[1] That dialectic is atheistic is not a mere assertion but a
concrete and verifiable fact rooted in the genesis of dialectic itself;
this premise takes its substance from the ontology of dialectic, which
has its foundation in materialism, evolutionary development,
specifically, socio-historical-development in terms of logic and the
concrete facts of physical existence: that all things are in motion;
that all things proceed forward into a process of self-negation; that
contradiction is vital to comprehending a reality in motion.
[2]
The ontology of dialectic is not something that is contrived or
fabricated, but something that was historically discovered at the right
time of conceptual development, which amounts to an advance in
consciousness. This consciousness was a social development of
progressive-transference. 'Not fabricated,' simply means that dialectic
derives from the evolutionary/progressive order of nature. The
consciousness of dialectic always presupposes a historical development.
[3] Because dialectic is a "critical
logic," in the most explosive sense; contrary to Nietzsche, to do
dialectic is not merely "to philosophize with a hammer," but to scorch
the earth with an atom bomb. Dialectic, in its mature form, doesn't
actively go after lower forms of "representation" because it already
presupposes their negation (because it has already contextualized them;
negated them as inferior forms); it goes after the higher, more
advanced, manipulative, ideological, mono-logical structures that were
(historically) erected after the mytho-logical structures. The
mytho-logical is inferior to the mono-logic, but it is the mono-logical
that a mature dialectic actively deconstructs and destroys. Why should
it lower itself, going back to the superstition and inferiority of the
mytho-logical form?
[4] The concern of
dialectic is comprehensive, self-conscious freedom; all that it does it
does for the purpose of freedom. Because of this vital motivation,
dialectic is concerned with exposing and abolishing all forms of social,
psychological and political domination. Insofar as religion is an
ideology of control, specifically a form of abstract idealism, dialectic
is set against it, and as we have already said, it presupposes its
negation. Religion is one of the first forms that dialectic
contextualizes and transcends.
[5] When
dialectic takes conscious aim at religion, at the mytho-logical form, as
opposed to the mono-logical form, it achieves a greater negation than
all the negations that came before it, precisely because a
dialectical-critique is the most comprehensive, historically conscious
critique, ever achieved by man. For religion to survive the atomic-critique
of dialectic it would be necessary for it to change its ontology, but
this is not something religion can do, its place in history is as a
subconscious projection of man negating against the concrete facts of
historical existence. Through dialectic we come to understand that the
construction of the religious world is nothing more than a subconscious
negation of the real world, motivated by fear and desire for power; it's
the fragile, and socially oppressed human, trying to comfort itself
through the construction of an escapist ontology and soteriology.
[6]
Dialectic discerns that religion negates itself through unspoken,
presuppositional commitments that contradict the assertions of its
theology. It also discerns how theology negates itself through the
consistency of its own logical development (an inescapable contradiction
that comes from within). Beyond this it "recognizes" the contrived
essence of its form, which is to say, recognizes theology to be nothing
more than the invention of the subconscious human psyche, egotistically
projected as a concrete transcendence. But, via dialectic, this is
really just humankind deceiving itself with its own imagination.
[7]
Dialectic is not an ideology constructed by the thinker, but a logic
discovered and disclosed by thought as thought informs itself from the
concretion of what stands before it (from what it experiences). The
thinker doesn't get to choose the content that proceeds from dialectic,
but allows dialectic to inform content. This is another reason religion
doesn't survive dialectic; another reason that dialectic is hostile to
religion, because religion is an attempt to create and superimpose
theoretically desired content. Dialectical-logic is an
evolutionary-logic: there's no way to escape this premise -- if it is
indeed a fact that dialectic is not an idealistic construct!
[8]
Because dialectic is concerned with mastering and overcoming the
alienation of existence in every form, dialectic from the outset, is
directly pit against the claims and existence of religion (against
religion's domination as it preys on ignorance!). In historical religion
domination is (astoundingly!) asserted as an existential virtue;
obedience is superior to freedom. It would be impossible for a
dialectical logic to reconcile itself with such an oppressive and
ignorant view of the world.
[9] In
religion mastery of alienation takes on the form of projection, which is
to say, where religion encounters alienation, in the first instance,
not only does it fail to comprehend it, sometimes defining it as
"freedom," but in the second instance, it fabricates imaginary concepts
against it. These ontological facts, once again, pit dialectic directly
against religion. Religion is reified alienation!
