Hey everyone how you doing? I hope you're
all well.
Today we're going to check in about
some of the
theories of religion that we read about
and I specifically want to focus on what
we call the hermeneuts of suspicion.
So hermeneutics
is an interpretation right, so remember
Hermes is the
god of the crossroads, so when you're at
the crossroads you have to make a choice.
So the hermeneutics of suspicion
specifically refer to the classic
triumvirate of Freud
Marx and Nietzsche.  However there are lots
of contemporary hermeneutics of
suspicion as we'll see with the sort of
Darwinian atheists, that kind of thing.
Anyway so
these three guys Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche 
believe
that the material world is
what they're what really is, right, and
that theories of you know having a god
are somehow
somewhere between faking yourself out
and actually harming yourself.
All right so let's take them in
historical order.
So let's begin with Marx- things we need
to know about
Marx. All right so Marx
uh was living during the industrial
revolution
and people's lives just sucked.
I mean there's just if you worked in a
factory you know your life sucked there
weren't any
um regulations about how many hours a
day you could work, how old you had to be
to work,
uh there are no safety regulations and
you didn't get paid by the hour you get
paid by the piece.
So let's say that we
all um we work in a factory
and we make blue shirts. It's the same
blue shirt
every damn day. Now I make
the collars,
one of you makes the left sleeve,
the other one makes the back...
see where I'm going here
Well let's say that I,
right, I get paid by the collar so i need
to figure out how many
collars I have to make a day in order
to have enough money to live on.
Meanwhile I'm like sucking in threads,
uh literally people died from
threads in their lungs, it was just
dreadful.
And you know we've got these
gas lamps that sometimes light us all on
fire and
it's just a terrible terrible system.
And i'm just chugging along and this
dude over here
is getting rich off of all of our labor
and we're not getting rich off of it, he
is!
And then at the end of day--this is what
he calls alienation from your labor--
uh at the end of the day I can't tell
which collars I've made,
because there are 25 of us making blue
collars.
Did I make that shirt? part of it? got no
idea.
There's a whole row, rows and rows and rows of
shirts
on racks and I have no idea what i
contributed to.
So i'm not a happy camper, right? I'm
unhealthy,
I'm poor, I don't have pride in my labor
and so
when we think about Marx and we think
about religion
the very first thing that should pop to
mind is "religion
is the opiate of the masses." Now what
does he mean by that?
He does not mean like it's an opium
den.
What he specifically means is that
religion functions
in the same way for his day
that cable
and beer cans functions for us.
So let's say you have a really crappy
job--lots of people have crappy jobs.
You go home... what do you do? You open a
beer you turn to the tv.
You've got 518 channels! People,
518! That's amazing.
Right, so you just zone out, you drink
your beer, and you know
watch whatever it is you watch. And
it just pacifies you enough that you
you don't think I need to change my
life, right? Um we
need to be treated better.
We need to, you know, organize as a
collective
and say we're not doing this, right, you
you need to pay us more,
and improve our conditions and do this
and this. So,
but Marx says that that's exactly what
religion
(and he's very specifically means
Christianity here, um given his time and
location)
that is doing, right? It's like well my
life sucks now
when I drop dead whoa I'm going to
heaven,
everything's going to be awesome,
there'll be angels, and Jesus,
and nobody's ever gonna,
you know, make me make shirt collars
for all of eternity. It's like that
view is not only short-sighted,
right, but it is actually dangerous.
So the the opiate of the masses,
right, this this thing that gives you
just enough you know take the edge off,
okay my life sucks but I'm not gonna
change it.
That is a problem. So
he's completely against religion and he
thinks it's going to
uh just go away when when people's lives
get better.
That remains to be seen but anyway
that's Marx.
Number one. Number two, my boy Nietzsche.
All right so Nietzsche um,
well Nietzsche hated everybody. But he hated
them all pretty equally,
so, you know, he's not a bigot
he's just a hater. Um
right so Nietzsche in a very sort of
similar situation when we're thinking
about
Nietzsche the first thing that should pop
to mind is, God is dead.
God is dead and we have killed him.
What does that mean? So
how do you kill a god? Well,
you just start paying attention to it.
What's going on in Nietzsche's day... So Nietzsche 
by the way was the first philosopher to
use a typewriter
so that's kind of a handy way to
remember where he is in all this, you
know 1880s. And
so Nietzsche is um
he's in the middle of the industrial
revolution, at the medical revolution
all right, and secularization.
All right so post Darwin lots of people
are like oh
wait, wait, we didn't come from Adam and
Eve?
I used to be a monkey? Well okay then.
And of course other people flipped
out of this prospect. I mean, I
personally never met a monkey I didn't
like, but anyway...
All right, so Nietzsche just like, God is dead.
