Suicide: The Origin of God & Genealogy of Evil in Religion

Whatever we see when awake is death; when asleep, dreams.
—Heraclitus, Fragment 16

11. Reality & Ideality.

Humans access two modes of perception or awareness—namely, empiricism and reason; that is to say, reality and conceptuality.

Reality in this context refers to the physical realm of matter, energy, and their processes. Conceptuality entails the intellectual realm of ideas, more aptly known as ideals, the crystallization of qualitative essence into absolute notions of being. In this sense, the mode of reason innately fosters idealism.

Thus! One may revise the original terminology to declare that humans access two modes of perception: reality and ideality.

12. Ideal of Pure Reason as Definition of God.

Idealism refers to the phenomenon whereby a human believes in—places faith in—an ideal. The highest conceivable ideal equates to the being that contains within it all possibility, in a word, omnipotence.

So! This reveals the main definition of god: the being that can do anything. The reader will observe how god derives explicitly from the idealism of human reason, or to rephrase it, god derives from ideality. Ergo, god qualifies as an ideal; god is defined as the personification of perfect potential. Ontologically, the name god refers to the hypothesis of perfect being that contains a triple ideal within it. Algebra might classify god as perfection cubed or being to the third power.

1. Perfect qualities: absolute
2. Perfect form: sublime
3. Perfect presence: eternal

Therefore, in an ironic way god does exist as a notional being, albeit not in physical reality—god exists in ideality, in the imagination as the ultimate entity. Alas, it technically becomes an error for atheists to categorically refute the existence of god altogether when in fact it does hold form as a figure in the intellectual realm—and subsequently as an egregore on the astral plane; for more on god-form egregores, see the author’s Black Magick Manifesto.

The Christian saint Anselm of Canterbury expounded his notorious ontological argument. He defined his mono-god in the text Proslogion in 1078 as the following:

There is no doubt that there exists a being than which nothing greater can be conceived, and it exists both in the understanding and in reality.

To rephrase his position in a straightforward manner, he denotes god to be the greatest being a human can conceive—exactly what the author elucidated.

13. Worst Transcendental Error.

With Anselm’s premise laid out, it becomes lucidly clear where in particular he trespasses into radical falsehood. He insists that his god does not merely occupy the mantle of highest being in the realm of ideality; he oversteps that boundary and insists that his god also exists in reality. In the very instant of this critical ontological overreach—what Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard named a leap of faith—the notion of god transforms from an ideal into a delusion into which Anselm places faith. As an aside, this suggests why the prominent neo-atheist Richard Dawkins named his top book The God Delusion.

The term transcendence in this context denotes the crossover between the modes of awareness, specifically, the back and forth between reality and ideality. Hence, the tragic conflation whereby the theist mistakes his ideal entity to be a real entity classifies as humanity’s worst possible transcendental error.

Voila! Theism has been stripped down to its barest bones, wherefore anyone can nakedly view it as the severest violation of the division between reality and ideality, the biggest deception upon reality, the grossest epistemological misinterpretation, the vilest vandalism of aesthetics.

One of the most enlightened philosophers who ever lived, Immanuel Kant, highlights the glaring fallacy in the transcendental error in his tour de force Critique of Pure Reason:

[A deity is] a concept that we can never exhibit in concreto in its totality, and thus it is grounded on an idea which has its seat solely in reason. […] This idea of the sum total of all possibility […] refines itself to a concept thoroughly determined a priori […] and then must be called an ideal of pure reason. If we consider all possible predicates […] then we find […] a mere non-being.

Observe in the above quotation that Kant revives Anselm’s ontological argument—that god is the highest conceivable ideal. Then in a milestone refutation, Kant demolishes the transcendental error assumed in his position, Anselm’s faith that the ideal being exists in reality too, as opposed to ideality alone. Kant does so in his proof that the god-ideal can only derive a priori from reason and never from empiricism.

