God Disorder

God Disorder is a psychoanalytic tour around the theories and claims of deities, ideologies, pancakes, cult religions, ironies, refutations, coupled with brief excerpts from atheist thinkers.

Tolga Theo Yalur

Truth Functions

In the humanities and cultural sciences, the humour of ontologizing, essentializing and servicing the fictional narratives about any “original” as “truth” is described as “mocking”. Though it is more encountered in human sciences, this mode of structuration of events, happenings is also a significant concept in STEM sciences. Mocking what is the original, the Truth of the Real, and what could be or what should be done about what is presented as the origin or the original or the truth. Psychology is not an exceptional discipline from this, which conceives this fictionalization of data of common sense, a series of postulates which decide the problems in their very conditioning.

No doubt it appears from the outset that the frameworks in which psychology classifies phenomena into sensations, perceptions, images, beliefs, logical operations, judgments, etc., are borrowed as such from scholastic psychology, which itself derives these from the work of centuries of philosophy. Far from having been forged for an objective conception of psychic reality, these frameworks are only the products of the abstract destruction in which the vicissitudes of a specific effort are traced, which impels humans to look for trust for truth for self-consciousness. A trust that is transcendent in position, and therefore remains so in form, even when the philosopher denies its existence.

Sigmund Freud was a tenacious atheist, suspicious of beliefs, religious, ideological or philosophical. He pointed out the inextricable connection of illusion to belief (Freud, 1927). Psychoanalysis is the Freudian genius, denouncing any need for belief and religions as powerful means of mobilizing the unconscious, provoking and manipulating the subject. The need for belief is anchored in the human difficulty in renouncing the idealized objects and confirming disillusioning the world. The concept is closely linked to the ideas of secularization and modernity.

Jacques Lacan stated the “experimental facts” that are doomed to be contingent upon the fictions of reality, what Hannah Arendt describes as “contingent facts” (1972). Reality is not scientific but political, and the politics is rooted in the everyday, not in the grand narratives of the good and the evil. That’s not to say that there is no science of reality. Indeed, psychoanalysis is one of the sciences of reality. As for the distinction of facts from scientific law, that’s where the Real fits into: that which could be observed, calculated and concluded to be unchangeable following adequate numbers of the same findings of the same observation. Gravity would be the most possible case to see what is at stake here. For instance, it’s not the magnitude of the gravity that has to be the same but the natural phenomena of it as and to-be a law. Fact would be the scientifically observed and calculated degree of the gravity at a pinned point on the earth. That’s the scientific example of contingency: gravity is a law that is contingent upon a place, not a space. One of the numerous symptoms of the Real is the moment when the apple falls down on Newton’s head. The psychoanalytic interpretation would then be that there is the Real yet to be discovered, and Newton is contingent upon the falling apple on the tree to discover gravity. If Newton was sitting under, and therefore contingent on, an olive tree, that might have ended differently due to the affects of the weight differences of an apple and an olive. In a similar way, naming something “gravity” is the only means of making it a reality, including the description in the scientific journals, then observing it in various places on the earth, and concluding that it is Real, scientifically observable, applicable, and calculable anywhere on the earth: a Law. The Flat Earth Theory, however, to give a counterexample, is not. That’s completely associative and contingent on the politics around cultural norms of certain groups who claim to decide on what reality is, and even in a lot of countries, could enact laws. The Flat Earth Theory vs Gravity: History is full of examples of the fact that there are groups who believed and still believe that the earth is flat, and thus, gravity is not real. Enacting a law that the earth is flat would otherwise be an extreme case of “contingent facts” in science, and denying the flat earth law, as well as illustrating that the Earth orbits around the Sun, did in history, and, if enacted today, would lead to imprisonment, capital punishment and so forth. From the psychoanalytic thought on any span of the good and the evil, the conception of what is the good and what is the evil, as if condensing something into something else…

Debunking the parascientific, religious Truth Functions evoke the mockumentary film genre. Luis Buñuel narrated a truth for the discovery of a village of the hungry in Spain in Land Without Bread (Las Hurdes: Terra Sin Pan , 1933). In his 1938 radio program, Orson Welles narrated H. G. Wells’ 1898 novel The War of the Worlds (1938), as if the alien invasion was broadcast live in the USA and the world. Half a century later, Americans believed in Rob Reiner’s 1984 mockumentary This is Spinal Tap so much that they made-up concert memories of the non-existing rock band. Peter Jackson, before the Lord of the Rings (2001-03), did this in the Forgotten Silver (1995), a mockumentary where they find the archive footage of a forgotten but one of the first New Zealander directors in a garden, then the mockumentary is all about functioning a truth into a structure around this director, narrating what really was there, ontologizing with real personae, specialists, film critiques and directors. The 1999 horror mockumentary The Blair Witch Project , the montaged archive-footage of three missing documentary filmmakers of a local Blair Witch myth. Narrative, montage, and fiction make the mockumentary.

Ontologizing is always made in reverse. Something is taken at the moment and then structured into a narrative, a function of truth. “The truth reinforces a structure of a fiction,” stressed Lacan (1971). Not surprisingly, all ideologies and religious narratives are fictions that are replete with resemblances and free-association of myths, coupled with experiential ontologies, contingencies, politics, economics to be rendered as the Real and Reality. This book is on a psychoanalytic tour around the theories and claims of deities, ideologies, pancakes, cult religions, ironies, refutations and the atheist soupbook, coupled with brief readers and excerpts from atheist thinkers.

Reality Fictions

Jacques Lacan advances the Freudian reality doctrine as a triple reality: the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary, which are three different senses. Reality in this psychoanalytic tradition illustrates the sign, more or less demonstrating the equivalence of these units in a hole that is the symptom (Lacan, 1967). The Real is what is strictly unthinkable, what would at least be a departure, what would make a hole in the register of the Symbolic. And it would make it possible to question what the real is about the triple reality that conveys a sense. This sense is there only to be lessened to the function that supports the unconscious, the function that is structured as language. The equivocation of this function is symbolic, not sense. Sense is other than the symbolic and support the Imaginary, everything that is represented for the human being who cannot grasp the whole, such as the psychosomatic wholeness, but instead needs reflexive objects to get a glimpse at the bodily unity, mastery over the human as psychosomatic being.

The human being conceives reality because of the conditions of the illusion in/from/of it. Psychoanalytic theory conceives the human reality in these essential registers to answer questions of the unconceived (the real) and the singular experience (imaginary) that report the subject through speech (the symbol). The subject’s registration into reality is the step toward a primordial question in connection to the trespass from the conscious to the uncon‐ scious. To diagnose what happens in the Real in the symptom:”Symbolism is through which the symptom returns in language. As Freud manifested as the essential reality, there are symptoms, missed acts, inscriptions. These are symbols that are even specifically organized in language, functioning from an equivalent of the signifier and the signified: the very structure of language,” expressed Lacan (1953). The experience, the essence of psychoanalytic speech is the trespass of the forces that give balance to being human: the objet (a) . The symbol of the objet (a) is “the object there”. When the object is no longer there, it is incarnated in duration, devoid of self. By the same token, the object is there for the subject S, all the while. Here is the report of the symbol to the fact that all that is human is considered as such. The Real manifests itself not only in the analytic experience if the notion of symptom was introduced. Before Freud, Marx revealed that the symptom is the sign of the wrong in the Real.

