestige goal to increase government support, but it can just as well be sacrifices to a perceived threat (real or imagined) if this gains widespread support.

Initially already established scientist still had the old empirical truth as a first principle, but as more people grew up into the funding system goodwill to the group became number one priority. Second priority is publicity and prestige.

Today’s superstitions

Today we do not have people trying to protect us from perceivable dangers like a storm. Instead, all dangers are invisible and undetectable with our own senses.

We got fear campaigns against nuclear power, severe climate change (both cooling and warming) and a pandemic for a new virus with the severity of a common flu virus. We might also add the patriarchy thought up by feminists. A problem of the social justice was that it has to move from issue to issue because once they achieved a goal through new legislation, they need a new one to keep their group coherent. First, we got feminism, then gay rights, then trans rights and a few voices already call out for men’s rights after they have been destroyed by feminism. So, the cycle can begin again. A new form of this group without a fixed goal is the equality movement. People are inherently born unequal, so this group can constantly change society as they see fit. Their equality is not based on equal opportunity but on equal outcomes and measured in arbitrary measurements such as perceived race or perceived gender.

As we have seen in previous sections there is no limit to the extremes people are willing to go to continue their beliefs. Death of your own children, genocide and collapsing the economy are acceptable.

Strictly gay people have no genetic future and will be selected out through evolution. Trans people receive a permanent castration if they opt of a surgical sex change. If everyone would be gay or trans the society would be dead within one generation. This is nothing to be celebrated, at best people with those maladaptation’s could be tolerated in a society.

In response people have formed other groups. A weird and well-known example is the flat earth society. The biggest flaw of the flat earth model is that it has no practical application. No amount of special maps and other “proofs” by the society can change that. It is far inferior to a round earth in navigation, space exploration or environmental sciences. But for ordinary people it does not matter in their daily lives if the earth is flat or not. If they found a way to escape undesirable practises like the social justice cult, then overall the flat earth theory is beneficial to their lives. It is never about logic; it is about living in a social group. Your friends and family likely belong to the same group as you. Leaving a social group is not as simple as recognizing a flawed logic and simply discontinuing it. You might have to convince your friends to do the same if leaving the group is frowned up on. Otherwise, you replace them with people from another group.

Since these modern superstitions are about group cohesion and not about logic the correct way of declining support would be: “Sorry, I am not religious” or “Sorry I’m already part of another religion and don’t intend to join another”

For the big state supported religions the people receiving funding for expressing goodwill to the group also control our perception of the apparent danger. It is the same system as the church. They tell you are born with sin and naturally end up in hell, but if you become a follower god will forgive you and you go to heaven. The catholic church also monetised sins in the medieval ages. You could simply buy forgiveness with money. Today you buy CO2 certificates for generating electricity or pay a CO2 tax for driving a car.

Instead of practically doing nothing in the form of prayer we went back to physical sacrifices by giving up our quality of life.

Detailed Analysis of major new religions:

Since it is impossible to analyse all modern superstitions, here are three guiding principles:

Clue for overreactions:
The threat cannot be fought against physically.

Clue for superstitions:
The threat is invisible and other otherwise undetectable with our senses.

Clue for religions:
The people who claim to protect you from the unperceivable danger are also the ones who tell you how dangerous it is.

Alternative to religious groups

My life philosophy is adventurism and exploration. It does not depend on fear or pretending to protect you against something. Personal rituals are hiking, cycling, or kayaking through nature, all of them require a fit body. These activities are possible to do individually or in groups. For a country, this philosophy would be mainly space exploration. Apart from the deep sea every place on earth has already been explored. In order to explore space, you need very bright minds to invent more efficient space vehicles. A by-product of this philosophy are new scientific discoveries and engineering solutions. Science itself is just a method to test and verify theories, not a philosophy you can follow as a person or group. It is neither good nor bad. A phrase like “Trust the Science” is completely unscientific. There is nothing to trust. This phrase is an appeal to authority, to trust a person with a certain title.

With science you can just reach an acceptable level predictability. For example, gravity can be explained by Newton’s law of gravitation and Einstein’s law of general relativity. For satellites orbiting earth Newton’s law of gravitation are perfectly sufficient. No one uses general relativity to calculate a satellite orbit due to its complexity. For all planets but mercury Newton’s laws are sufficient as well. Even if general relativity is technically more accurate it does not replace or invalidate the previously discovered model. You need to choose a model depending on your application, not put blind trust in any model.

Bibliography

Religion & Evolution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jffWAdaz3kQ

Radioactivity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSsMRkN99aE

The International Version of the Bible

Personal Life experiences of switching social groups (country and language), PhD indoctrination