The subject of this lecture is the coming religious revolutions. From the dawn of history religion has been the focal point of human society, and it will be perhaps even more important as the age of troubles that’s coming unfolds.
THE AGE OF SECULARISM
A problem in dealing with the whole subject of religion in today’s world is the reaction to the less happy aspects of Christianity, of religious persecution the 30 Years War where half the people of Germany were killed. In this the various brothers in Christ murdered each other and so on and so forth. As a result, you had something called the Enlightenment and Secularism emerge, the most extreme form of this was the ideology of communism, which came to power in Russia in 1917, in China and 1949. It’s very important to understand that this mentality of secularism is a very big aberration and short-term aberration in history. But that is the age that we are emerging from, so it’s very important to be able to look back thousands of years into the past and not get distracted by the present. History at any time in the human experience, to a large extent, is the opinion of the present about the past, or the delusions of the present about the past. It’s not necessarily about the real past. And the concept of secularism, atheism, whatever you want to call it is not a viable ideological point of view in the human condition, and it’s going to be even less viable as the time of troubles that’s coming unfolds. The collapse of communism in Russia and the whole Soviet empire is an example of that. It didn’t really offer people any real anchor, any hope, the idea that you’re going to party away here and then croak and that’s all life’s about really isn’t very compelling. It’s not. And it doesn’t meet human needs. So this is a very important point to understand.
RELIGION IN AMERICA
In America you have a very unstable white Christian evangelical movement and you got understand evangelism itself is a very short-term religious phenomena of the so-called evangelical Christian movement is only 200 years old, and there are theological questions as to whether aspects of it could even be considered traditional Christianity, and there’s even more question as to whether it might go the way of Puritanism, which ended up collapsing. We think that’s unlikely but it’s important to understand the realities of what’s in the American, right wing, white evangelical Christian movement. This doesn’t mean all evangelicals, there are a lot of good evangelicals, but the movement towards the extreme right in evangelical leadership has turned off and alienated a good part of the coming generations. So the religious situation in America could be classified as extremely unstable.
THE HUMAN NEED FOR A GOD
However stable or unstable, people want to believe that there is hope after death. People want to believe that there’s a God out there, or gods, if they're pagans, but a God who cares about them, that they can talk to, and that they can communicate with. People want to feel that they’re doing the right thing by studying their Bible or their holy Koran or whatever sacred Scriptures they read. They’re trying to make something of their life. It’s not just a question of getting to heaven, or whatever, it’s a question of feeling that they’re doing something worthwhile in the here and now. The atheist movement is not going to go anywhere in the 21st century, it’s not, and again, this is a short-term trend. Atheism and secularism are short-term trends, they are fading away into the rearview mirror.
PROBLEMS IN HINDUISM
What we find particularly troubling is not just the highly unstable and extremely disturbing religious situation in America, but the deteriorating religious situation worldwide. For example, the most extreme forms of radical Hinduism have come to power in India with the BJP and Mr. Modi. Now where they go, what happens, a lot of this is a circular argument. If the fairytale promised by the plutocrats occurs and that we have this high-tech utopia they claim that they’re going to build, a lot of this is less significant if you don’t buy that. If you see the environmental disasters that this is going to produce. Then it’s a totally different story.
PROBLEMS IN ISLAM
In the case of Islam, after World War II, you had the domination of World War II of Islam by a radical extreme faction, the Wahhabi faction, which took over the petrol wealth of Saudi Arabia after World War I. This loony sect, the Wahhabi’s, was allowed to take over Saudi Arabia because nobody thought there was any oil there and they took over the holy places and the Western imperial powers had tired themselves with the fights in the Middle East and were busy stealing various countries like Iraq and Syria from local Arabs, double-crossing them by the way over their promises to bring freedom in World War I. They didn’t want another war, so they allowed the Wahabbi sect to take over Saudi Arabia, because after all, it was just a bunch of sand dunes. Well, it turned out not to be just a bunch of sand dunes and the these counties...this is the kind of thing that wasn’t followed by Western analysts... but the Wahabbis exported their extreme intolerant form of Islam all over the Arab and Islamic world. Not just the arabs, people forget that the majority of Muslims in the world are not Arabs, so in places like Pakistan you have very extreme views. Some people say the Saudis will reform themselves, and look at this new crown prince. We don’t buy that. We don’t buy that the Wahhabi ideology isn't an extremely malevolent ideology. And particularly troubling is that in a place like Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim state, you have everything moving in a much more radical direction.