Marx was able to work on the symptom as long as the symptom was the affect of the Symbolic in the Real, reflected in the Imaginary, making up a hole. As long as the unconscious says everything that responds to the symptom. The unconscious is responsible for reducing the symptom to the symbolic register, which is everything that makes sense in words in the human consciousness and the unconscious, by means of human imaginary reports to others to enter into the symbolic order of reality as subject.

“The symptom is not the novelty of Freud’s introduction to psychoanalysis but Marx’s. Marx’s capitalist discourse, inasmuch as it is the determination of the master’s discourse, discovers the fact of the symptom. Capitalism departing from the master’s discourse is what seems to distinguish the political outcomes from the Marxist critique of the discourse of semblance. If there is something revolutionary in Freud, though the word “revolutionary” might be misused, it is the fact that he prioritized one function which is the function in common with Marx: it is to consider a number of facts as symptoms. The dimension of the symptom is that it speaks, even to those who do not know how to hear it. The symptom does not say everything to those who know how to hear it.” Jacques Lacan (1971).

Karl Marx’s theory is the theory of capitalist discourse and the symptom of this discourse is the power of the poor, the proletariat. “For they do not know what they do,” is the quote from Marx to diagnose the fact that the poor does not know, nor does the poor own the means of production that is held by the upper classes to determine the reality, but nonetheless the poor does the work of reproducing not only capitalism as the economic system but also the social reality, for which, Marx adopted theword “false consciousness”. “The dimension of the symptom is that it speaks, even to those who do not know how to hear it,” said Lacan for Marx’s discovery of it:

“This dimension of the symptom is the turning point in a register that has been resonating around the theme of cognition. The theory of cognition explains the register to constitute the formulations of science, for which the physics formulates regressions. With the evolution of science, the human is in the condition of being on the path to some truth, which demonstrates a heterogeneity of the double register. Except that in my teaching, the coherence of this register is in question.” Jacques Lacan (1971).

Lacan’s rework on reality is based upon the context of the psychoanalytic discourse where the analysand speaks and the analyst keeps silent most of the time, and obviously the psychoanalytic discourse is not only personal but political as well. Lacan had to compare his work with Marx’, and the psychoanalytic subject with the worker. “Speech” is the psychoanalytic specialization that led Lacan to formulate the “discourse”. Discourse is theword for “speech” in French but psychoanalytically means more than that. When the analysand speaks, it is with signs, symbols, the level of interpretation for the analyst. The cognitive, conscious and unconscious functions of speech is the discourse in psychoanalytic theory. The Other ( L’Autre, A ), the symbolic speaks in the form of the unconscious word. This “speech” is discursive, banned and censored, distorted, stopped, captured, profoundly ignored for the subject by the interposition of the imaginary report of the objet (a) to another object, of the self to the other. The essentially alienated report of the subject to the symbolic in the discourse, the Big Other. Would the discourse of the subject be coherent in the Other, the symbolism where all the discourses settle? In the realm of the Other, a consistent whole is not possible.

In psychoanalytic theory, discourses construct the subject in the reality, the social other, the invisible whole, which, in its complete form, reproduces itself whenever the subject speaks as. In Jacques Lacan’s (1972) view, this intersubjectivity is structured upon the function of the self where the specular report to the Other in narcissism is pressing. Sigmund Freud (1920) pointed to the question of the indestructibility of the unconscious desire to mark its essential character in reiteration and reproduction that cause the unrest in civilization. Freud was not walking down a spiritualist path but questioning the structure of discursive determining the fictions as reality.

The psychoanalytic notion of discourse rationalizes the subject on the web of reality. Psychoanalytic theory answers questions of reality in various networks that Freud revealed and Lacan methodized, where he conceptualized the subject of reality in discourses. The ‘informative discourse’ has the symbolizing mechanism to register, diagnose, detect, decode the patterns or patternize the subject’s information for desire, need and consumption behaviors that Lacan described objet(a) in psychoanalysis. The subject depends upon the information he/she creates or the subject is conditioned by the prescribed information, which is what the discourse contextually might store in databases to make sense of the subject’s desire, need and various behaviors.

Jacques Lacan’s notion of discourse works well to rationalize the psychoanalytic subject on the web. Lacan’s method answers the question of reality in various networks. What could be conceptualized as the “informative discourse” has the symbolic mechanism to register, diagnose, detect, decode the patters or patternize the subject’s information for desire, need and consumption behaviors, objet(a). The user is the Subject S who depends upon the information he/she creates on the web. There is no obvious Symbolizer in the informative discourse but sets of logics that could

make truths concerning the subject information. Unlike Lacan’s former discourses, the Informative Symbolizer does not stand for dominating narrative in the discourse, but the symbolic that varies in the web. In other words, there is no universal discourse on the internet but small incompatible varieties of knowledge that claim to offer and represent what is true, what is Truth.

“The herds never knew the thirst of the truth. They demand unrenounceable illusions. They always give preference to the irreal over the real; the irreal has the same force as the real on them. They have a visible tendency not to make a distinction between the one and the other.” (Freud, 1920)

The informative discourse depends upon the Web where there are varieties for the subject. I would conceive the notion of the web that would be a wholly individuated discourse as well for the user subject through singular quantum computers where all the artificial intelligences make the whole internet into a web only for the singular user’s subjectivity. That theoretical approach might incorporate even more confusing quantum formulation of the subject of the discourse. Here the subject might not be alienated from the surplus of the information that represents the subject through the symbolic mechanism. I would describe this as incorporation since the very idea concerns corporating the subject in the reality where he/she owns the means of the web making.

Karl Marx’s idea of ideologies and religions, when he said that it's like opium, he meant it maybe more for the privileged capitalists than the workers. Reproducing the existing material realities unconsciously or not. Doing it without knowing it. Marx might have been naive in presuming that non-woke idea of the human being. The Marxian trick, however, is doing it and knowing it. “Just do it, do not betray your desires. Go and get the good, but not the ideology inscribed in the good and its packaging.” The wholly conscious, Marxian individual for the Woke Capitalism’s cultural appropriation of Marxian though. Woke-washing means to deploy themes of racial, religious and social sensibilities in marketing without taking a true action. Ecologists and vegans, for instance, might go for organic products, such as single origin, which means that you know who produced that good where. The truth of the good is packaged with a few dollars more pricing. No one needs to do PhD research for the truth any more. Truth, the last desire of human beings to reach out to. Truth has turned into an ideological inscription conditioning the consumer in the Woke Capitalism. The cognitive sciences have worked on conditioning the consumer in the 20th century, for the work of Marx and Freud, where to shelve a consumption product in the supermarket. That's also the idea of the Religion of the Woke: reinstituting the humane. The idea of the truth, the origin that’s single, only one origin, which claims to fill in that loss in, say, in betraying your desire for the truth. The very humane incentive is this sense of the truth, the origin that is lost in capitalism. The Woke is the ceteris non paribus condition in economics, not keeping everything constant: the Marxian “ know it but nonetheless do it .” The Woke emerged exactly with the promise of filling-in that loss in the historical process of veiling the appearances, verbally and visually.

