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Religion truly begins with the lowest class, as everything does, and from there it passes to labor to use for its purposes. Labor-power in the form of the beings themselves - productive or otherwise - is the genuine substance allowing religion to do anything. The tools of religion are all alien to the interests of both classes, and those alien tools are a necessity for religious thought to arise. We can imagine a type of spiritual authority that arose purely from the base and belonged to labor without regard of the other orders. Science as a spiritual authority makes this claim specifically, if it is true science and not a usurper calling itself science. Science only has spiritual authority so far as it allows independent verification of facts in the world, and it only has the spiritual authority its practitioners can re-assemble independently. For the scientist, approaches to the material world and the purview of science are unique to the mind or the association of labor that takes on this task of the mind. The mind proper, though it is treated as technology, really originates from the genius that is the basic property of anyone who lives, however faint or great it is. But, that genius is voiceless in any political setting, is devalued in society, and does not correspond to any substance of virtue that can be measured. Intelligence, the qualities of mind, the faculties of the body and brain, are all measurable in some way to be worthwhile propositions, but "genius" defies this description. The true substance of all of it is labor. When associations collaborate in the assembly of knowledge, even if they are "collaborating" without deliberation or their members fight with each other, the only expression of genius is labor, or the impressions and assumptions about genius that take on superstitious qualities. All of the superstitions of religion, and the crucial superstitions about intelligence and reason that are politically valued, belong to something other than labor, but it is labor who purposes such a tool for their aims in all cases. Those who occupy institutions, hold property, and become priests or spiritual paragons, all conduct labor, and this labor is granted a value above many other labors. This value is not inherently exclusive from "base" labor, where those who pray only pray and their knowledge is placed higher on an imagined hierarchy. That feature is left for the next chapter. For now, the functions of political life don't really conform to any classes, and do not need to. If there is to be a mass religion, social class cannot be a given, and for a moment, it is nullified among the valid, and the invalid are irrelevant to the proceedings except as a prop or a nuisance to be swept aside. Who is and isn't invalid is the property of the association and no other. The same applies to religious assocations and mass religions.
Religion is an alien thought-form to labor's interest, except for one purpose - that labor recognizes the evil, however it does, and accedes to this alien because doing so would be preferable over succumbing to the evil. The first counter-argument to religion is that there is no evil, or evil is vague or relative, or rooted ultimately in sentiment. An axiomatic, rational, and timeless definition of evil is not possible, and nothing compels humans to avoid the evil. It is a conceit of states that, typically, the evil is something to be shunned, but by the time the holders of states assert what is good, the comfortable classes can easily choose cynicism about the good, or embrace the evil. For labor, whether evil is something to avoid is not a given. Nothing prevents the workers from deciding that evil, however they sense it, is the superior sentiment, and all of this nonsense about justice or kindness or anything we would have wanted was for the rubes. If the worker truly believed there was no devil, then there would be no argument for their competition with each other, and their disdain for those who were cast out of society. Maybe the workers can ignore all that happens around them, and maintain a fiction forever. The worker might embrace the ritual sacrifice as necessary or good in-of-itself - after all, they very much liked living, and after the sacrifices started, the damned were never going to forgive that nor should they. The worker cannot with any seriousness actually believe they can edit reality or declare that the ritual sacrifice didn't happen. If the worker believes reality works that way for itself, it only fools itself. Since foolishness was the chief purpose for the ritual sacrifice - hatred of that which is dumb - inflicting that on the worker itself would be a form of self-hatred with predictable consequences. Mere hatred or a conceit about intelligence did not justify the act or even make it evil. Evil is that which allowed it to perpetuate through the lie and the taboo, rather than the essential act which is, after all of its glorification, no more than what it is. The damned have long ago come to the conclusion that humans are irredeemable and do not wish to be redeemed, and endure through this life as if it were yet another sad story. Even if the truth were undeniable and ritual sacrifice stopped, what do the damned have to live for, and why would we want to believe that those who were more than happy to allow this to go on generation after generation will suddenly stop? We saw the result of a social expectation of the most fickle mercy - a mercy that only existed as a religious tenet because, after many centuries of no mercy whatsoever and its predictable consequences, an evil force in Christianity saw the value of mercy as a tool to control human livestock. Even though this mercy would have made the procession of an evil religious law much simpler, at no cost to anyone, the very idea of mercy was so offensive to the sentiments of labor that it was easy to convince enough of the laborers that this mercy was onerous on them, purely because of a sense that torturing the lame was so exhilirating that to contain oneself was worse than death, if you listen to their screaming. Even though this madness serves no one, and most of humanity had enough sense to see that and act accordingly, groups of labor and their enablers in the lowest class have always squealed that they are not allowed and enabled to continue the typical Satanic faggotry of this failed race. They only had to conspire to select for each other and fill institutions that would mandate that more of their kind would be born, and any shred of honesty or decent would falter. This quickly moved beyond the initial thrill of torture for the ritual sacrifice, and turned into a purge of the wicked against the honest, even the honest who were just as sadistic towards the lowest class. The honest had lives and interests contrary to a purified form of ritual sacrifice, and so they would "sin" by relenting on the torture after the lowest class had been subdued and was clearly not a serious threat to anything. But, this honesty was an inefficiency and a stain, by the economic and political imperatives and logic that prevailed in modernity. That question is ultimately one rooted in science and technology, which religion mimicked, but the extant religions had no answer to. Because technology was unevenly distributed and unevenly developed, the divisions within the association of free men in labor, which were already stark by the start of modernity, were to be rearranged along lines humanity had never known. Superstititon regarding technology, science, and the natural world had always lurked in the human project, but never had the superstition turned into what it became during the 20th century - a future that men today, in the past century, and during the 19th century, were fearful of and knew the consequences of as it had formed. It only required the venal fags who didn't need to think of anything but pushing the torture button to select for each other, and insist that their way of thinking was default and eternal, above god and nature.