PROBLEMS IN BUDDHISM
In the case of Buddhism, part of the problem of Western interpretations of non-Western religions is that Western intellectuals, the intellectual elites, are incredibly arrogant and they want to see what they want to see, and they want to believe that their actions are somehow transforming the local population into being what they want to be. The western secular intellectuals are in many ways just as arrogant as the Western Christian evangelists in wanting to see what they want to see, other than what’s real, and people such as Gandhi, who was a good man and did a lot of good, but are not necessarily representative of all traditional cultural ideology. In India the caste system is a racial system, so the culture of all Hinduism as a warrior culture, obviously this doesn’t fit Western ideas, and Gandhi himself was a much more complex person in terms of his actions than he is portrayed to be. In the West, the most ludicrous situation is people seeing the Dalai Lama of Tibet as some sort of representative of Buddhism. We're not really going to comment on the Dalai Lama personally, but Buddhism historically has been filled with the ideology of war, but people don’t want to believe that, because they want to see their version of Western pacifism as Buddhism, and of course you see in World War II for example, the leading Zen Buddhism and so on the Samurai cult of the Emperor, and fusions of Buddhism and Shintoism, and so on. In the case of Buddhism, you have growing violence with the Rohingya and the body of ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka are being fueled by Buddhist monks, and this is really some of the tip of the iceberg. I mean a resurgent Japan in the future could be led by some high-tech Samurai, perhaps have a variety of nuclear weapons, who knows, but this is a problem in understanding of what’s happening.
[SECOND PART OF LECTURE BEGINS]
NEW RELIGIONS
This is the second part of our lecture on coming religious revolutions. In this lecture we are going to try to define the structure of the coming religious revolutions and this will be different for different parts of the world.
Some basic points it is possible that new religions could emerge religion is a powerful structure of tradition. It’s a subconscious power as well as a conscious power. So while new religions could emerge, we are skeptical about a totally new religion coming to power in a major country. It is possible, but we think it is unlikely. It is far more likely that a new religion will present itself as a variant of a traditional religion depending on what that tradition is in what country, like for instance in Muslim countries it would be a variation of Islam, in Christian countries it would be a variation of Christianity, and so on and so forth. But it is possible that a totally new religion could emerge. But we find it inconceivable that a new religion would emerge from zero. We would have to hearken back to something of an ancient tradition where turmoil will emerge is where countries are all divided in terms of religions and is there a religion that can bring them together. That’s a very tricky situation.
THE INSTABILITY OF THE ENVIRONMENT
LEADING TO INSTABILITY OF WORLD RELIGIONS
Now what are the things that are going to drive these religions? We will go over a number of forces. That one of the biggest things that’s going to drive them, and you really need to look at our world future outlook report to get a better picture of this and the other material we have documenting the future, is the deepening environmental problems in our world which operate on a whole lot of different levels, and there are a number of significant trends that will lead to conflict population explosion in some areas, but even if there’s not a population explosion, the massive problems of the green revolution climate change destruction of the oceans and we could go on quite a ways what will happen if there’s major crop failures of the genetically modified uniform food, which is of course highly vulnerable to any kind of plague when there’s a lot less food for the same number of people. This can put people in a very frightened and angry mood towards each other about who ends up getting the food, whether the distribution of the food is "fair" and "just" and so on and so forth. You can figure out where that goes. So all the of the coming of physical problems will drive a great deal of turmoil.