Why There is No God

"The creationist misappropriation of the argument from improbability always takes the same general form, and it doesn't make any difference if the creationist chooses to masquerade in the politically expedient fancy dress of ‘intelligent design’ (ID). Some observed phenomenon — often a living creature or one of its more complex organs, but it could be anything from a molecule up to the universe itself — is correctly extolled as statistically improbable. Sometimes the language of information theory is used: the Darwinian is challenged to explain the source of all the information in living matter, in the technical sense of information content as a measure of improbability or ‘surprise value’. Or the argument may invoke the economist's hackneyed motto: there's no such thing as a free lunch — and Darwinism is accused of trying to get something for nothing. In fact, as I shall show in this chapter, Darwinian natural selection is the only known solution to the otherwise unanswerable riddle of where the information comes from. It turns out to be the God Hypothesis that tries to get something for nothing. God tries to have his free lunch and be it too. However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747... The factual premise of religion — the God Hypothesis — is untenable. God almost certainly does not exist. This is the main conclusion of the book so far. Various questions now follow. Even if we accept that God doesn't exist, doesn't religion still have a lot going for it? Isn't it consoling? Doesn't it motivate people to do good? If it weren't for religion, how would we know what is good? Why, in any case, be so hostile? Why, if it is false, does every culture in the world have religion? True or false, religion is ubiquitous, so where does it come from?" Richard Dawkins, God Delusion (2006)

There is a scene of Richard Dawkins’ visit to one of the evangelical new age churches in his 2006 documentary, The God Delusion . The place looked like a stock exchange market, Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange with grand screens on the top, showing all the speculations not so unusual for religions. The pastor who Dawkins interviewed looked like a bully on Wall Street, trolling Dawkins subliminally: “the people of faith,” are the good, who “always have problems” with the devil. Well, in this case, that’s atheists or atheism, with evil in their minds. What I describe as the chauvinists of the 21st century.

People of faith who have a lot of ideas in their mindsets about the devil might also have network problems, not confined to those stock exchange gatherings in churches and to the new wave religious cults and sects. For that matter, the 21st century neoinquisition is not a limited mindset only for the monotheistic religion. It has influenced seculars and even leftists as well. Indeed, Dawkins himself questioned in 2023 if the Woke counts as a “new” religion, pointing to the default irrationalities of it, rooted in politics and pseudo-liberal ideologies around what is embraced as the Woke. The decade that followed Dawkins’ documentary and the book of the same name continued with more demonizations along with the rise of the right-wing compared to the New Atheism. Obviously, there’s a symptom. The symptom is chauvinist. The Woke is one of numerous possible incorporations of the symptom. The parable is of the disputes, debates, conflicts, complexes, fights, wars that are all outcomes of differences of fangles of views, which might even go extreme.

Woke Atheism

The Religion of the Woke and monotheistic religions have been using individual liberties, identity issues, intersectionalities to disclose a veiled conflict with Atheism. The Trans Ideology, for instance, has become one of the means to subvert atheism, which has been "coming out of the closets" as 'Brights' and 'New Atheism' and so forth. The Woke, and, if not all the monotheistic religions, but Judeo-Christianity in particular, look as if they've been using the Trans as an Ideology to just overturn atheism and the imagery and the “threat of the atheology” as Michel Onfray describes (2005). Not sure if “the threat of the atheology” is the rightword to use, but the ‘Trans as Ideology’ obviously, for certain, has been used in as much as the arguments from Intelligent Design are used in politics and religions. Both arguments are not scientific. The Real threat is the delusive, collective hysteria.

“All religions, with their gods, their demi-gods, and their prophets, their messiahs and their saints, were created by the prejudiced fancy of men who had not attained the full development and full possession of their faculties. Consequently, the religious heaven is nothing but the mirage in which man, exalted by ignorance and faith, discovered his own image, but enlarged and reversed - that is divinised. The history of religions, of the birth, grandeur, and the decline of the gods who had succeeded one another in human belief, is nothing, therefore, but the development of the collective intelligence and conscience.” Michael Bakunin (1871)

When there is something wrong, it is always the atheist. The logical formula of failure of monotheistic religions is a means to exorcize via messianism, a very smart substitution of the atheist for the prophets and their followers who have the sense of entitlement to reserve a rightful space in heaven and the earth. Well, the same logical scheme would apply to all prophets as scammers. The chauvinist mindsets refrain from accusing the prophets for their own wrongdoings and instead, just reflect and pass that on, say, the atheist. “The Law of the Great God” has a place for the believers in heaven, and for the disbeliever in hell for their deeds on the earth. Quite reasonable.

“There is a central paradox at the core of religion. The three great monotheisms teach people to think abjectly of themselves, as miserable and guilty sinners prostrate before an angry and jealous god who, according to discrepant accounts, fashioned them either out of dust and clay or a clot of blood… On the other hand, and as if by way of compensation, religion teaches people to be extremely self-centered and conceited. It assures them that god cares for them individually... There were always shrewd comments on the way in which religion reflected human wishes or human designs. It was never that difficult to see that religion was a cause of hatred and conflict, and that its maintenance depended upon ignorance and superstition. Satirists and poets, as well as philosophers and men of science, were capable of pointing out that if triangles had gods their gods would have three sides, just as Thracian gods had blond hair and blue eyes… The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.” Christopher Hitchens (2007)

By the time I was writing this note, the computer had just given an error, that is, state-subsidized, psychological terror. My computer was bugged and monitored, as well as my online-offline information. I’ve been bugged and gaslighted to the salt I use for food. The Religion of the Woke, QAnons, religious ideologies and how to make sense of the world through the messianist and exorcistic approaches.

“The truly religious state is the theocratic state; the head of such states must be either the God of religion, Jehovah himself, as in the Jewish state, or God’s representative, the Dalai Lama, as in Tibet, or finally, … all the Christian states must subordinate themselves to a church which is an ‘infallible church’. For where, as under Protestantism, there is no supreme head of the church, the rule of religion is nothing but the religion of rule, the cult of the government’s will. Once a state includes several creeds having equal rights, it can no longer be a religious state without being a violation of the rights of the particular creeds, a church which condemns all adherents of a different creed as heretics, which makes every morsel of bread depend on one’s faith, and which makes dogma the link between individuals and their existence as citizens of the state.” Karl Marx (1842)

The mindsets of constructing narratives, functions of truth and followers about someone named Mohammad, Moses, and Jesus, who was a fiction and did not exist in as much as God never existed. Any sense of entitlement to the Law of the God inscribed in the holy monotheistic books; Sharia, Canon or Talmud needs a rightful space in the DSM-V. I have been writing and looking at the references that have researched the 17th century debates and texts. As for my response, I only responded with an editorial translation of a text written by Spinoza. I feel no need to respond with anything else, just to the Three Impostures: Jesus, Moses and the Muhammad suffices as a response. I ended up with the conclusion that chauvinist is not limited to an epoch.

