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Hail and welcome to A Satanist Reads the Bible. This month’s series will largely be a continuation of the November series, which was originally planned to be an exposition of some of the problematic aspects of religion. As sometimes happens, the nature of that project changed somewhat in the course of my writing and research. What I initially understood as being clearly problematic manifestations of religion turned out to have unexpected complexities and nuances. In the end, I think that series would have been better titled “Why the Problems of Religion Aren’t What They Appear to Be,” or perhaps something along those lines but more clever and pithy.
This month’s series will be—or at least I plan for it to be—more along the lines of what I had originally intended for the November series: a look at what might be called the pathologies of human ideology, specifically including dogma, hegemony, and nihilism. There have already been some changes to my plans for this series. I had originally planned for there to be one episode on each of those three pathologies, but I realized fairly early on in the course of my research that dogma and hegemony are deeply interrelated and exist in terms of each other, such that it’s impossible to discuss one without discussing the other. Dogma is a kind of hegemony over truth, and hegemony is a kind of dogma over societies. And so this essay will focus on both of these, with the second essay focusing on nihilism, and the third seeking to build from those criticisms a concept of religion that is free from their underlying pathologies.
Findings and Conclusions from the November Series
The first essay in the November series, “The Fringes of Religion: Aum Shinrikyo and the Branch Davidians” (Bilsborough, 2020a), took a close look at the two religious sects named in its title, both of which were involved in incidents of violence in the 1990s. Aum Shinrikyo gassed the Tokyo subway system with the powerful chemical weapon sarin, and the Branch Davidians battled the ATF and the FBI in a 51-day siege culminating in a fire which destroyed the Branch Davidian compound and killed almost everyone who had been living there, including many children.
The people who had joined either Aum Shinrikyo or the Branch Davidians were typically sensitive, thoughtful people who had been alienated by life in modern capitalist society and who sought some way of living which would provide for them a deeper sense of meaning and purpose. These tendencies were taken advantage of, albeit in very different ways, by the leaders of both groups: Shoko Asahara of Aum Shinrikyo, and David Koresh of the Branch Davidians. The leaders of both groups evidently possessed an advanced spiritual understanding but also suffered from either profound moral failings (in the case of David Koresh) or outright sociopathy (in the case of Shoko Asahara). And both groups were construed by the media in a particular way, framing them as “cults,” a word which immediate short-circuits any meaningful discourse on the nature of these organizations and the people who joined them.
In the second November essay, “What Is Religion?” (Bilsborough, 2020b), I tried to get at how religion is both defined and experienced, both by religious people themselves and by those who are critical of religion, such as biologist and prominent atheist Richard Dawkins. This work not only demonstrated to me that arguments against religion often lack a sufficient understanding of the subject matter, but also provided my first indications that the way that we construe “religion” as a concept is itself a significant problem in discourse concerning religion.
This set up the third essay in the series, “Against Antireligious Atheism” (Bilsborough, 2020c), which examined the arguments of two proponents of atheism (Christopher Hitchens and Julian Baggini) primarily in terms of how they define and construe “religion.” These investigations led into a survey of the work of Anglican priest William Cavanaugh, who argued that the problem of religious violence, such as it is socially understood, is a myth resulting from religion being construed in an essentialist way so as to support a narrative authorizing certain forms of violence, especially “secular” violence on the part of the state. This is not to say that religion, such as we understand it, does not have a problematic relationship with violence, or that this relationship should not be deeply interrogated, but only that this relationship is not analytically separable from the relationships between violence and other forms of ideology, such as political and cultural ideologies.
Dogma
Turning now to the pathologies which are the topic of this essay, I’ve leaned on these three in particular—dogma, hegemony, and nihilism—for most of the life of the Satanist Reads the Bible project without spending much time saying what exactly these things are. I’ve covered nihilism in a little more depth, but dogma and hegemony have largely been left undefined in these pages. I will now remedy that deficiency.
Dogma derives from the Ancient Greek word δόγμα, which means “opinion” or “belief.” The term appears in the original Greek of the New Testament, such as in Luke 2:1 and Acts 16:4, to mean an official law or decree. Luke 2:1, for example, reads “In those days a decree [δόγμα] went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered” (NRSV).