SECULARISM IN EUROPE
The effect which will drive turmoil, which is less discussed, is the spiritual vacuum in many countries in Europe. A good part of Christianity is simply dead. But it’s not entirely clear that the kind of secular culture, we have great admiration for the European social welfare state systems, but it’s not entirely clear that the secular culture of Europe is a long-term situation. We do not think it is. So and when you have a vacuum, vacuums can be filled very quickly by some kind of charismatic leader so on and so forth.
THE ELECTION OF TRUMP AS A TURNING POINT IN HISTORY
In America you just simply have a mess you have a complete mess because you have this out-of-control white evangelical movement, and again were not condemning all evangelicals, but very negative things are going on, and as push comes to shove will clash even more violently, and the majority of the population will become vehemently opposed to what they are all there talking about. So in America what you can say is it’s a big mess and of course the election of Donald Trump is compounding all these problems. Trump is in our view an evil force. He is stirring up hatred by his hysterical statements and the election of Trump on November 9, 2017 is a turning point in American history. November 9 is kind of witching hour in world history. It’s the birthday of Luther. It’s the day Napoleon about set up the Empire. It’s the day that the Kaiser abdicated. It’s the day of Hitler’s beer hall putsch. And it’s the day of another big turning point in history, the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989. So major changes are coming in America.
RELIGION IN CHINA
Another area which is very interesting look at from a religious point of view is the totalitarian system in modern China. Now we spent a good part of our time studying totalitarianism and studying the emergence of totalitarian regimes such as the transformation of the Weimar Republic into the totalitarian state of national Socialist German. Now the different structures of totalitarianism the structure of Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy and you could say possibly also Castro’s Cuba was a dynamic that he was a very popular leader, with a lot of popular support, and so on and so forth. In the case of China you have an aging bureaucratic elite that’s keeping itself in power by means of one of the most ruthless totalitarian systems the world’s ever known. The Chinese leadership is obviously aware of the threat posed by religion and the vulnerability of their secular system because they are absolutely hysterical about any kind of religious dissent in light of the classic examples are the absolutely hysterical reaction to the obscure Falong Gong cult. There is reason for this, because of the Taiping rebellion in the 19th century which killed more people than World War I and severely weakened China’s ability to stand up to Western imperialism. The Taiping rebellion was to a certain extent an indirect creation of Western missionaries. Western missionaries eventually denounced this, but the guy presented himself as some kind of Christian. It’s all a very interesting and a horrifying story, but throughout Chinese history you have religious rebellions, the white lotus rebellions and so on so forth so. There’s reason Westerners look at this as kooky. Well it’s not kooky on their level if you know something about Chinese history, which most of the so-called experts in the West don’t. There’s a reason to be concerned the Chinese leaders keep themselves in power by their bureaucratic system of oppression. We are skeptical about the long-term stability of China. We see in many ways the Chinese sitting on top of a social volcano if it they ever let up.
AMERICAN IMPERIALISM
Now what’s another force produced that’s leading to turmoil and disaster are the forces of American imperialism. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union you've had a runaway system of American imperialism around the world, and this form of imperialism is bipartisan, and supported by people like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, as well as George W Bush. There’s been a kind of Washington consensus that Washington knows best and that if people in other countries disagree America has a moral obligation to come in and "liberate" the population, translate invade and murder anybody who gets in our way. This was tried in Iraq. A million people were killed by the sanctions, and another million were killed after that, and tried Iraq is a complete mess. It was tried in Libya, that’s a complete mess. It was tried in Syria, that’s a complete mess. Obama ludicrously claimed Yemen was a proven success story, even though it's a total disaster today.