14. Earliest Natural Philosophy.

Dear reader, travel back in time to many millennia ago. Nature vexes the earliest humans badly; they marvel at its organic forces with deep fear and awe. In the absence of scientific instrumentation, stone age people could not accurately theorize about the mysterious forces of nature in a thoroughly empirical manner. For example, when deadly lightning bolts strike down at earth from an ominous storm cloud, what line of reasoning could these primitives employ to rationalize the violent phenomenon, when they lacked knowledge of electrical discharge? What kind of logic could they utilize to comprehend fire, weather, child birth, death, and other perplexing events of life?

These humans are not abject fools though, for they seed the embryo of natural philosophy. They intuitively discern human causality—anthropogenic causality; they apprehend how they could catalyze events to occur manually by their own hands. For instance, if they hammer a stone on a person’s skull, it inflicts death; if they rub sticks together fast, it ignites a flame; if they eat fruits and nuts, they feel nourished; if they massage a special herb into a wound, it heals. Hitherto, they could plainly identify themselves—human beings—as the sufficient cause for isolated effects in their personal lives.

15. Hypothesis of Super-Human Causality.

Ah! With their feet planted on this rudimentary logical ground, they now inspect the mysteries of nature through an inquisitive lens and suddenly become suspicious that perchance hidden humans cause these marvelous organic forces to occur. They speculate: if we ourselves spark the flame, then who specifically sparks the flame of lightning? They answer: it must be a person like us, and if so, then that person must necessarily also possess the power of causality by an order of magnitude greater than our own. They declare: hidden super-humans exist!

They extend their elemental line of reasoning—their law of human causality—into the sphere of natural forces like the weather and seasons, which unbeknownst to them is not an effect of human causality at all at the time. Nevertheless, they believe vehemently in this deep suspicion out of innocent ignorance because they have no other explanation.

16. Advent of Religion.

Dear reader, consider how passionately the scientists of today fight to defend their theories. They claim to be impartial, but nonetheless they still stake their entire livelihood on their signature ideas. Now regress back to the most primitive of times, when paleo-humans possess no rational morality, no scientific dialectic, and instead enforce hyper-tribalism. The tribal majority suspects that hidden super-humans cause natural events, and thus this group consensus rules the milieu—henceforth they all believe in super-beings, with no space for rebuttal nor alternative theories.

Their intellectual combination of the super-human hypothesis and hyper-tribalistic culture marks the advent of religion.

17. Psychology of Polytheism.

More has transpired cognitively in this series of events than it may seem, and it merits the shrewdest analysis. Recall the main definition of god by Anselm and Kant: the ideal of pure reason; the personification of all potential; the highest conceivable ideal. This notional creature is born innately by the realm of intellect.

These earliest humans access the virgin ideal of a perfect being first—idealization; then they project this ideal being onto reality as a god—projection; split the whole being into a plurality of individuated gods—pluralization; and assign those many individuated gods as rulers of t
he many individuated forces of nature—anthropomorphosis.

The cognition behind polytheism:

1. Idealization: conceive the highest possible being, i.e., ideal of pure reason, or god.
2. Projection: project the ideal onto reality, i.e., transcendental error.
3. Pluralization: split the whole god into a multitude of individuated gods, i.e., polytheism.
4. Anthropomorphosis: attribute the causality behind natural forces to each individuated god.

18. Psychology of Monotheism.

The cognition behind monotheism mirrors the exact series of psychological events as polytheism, albeit abbreviated to only three steps instead of four.

The cognition behind monotheism:

1. Idealization: conceive the highest possible being, i.e., ideal of pure reason, or god.
2. Projection: project the ideal onto reality, i.e., transcendental error.
3. Anthropomorphosis: attribute the causality behind nature to god.

19. Discovery of Morality.

Immortals become mortals, mortals become immortals, they live in each other’s death and die in each other’s life.
—Heraclitus, Fragment 66

The early primitive humans watch bolts of lightning destroy fruit trees, loud cracks of thunder boom across the sky, torrential rainfall floods the land, packs of animals migrate away.