The psychoanalytic conception of reality as an illusion conditioning the subject is what Jacques Lacan reworked, based upon the sign, more or less demonstrating the equivalence of these three in a hole that is the symptom, which is strictly unthinkable. The symptom is what would at least be a departure, what would make a hole in the register of language. For the Freud of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), the gag that turns on the word is the slip of the tongue. Freud requires the minimum of overdetermination for a symptom in psychoanalysis, which constitutes the sense of a symbol in a conflict that is defunct beyond its function in a present conflict, which is no less symbolic. It is already quite evident that the symptom resolves itself in language. Not only does Spinoza make a Freudian slip in calling monotheist religion an ‘imposture’; before the Freud of Moses and Monotheism (1939), but he also does a word of spirit, a wit in his very use of the word ‘spirit’; in the Treaty of the Three Impostures. Therefore, this book was known and translated as Spinoza’s Spirit (Spinoza, 1677-88).

The slip, the symptom, the spirit. The gag is what Spinoza goes for in the Treaty: the Spectra of the Truth. The cure of psychoanalysis is to fade away the symptom, to forget. How to evaporate the Truth of the Spirit, the Spectra of the Truth? It depends on whether the Spirit wants to return. That might be why Spinoza uses theword Spectra, not singularly. The sense of the Spirit, however, is not its multiplication or extinction but the Truth in a world where humans seem doomed to live with mistakes and illusions. A rational form of knowledge is possible with the corporeal causes.

Almost two centuries before Marx and Freud, Spinoza diagnosed the symptom in grand detail with theword Spirit, which had been called Demons as Spectral apparitions at the time (Spinoza, 1677-88). It would make it possible to question what the Spirit as the symptomatic hole is about the threefold reality that conveys a sense. This sense is there only to be lessened to the function that supports the human unconscious in psychoanalytic theory, structured as language. The equivocation of this function is the use of language, if not that sensitive but affective in the uses of such word as Devil, Satan, Hell. Affective sense adds the lingual dimension to the Imaginary, everything that is represented for the human being who cannot grasp the corpora as a whole. What interests Spinoza in monotheism, derived from polytheism, is first and foremost the God as Truth because he finds it regressive to imagine a humanlike corpora of the God as in Christianity or playing the God’s messenger as in Judaism and Islam. Spinoza’s notion of the universe introduces the Being as the God. As for the Truth, it is a universe for it to transgress in comparison to the singular. The notion of the universe introduces the pantheistic idea of God as the Truth.

Spinoza is poignant for the three things in his portrait of human feelings. First, the human psyche, individual or collective, oscillates ceaselessly between fear and hope. Then, he points out that the joys and feelings humans assign to individuals would be grand, more realistic, and more productive than individual passions. Last, there appears to be a principle to such fluctuation of the psyche: the response to the question of what is the joy in the human life continuously varies. Lacan’s conclusion for the responses for jouissance is that “The unconscious is structured like a language.” Cognitive science affirms this.

Woke Islam

“It is equally unknown how many Muslims truly believe that all infidels and especially kafirs (apostates from Islam) deserve death, which is what the Koran (4:89) undeniably says. Johannes Jansen points out that in earlier times Judaism (see Deuteronomy 18:20) and Christianity (see Acts 3:23) also regarded apostasy as a capital offense, but of the Abrahamic faiths, Islam stands alone in its inability to renounce this barbaric doctrine convincingly. The Koran does not explicitly commend killing apostates, but the hadith literature (the narrations of the life of the Prophet) certainly does. Most Muslims, I would guess, are sincere in their insistence that the hadith injunction that apostates are to be killed is to be disregarded, but it’s disconcerting, to say the least, that fear of being regarded as an apostate is apparently a major motivation in the Islamic world.” (Dennett, 2006)

Within the world of Islam, the notion of religious renewal is a delicate and complex matter. The very idea of apostasy, the abandonment or renunciation of one's faith, is a highly sensitive and contentious issue that casts a long shadow over the landscape of Islamic discourses. For Muslims, the fear of being perceived as an apostate, or even entertaining thoughts that could be construed as such, is a constant source of trepidation. The consequences of being labeled an apostate can be severe, ranging from social ostracization to, in some cases and countries, the ultimate penalty of death. This pervasive sense of unease has created an atmosphere of uncertainty and fear where even devout Muslims are often hesitant to openly explore or advocate for religious reforms or reinterpretations.

No Hare Krishna or Bhagwan, no Scientology, Mormonism or Transcendental Meditation in Mecca or Cairo. Though Woke Islam turns these into a confounding “wisdom” of its own, “Sharia” mindsets return behind the veils and muslim-majority countries around the world. The Woke Religion, and moderate Islamists, and even leftists have incentivized this even in the USA. In fact, this is the inquisition in the Islamic traditions. In its history, a lot of scholars, some of whom were religious, were executed because of whatever the Quran might be told to say and entitle the believer to exert power on, say the kafir. Killing the kafir reserves space in heaven. The space is legitimate though could be legally confirmed and granted in Islamic democracies on a piece of paper. Failure to disappear the kafir might yield martyrdom depending on the context and condition, which is yet another reason to go right into heaven without reservations.

“I therefore see the plurivocity of islams in action and I know that the majority of them insist on the advantage over the spiritual and universal dimension over others, more rigid and asserting the theocratic and political dimensions.” Michel Onfray (2016)

Here, I hear the echoes of the accusations of Christophobia and Islamophobia made to Richard Dawkins. They hold the same level of legitimacy and credibility as the belief that the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven on a winged horse is a provocative and controversial stance. On one hand, the idea of a religious figure literally riding a mythical creature to the divine realm is rooted in the realm of faith, spiritual belief, and supernaturalism – realms that exist beyond the bounds of empirical, scientific verification. Similarly, the concept of “Islamophobia” – an irrational fear or hatred of Islam and its adherents – is a subjective, socio-political construct that can be difficult to objectively measure or prove in many cases. Just as the details and mechanics of Muhammad’s purported heavenly journey are shrouded in the ambiguity of religious scripture and oral tradition, the line between valid criticism of Islamic doctrines and institutions versus unwarranted prejudice and discrimination is often blurred and highly debated. Ultimately, both the existence of Islamophobia and the specifics of Islamic theology exist in philosophical and ideological domains where facts can be elusive and personal beliefs and interpretations reign supreme. For those who are skeptical of the legitimacy of “Islamophobia” claims, equating them to the fantastical notions of religious mythology is a way to dismiss them as equally unfounded and implausible.