It is this which preceded the workers, before religion in the proper sense would be a thing they adopt. Before this, labor needed no such law or institution, for none existed which could be found among men. The evil of the world is of a different sort, and humanity has no ability to change it at a fundamental level. This is to say, laws of nature are not things humans get to change by any decree or clever working. The greater work of science is not to abase oneself to nature, but to find clever ways to harness the natural forces humans can drive like their cattle herds, or adapt to a world as best as they can. No great "nature cult" is found among primitive mankind. It is a beast created by civilization to mark itself as alien to the barbarous world, and it creates a parody of nature in its image. Such a view of nature is wholly anathema to any aim labor would have, and this would be recognized from the first insinuation of such a beast. Before mass religion could form, the aristocratic order and its enablers would have already split off from the rest of us and established their workings for their purpose. There is not a "null state" where there was only labor and the underclass that ever existed in pristine state. There was an understanding that the technology and workings of the political order were artificial, and nothing in nature required that political order to exist in a preferred form, ready-made and imposed on existence and the past. All that was required was that the institutions would be viable enough with the tools and labor available to it; and so, the valid class of laborers could in principle have joined the political beast or attach themselves to its fate. A barbarous society has its cults and institutions and favored interests, and they make no pretenses about justice at all. Rule of fear and rule of man is the law in such a society, and there is no reason to expect that it would be different. Civilization can choose the veil of "justice" for a greater depravity, or suggest that technology allowed for something different to exist; and the barbarous are defined most of all by their conflict with civilized states rather than any essence or spirit of their own. On their own power, the barbarians would conduct politics and form empires, and they are not ignorant of technology's value. The difference was in what was valued and what imperatives would be necessary. Civilization organized around the temple and rituals which suggested its initiates would become altogether different creatures if they acquired the great secret, whereas the barbarous society saw correctly this was a trap that shit up the world. Such traps exist in their own societies before civilization created more stable institutions. But, in a primitive stage, anyone's thought on religious law had no reliable record, and so the true story in their own words is lost to us. We can only guess, by whatever sympathy remains in the human spirit, what someone who lived through such encounters would think. For the purposes of this book, speculation on "why civilization" has to be terminated, since civilization is clearly here and it is the civilized who write and leave history that we communicate, with all of its biases intact. I find it very likely that the barbarians of the world were little different in their core convictions, since the evil religion referred to was something common to all of mankind. No special technology was necessary to make men malicious, evil, or clever in their manipulations. If civilization never formed, and there were many factors working against it, it would have presented a niche with advantages to anyone who reproduced the strategy that did happen. Creating a single city, let alone a civilization, is not a trivial task like the free reproduction of commodities. There are only a countable number of civilizations worth calling such in all of human history, almost always associated with empires and, during Antiquity, the world was subsumed within the imperial model rather than an idealized model of cities. There are even fewer empires, all of whom follow a similar strategy and aim of world conquest, for whom peaceful coexistence in an imagined stately dance with other empires was never a serious proposition - unless the "empires" became nothing more than subsidiaries of the true empire. That matter moves far away from religion, but it will be a constant evil - a sense of the ruling power looming over most of the world, held by a few people, their fellow travelers, and their enablers.