They demand answers: Why have the hidden gods caused this? Why do the hidden gods hate us? Why do they punish us? And in a historic watershed moment the destiny of humankind changes course forever. Primitive man reflects back on his own conduct and asks the first moral question: What did we do wrong?

An alien, awkward, new pathos falls over his neurology and his breathing stops. His heart skips a beat. He suddenly throws his head back in horror and screams desperately into the wind: Oh gods, what did we do to deserve this? And for the first time ever man is infected with the disease of bad conscience.

Then in a soul-deadening act of psychic suicide, he remorsefully asks the second moral question: What can we do to apologize?

Humanity casts its fate. Prognosis: terminal cancer.

20. Advent of Sacrificial Worship.

The paleo-humans scour their conscience to determine which of their acts may have offended the gods. And it dawns on them: it was not what we did, but rather what we did not do! All this time we feasted on the reddest meat, imbibed the sweetest juice, and had the most orgasmic sexual intercourse with one another… but we never shared our cornucopia of abundance with the gods who provided the rich bounty to us in the first place! How ignorant! Like ravenous thieves, we plundered their gifts and saved none for them, so now they avenge our evil. We have wrought this cruelty on ourselves. Perhaps if we consistently sacrifice a share of our goods to them, they will feel merciful and forgive us. Henceforth, we will always tithe a portion of our goods to these super-beings so as to preserve a happy healthy friendship… or else a maelstrom of tragedy will befall us again!

That god births life? Then we shall sacrifice life back. We hereby slay this virgin child and gift her blood as an act of communion.

That god forges gold? Then we shall sacrifice gold back. We hereby toss these coins into the river, so they flow to the otherworld as recompense for our abundance.

That god herds animals? Then we shall sacrifice animals back. We hereby hunt and smoke these carcasses as tribute.
So! The emergence of this insanely paranoid sacrificial tradition filters its way down into the mundane life of the tribespeople and permeates to the point where religious dogma today enforces a meticulous code of tedious regulations about how people dress, eat, socialize, labor, and travel—all to avoid upsetting hidden super-beings.

On the main, their primitive line of reasoning in regard to sacrificial worship will strike a contemporary person as excruciatingly stupid—this idea that humans owe compensation to an imaginary god. But their rationale makes sense relative to the extreme scarcity of knowledge at the time. Their poor condition is called innocent ignorance.

21. Inception of the Priest Class.

With all these vengeful deities and their many supposed demands, how can the tribe safely monitor and adhere to a rigorous schedule of communal sacrifice? Thus the hierarchical class of priest—the intermediary between god and man as the administrative secretary of sacrificial worship—rises to prominence. Hence, rather than a whole clan fretting about the complicated details of sacrifice, a few individuals devote their entire lives to simplifying that singular duty for everyone: to carry out sacrificial worship every season, weekend, and holiday at the exact specific times required.

22. Politicization of the Priest Class.

This ecclesiastical class now enjoys legal privilege, which thereby establishes a divisive hierarchy in society as follows:

1. Gods
2. Priests
3. Humans

Henceforth, the priesthood becomes a political force.

23. Homicide by the Priest Class.

The priest class receives the judicial authority to sentence individual heretics and apostates to death for endangering the tribe through their dissidence. Ergo, homicide becomes ingrained into the cultural norms of the tribe. The ordinary members of society love it. They chant: save us from damnation! Burn the heretics alive! Long live our wise, valorous priests!

Alas! The tribal priesthood morally degenerates from protector to predator. Religion irrevocably crosses the critical threshold from innocence to evil.

24. Psychopathization of the Priest Class.

Closet psychopaths who lurk in the margins of society secretly admire the violent privilege of the priests, who openly murder victims without ramification. Like a hungry shark, the psychopath catches a whiff of blood in the tide, feels intoxicated, and circles its prey. This maniac enrolls into the priesthood as a covert way to enact aggression under the guaranteed safety of religious authority. Like moths to a flame on a summer night, more and more madmen flock to the priesthood for access to a weapon that actualizes their sadistic fantasies.