“Religion is a neurological disorder,” said Bill Maher in Religulous (2008), echoing Freud’s diagnose that “Religion is the universal neurosis,” in the Future of an Illusion and Richard Dawkins (2006) made it apparent that God is a delusion, and religion is a collective hysteria, a mental disorder. Freud was reinterpreting the then-prevalent Marxian notion of religions as illusory insanity. The Woke Religion is not constrained to one simple illusion.

Daniel C. Dennett once described religions as prescribing “Moral Viagra”, criticizing the western religious domination as asserting to be a “moral viagra” a decade before Chantal Mouffe suggesting a “plural agonistics” without the western “moral values” in Democratic Paradox (2000). Joe Biden echoed in the 2020 election campaigns to run for the world’s “moral leadership”, sounding like a “closet crusader” in the need for one of the pills to boost a worldwide religiosity, and leaving the stage due to the age concerns. Obviously, he was not. And millennial experiences illustrated that the world is not in the search for decadent moral leadership vis-à-vis whoever is independent from religious affiliations –the Brights, the atheists, new and old and so forth. Even Kamala Harris’ affirmation of focusing on “future” does not make the Woke a better option to lead the increasing irreligiosity in the world.

Religious institutions must be prevented from using a veneer of respectability to shield their extremist excesses. One part of the solution is to reduce the “sacred” status of religion and treat it as “worthy” among belief systems. Whoever is independent from religious affiliations - atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, secular humanists, and others - is well aware of the good that religions can accomplish. However, to channel human charitable efforts through secular organizations, no one should lend credibility to any religion. Moderate religious adherents also have a responsibility to avoid endorsing or funding the extremist elements within their own traditions and wisdoms. This is difficult and even dangerous work, but it is a duty for any religious who wishes to address the actions committed in the name of their faith.

Religious Resistance

When the human mind was not that capable of conceiving an invisible, almighty God encompassing everywhere, the commoners of the time had confusions and wanted to a Being that was visible, and that’s where the pre-learned myths were merged into a myth of Jesus (Onfray, 2023). Christianity has veterotestamentary inscriptions, textual, visual and corporeal depictions of the monotheistic God idea. The affective feminine was prevalent in Judaism with the Mosaic consciousness inscribed in Laws. Instead of the Father in Christianity whose image is let to be depicted, in Judaism that's more on the Mother though the God is genderless in the latter and Islam. For sure, Moses’ wife was a Goddess-troublemaker (Freud, 1939). What is false are Prophets and Religions. Though Michel Onfray does not say that Jesus theorized as God himself with the apparitions of the Holy Spirit, the The Trinity was composed of non-existent theoretical corporations, as if that's playing God as the Truth. None of the monotheistic religions allow blasphemy, but all did that for themselves. Self-contradiction. The material Onfray deals with even refutes the myth of Jesus’ birth to a Virgin with another fiction, illustrating the invention of Jesus at the time after his previous work on christianism and Jesus in La Résistance au Christianisme (2006). As for the Mohammed Theory, who had numerous “wives”, the book was written down decades after his death and hadiths were around centuries later though the theory is limited to who should play the God and what should be the image of the God's messenger during the time of fights and tribal conflicts. Spinoza pointed out in the Three Impostures in the 17th century that virtually all of the monotheistic narratives mocked the previous ones, mostly polytheism and pagan gods and sagas, and centralized gods into one God as the function of the Truth . The literary research has illustrated that the real references in these books of monotheism are not the mystical voices of an entity they named “God”. Predominantly, pagan and polytheistic texts were reinscribed and fictions were reinterpreted and centralized around one unified God. The ubiquity and invisibility laid the ground for the belief-effect needed to bind the collective consciousness. In truth, monotheism was a gradual evolution in consciousness and did not happen all at once.

The idea of inventing monotheistic religions may sound rational, but monotheism does not. The monotheist religion knew how to trick people into buying these fictions, the invisible product. Well, the leading characters of the best selling God fictions are known to be prophets: “I’ve been in the mountains for a while, and God sent me these texts, and so forth.” Something is happening at the moment and because of the conceptions of the good and the evil, this has reversely been conceived and narrated in a structure prejudiced and prescribed with the ideas of the good or the evil. The product is God as the ultimate and the sublime maker of things, which it legitimizes with the inscriptions of the religions or monotheism. How did the prophets write these fictions at the time when writing was a very luxurious talent? All prophets were from upper classes, affluent backgrounds, the 1% of their time, who had some means to literacy, reading, writing, being taught about the history of literacy, philosophy, economics, math etc that were monopolized by the kings as gods who lived for millenia with the titles assigned, words distributed, coins circulated.

Religion and belief in psychoanalysis delusively condition the subject is what Jacques Lacan reworked in his theory of reality, based upon the sign, more or less demonstrating the equivalence of the truth as a whole that is the symptom, which is strictly unthinkable. The symptom is what would at least be a departure. The cure of psychoanalysis is to fade away the symptom of the delusion. For the Freud of The Future of an Illusion (1927) and Moses and Monotheism , God is a childish wishfulness of the oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes. Spinoza made a Freudian hint at the monotheist religion an "imposture" in the 17th century, two centuries before the Freud, and three centuries before the mental diagnosis of delusion in DSM-V manual of mental disorders that describes a delusional disorder as “a false belief based on an incorrect reference about the external reality.”

The Philosophy of Atheism

In Emma Goldman’s words, theism sees no morality, justice, honesty or fidelity without a “Divine Power”. The vile and ill-product is the very morality that theism prescribes with self-righteousness, in part with hypocrisy: “As to truth, justice, and fidelity, who have been their brave exponents and daring proclaimers? Nearly always the godless ones: the Atheists; they lived, fought, and died for them. They knew that justice, truth, and fidelity are not, conditioned in heaven, but that they are related to and interwoven with the tremendous changes going on in the social and material life of the human race; not fixed and eternal, but fluctuating, even as life itself” (Goldman, 1916). She foresees that wherever atheism reaches, there is no room for prophecy. Human freedom is the force to leave the horrors in the past.