THE CREATION OF FURTHER INSTABILITY IN THE MIDDLE EAST
So this is not working very well. What it is doing is totally failing. It’s in many ways a criminal system that is running amok. What it is doing is fueling radicalism against America and providing, in the case of Islam, providing a great deal of logic for groups such as Al Qaeda and ISIS, and ISIS is probably going to be destroyed, but the day after it’s destroyed you're just laying the groundwork for another one.
THE FAKE AND MEANINGLESS WORLD OF THE PLUTOCRATS
We want to move beyond sort of the specifics of all this to the issues of why religion, and what people want, people want to feel there’s somebody who cares about them. They want to feel that their life is taking place in a in a cosmic landscape so to speak. You cannot overemphasize the phenomenon of loneliness in modern societies where people, and particularly in America is a particular case because the Democrats have so crushed the labor movement, that many people are just leading a rat race existence. They go to work, they go home, collapse, they go to work, they go home, collapse. They have very little time to even have any social life. So this leads to a sense of loneliness and despair and so on. In the so-called developing world the fairytales of the plutocrats are just that, fairytales. That they’re creating yes a upper-middle-class for people, but that’s actually making people at the bottom feel even more angry, and even more desperate in the environmental destruction that it’s creating. It is creating an even bigger nightmare for the people of the bottom. Now the assumption is that eventually this is going to create heaven on earth, that’s predicted some high-tech fairyland. We think that’s crap. And that what it is likely to create is a growing and increasingly unstable and environmental situations that can lead to two death on an enormous scale
THE HYSTERICAL OPPOSITION TO IRAN OF THE TRUMP GOVERNMENT
We will comment here on the hysterical opposition to the Iranian government by the Trump administration and neoconservatives, on both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, in the Imperial capital of Washington DC, and this is a very tricky situation because, first place, it’s wildly paranoid. Think this thing through, okay, if America’s going to launch this crusade against Iran, how does that work? The result of Bush’s invasion and destruction of the state of Iraq is that you have huge support for Iran inside Iraq. So how is that going to work? You're going to chase all the Iranians out of Iraq? Are the Iraqi people going to put up with that? I don’t think so.
A much more dangerous situation is the second phase of the Syrian Civil War. The war in Syria was launched by Hillary Clinton and Obama in conjunction with Saudi Arabia and Qatar and Turkey to overthrow the government of Assad, which was sympathetic to Iran, and replace it with some sort of puppet state. The Syrian people did not want to go along with this initially, they didn’t want to support the extreme religious extremist terrorists and murderers that Hillary Clinton and Obama teamed up with. So that didn’t work, and what happened was that Russia intervened. Now today you have an incredibly dangerous situation in Syria where you have for the first time since the end of World War II major Russian and American military forces maneuvering in the mad max wasteland of Syria and if America wants a campaign to drive Iran out of Syria it’s very hard to see how the America American military forces will not come in conflict with Russian military forces. So that’s an extremely dangerous issue right there.
THE RISE OF THE CHRISTIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH IN RUSSIA
Now dealing with the issue of Russia itself, again there’s a religious aspect of this. Putin has very cleverly manipulated...or maybe he genuinely believes in this...the tremendous religious revival that is taking place in Russia vis-à-vis the Orthodox Church, and this is a further legacy of the disaster of communism because the Orthodox Church is able to reemerge on the ashes of communism and play upon the failure of communism and is an extremely powerful force. Western intellectuals...the Washington consensus of the foreign powers policy, so-called experts, translate idiots and/or war criminals who produced the disaster in Iraq and Syria, want to believe there also some moderates in Russia, they want people supported by Hillary Clinton to be running Russia and so on so forth. And in Russia today, you have a sort of religious nationalism that is potentially very dangerous. So if Putin had a heart attack tomorrow, he would very likely be replaced by people who were even more radical and who might have some extremely dangerous religious delusions about using one of the two largest thermonuclear arsenals in the world. So these idiots in the West who keep talking about wanting to overthrow Putin are playing a very dangerous game and the American intervention in Ukraine, overthrowing the Ukrainian government, and directly threatening Russia, there is an extremely dangerous action and this is now being supported by the Democratic Party because of their feeling that Russia somehow intervened in the election which is of course the total height of hypocrisy since America’s intervened in God knows how many foreign countries and intervened massively in the 1996 Russian elections and so on so forth. This is a further element of the orbit of instability in the world.
THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION AND HIS WHITE EVANGELICAL SUPPORT
And the trade policies of the Trump administration we feel there’s a need for reducing the trade deficit, but the clumsy tactics of the Trump administration have an excellent chance of triggering an economic collapse, yes they do, in the whole upside down pyramid of debt on Wall Street and so on that also leads to an economic collapse. This is a very shaky system and on November 9, 2017 a psychopath was put in charge of that system. People are in a state of denial about Trump. They're in a state of denial about the threat that this poses. You say this is a highly relevant situation and this all leads to a further element of stability.
Getting back to religion in America, one of the things in our view that has driven the religious right, has driven the so-called fundamentalists, I will let other people decide whether they are really fundamentals or what, is the collapse of the middle class due to the plutocratic trade deals put through by the elites people like Clinton, and so on. That as people’s jobs have disappeared, as their lives have been basically wrecked, and the fairytale jobs promoted by charlatans like Clinton never appeared, that the fairytale high-tech wonder jobs turned out to be just that, fairytales, that has also fueled the religiosity and the American people... as people lost their jobs, they look for something. So this has been a factor here. How things sort themselves out in America, we're not quite sure. What we are pretty sure of is this going to be a big train wreck and goodness knows who’s going to be able to pick up the pieces. Hopefully people like Bernie Sanders or some sane people in the Democratic Party will be able to clean up the mess, but it’s going to be a very bloody process. It’s going to be a very painful process because the likelihood of these people driving the economy over a cliff is very high.
Also, the Trump administration’s environmental policies are really crimes against humanity, sabotaging efforts to stop severe environmental problems that are coming is really criminal. It’s like going into a sick person’s hospital room and smashing the medical equipment, and things bode very ill for the plutocratic world order because these plutocrats in America are very stupid. National health insurance is not an act of charity, it’s a matter of public health. You don’t really want poison yourself by weakening environmental regulations. But these people are so obsessed with getting their tax cuts they are beyond that. And in America, in 2017, we had a tearing away of the veil. We've seen that the Republican Party is quite willing to kill hundreds of thousands of people. Yes they would, by taking away their health insurance to get their tax cuts and the plutocrats are going along with that.
But particularly relevant is that most of the religious right has gone along with Trump. They are his key supporters. They are his greatest supporters. And if you look at the other horrors being unleashed by Trump, this raises serious questions about the morality of these people, and it brings up questions that we have raised about the dark aspects of Christianity, the relentless religious persecution that was unleashed throughout Europe when the Christians came to power in the fourth century AD and so on and so forth. Again Christianity in America is a mixed bag. White evangelicals are not "Christianity," and there’s positive forces such as Pope Francis who we think will become an increasingly important person in the world, though we have some reservations about certain things that Pope Francis does. We are not an anointing him as the Angels who can save us. We would not say that, but we do see a huge amount of turmoil up ahead in America of competing factions which bodes very ill reaching a consensus. But as things become more unstable, people want to feel there’s somebody out there who cares about them, people want to pray for guidance. They don’t know what to do. People don’t know what the hell to do. So if they can pray to somebody that will give them guidance and make them feel more comfortable about making decisions that’s very powerful. People want to feel they’re connected to something bigger than they are. People want to feel they’re doing the right thing. Yes they do. These are an enormously powerful human needs and can only be met by religion and have only been met by religion
THE RISE OF PSEUDO RELIGIONS
Our fear is that pseudo-religions will come to power around the world, which will use these positive human desires and manipulate them and set in motion fanatics who will be a very destructive if not catastrophic the emergence of these radical Islamic movements such as ISIS and the Taliban are an example of that the Westerners described them as crazy their ideology is very evil but it is not crazy what’s crazy is to believe the garbage of people like Hillary and Bill Clinton that there plutocratic nonsense is going to create a wonderland that’s crazy anybody believes that is that nuts. anybody who believes that America invading all these foreign countries is going to bring freedom those people are totally crazy total idiots that’s the view of the Islamic extremist are quite right to see American imperialism as a very malevolent stare quite right to see that they are not likely to get all the money and someone so forth from missile plutocratic world order the quite right to see that that they have no future.