The contemporary use of “dogma” encompasses both an official, doctrinal meaning and a pejorative meaning. The official meaning is given by the official Catholic Encyclopedia as follows:
…[A]ccording to a long-standing usage a dogma is now understood to be a truth appertaining to faith or morals, revealed by God, transmitted from the Apostles in the Scriptures or by tradition, and proposed by the Church for the acceptance of the faithful. It might be described briefly as a revealed truth defined by the Church — but private revelations do not constitute dogmas, and some theologians confine the word defined to doctrines solemnly defined by the pope or by a general council, while a revealed truth becomes a dogma even when proposed by the Church through her ordinary magisterium or teaching office. A dogma therefore implies a twofold relation: to Divine revelation and to the authoritative teaching of the Church.
So, for something to be dogma in the official capacity, at least with regards to the Catholic Church, it must be a revealed truth which is officially endorsed by the Church. The article gives the example of the Apostles’ Creed:
I believe in God the Father Almighty Creator of Heaven and earth and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord; Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, Suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; He descended into hell; the third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into Heaven, sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Ghost, The Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting.
CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Apostles’ Creed, n.d.
The more pejorative sense of the term is given by Wiktionary as “An authoritative principle, belief or statement of opinion, especially one considered to be absolutely true and indisputable, regardless of evidence or without evidence to support it” (Dogma – Wiktionary, n.d.). It’s easy enough to see how this pejorative sense derives from the term’s official meaning; this definition is essentially a description of the Apostles’ Creed, generalized so as to be applicable not only to religious doctrine but to any ideology.
In his book Atheism: A Very Short Introduction (2003), which I investigated a couple of episodes ago, philosopher Julian Baggini describes dogmatism in the following way: “To be dogmatic is basically to hold that one’s beliefs are indefeasible when such a refusal to countenance the possibility of being wrong is not justified” (p. 23). That seems to be exactly the case with the Apostles’ Creed. Recall that one of the necessary conditions for dogma is that it be revealed truth. Revealed by whom? By God. That is a necessary condition: God is the one who must reveal revealed truth. And then to say that the Apostles’ Creed is defeasible is to admit to the possibilities that the Creed wasn’t revealed by God or that God is fallible, and God’s existence, God’s perfection and commensurate infallability, and God’s being the source of the revelations of the Creed are themselves further dogmas (CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Nature and Attributes of God, n.d.). Indeed, dogma can only be supported by other dogma, if by anything at all; if it were supported by empirical evidence or rational argument, it would no longer be dogma, and that which is asserted to be true in the absence of such evidence or argument is necessarily dogma.
Going back to Baggini’s definition, though, we find ourselves in a bit of a conundrum. “To be dogmatic is basically to hold that one’s beliefs are indefeasible when such a refusal to countenance the possibility of being wrong is not justified.” So now we have to ask ourselves, when is such a refusal justified?
Let’s say I make the claim that 1+1=2. I think that my belief that that is the case is indefeasible, and I also believe that I am justified in that belief of indefeasibility. I cannot imagine any evidence or scenario that would lead me to believe that there might be circumstances in which 1+1≠2 because I can hold up one fountain pen, and another fountain pen, and I have two pens, and I can do that with any objects or analyze the equation in terms of pure abstract mathematics, as Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead did in the Principia Mathematica, and come to the same conclusion. So I think that my belief that 1+1=2, despite being believed as indefeasible, is not dogmatic. Curiously, my belief in the indefeasibility of my belief in the truth of this mathematical statement is not itself indefeasible: I have never delved into the philosophy of mathematics; should I do so, I do not expect to encounter anything that will negate my belief that 1+1=2, but I may encounter theories that force me to allow for that possibility.
Under what circumstances are we justified in believing that our beliefs are indefeasible? The belief that another belief is indefeasible is itself a belief, so the question can be reduced to: when are we justified in our beliefs?
Julian Baggini has, unfortunately, defined dogma in such a way as to be reliant on the answer to one of the core questions of philosophy, a question which has been debated for literally thousands of years without resolution. The question of when we are justified in our beliefs is one of the central questions of the philosophical field of epistemology, defined as the study of knowledge but inclusive as well of inquiry into related topics such as belief and understanding. The dogma of the Apostles’ Creed is an assertion of belief: it begins “I believe…” and then lists a series of things that the one reciting the creed supposedly believes. I say “supposedly” not because I think that those reciting the creed do not believe what they’re saying, but only because it is possible that they do not. Indeed, I recited the entire thing a moment ago and the only part of it that I believe is that a person named Jesus suffered under Pontius Pilate, governor of Judea at the time, and that Jesus was crucified by Pilate, died as a result, and was buried. It’s worth noting that I don’t claim this belief as knowledge. I don’t believe that I have sufficient grounds for doing so. There is a theory—referred to as the Jesus myth theory or Jesus ahistoricity theory, among other names—that the historical Jesus didn’t exist at all, and while I consider the available evidence to weigh against those theories being true, they’re at least plausible. I can only say that, based on the evidence I’ve encountered, it seems much more likely than not that the historical Jesus existed, but without certainty—even fallible certainty, a certainty that I allow is defeasible—I can’t claim it as knowledge. We can also observe that, in order for me to rightfully assert this belief as knowledge, it must actually be the case that the historical Jesus existed. If the Jesus ahistoricity theory is correct and the historical Jesus never existed, I could not rightfully claim to know that he did exist, but I could still wrongfully make that claim. If I did so, and then learned of compelling evidence proving that the historical Jesus did not exist, I would have to then say, “Ah, I thought that I knew that the historical Jesus existed, but I was mistaken. I believed that the historical Jesus existed, but that belief was wrong, so I did not actually know that it was true.”