“Intervention, whether moral or political, is always and everywhere a matter of the most exquisite timing. The choice of time and the selection of place can be most eloquent. So indeed may be the moments when nothing is said or done. Mother Teresa is fond of claiming to be not so much above politics as actually beyond them, operating in a manner that is transcendental. All claims by public persons to be apolitical deserve critical scrutiny, and all claims made by those who affect a merely 'spiritual' influence deserve a doubly critical scrutiny. The naive and simple are seldom as naive and simple as they seem, and this suspicion is reinforced by those who proclaim their own naivety and simplicity. There is no conceit equal to false modesty, and there is no politics like antipolitics, just as there is no worldliness to compare with ostentatious antimaterialism. Mother Teresa's timing shows every sign of instinctive genius. She possesses an intuition about the need for her message and about the way in which this message should be delivered… At the Bhopal airport, greeted by throngs of angry relatives of the victims, she was pressed to give her advice and counsel, and she did so unhesitatingly. I have a videotape of the moment. 'Forgive,' she said. 'Forgive, forgive.' On the face of it, a strange injunction. How did she know there was anything to forgive?” C. Hitchens (1995)

Freud of the Future of an Illusion , a critic of belief, religions and God, was writing from a psychoanalytic view aged enough to be wary of the fact that it was prone to “mistrust” and “ill-will”, that the haters of it would say “We see what psychoanalysis leads to. The mask is off; to a denial of God and the moral ideal, just as we always suspected” (Freud, 1927). Freud underlined that, despite the ill-conceived efforts to destroy psychoanalysis, it was capable of forming a world-view. Freud’s allegory is that calculus would be targeted since it is used in physics to illustrate the destruction of the earth, and that the same would be for psychoanalysis for using what Jacques Lacan re-described as the Real, which is concealed in culture but spread to the reality. Concepts here are abstractions of material realities, and the quests to target concepts for what they reveal would yield what is diagnosed: the real destruction. The same logic applies to when Freud warned about the future of beliefs as illusions: the more access to the science, “the more widespread the severance from religious belief”. Psychoanalysis was not destroyed, but beliefs suffer in the 21s century to the degree of the warning: the real self-destruction.

Epicurus is best known for his materialization of the gods into material, corporeal ideals consisting of atoms and reiterative appearances of visages, idea of the system, in mostly the undiscovered or untranslated On Matter / Περὶ Φύσεως books. Karl Marx’ dissertation concerned the materialist view of the epicurean atheism for the superstition of believing in gods, angels, demons and waiting for finitude from the infinite of the higher existence, in the material conditions. From there on, Marx advanced a theory of ideology which reinterprets Hegel’s version of the more accessible epicurean work on opinions (Marx, 1841). For Marx, Epicurus’ is the praxis of the doxa, the opinions about the deities, experienced in the human material reality.

In the logical context the word doxa or opinion refers to a set of Ancient Greek ideas of episteme (knowledge), and the systems of thought. Both mean idea that is objectively true or false, but with a difference: “There is no such thing as false knowledge since falsity denies the very existence of knowledge… Blaise Pascal urged the question concerning God's existence hundreds of years ago, he was not interested in finding an answer…” (Baker, 2002). In the view of Ulus Baker, the question, like Epicurean one and Marx’ materialist reinterpretation of it in describing ideology, concerns the human material existence in the world, in the finitude of infinite poverty. As such, Spinoza’s work references this self-contradiction of false knowledge , stating that Spinoza initiated a rupture in the context of the opinions, as necessary illusions.

Spinoza’s “fluctuation of mind” is the view of political life in which people oscillate between hope and fear when there are no definite and specific laws to be submitted,

no such a legal order. Spinozist philosophy has been highly politicized in this respect, since even the most political regimes necessitate these two affects: the hope given to the subjects, and the fear instilled in the hearts. In their hopeful days, people are insolent and live as much as possible. They’d ignore if one speaks of hopelessness. In days of doubt and fear, even the most meaningless word turns into a magic wand that would save them from their bad situation.

Spinoza drew attention to three points in his portrait of human feelings. First, human minds, individual or collective, oscillate ceaselessly between the two poles of fear and hope. Then, while humans are accustomed to attribute feelings and passions to individuals, he points out that such passions and feelings would be massive as well, even more real and productive than individual passions. Lastly, in this fluctuation of minds, human life continuously changes.

In Ethics , hope joins sadness. At first, Spinoza’s inclusion of hope among sadness, that is, bad feelings may seem a little weird. In fact, hope has been institutionalized and put into service in different ways in the history of human societies. There is virtually no society in which traders of hope do not exist. Priestly castes, media institutions in modern societies, and even opposition parties all thrive by processing and using hope and fear. Religious life, messianism, and salvation doctrines, all attempt to instill hope in people. If not, they work by evoking feelings of hope. The affairs and institutions of power, however, cannot be carried out just with hope. Governments need a little fear and intimidation, to instill fear in people’s minds. Since uncertainties about the future always lead to these two feelings, it becomes inevitable for people’s expectations about their future to be reduced to these. Governments are found, and survive by, strengthening both fear and hope. They cannot do without fear and hope.

While I was writing, the Israel-Hamas war had just begun. The relevance of Sigmund Freud in the psychopolitical reality of Israel founded in the post-war world. How is the psychology of a country to be compared to one of the countries that was found around the time, in the interwar world? Freud’s relevance is not merely personal or individual but his work is as powerful a founder of psychoanalysis as the founders of Turkey and Israel. Lacan made sense of that which Freud may not have described in his writings and writing techniques: Freudian notion of reality, symptoms and unheimlich, the repression of what is not expressed in language. His neologism as an inheritage of Freud is not surprising. He even invented the concept of jouissance that means much more than what it is in French: Juis-sense to conceptualize the deferral of meaning in language of psychoanalysis, specifically that of Freud. Their analysands, however, were all from affluent backgrounds from France and Austria, so their findings were more relevant to limited groups in these societies. Lacan described and suggested jouissance instead of pleasure because of the lack in the sense of the beyond the pleasure, being towards death. Instead of the usual pleasures, this concept concerns life and death and how the unconscious desire and joy are structured around life-death.

“To be or not to be. That’s not really a question.” Jean-Luc Godard

Lacan’s interest in Freud's language also included the addressee of the speech, and if the meaning arrives at the addressee. Of course, who did Freud address had turned out to be a question. “The unconscious is structured like a language,” is Lacan’s conclusion. Cognitive science affirms this. The Freudian slip is when the sense goes somewhere else, if not the addressed, which would otherwise be resolved. The afterward (nachträglich) influence of the event, the psychic causation that is retrospectively dissolved and interpreted with comprehensive logos. Of course, this is not constrained to intra-politics in any country because there is glocal politics, treaties in there which might have been preventing publicizing the psychopolitical reality or the Real in Lacanian sense. “A letter always arrives at the destination,” is Lacan’s freudian motto in his reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1844 story “Purloined Letter” (La lettre volée, 1955), which Jacques Derrida (Le Facteur de la vérité, 1975) interpreted deconstructively, claiming that the slip is that of meaning, a failure of arriving at the right address. Slavoj Žižek (Enjoy Your Symptom!, 2002) confirmed the psychoanalytic version with references from films and real personae. While, for Derrida, even an arrival would be without an origin, lacanian interpretation necessitates a teleological sense of the message, that is, the meaning is tied to the origin even when it is not. Discursively, that’s the most formidable word-play.

Single Origin

Psychoanalysto 2023-2024

The Unquotable

Quotations can be valuable when ignorance or obscurantist beliefs are prevalent. In periods when misinformation, conspiracy theories, and a general lack of critical thinking are widespread, well-chosen quotations shine a light on the truth and end the fog of confusion. Here are some quotes from Richard Dawkins’ God Delusion (2006) and Science in the Soul (2017) and Terry Eagleton’s Ideology (1991) and Humour (2019), two British atheists with differing opinions in their holy books, converted into Q&A and written by the AI writing webtool at the Copy.ai. I did the editing and rewriting.