THE INTERNET STIRS UP RESENTMENT
CREATING A VISION OF SEX AND WEALTH MOST WILL NEVER HAVE
Another factor that we feel drives a huge amount of bitterness and unhappiness, which is not study because it’s considered taboo to study, is the growth of the world pornography industry. Hardcore pornography, for the first time in history, is universally accessible to anybody with an Internet connection. The wildest and craziest forms of pornography are now accessible. What that does is people look at the fantasy world view of sex, that they see there is...my goodness...that certainly what they see, that doesn’t relate to their lives, and it makes people all the more angry. They feel that they are missing something. That they should have that as well. That they are missing out on all the plutocratic wealth and so on and so forth. So pornography, you want to get into an argument of the full implications of pornography, we are to discuss the political implications of that, which makes people feel all the more angry and bitter that they aren’t getting something that they think they should have. A good part of the depiction of sexuality in pornography is completely unreal, but that that of course further fuels the frustration and anger that people feel they aren’t getting something. So that’s another issue. That is a force for the whirlwind. A force for the storm.
WHILE PLUTOCRATIC WORLD FAILS TO PROVIDE
ISLAM OFFERS A VISION OF WEALTH AND SENSUALITY IN THE AFTERLIFE
But getting back to these Islamic extremists, they are right to see American imperialism in light of its war crimes as a malevolent force. They are right to see the long history of Western invasions of their countries as a malevolent force. Their quite right to see that, and these ideologies give them hope. They’re never going to get the fancy car, the fancy house that they see on the Internet, that they see in the ads, but they can achieve paradise, they can live in paradise, and as far as sex is concerned, the Islamic paradise that they present is a very sensual place, there will be all sorts of beautiful virgins and so on and so forth for entertainment and so on and so forth. So this is a very compelling ideology
CONCLUSIONS
The world that Hillary Clinton is selling is a fraud. It’s not there. It's never going to be there. People are smart to realize that they’re never going to get that. Unfortunately they believe another long view, that by adopting these extreme ideologies, and the horrible crimes that these people commit, that they will somehow get a utopia, but how to deal with these people, how to deal with these people is education. But part of the thing driving these people is the structure of American imperialism, to save and educate these people without stopping America’s bombing and killing and torturing people is a little ludicrous. America is probably the number one driver of this kind of behavior and again under Trump you have America supporting Saudi Arabia’s war crimes against Yemen. You have a psychology of increasing violent behavior by America etc. etc. But getting back to the issue, what people want, people want to feel there’s a future for them. People want to feel somebody cares about them. The issue of loneliness is extremely important.
In conclusion you underestimate the power of religion at your peril. For many people, their local church is the center of their life. It’s where they baptize their children. It’s where they bury their dead. It’s their only means frequently outside of work for having any kind of communion with other human beings in an increasingly cutthroat plutocratic world where people are basically seen by the plutocrats at the top of the system as nothing short of excel entries on a spreadsheet, and if they cut the expenses just a bit more of those entries and get profit soaring we all know that’s got to be "great". It obviously isn't. It is creating a nightmares. Creating disaster and so on. So that’s going to fuel more unhappiness. But stay tuned. Tremendous powers of religion are being unleashed and all are going to shape the turbulent world of the 21st century to come.