In order to be justified in the indefeasibility of the Apostles’ Creed, one would need to be justified in the beliefs themselves. What would justify the belief that Jesus will, at some point in the future, come from Heaven to judge the living and the dead, as the Creed claims? I have beliefs about the future and I can even say, to a very limited extent, that I have knowledge of the future. I would say, for example, that I know that the sun will rise tomorrow, by which I mean that the Earth will continue to rotate in such a way as to create the appearance of the sun rising. It may be possible that some catastrophic cosmic event will prevent this from occuring, but that possibility seems sufficiently remote that it doesn’t pose a threat to my knowledge. My knowledge is grounded in perceptual evidence and expert testimony that informs me as to the mechanism of the sun’s rising and setting, which is not likely to be disrupted between now and tomorrow morning. But this claim regarding the future judgement by Jesus—let’s call this proposition J for easy reference—seems to require a very specific knowledge about the future that does not result from knowledge of an ongoing process or mechanism that would make such an occurrence inevitable. I might reasonably be able to say that I know what I’m cooking for dinner tomorrow, and I could say this because I have direct access to my plans. If I tell my partner, they would then also be able to say that they know what I’m cooking for dinner tomorrow, so we can observe knowledge about the future being transmitted in this way, but both my and my parter’s knowledge would, in this case, be defeasible. Even if I’ve already bought the ingredients, I might change my mind, or something might come up that would prevent me from cooking as planned. In the case of an indefeasible belief about the future, such as proposition J, it seems that the event described would have to be inevitable. This would be the case if God exists, is perfect (as a perfect being would never change their mind and would always follow through on their plans), and revealed this plan to humanity. This is, of course, exactly what those professing the Creed believe; such people would assert that such beliefs are indeed justified as indefeasible and thus not dogma in the pejorative sense.
Dogma is closely associated with Christianity because Christianity is about belief in a way that other religions are not. Judaism and Islam, for example, are more concerned with keeping God’s law, and Hinduism with fulfilling one’s personal duty. All religions involve belief in some way, but in Christianity, it’s the central matter. Christianity’s central claim is that, as a result of sin (including the Original Sin of Adam and Eve), humans have fallen out of favor with God and are thus in danger of eternal torment in Hell, but are allowed the possibility of grace and eternal paradise by the sacrifice of God’s incarnation in the person of Jesus Christ. And how is it that one can actualize this possibility, get into God’s good graces, and be assured of eternal life in paradise? “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life,” (John 3:16, NRSV), “Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God,” (John 3:18), “…[I]f you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved (Romans 10:9), “‘The one who believes and is baptized will be saved; but the one who does not believe will be condemned’” (Mark 16:16, spoken by Jesus). In Islam, the shahada, the statement of belief in God and that Muhammad is the messenger of God, is the first of the five pillars of the religion, but in Christianity, belief is the religion’s underlying mechanism.
That said, dogma in the pejorative sense is not confined to Christianity, or to religion in general. Many Americans are highly dogmatic in their beliefs in the supremacy of their nation and its supposed values. That such beliefs persist in the face of authoritarianism and the American government’s and people’s catastrophic response to the coronavirus pandemic is evidence to their being dogmas; these beliefs are evidently held as indefeasible because they have not been reconsidered and revised in light of strong contrary evidence. Similarly, we can observe dogmas about economic systems: both American capitalism and Marxist-Leninist socialism are held as indefeasibly superior to each other and to other possible systems, despite the very evident failings of both.
Hegemony
Hegemony is another word with roots in Ancient Greek: a ἡγεμονία (hegemonia) in Ancient Greece was a period of dominance in the region by a particular city-state, so one might speak of the Spartan Hegemony or the Theban Hegemony as being those periods during which Sparta and Thebes, respectively, were the dominant city-states in Ancient Greece.