Richard Dawkins

Question: What is a prophet?

Richard Dawkins: “When one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion.”

Richard Dawkins considers prophets’ beliefs, perceptions, and behaviors to be divorced from reality, stemming from a wounded grasp on objective truth. However, when a large group of followers collectively share the same delusional beliefs, it often takes on the mantle of religion. That, of course, is not confined simply to monotheistic religions. What may appear irrational or nonsensical from an outside perspective becomes a profound spiritual truth for the faithful adherents of all religions. Societal norms and institutions lend credibility and structure to these shared delusions, lending them legitimate claims to delusive truths that an individual’s isolated delusions could never attain. Customs, rituals, and dogmas become deeply ingrained, perpetuating the shared psychosis across generations. Questioning the fundamental tenets of widespread religious belief systems are often met with ostracization, ridicule, targeting for violence, for the collective delusion is fiercely guarded. The irony remains that one’s insanity is frequently upheld as sacred truth when manifested in the beliefs and religious behaviors. Religious delusions and the unsecular power structures that reinforce them illustrate the troubles with prioritizing consensus over objective reality.

Question: What is the God in God Delusion?

Richard Dawkins: “We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”

In Dawkins’ perspective, countless gods and deities have been worshiped by various cultures and civilizations, each with their own unique attributes, origin stories, and systems of belief. With the advance of the human collective consciousness, the vast majority of these once-revered gods have fallen by the wayside, relegated to the annals of mythology and folklore. Just as one might view the gods of ancient Greece or Rome with a sense of historical curiosity rather than religious devotion, the same can be said for the myriad other deities that have captivated the human imagination over the millennia. In that sense, what Dawkins means by “we are all atheists” is that no one believes in the divinities of these gods any more. He then posits that the final step in this process of religious skepticism is to extend that same level of disbelief to the one god that still commands faith – the Monotheist God, as worshiped in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In this perspective, the “atheist” refuses to grant any more credence to the God than to the pantheons of ancient civilizations, challenging the idea of religious exceptionalism, asking why the God in monotheism should be an exception to the inspection and doubt applied to the gods and the deities of the ancient polytheistic religions.

The core point made by the monotheistic religious apologists was that the God of monotheism, whether the Judeo-Christian-Islamic conception or others, was fundamentally different from the mythological gods of the past. They pointed out that this singular, all-powerful, all-knowing divine being exists outside of the physical realm and natural order, transcending the limitations and human-like attributes associated with the anthropomorphized gods of antiquity. The God of monotheism, they claimed, was not beholden to the same rules of evidence and logical analysis that could be applied to demonstrating the existence of these mythical deities, as this supreme deity was believed to exist in a metaphysical realm beyond empirical verification. The sophistication and philosophical depth of monotheistic theology set it apart from the “primitive” or “superstitious” nature of polytheistic belief systems, making the God of monotheism an exceptional case that should not be subjected to the same burden of proof. Critics, such as Dawkins, countered that this special pleading amounted to an unfair double standard, and that the God of monotheism should be scrutinized with the same rigorous standards.

Critics of monotheistic religions, such as the renowned evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, have argued that the concept of a singular, all-powerful deity upheld in these faiths is subject to an unfair double standard when compared to the ancient polytheistic belief systems of the past. They contend that the “special pleading” granted to the monotheist God – the notion that this deity exists outside the normal bounds of the physical universe and is therefore exempt from the same standards of evidence and logical scrutiny applied to other supernatural claims – represents a glaring inconsistency. After all, the gods and goddesses of polytheistic pantheons, from the Olympian deities of ancient Greece to the multitude of divine beings revered in Hinduism, were also purported to possess extraordinary, superhuman qualities and abilities. Yet these polytheistic faiths have long been subjected to intense skepticism and criticism, their supernatural claims thoroughly examined and dismantled through logic and scientific reason. In the view of Dawkins and like-minded critics, the God of monotheism should be scrutinized through the same rigorous standards, with his existence, nature, and claimed powers subjected to the same level of meticulous, unbiased analysis. If the ancient polytheistic gods cannot withstand such scrutiny, then neither should the monotheist conception of a singular, all-powerful deity be granted any special exemption from this process – a double standard that unfairly privileges the beliefs of monotheism over other supernatural worldviews. Through this line of reasoning, these critics aim to demonstrate the logical inconsistencies and lack of credible evidence underlying the notion of the monotheist God, just as they have done with the gods of polytheistic faiths.

Question: What does disencourage science?

Richard Dawkins: “Hijacking by pseudoscience and bad science fiction is a threat to our legitimate sense of wonder.”

For Richard Dawkins, the intrusion of pseudoscience and poor science fiction into the public discourse poses a serious threat to the legitimate sense of awe and wonder at the natural world. Dawkins has long been concerned by the proliferation of fringe beliefs, conspiracy theories, and fantastical stories masquerading as science. For him, these undermine genuine scientific understanding and appreciation. In this view, when unsupported claims about alien visitations, quantum healings, or paranormal phenomena are given credence and amplified, especially through media, they displace and diminish the human capacity to marvel at the incredible realities of the universe and the complexities of life. Dawkins argues that a deep fascination with the verified facts of nature - the scale of geological time, the process of evolution by natural selection, the mind-bending revelations of quantum physics - is discredited by sensationalized quack narratives that provide a fleeting thrill but lack the substance to maintain genuine intellectual quest. Since the paranormal or the oversimplified tropes of science fiction attract more and more, the risk is to lose sight of the wonders of the universe uncovered by scientific enterprise.

Terry Eagleton

Question: How to account for the absurdity that the concept of ideology is now obsolete?

Terry Eagleton: “In a world racked by ideological conflict, the very notion of ideology has evaporated without the trace from the writings of postmodernism and post-structuralism.”

For Terry Eagleton, this represents a deeply problematic development. Because ideology - the underlying systems of belief, values, and assumptions that shape our worldviews and social realities - is crucial to comprehend religious, political, cultural, and economic forces shaping the modern world. However, Eagleton argues, postmodernist and poststructuralist scholars, with their aversion to grand narratives and overarching explanatory frameworks, have effectively erased ideology from their analyses, leaving them ill-equipped to grapple with the very real, ideologically-charged struggles and antagonisms that are tearing the world apart. In a world rife with nationalism, chauvinism, religious fundamentalism, and other virulent forms of ideological polarization, Eagleton insists for a critical and urgent conception of ideology that the postmodern canon, for all its analytical sophistication, has thus far neglected or actively avoided.

Question: How does humour matter for the ego?

Terry Eagleton: “Freud argues in an essay on humour that superego may take pity on the ego and reinforce its narcissism.”