Perhaps at first the priesthood could weed out the bad apples; they can identify the psychos. But over time, the specie of psychopath becomes shrewd and calculates how to disguise its kinky bloodlust under a vanilla personality. Generation after generation passes, and the wheel of time breeds the most refined class of psychopaths in the history of the human race: vampires dressed as holy men.

25. Masochization of the Lay Class.

As the engine of time births the sharpest psychopaths, it simultaneously incubates the most fervent masochists in tow. Generation after generation of submission to the predator class breeds a victim class that is thoroughly indoctrinated to love and defend its predators.

The division between superior and inferior castes encodes into the genetic makeup of the human brain. Babies inherit genetic masochism from their parents, who inherited genetic masochism from the grandparents, and so on all the way back to the early psychopathization of the priesthood.

Behold: the genealogy of evil in religion.

26. Inception of Holy Wars.

Bigotry is the sacred disease.
—Heraclitus, Fragment 56

One day a wandering priest gazes across the river in prayer. He recoils in horror at the sight of distant tribespeople dancing around a fire in worship of their own gods. The slander “false idols” escapes his quivering lips, and the all-too-familiar feeling of bad conscience saturates his neurology once again. His eyes turn bloodshot, and his gut fills with rage to avenge their shameless heresy.

Bloody holy wars erupt between neighboring tribes on every continent over millennia, and some still ensue today. Whole empires rise and fall under the backbreaking weight of bitter ethnic conflict. Genocide becomes not just a norm, but a necessity for the tribe to remain innocent under the constant surveillance of their vengeful gods. Needless to mention, other factors are involved in tribal warfare than religion alone, such as territorial dispute, family blood feuds, etc.; nonetheless, the clash of faith steadily shovels heaps of coal into the furnace of belligerence. Scarcely does religion ever silence a battle drum. To the contrary, so-called holy men usually pace the avant-garde before battle, to bless the warriors in their combat, to anoint them soldiers of god—to reinforce their feeling of bad conscience.

27. Birth of The Devil.

No hint will be necessary to help you to understand at what moment in history the dualistic fiction of a good and an evil God first became possible. With the same instinct by which the subjugated reduce their God to “Goodness in itself,” they also cancel the good qualities from their conqueror’s God; they avenge themselves on their masters by diabolizing the latter’s God. The good God and the devil as well: both the abortions of decadence.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist

No graver evil exists than adversarial apostasy in the purview of The Tribe. So much so that they personified the essence of this evil into an archetype known as The Devil.

If a tribe measures its safety by the degree to which its population faithfully worships its pantheon of vengeful deities, then it also measures its danger by the degree to which its population does not faithfully worship the same deities.

This black-and-white rubric divides people into ally or enemy with categorical distinction:

1. Friend: Whoever faithfully worships the tribal gods.
2. Enemy: Whoever does not faithfully worship the tribal gods.

This absolutist, divisive attitude of you are either with us or against us unites members of the tribe together—faith being the social glue, the common thread. For this reason, apostasy is judged as a deviant crime in the eyes of the tribe. It becomes a grave religious sin because to disavow the tribe means to renounce the gods, an offense for which the deities may retaliate viciously. Ergo, apostasy endangers everyone, therefore the priests pass the strictest laws to prohibit heresy and blasphemy.

But it worsens still: in judgement of the tribe, there remains a crime so irredeemably evil, so unconscionably bad, that many tribes personified it into an archetypal character of its own, as a super-human figure on which they can attribute the causality of evil itself.

The Devil.

To a tribe, the worst conceivable taboo is to not only apostatize, but to then fight against them too. That is, to become an adversarial apostate—a traitor. One who not just disavows the tribe and renounces the gods, but who worships new gods with a new tribe and accuses the former tribe of evilly worshiping false idols.