The modern usage of the term stems largely from the Italian philosopher and political theorist Antonio Gramsci and refers to his theory of cultural hegemony. Whereas classical hegemony denotes geopolitical control maintained through force or threats of force, cultural hegemony refers to social control maintained through culture. As an example, which I’ve derived from one given by the economist Tom Nicholas (2017), one can look to American television shows throughout most of the 20th century, which almost exclusively depicted families as consisting of a long-term heterosexual relationship between a cisgendered man and woman, along with their children. Often, especially earlier in the 20th century, such families were depicted as having a patriarchal leadership structure, with the father being the primary provider and source of authority within the family. Such exclusive depiction creates a widespread cultural perception that this family structure is the normal or default option, thus reinforcing the dominance of the dominant group, that of cisgendered white heterosexual Christian men.
Cultural hegemony has been approached in different ways by other theorists, often using different language or concepts that are related to hegemony but not identical to it. In Sapiens (2015), a general history of the human species, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari describes what he calls imagined orders, socially-constructed realities not based on objective or natural realities. Evolution by natural selection is a natural order, but our governments, laws, economic systems, and institutions are creations of the human mind which, being imaginary, are unstable. They can be enforced through violence or the threat of violence, but they are ultimately predicated on belief. That belief is promulgated and reinforced by making the imagined orders in question appear to be natural orders.
How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined. You always insist that the order sustaining society is an objective reality created by the great gods or by the laws of nature…. You also educate people thoroughly. From the moment they are born, you constantly remind them of the principles of the imagined order, which are incorporated into anything and everything. They are incorporated into fairy tales, dramas, paintings, songs, etiquette, political propaganda, architecture, recipes and fashions.
Harari, 2015, pp. 112-113
In the mid-20th century, French structuralist philosopher Roland Barthes described what he called mythologies, which Gramsci would likely have seen as being manifestations of cultural hegemony and which Harari would likely see as being the cultural support structure for imagined orders. In his book Mythologies (2006, originally published in 1957 with the first English translation in 1972), Barthes analyzes the myths surrounding various products and aspects of popular culture. For example, he describes the world of professional wrestling as being a kind of morality play that reinforces the social understanding of good and evil.
The world enters language as a dialectical relation between activities, between human actions; it comes out of myth as a harmonious display of essences. A conjuring trick has taken place; it has turned reality inside out, it has emptied it of history and has filled it with nature, it has removed from things their human meaning so as to make them signify a human insignificance. The function of myth is to empty reality: it is, literally, a ceaseless flowing out, a haemorrhage, or perhaps an evaporation, in short a perceptible absence.
pp. 142-143
In another variation on the theme of hegemony, another mid-20th century French philosopher, Louis Althusser, who was influenced by Marx and Gramsci, described what he called ISAs: Ideological State Apparatuses, which are associated with institutions such as schools, political parties, and religions and which work collectively to support and inculcate the State Ideology, which is the collective of essential values needed by the state to “ensure the reproduction of the relations of production” (Althusser et al., 2014, p. 138). Feminist theorist bell hooks describes the “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” a system of interlocking social orders which reinforce the dominance of men. Noting that she is often met with laughter when naming this system in this way, she states that “[t]he laughter is itself a weapon of patriarchal terrorism. It functions as a disclaimer, discounting the significance of what is being named. It suggests that the words themselves are problematic and not the system they describe” (2004, p. 29). Yet another example of cultural hegemony in action.
Gramsci, being a Marxist, had the cultural hegemony of capitalist states in mind when he wrote while imprisoned by Mussolini’s Fascist regime, but religion has its own hegemonies. In a 2003 article for the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Canadian professor of religious studies Lori G. Beaman writes:
Assumptions about the nature of religion and what constitute “normal” beliefs and practices pervade the media, law, and academic writing. Although the media are not necessarily a good source of social scientific data, it is significant that groups on the religious margins are almost always portrayed negatively. New religious movements attract media attention for apocalyptic views and actions, and remain “cults” in public discourse…. Muslims are the subject of biased media reports that seem to result in attacks on mosques and anti-Muslim sentiment….
p. 315
This is what we saw in my essay from last month, the aforementioned “The Fringes of Religion: Aum Shinrikyo and the Branch Davidians.” Following the section describing the history of the Branch Davidians up through the fiery destruction of their compound which resulted in the deaths of most of the adherents, I discussed the media characterization of the Branch Davidians and other new religious movements as “cults,” using, for additional context, the 1988 book Manufacturing Consent by political theorist and linguist Noam Chomsky and economist and social critic Edward S. Herman. This book describes how the media restrict debate to “the bounds of acceptable premises,” those premises which “inculcate and defend the economic, social, and political agenda of privileged groups” (p. 298). This isn’t a deliberate conspiracy, at least not in total—such a depiction was not the intent of Chomsky and Herman, nor Gramsci’s in describing cultural hegemony in general—but rather a natural result of the cultural dominance of political groups and, with regards to the media, what Chomsky and Herman call the advertising license to do business, the fact that the media are financially dependent on advertisers who benefit from media which depict the world and its events in a way that supports the advertisers’ interests.
