Reactionary Metaphysics II - Problems With the Worship Model

[Note: if you aren’t into religious stuff or are already pretty invested in a religion, feel free to skip this series of articles because it’ll be either boring or enraging.]

In the previous installment, we dove right in and explored the difference between two different approaches to spiritual life. To summarize, some religions and their practitioners take the position that one must simply believe in prescribed dogma to achieve the salvation of one’s soul and the ascent to a better plane of existence in the afterlife. Others, that one must seek out this experience themselves and come to know it, not just believe it.

This is the main difference between what can be termed exoteric and esoteric spirituality.

Various esoteric schools of varying quality generally maintain that they can provide the practitioner with a path to actual, felt spiritual experience. Whether or not this experience can be categorized as “good” or “evil” is beyond the point (for now). The point is that the regular approach to religion espoused by most faith-based systems does not claim to offer people an actual mystical experience. In fact, oftentimes when a member of the flock experiences a brush with the metaphysical in the form of visions or so on, the priests treat it with skepticism or even alarm.

People approach just about every facet of life in different ways and one’s approach to spiritualism is no different. Some are content with exotericism and others feel the need to take the esoteric path. Does this indicate that some people are different on the soul level? Almost certainly Maybe.

Let us take a quick detour and discuss vanguard dissident movements before we circle back to our discussion of pure metaphysics.

Vanguard movements often reject the reigning culture of the vast majority of their own people. If we look at Louis Farrakhan, we see a Black racial militancy movement that has rejected Christianity and embraced Islam despite the fact that the vast majority of Blacks in North America are either agnostic or nominally Protestant. In right-wing circles all over the White world, we see radicals drawn to paganism of either the Scandinavian, Slavic or, more rarely, Greek and Celtic variety. They do this despite the fact that the vast majority of Whites are either agnostic or nominally Christian.

There is a feeling in these circles that something is wrong with the current cultural situation and that a fundamental change in the consciousness of their people must be triggered before anything can change. The word “radical” is quite apt here - radical being derived from the Latin and meaning “the root”. Radicals are not content with cosmetic changes and seek to tear out the roots of the old order and replace it with another.

But most of these malcontents seem unable to change the actual approach that they have to religion. They may be able to swap out Jesus for Thor or Odin, but they haven’t changed anything else. In short, they are simply looking for new/old objects to worship and their fundamental point of contention with other religious systems is who or what to worship and not really the practice of worship itself.

This all begs the question: What is the point of worship? And: Do we need it at all?

Let’s take a look at an example that most of us should be very familiar with.

In the Old Testament, the Jews have a very straight-forward relationship with the Yahweh entity. They ritually sacrifice their first-born, their enemies, and special animals to their tribal deity and he, in turn, blesses them with military victories, children, slaves and livestock, among other things. At times, he even extends the physical lifespan of some people.

“Yahweh and his wife Asherah”

Yahweh, it seems, has the power to grant them material riches in this plane of existence in exchange for abject fealty and ritualized worship. Furthermore, the relationship that the Jews have with Yahweh is a blood bond - he only recognizes them and their seed and promises to help the Jews destroy and enslave all other nations of the world. In fact, certain versions of Deuteronomy 32:8 seem to indicate that the Jews as a people were given to Yahweh by a higher god, El. This is similar to how different races have different patron deities in fantasy worlds like DnD and Warhammer or even Lord of the Rings (the Silmarillion).

However, Yahweh’s power appears to be quite limited at times, as evidenced by the fact that northern chariot riders trounced him and his Jews in battle.

Yahweh also was no match for the Imperial Eagle of Rome. This caused great consternation among the Jews, who scrambled for an explanation for why they had been so thoroughly subjugated by the Romans.

Most of the prophecies in the second half of the Old Testament are the Jews basically seething, coping and rationalizing. One explanation that they settled on was that this was punishment for their sins and for not worshipping Yahweh hard enough and allowing the worship of Ishtar/Asherah/Whore of Babylon and other idols in the Temple. This is harshly condemned by the prophets. Another explanation that they settle on is that this is a test of their faith and that soon Yahweh would send them a warlord-savior with legions of angry angels at his back to destroy their racial enemies.

This never occurred.

Centuries later however, Nicene Christians declared that these Jewish prophecies, made by Jewish prophets, written by Jewish priests, for the Jewish people, were actually heralding the coming of Jesus Christ - a universal suffering messiah who condemns the Jews - and not a vengeful Jewish ethnark as the Jews themselves believed. This is somewhat akin to an African going to China and telling the Chinese that they had interpreted the writings of Confucius incorrectly and to listen to his version instead.

The Romans, by the way, on two separate occasions discovered that the Jews worshipped a donkey/donkey-headed god in the Temple after they stormed it. This is in keeping with what the Egyptians claimed about the Jews much earlier as well - that they worshipped Set - the donkey-associated god of chaos, evil and foreigners. A sort of Demiurge-like entity.

But this is all just history trivia and beyond the point, really.