The ancient Greeks coined a word for this precise treason: diaballein. It means to throw across, to travel from one side to another and eventually became a figure of speech as in to betray and accuse. Diaballein simplified to diabolos as a name for traitors and accusers, which turned into diabolus in Latin, then diavolo in Italian, teufel in German, and now devil in English.

The Devil embodies the worst malevolence from the perspective of the tribe, the most devious social taboo, namely adversarial apostasy. The tribespeople attribute anthropomorphic causality to this villain with the same passion by which they attribute causality to their ethnic deities. Any time a person apostatizes the tribe or blasphemes the gods, they blame The Devil for it; they claim that Satan the Adversary possessed or tempted the heretic to do so!
Due to this long tradition of violent antagonism toward deviant heretics, members of contemporary society still tend to feel suspicion and enmity toward weird individuals who defy cultural norms. Perhaps part of their psyche still worries about that eccentricity. As such, the spirit of The Devil will endure insofar as The Tribe feels threatened by The Individual.

28. Entire Psychology of Religion.

The cognition behind religion in full:

1. Idealization: conceive the highest possible being, i.e., ideal of pure reason, or god.
2. Projection: project the ideal onto reality, i.e., transcendental error.
3. Anthropomorphosis: attribute the causality behind nature to god.
4. Worship: sacrifice the effects of a cause to the god who rules that cause so as to preserve equanimity, i.e., sacrifice animals back to the god who gifted the animals
5. Inception: delegate the timely role of sacrifice to a devoted class of priests who act as constant intermediary between the gods and tribe.
6. Politicization: assign legal privileges to the priest class, which thus establishes a hierarchy in society, thereby the priesthood becomes a political force.
7. Homicide: employ judicial authority to sentence apostates and heretics to death for endangering the tribe, e.g., Christian Inquisition.
8. Psychopathization: psychopaths identify the priesthood as a way to enact violent impulses under the guaranteed safety of class privilege. Generations of cumulative psychosis in the priesthood breed the shrewdest specie of psychopath, i.e., vampires disguised as holy men.
9. Genocide: deploy martial forces against neighboring tribes to annihilate heretical worship of false idols; interminable holy wars ensue globally, e.g., Islamic Jihad.

29. Current Status of Religion.

At present, two main strains of religious idealism pervade global culture: monotheistic absolutism and mystical nihilism. Monotheism places absolute faith in the ideal of a notional being to whom they attribute natural causality. Mysticism denies the self through radical asceticism and judges life as suffering altogether in a kind of nihilistic pessimism. Both varieties foster degeneracy in essence, and impoverish the soul of humankind, because they distract away from real life itself. One could define the central quarrel in the heart of humanity thus far as a wrestling match between realism and idealism, between existentialism and fantasy, between secularism and faith, between life and death.

30. Warning Against Statism.

Dear reader, this millennia-long degeneracy in the genealogy of the Church also occurs in the State, epitomized by the careful interbreeding of medieval aristocratic bloodlines. Over generations and down many levels of a royal family tree a vicious genealogy of psychopathy rears its ugly head, sinks its razor fangs into the chubby flesh of humanity, and injects deadly venom. From ancient tribal chieftain clans to medieval imperial monarchical houses to contemporary democratic presidential dynasties—the State breeds the sharpest specie of psychopath known to humankind—perhaps deadlier than the Church?

For this reason, a nominally secular government that insists on the separation of Church and State remains as vulnerable to this sort of psychopathic pervasion as the religious priesthood. Do not for a moment place full faith in any Church or State, so long as it wields the authority to inflict violence or censorship upon intellectual dissidents. The political might to deploy brute force always has been, and always will be, admired and administered by the most sophisticated psychopaths in the human species. They cannot wait to get their greasy palms on the red nuclear button, so to speak.

Oh! But what about a democratic state? How could it possibly breed psychopathy if the citizenry elects the legislators? Nothing has changed; as previously explained, the underclass of citizenry consists of genetic masochists. Thus the election is nothing more than a fanciful way for the underclass of slaves to vote for their own masters. Regardless of the candidate, the underclass remains lowly.

