Re: Religion

Are not all religions based on some specific means by which the human species regulate and control themselves - to "pull oneself up by the bootstraps"? And it becomes a barrier to seeing the world as dumb emergence (dumb here should be understood as appealing to its unconscious randomness). But it should be noted that "religion" once worked at the level of society (the king as instantiated god-head) and later (though necessarily coexisting such as Neanderthal and Homo Sapiens) at the individuated subject (one's personal struggle, or one's salvation). 

If the emergence of a technology of control evolves coextensively with societal evolution (the collective becoming-human), then there exists some moment (y) that is contingent on some moment (x) where f(x) is defined as a partial mapping from (x) to (y). B is a set that contains (y) and f(x) is the smallest possible union of the set A and the set B. B containing a bijection of what could be objectively reasoned as an alpha group structure vs a collective non-hierachical structure.

 Despite that religion is defined here as some "control mechanism" does not imply that "religion", which is the techne of "god", is necessarily negative. Since, is not food or treats a means by which we control dogs; and that control we assert produced an animal which is well tempered for a variety of human uses? Instead, it opens up the larger set of possible roles for the expression of being-human - explicitly, religions are both potentially positive and negative forces; the set of positive forces (P) is equinumerous to (Q) as (Q) is ~(P) assuming symmetry between positive and negative forces so that for every potential force (r) there is an inverse of (r) which is (s) where t(r,s) = 0 since t = (r+ s) and s = -(r). Though a specific culture may be more predisposed to certain tendencies, it does not necessarily follow that there is only one "pure" dominate strategy for the application or production of a religion. Anecdotally, it seems more likely that monotheism has this tendency to extreme violence and other virulent methods of cultural control and production. This does not imply that a "pantheistic monotheism" like Hinduism is thereby better - i.e. the cast system and religious violence that the government is partially tacit in "tolerating". It is important to explicate that "religion" seems to have consistent structures (note that consistency merely indicates there is at least some limited form of comparable, abstracted, or higher-level interpretation that can coherently be mapped onto each religion's domain of meaning). Take the rise of "monotheism"; it was contingent on the "need" to transcend the jaded and increasingly diluted pantheism of Hellenism (possibly due to the over acceptance of "foreign" gods and the rising awareness of the logically weak explanation of natural forces as produced by a multitude of vagrant gods). This may not be a strong root to tie the randomness of its acceptance by Rome as a state religion, but there must have been some, if not a legion, of reasons Hellenistic pantheism stopped being fertile soil for the continued production of culture, and specifically, a techne of being religious (defined as a rubric for the structuring and thereby the understanding of the world). Monotheism is just the next logical step in a series of potential understandings of the world and ourselves - in this case, as an individual intimately connected to a single transcendence - a single authority for the production of culture. And it must be noted, the ascendance of monotheism was a long time coming (now think how long various earlier forms must have endured); the moment where monotheism becomes the dominate religion (and/or world-view) was when it had reached some critical mass within a given culture and this tertiary (where primary is defined as the set of all coherent practices at a given time, and secondary, the set of dominate practices) culture was subsequently appropriated. The moment when the members of the union of the set of dominate practices (A) is greater than the disjoint of (A, B), defined as g(A n B) = Y, where the set (B) is the coherent set of minor practices (coherent, meaning logically falling within a domain of practices which are produced by a significantly large enough collective of people who would consider these practices to be part of the same domain, and since this criterion is contingent on the subject's heterophenomenological perspective there is some margin of error; however, the precision of which may be generally unattainable or inherently unstable). This union, defined as h(A,B) = {A U B} = Z, (Z) is then a subset of (A) and j(Z, B) or {Z n B} = W, is defined as the practices in (B) heretical to the practices in (Z); thereby, (B) either becomes a proper subset of (Z) so that (B) is fully contained in (Z) or (B) becomes a threat to the cohesion or stability of the dominate practices (A). A dominate culture comprised of coherent practices are defined as being stably propagated through multiple generations (i.e. the Catholic efficiency and bureaucracy of the late Roman state and the Catholic control of the dogma through which they lend authorship - the Bible is not a stable text, the pages may stay the same - the content the same but the concepts produced and followed is continually constructed by the church, whether a specific pastor's "reading" or the "party-line").