[10]
The birth of a dialectical theology as the negation of religion: Dialectic is not hostile to the
word, "God," until it takes on a specific ideological character; God as
speculation is not contrary to dialectic, but dialectic severely
qualifies the romanticism that humans attach to the concept, what is
left is a real, negative theology, that eviscerates and contextualizes all
forms of human religion and notions of spirituality. It's only through
dialectic that a concrete and self-conscious theology could ever be
truly grounded. This has never happened in the history of mankind, all
theistic notions have been tainted by romanticism and human desire.
[11]
As Marcuse has said regarding dialectic: "Dialectical thought thus
becomes negative in itself. Its function is to break down the
self-assurance and self-contentment of common sense, to undermine the
sinister confidence in the power and language of facts, to demonstrate
that unfreedom is so much at the core of things that the development of
their internal contradictions leads necessarily to qualitative change:
the explosion and catastrophe of the established state of affairs."*
This
doesn't mean that facts are supplanted by extra-logical or supernatural
claims, or that these claims are superior to facts, it means that
dialectic sets itself against the oppression of the positive in every
form it appears, probing beyond the lie of its appearance, searching for
the concretion of reality's interconnection and movement.
[12]
In dialectic negation is (counterintuitively) the path to the positive,
which is to say, the path to comprehensive freedom, which is the chief
concern of dialectic. In religion, the assertion (imaginary projection)
of the positive, against the undesirability of the concrete-negative, is
the path to freedom. In other words, when religion is confronted with
the uncomfortable facts of reality, it tries to create an imaginary
world to pit against the real world, to escape into idealism as a way of
coping with reality. Conscious-negation, in dialectic, means that it is
ontologically hostile to religion.
[13]
Marcuse, "to express and define that-which-is on its own terms is to
distort and falsify reality." This means that dialectic cannot take (and
would never take) religious claims at face value, but would, from the
outset, press against them in the most nuclear sense of the term --
dialectical criticism is nuclear criticism! Dialectic is naturally
suspicious and aggressive toward the positive.
[14]
Dialectic logic drives the internal logic of any form toward its own
negation, to reveal its explanatory incompleteness, to demonstrate that
it is still the "blind victim of unmastered forces." In the case of
religion this means that the human subject is deceived by the symbolic
and phonetic form, instead of seeing through the human machinations that
make use of these forms, creating fantastic concepts, the naive,
religious consciousness, validates them on the basis of authority.
Dialectic shines a light on this darkness so one can see the actual
forms that are casting the shadows. That is, religion is a product of
man imposed on himself, it's a form of self-deception, claims without
substance, but to assimilate them without dialectic is to fail to
recognize the lie of their content and form.
[15]
Is dialectic atheistic? It's skeptical, but in a way that goes beyond
mere abstraction. In what sense then is dialectic atheistic? In the
sense that its critical application leads to the demise of cultural Gods
and cultural forms of religion, it's only agnostic in the most negative
and limited sense of the term, which is to say, dialectical agnosticism
is, first of all, not neutral, and secondly, undesirable to any
culturally conditioned religious person. At best it ends by claiming
that humans can know nothing about God or Gods, and more importantly,
that the concept has been historically destructive and has no concrete
value to the species.
[16] It could be
asserted that mythology has a value for the structure and order of
society because of the values it contains, but this is called into
question by noting that these values are the result of subconscious
forms (existential reactions), as opposed to a dialectic-logic, which
would formulate them on the basis of a conceptual and social
consciousness. Neither would these formulations be based on mono-logical
axioms but would proceed from a historical and intersubjective
consciousness with an eye toward comprehensive freedom leading toward
the qualitative progression of the species.
[17]
It is the ontology of dialectic that makes it such a threat and terror
to religion, precisely because it is a hyper-critical logic, precisely
because it is suspicious of the positive. The reason dialectic is
antithetical to religion is because the specific claims of religion
cannot survive the skeptical critique of dialectic, further, dialectic
is derived from material conditions, from the motions of reality, which
would seem to presuppose the negation of the religious form from the
outset.
[18] No philosopher is a greater deceiver than him who tries to replace negation with the sophistical lie of a positive sublation, thereby calling it dialectic: for not all things can be or should be sublated! Some things must be transcended so that the species can advance into higher forms of intelligence and freedom; dialectic discerns that religion is a primitive form that needs to be transcended.
*Herbert Marcuse, "A Note on Dialectic," (1960), supplement preface to, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory
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