In his influential essay on the nature of humour, Sigmund Freud posits a fascinating theory about the relationship between the superego and the ego. Freud suggests that in certain instances, the superego – that critical inner voice that represents our internalized ethical standards and societal expectations – may actually take pity on the struggling ego and work to reinforce its sense of narcissism. The superego, usually holding the ego accountable, can at times recognize the ego’s vulnerable state and opt to provide a reprieve, allowing the ego to indulge in a moment of self-aggrandizement or self-amusement through humor. This dynamic, according to Freud, is what enables us to find certain things humorous – the superego temporarily relaxes its grip, granting the ego permission to revel in its own foibles and imperfections without harsh judgment. The superego, in a sense, bolsters the ego’s narcissism and provides an outlet for tension release. This complex interplay between the superego and the ego lies at the heart of Freud’s theory of humor, which sheds light on the deep psychological underpinnings of our capacity to laugh at ourselves and the human condition.

Question: Did Freud mean himself or others?

Terry Eagleton: “The doctor joke grants some momentary relief from the need to behave with decorum and treat others considerately.”

The doctor joke, with its absurd and irreverent premise, provides a fleeting yet powerful sense of relief from the constant pressure to maintain propriety and treat others with unfailing kindness and respect. In our daily lives, we are often expected to adhere to strict social norms of decorum, carefully monitoring our words and actions to avoid causing offense or disruption. But the doctor joke offers a temporary escape from these burdensome constraints, allowing us to indulge in a moment of gleeful irreverence and the shedding of our usual inhibitions. Moreover, the joke’s dark, morbid undertones also grant us a respite from the ever-present anxiety over our own mortality. The grim specter of death is never far from our minds, and the prospect of our inevitable demise can be a constant source of anguish and distress. Yet the doctor joke, with its gallows humor and macabre punchline, provides a cathartic release, enabling us to confront and even mock the reality of our mortality in a safe, consequence-free setting. In this way, the doctor joke exemplifies the “release theory” of humor, which posits that laughter serves as a means of liberating pent-up psychic energy and emotional tension. By tapping into our baser impulses and primal fears, the joke grants us a rare moment of unencumbered freedom from the stresses and solemnities of everyday life.

Christopher Hitchens Reader

Sigmund-Freud - The Future of an Illusion

A Coda - How Religions End

The Atheist Question

Marx may have criticized theology in the Jewish Question . The legal ground for this could be substitution for the Jew in question in time and place. Would the Atheist work in the quote?

“In its perfected practice, Christian egoism of heavenly bliss is necessarily transformed into the corporal egoism of the Jew, heavenly need is turned into world need, subjectivism into self-interest. We explain the tenacity of the Jew not by his religion, but, on the contrary, by the human basis of his religion – practical need, egoism.” Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question (1843)

Let’s see if Marx’s quote works even if Atheism is not a belief system...

“In its perfected practice, Islamist egoism of heavenly bliss is necessarily transformed into the corporal egoism of the Atheist, heavenly need is turned into world need, subjectivism into self-interest. We explain the tenacity of the Atheist not by religion, but, on the contrary, by the human basis of atheism– practical need, egoism.”

Now, let Marx integrate the state into the question:

“The Jewish question acquires a different form depending on the state in which the Jew lives. In Germany, where there is no political state, no state as such, the Jewish question is a purely theological one. The Jew finds himself in religious opposition to the state, which recognizes Christianity as its basis. This state is a theologian ex professo . Criticism here is criticism of theology, a double-edged criticism – criticism of Christian theology and of Jewish theology.” Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question (1843)

In two religiously legitimized and legitimately legalized pseudo-secular countries, Turkey and the USA, the legitimate might violate the individual because the legality of it is the question. Let’s see if Turkey fits into the question:

“The Atheist question acquires a different form depending on the state in which the atheist lives. In Turkey, where there is no political state, no state as such, the Atheist question is a purely theological one. The Atheist finds himself in religious opposition to the state, which recognizes Islam as its basis. This state is a theologian ex professo . Criticism here is criticism of theology, a double-edged criticism – criticism of Islamic theology and of Atheism.”

This evolving quote by Marx would work better for the US, with only a change of Germany with the USA:

“The Atheist question acquires a different form depending on the state in which the Jew lives. In the USA, where there is no political state, no state as such, the Atheist question is a purely theological one. The Atheist finds himself in religious opposition to the state, which recognizes Christianity as its basis. This state is a theologian ex professo . Criticism here is criticism of theology, a double-edged criticism – criticism of Christian theology and of Atheism.”

To say the least, me making statements about atheism would be conceived as an “offense” to be legitimized and legalized by means of the oppressive state tools. On an equal, secular, and legal basis, however, “That’s offensive” should not even be an argument, as Christopher Hitchens said, let it being ‘the legalized legitimate’.

The atheist as a human being, therefore an equal citizen, is in itself more an offense to God's Law ( Sharia , Canon , Talmud ), if not the secular law (there are thirteen countries in the 21st century world where atheism is illegal and all are muslim-majority).

“Even though sura 5.60 of the Koran condemns particularly Jews but also other unbelievers as having been turned into pigs and monkeys —a very intense theme in recent Salafist Muslim preaching— and the Koran describes the flesh of swine as unclean or even ‘abominable,’ Muslims appear to see nothing ironic in the adoption of this uniquely Jewish taboo.” C. Hitchens (2007)

One of the policies of religious countries or countries where religion is culturally embedded in laws even if there is no religious law, culturally and traditionally some countries including Turkey, the religious laws and rules are taken for granted even if they’re not written in the law on the paper. And one of the issues in Turkey for instance the religion is assigned at birth looking at the parents’ religions. Even if scientifically no child is born with the mental capacity to choose a religion or to be religious but the creationist assumption is that they’re born with their by the gift of Allah or God or whatever. That’s a policy, one of the symptoms of the God delusions in Turkey, a secular state. In time, questions and issues emerge as to what is legal and what is legitimate? Delusion or science? The legal is what’s officially written on the paper but the legitimate is not constrained to the official paper. That’s a weakness of the law in Turkey. Getting rid of the religious section in the ID altogether would be the way to avoid the deadends of these issues.

What’s legal and what’s legitimate? When automatically assigning a religion at birth is understood as legalizing the assumed-legitimate, the god-given religious identity (mostly Islam), then the legitimate itself becomes another question. To put another way, assigning religion as a legal identity at birth is to make the legitimately conceived legal. The border between legal and legitimate should be questioned first.

Because there’s much more violation of law than the laws grant with all the legitimate policies. When religion legitimizes itself legally, it also equips itself with the state mechanisms to engineer what it does not view as legitimate. To say the least, having no religion is not legitimate since the official identity system does not recognize such a conception as atheist, non-theist, deist, disbeliever. The only option is ironically “No Choice.” And all the choices are religions. That’s absolutely not secular, a self-contradiction of the secular state. The religious concealing the veil of the secular.

Well then, of course, when the borders of the legal and the legitimate are intermingled, then the expression of the subject should weigh in more, as it is more legitimate than the bureaucratically ill-constructed state system. However, that’s always already exactly where the legitimate went legal, where the expression is repressed by the legalized legitimate.