Conclusions
Earlier in this essay, I referred to dogma and hegemony as pathologies of human ideology. Having given a general account of both, I will conclude this essay with an account of why both are problematic to the point of being pathological.
As I’ve stated before on this show, responsible belief is a moral duty. Our actions, after all, are guided by belief, and not only by the beliefs themselves but by our confidence in these beliefs. If I believed that God wanted me to kill a large number of Americans by hijacking their planes and flying them into the World Trade Center, but also considered that belief to be a defeasible one, I probably would not go through with it. After all, that’s a radical action that would, were I wrong about it, be enormously harmful. Better to err on the side of caution. But if that was a belief that I was absolutely certain about, how could I even hesitate? For this reason, it is a moral imperative that we seek consistent correspondence between our beliefs and the facts of the world. This being a constant struggle towards an unachievable ideal, we should be wary of holding our beliefs with too much confidence.
Which leads me to ask, what do we ever gain by dogmatic belief? By holding beliefs that we consider to be indefeasible? This is not in contrast to not holding those beliefs at all, but simply in contrast to holding those beliefs, perhaps even holding them strongly and with great conviction, but allowing for at least the possibility of revision. One might suggest that, as people do in fact hold dogmatic beliefs, there must be some benefit to it. Well, perhaps, but we might not necessarily be the beneficiaries. The beliefs of the many might have benefits only to a privileged few. I’m guessing that Jeff Bezos, for example, would prefer that belief in capitalism be held dogmatically rather than defeasibly.
And on that note, as to hegemony, my argument is much the same: the hegemonic model of the world, which sees our institutions and orders as being natural rather than historical and socially constructed, is not an accurate one. That which is socially constructed can be deconstructed, reconstructed, and analyzed in terms of its power dynamics, whereas that which is natural is intrinsic to our lives as humans. If we mistake imagined orders for natural ones, we will fail to understand the ways in which they shape our lives, thus unconsciously ceding a great deal of control over our lives to these imagined orders.
I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content.
Works Cited or Referenced
Althusser, L., Balibar, É., Bidet, J., & Goshgarian, G. M. (2014). On the reproduction of capitalism: Ideology and ideological state apparatuses.
Baggini, J. (2003). Atheism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780192804242.001.0001
Barthes, R. (2006). Mythologies (A. Lavers, Trans.; 47. [print.]). Hill and Wang.
Beaman, L. G. (2003). The Myth of Pluralism, Diversity, and Vigor: The Constitutional Privilege of Protestantism in the United States and Canada. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 42(3), 311–325. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5906.00183
Bilsborough, T. (2020a, November 7). The Fringes of Religion: Aum Shinrikyo and the Branch Davidians. A Satanist Reads the Bible. https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/the-fringes-of-religion-aum-shinrikyo-and-the-branch-davidians/
Bilsborough, T. (2020b, November 17). What Is Religion? A Satanist Reads the Bible. https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/what-is-religion/
Bilsborough, T. (2020c, November 27). Against Antireligious Atheism. A Satanist Reads the Bible. https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/against-antireligious-atheism/
CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Apostles’ Creed. (n.d.). Retrieved November 30, 2020, from https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01629a.htm
CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Dogma. (n.d.). Retrieved November 30, 2020, from https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05089a.htm
CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Nature and Attributes of God. (n.d.). Retrieved November 30, 2020, from https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06612a.htm#IID
Dennett, D. C. (2007). Breaking the spell: Religion as a natural phenomenon. Penguin Books.
dogma—Wiktionary. (n.d.). Retrieved November 30, 2020, from https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dogma#English
Harari, Y. N. (2015). Sapiens: A brief history of humankind (First U.S. edition). Harper.
Herman, E. S. & Chomsky, N. (1988). Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon.
hooks, bell. (2004). The will to change: Men, masculinity, and love (First Washington Square Press trade paperback ed). Washington Square Press.
Tom Nicholas. (2017, August 14). Hegemony: WTF? An introduction to Gramsci and cultural hegemony. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LI_2-qsovo&ab_channel=TomNicholas