IDEOLOGY is WHEN IDEAS AND THEORIES ARE PUT FIRST OR TURNED INTO FALSE GODS
Ideology is a set of ideas that people use to suppress others and the truth. It is characterised by ignoring or lying about the violence involved in empowering it. It spreads confusion so that you cannot see that the violence was unjustified.
Censorship and violence and fear and arrogance are some of the symptoms of being ideological.
Evil and revolution go together and evil is always an attempt at a revolution - maybe a mini-one but yes a revolution. Ideology is the most common and perhaps deadly form of revolution. There is no such thing as a rapid revolution. It's a process that takes time. The goal is for it to be unstoppable before anyone realises what is and has been happening. Violence has to come for ideology works to smooth the way for it.
Take the Christian ideology
- a book preaching evil and violence as sanctioned by God (even if not now) is made THE book. It is even declared the word of God. That does not reflect the intolerance that is due to violence particularly faith based violence. This religion, like Islam, is worse than the most infamous ideologies for it presents a book as protected by God as something unique and special the book of books. God then logically wants all including children - and especially children - to study these books! But those books contain scary doctrine and say that God commanded that people be hurt and slain for sins.
- the Bible killed rebel Jews by its command. They were stoned to death for various things such as loving other gods or gay sex. That preserved the form of Jewish faith that "evolved" into Christianity and which it looks upon as a previous stage of God's plan to give Jesus and Jesus' religion of Christianity to the world. The faith rests on the back of dead stoned bodies. What about the other nations and religions, Canaanites in particular, that had to be slain in order to preserve "God's message" intact?
- prayer goes together with the notion that God has fitted you into a plan and that plan could be for you to fight in a "just" war. Such wars are only just by human opinion.
If these points don't help you see what an ideology is and why it is a dirty word and help you see that Christianity is not really a lamb even if it acts it but a blood-splattered lying ideology then nothing will.
Ideology is served by ideologues and by their sheep. Obviously their idol is their ideas and vision of the future. So it is unavoidable that they have some approach to the major subjects: truth-telling, God, God’s will, God’s revelation, afterlife and the meaning of existence/life. Even communists have a theology even if they don’t think much about it.
Christians say the answer to ideology is to give God his honour and due. It warns that if God is dropped then something else will fill the void and be treated as if it were God. There is no way to test if a relationship you have with God is in your head or not. You can be tested to see if you really do have a loving relationship with somebody else. The power of the Jews and the Muslims to love a blood licking God is a warning: the evidence is that there are a lot of relationships with God that are just in the imagination of those who claim to be devoted to him.
The Christian cannot ask or expect a non-Christian or secularist or atheist to take his claim to love God and experience God with any credence. There is something individualistic about this. It makes religion rather than a group of people united to God to be a series of individuals who just happen to claim to be in union with God. The individualistic side of faith is often unnoticed. Two believers being similar does not mean that there is a God having a similar effect on them. It can mean that they are alike the way company one makes a bike and independent company one comes up with one similar all by itself. Birds of a kind flock together. Experts hold that being spiritual easily leads to fanaticism and lunacy for it is very individualistic to be spiritual. In a sense ideology is individualistic and that accounts for why it causes so much trouble.
The secret of getting “good” or “ordinary” people to facilitate or conduct
grave evil is to make them feel the responsibility is not all theirs. Diffusion
of responsibility is the chief or essential secret. It makes the individual feel
better about the evil because he or she feels the evil is shared with others so
he or she is not so bad or no worse than anybody else. It makes the individual
feel supported. It make the individual feel stronger to be part of something
bigger, in this case, this nasty group. God is another way to avoid feeling much
responsibility for as creator God is ultimately and foundationally the cause of
all. Even the choices we make are not in spite of him but because of him. He
creates our choice.
When we go to such lengths to think ourselves good that we would distort the
truth and warp our own minds it shows the importance of having the truth even if
that means being in a religion. Any false ideology or religion is a menace. If
it simply false and nothing else it empowers bad people for lies are easy to use
for evil even if they are not your lies.
If we need ideology so much that getting rid of religious ideology means
replacing it with another ideology then though ideology is bad it can be a
necessary evil. You would need the minimal ideology for the less ideology and
the less ideological rules the better.
Strangely those who say that you must blame sin not the sinner contradict
themselves by saying you must forgive the sinner not the sin. Forgive the sinner
means see the person and not the sin and move on even as you condemn the sin.
When you say it is belief in superstition that causes harm you run into a problem. You are blaming the belief. Blaming a thing makes no sense for it is just a thing. So when we blame things we are really trying to paper over how its the people we blame. We act as if we misdirect the blame and we would not be trying to do that unless we blamed the people in the first place. Evil by x leads to y lying to herself or herself about where the condemnation and blame should go. This is a subtle encouragement But beliefs are not people and are never to blame. It is people creating fomenting accepting and furthering superstition that is the issue. The danger with ideology is that it thrives on people blaming it not the people responsible. Even those entering and implementing the ideology thrive on that. They don’t feel responsible for the harm they do for they idolise the ideology and its responsible or any responsibility they have matters little in the scheme of things. This shows total disrespect for the person who takes being hurt personally and who does not feel it is as simple as ideology doing it.
Politicians cheerlead attempts to avoid blaming a religious cultural entity
in any way as a whole for what its religious terrorists do. You don't say
the atrocities of the Inquisition or ISIS are nothing to do with them but just
the work of an extreme or unregulated part. You don't describe the Holocaust as
the work not of Nazis but of Radicalized Nazis. Ideology thrives and demands
that you never blame it. Trying to portray Islam or Christianity as totally
innocent even when their terrorists say they do it for faith is validating and
enabling them as ideology. Ideology is inherently exploitative.
If a system is pure ideology then that means you are in or you are out depending
on unbelief. You would be in and out as well for something less forceful but
with ideology there is more divisiveness.
Any ideology is inherently evil for it's about making an idol of ideas. A political or social one is not as bad as a religious one for the former if nonsense will collapse and weaken while religion solidifies and it is hard to get it to self-destruct. It is immune to evidence for it claims the evidence is God's concern.