The point that we are discussing here is the worship model or the worship approach to spirituality. In short, worship is part of a contractual obligation that the faithful have with their deity. In exchange for offerings, devotion and the performance of rituals, the faithful expect something in exchange. This has been the standard MO for centuries and its hardly a controversial observation to make. The purpose of ritualized worship, in almost all cultures, is to petition higher powers for help and to offer something in return for it, and the larger the request, the larger the sacrifice demanded, generally.

Based on this, an objective, rational experiment that could be conducted is to 1) simply gather worshippers of different gods, 2) ask them to perform their rituals and 3) then compare the results. One could basically run a test to find out which deity delivered on the goods most often and most consistently.

Sacrilege, I know. Not exactly sure why, though…

After all, most religions have legends about how the power of their god forced people of other faiths to convert out of awe.

Peoples have always done this and have started competitions between their gods and other peoples’. Almost always, the question of the stronger god was simply solved through war.

So, if cultural and political vanguard movements want to jettison the old religion and adopt a new one, but stick to the worship model of spirituality, then shouldn’t they just A/B test prayers and rituals to different gods and compare the results?

I’m dead serious.

Why bother worshipping an entity that doesn’t deliver on the goods? I could start worshipping my Power Ranger action figure today, but I don’t actually believe that it can help me in any way, so I abstain. Do modern neo-pagans think that worshipping a tree or Odin will yield them any results? If they do, then fair enough. If not, then it’s hard to understand exactly what they are even doing.

I think that they themselves don’t really know.

The technology of spiritualism has largely been forgotten and most people simply cargo-cult the motions without understanding the underlying premise or spiritual technology underlying them. At best, materialists (the majority of modern society) see this as a relatively harmless psychological coping measure and pay it no mind.

When Christianity came along, it did away with ritualized sacrifice offerings, claiming that Jesus was the last sacrifice that God demanded - that he did not need burnt offerings anymore, but that worship alone would suffice. The model remains largely the same though - only the offering has changed. One still worships God or Jesus and petitions them for help in some area of one’s life in exchange for prayer and good behavior. People often try to make deals with their gods, irrespective of their faith tradition. They offer to give up drinking, drugs or make a donation to charity if their god will deliver on something from his end. We’ve all probably done this in our lives at some point - I certainly know that I have. It seems to be a deeply-ingrained instinctual survival behavior of last resort.

A new approach to spirituality cannot confine itself to swapping out objects of worship, but has to swap out the worship model itself. Most people, however, are quite wedded to the worship model. They might be willing to debate the correct method of worship, and some might even be willing to reconsider the object of their worship, but few seem capable of conceptualizing an alternative approach to spirituality that isn’t structured around worship of one god or entity or another.

The problem with the worship model is that should a moment come when the gods fail to deliver, the faithful are often left demoralized, de-spirited and scrambling for answers. They generally either conclude that they are being punished either individually or collectively as a society or that this is a test of their faith, and so double-down on their worship. If the disappointment is bad enough however, they may abandon the religion and spirituality all-together.

You see this drama play out anytime that something bad happens to a person or their loved ones or their country. Every person eventually decides for himself whether a) they are being punished b) they are being tested c) they have been fooled. Almost all spiritual soul-searching that we come across in our literature and media is basically an exegesis on the age-old coping mechanism of worshippers and a commentary on why some people end up choosing option a, b, or c. You get it quite often in Dostoevsky, for example, but Western examples abound as well. Point being, very few people stop to consider analyzing the worship approach to spirituality itself.

To make matters worse, the rejection of worship is also often attributed to atheism or Satanism even though this makes literally no sense. Atheists don’t have a problem with worship - they blindly bow down to secular, worldly leaders and thinkers all the time. They simply don’t believe in a non-material plane of existence, period. Satanists also have no problem with worship. They simply swap out Jesus for Satan and petition him through rituals that most people find repugnant and depraved.

We’re running out of time and space here, and I think that I’ve set the premise for the next post quite well, but I want to summarize the relevant claims that I’ve made so far so that no one is left feeling confused or personally attacked.

First and foremost, I’m not saying that the worship method doesn’t work. If I was being facetious, I could make a crack about how 60% of the time it works 100% of the time, or something of a similar nature.

But I fully concede the possibility that ritualized worship does indeed yield tangible results for the worshipper that are not simply “placebo” effects. Frankly, I believe that the placebo effect is valid as well and simply illustrates the power of positive thinking, and therefore should not be discounted.

All I’m doing is positing that this is just one approach to spirituality that has attained a sort of mental brand capture in people’s minds. For example, nowadays, whenever we think of searching for something on the internet, we Google (R) it. When we get a runny nose, we use a Kleenex (TM) for it. But that doesn’t meant that Yandex or Duckduckgo or handkerchiefs don’t exist. When vanguard cultural or political movements talk about a new spirituality, they simply say, “who else should we worship?” because they’re stuck on the old worship model and cannot expand their thinking beyond it.

There are, however, other approaches to spirituality that do not suffer from the same pitfalls that the worship model does that are worth considering going forward.

But we’ll leave that discussion for next time.