31. Grounds of Secular Morality.

Let it be known: religion does not need to exist in order for humans to fall in love with truth, goodness, and beauty—a person need only bathe in the rainbow light of the world’s grandest marvels while freed from under the ominous shadow of a fictional god. Let religion be viewed in retrospect as the deadliest misinterpretation of nature by the ingenious human capacity to intellectualize life. And it has become time to finally demolish that stone age misinterpretation and supersede it with a valuation that aligns concurrently with reality—not archaically with ideality.

My! To find value in life itself… without the distraction of hidden gods, without the waste of sacrifice, without degradation by the priesthood, without war, without the social division…. to just enjoy life!

The antidote to remedy the poison, the formula to crack the code, the Latin slogan to herald this new era:

Amor vitae! Love of life!

With real life as the ontological springboard for morality, then three simple words summarize the secular ethic:

Bonum vitae est! Life is good!

In the sphere of morality, who can declare a higher principle? So intuitively known, so naturally right, so undeniably sublime; what convoluted nihilistic pseudo-logic dare try to refute it? If existence stands as the grounds for knowledge, and life amounts to the height of existence, then it morally follows that life is the highest good.

The Christian philosopher, Kierkegaard, actually sires existentialism and subsequently secularism with his renegade premise:

I reason from existence, not towards existence.

His quotation signifies that he does not look to a god nor otherworldliness to explain life, but rather he observes existence itself for insight into life.

32. Psychology of Secularism.

The cognition behind secularism:

1. Ontology: being exists.
2. Epistemology: humans can know existence only.
3. Morality: life is the most valuable form of being.
4. Aesthetics: life is the most beautiful form of being.

Maxim: love life.

33. Terms of a Social Contract.

As if forged out of the purest gold the earth’s crust could muster, this cosmic maxim—love life—becomes the most precious legal tender of the species. In the form of a mutual, consensual social contract: love one another. This three-word code of conduct forms the necessary foundation for a peaceful, durable society; one which preserves the integrity of each and every individual.

Moreover, in order for this social contract to qualify in fact as a valid ethical contract—it cannot bind non-consenting individuals by force of arms. In other words, this covenant needs to remain one hundred percent consensual, whereby individuals pledge voluntarily to join the community by their own volition. And for recourse, as soon as any individual violates the peace treaty—that is, they harm life—the society ostracizes and shuns them universally. The moment a criminal knowingly harms a fellow human, the rest of society turns their back on that evildoer immediately; all their relationships are terminated as fast as news of their evil can circulate virally: family, friendships, sexual partners, and trade partners tumble like dominoes. Through social ostracism, the criminal loses all access to the economy—they cannot shop at the grocery, cannot have their car repaired, cannot see a doctor. By their own violation of the social contract, they exile themselves into oblivion.

34. Best Future for Humanity.

Only through a secular social contract, and the abandonment of the god delusion, will humanity eventually find its way to its best future. In the meantime, atheists will be forced to grieve in horror at the insanity of religious terrorism again and again.

35. Afterword.

Does religion deserve scorn? Yes, it does categorically in its current condition of willful evil and ignorance. The reader must recall that religion does not need to exist anymore, and thus the tragic violence that it incites at present occurs totally in vain. Both holy war and religious bigotry break the social contract because they violate the maxim to love life. Ergo, religious adherents ethically deserve ostracism from society to preserve the peace of everyone else. In a primitive stage of humanity, theism and faith arose as a necessary way for tribes to rationalize the forces of nature. Religion probably aided those earliest humans, nonetheless it has become extremely toxic now because it is a false hypothesis that vicious psychopaths cite to justify their genocide and oppression.

New battles. After Buddha was dead, they still showed his shadow in a cave for centuries—a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way people are, there may still for millennia be caves in which they show his shadow. And we—we must still defeat his shadow as well!
—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Aphorism 108