So what is
taking the place, right? God is dead we
have killed him.
So we have killed him in a number of
ways, right? We have science,
right, so rather than going Oh, you know, I
have gangrene, I'm going to go pray.
It's like, Oh I have gangrene, I'm going
to go to a doctor.
Right? We have um,
you know, it's the sort of heyday of
colonialism, so there are
like Europeans running all around the
world,
meeting people who don't look like them,
and people who don't talk like them,
people don't think like them and most of
them are like
oh you know poor little people, but you know
a couple are like
Huh that's kind of interesting.
I guess there are different ways of
being in the world. What do you know?
And we just have increasing
secularization--it's like,
Well, you know, religion's not really
doing that for me.
So god is dead and we have killed him.
Right? What are we going to do to make up
for this,
this enormous act? He says, Are we not
ourselves going to have to become gods
just
to feel
like we deserved to be able to do this?
What does he mean by do we not ourselves have to
become gods?
It's like, well, I mean if you just look
around,
um a lot of people really do think that
their
thoughts are the right ones and that
there's real lack
of um humility, right. when it comes to
what you believe to be true.
Okay so God is dead. Lastly,
Freud. I know,  Freud gets a bad rap. Ignore
those people.
What you have to... when you think about
Freud, you have to consider
that he um
he was Jewish in 1912,
you know, etc Vienna.
Which means that he had a very specific
cultural context, right? Middle, upper-
middle class,
but he couldn't jump that barrier
because he was Jewish, right? So he
couldn't
treat Christians. So Freud started off as
a neurologist
and sort of backed into psychoanalysis.
Okay, so Freud's big theory
that everyone sort of makes fun of is
the Oedipal complex.
And the Oedipal complex, which is taken
from Oedipus Rex,
says that what
little little boys want is to kill their
daddies and marry their mommies.
And people ridicule this. Now, I
understand, you know, why you might ridicule that.  However, have you ever met a 
however have you ever met a
four-year-old? Really?
You think... you think that's crazy? It's
like mommy is my first girlfriend and my
second girlfriend and my third
girlfriend but you can be my
fourth. Thanks, kid.
Alrighty. Okay, so,
but think about that in the context of
1912 Vienna.
Alright, so dad's gone all day. We have no
idea what he does.  None whatsoever.
And this would
have been
the era of, you know you did something
wrong, Johnny, wait till your father gets
home! Right, so
dad would be the punisher and mom spends
all day,
you know, cleaning the house and taking care
of you
and she leads this very  unglamorous
life and then it's you know
five o'clock, and all of a sudden,
everybody is perfect!
Right, so mom goes and scrubs up, she puts
on a nice dress,
she scrubs you, and you know the children
literally would line up by the door
uh for for inspection, right? And so
there's mom somehow
unfathomably wearing a lovely skirt
and holding a martini on a tray, so
who do you want to be in this position?!
You want to be dad. Yes,
of course you do. And do you want a mom
just like this one? Of course you do.
Right, so everything is clean and pretty
and there's
you know a lovely brisket in the oven
and you know, Have a
glass of sherry or whatever, you sit
down, dear,  I'll take care of
everything.
I want a wife like that! Yeah, okay,
so Freud was not a fan of religion either. He doesn't say that it's a big fat
lie but he,
well, he thinks it's a big fat lie and he
sort of says that later.
But he calls it an illusion
and it says an illusion is
possible but unlikely.
So little girls
want to marry a prince. Did Meghan
Markle do that?
She did. (Then she saved his butt but,
whatever,
story for another day.)
So lots and lots and lots of little
girls want to marry princes. How many of
them are going to? 
Not that many. There's not that many
princes running around anymore and your
your odds are
not good whatsoever. Plus it's a crappy
job, princess.
Don't ever want to be a princess, it's a
terrible job. Okay,
anyway, so he doesn't quite say
that it's just a, you know, a raft of bs
but he totally thinks it's a raft of
bs.
He says that what god is, right,
is when you're a little kid
it's a big world and I need someone to
take care of me.
I need someone to feed me, I need to put
clothes on me, put a roof over my head
and somehow, you know, your daddy figure
makes you feel safe, right? But daddy also
can punish.
Right, so daddy can giveth and daddy can
taketh away.
So when you get older you're like, it's
still scary,
right? A tree could drop on my head at
any moment.
What a ridiculous way to die but it's
completely true.
So you still need that sense of security
uh but rather than
your daddy, you project a daddy in the
sky
and he takes care of you. And
he can he can whoop your butt if you're
bad
and it makes you feel safe, right, that
you
have this projected daddy
um even as you're older. Okay
so those are our good friends, Freud,
Marx, and Nietzsche.
Enjoy the reading--it's delicious.
and I will see you all shortly. Alright,
ciao!