The evil of the power above is the most evident evil - so much that the religion handed down to the masses looks to it as the obvious reference point, and religions which look to the world or down to the wretches, or which look inward and encourage self-indulgence, has little staying power or appeal to labor. Labor does not need to analyze itself too much to see that their situation is dominated by powerful entities and associations. Their own associations judge virtue to find leaders, establish any sort of command structure, and most of all, decide who is not part of the association. The greater evil are the ruling institutions and the ruling power. Whatever the laborer's stance towards the rulers, they would regard the obvious imbalance in power and rule when observing human society in total. This would be just as true in primitive conditions as it would in civilization. To a primitive society, life outside of the tribe is outside of the law, and outside of the law, the world is vast and full of dangers which have no regard for Man and hold it correctly in utter contempt. Yet, it is never "the world" that is the evil. The world is the enemy of aristocracy, but the world did nothing. Humans and their designs have been the most obvious evil, and their actions spring from a source that is knowable and was never particularly well-hidden. The standard operating procedure of the dominant evil is to exist in plain sight and make itself unmentionable through fear and use of the religious cycle - habitual lying and enjoyment from doing so. Evil would not hold its power if it were confined to a special place or hideaway. That promise that evil is somewhere in the shadows is sold either to mollify people with the most insulting of lies, or a scam sold to those who believe they can purchase the evil like some commodity in the supermarket of ideology. No - evil disdains to conceal its aims. Why would it, given the scarcity of the good and humanity's historical embrace? If we think about human society and what evil would do in it, anything good would see the contest for political power as a sad joke - one we would have avoided if humans were not a race of filthy jabbering retards who believed they could become gods. A smug sense that some low cunning marked a few humans as bright enough to laugh as the rest of us die has nothing good about it, when considering the condemned usually were far removed from any agency that the evil respects. Sufficient experience with humans will familiarize us with evil because it is reproduced in small niches - wherever the ugliness of this race reproduces and its family structure is reproduced. The argument that the family was intrinsically good and fit an ideal mold is one of the evil's greatest tricks - to tell you that exploitative relations are default, normal, and cannot be analyzed in any way. Reasonable humans, and humans retain enough sense and reason to see this, see the family as a means to an end, rather than a self-justifying koan that is divorced from anything a human family would do. The replacement of the family with an imposture or ideology comes early, even though no human has any reason to believe Big Brother exists at all, let alone that He has graced us with His baleful presence and we're supposed to love him. I highly doubt anyone in that world loves Big Brother or cares about loving such a creature, or that such a thing is the point outside of Eric Arthur Blair's perverse thought experiment.
Religious evil is the master's tool, but when possessed by labor and the masses, it is theirs to use and abuse like any possession. No right in nature would make of possession anything better than the right that Roman property entailed for its owner. This works both ways, to the chagrin of aristocracy which invariably invokes their version of natural law as their self-justifying doctrine. Never at any point is aristocracy expected to account for themselves by any merit of "points" or any standard that would allow anyone to say no to it. If that happened, the enterprise of aristocracy - insinuations and torture - would be so ruinous that the first and most necessary task of labor would be to extirpate that race and never speak of letting such filth call themselves "best" or allow them sanction to do anything but stay out of everyone's business forever - and it is forever. Any religion would be acutely aware of this, and the necessity of all involved to account for it - for the rulers to protect their property, and for the people to know that evil so that they could even navigate a world where it is present. The superstition and theology of religion remains confined to those who train their bodies to use the technology. The tools and teachings of a religion are, if information and secrets escape the assocation, free for the heathens to use and abuse just as the pious would use them. This applies only to the tools, and just as in economic and political life, the believers themselves are machines and tools. The believers, at a basic level, will see themselves as machines - autonomous machines out of necessity unless otherwise specified by facts they independently verify, but still, machines that can be repurposed, tricked, used and abused like any other object. The believer seeks to avoid being set against itself, regardless of its station. This would be a precondition for the believer of religion - that it has judged itself to be capable of agency regarding the evil, which requires at the least an ability of the body to do so. Its environment can never be an excuse for too long, no matter how onerous the environment is. Religion may answer questions about the environment and the evil pervading it, but the adherent of the religion is obligated to navigate that evil no matter what the world or other humans did to him. The self-indulgence inherent in religion makes this something the person and the human being will deal with, each separately and bound to each others' fate. The person, an institution, is bound to the flesh and its wants and vulnerabilities; the flesh is bound to all of the marks of shame that can only be assigned to an institutional representation, barring access to the body which requires imprisonment, force, and can be defied by nerves when all else fails and the person is declared insane. The subject matter of the evil affects all aspects of the human being rather than a preferred purview, and so religion will deal first with this question - how to reconcile the alien expectations of political and economic society with the believer's existence. Even if the evil were entirely a local thing, and the consequences were entirely private and society knew nothing, the consequences are still relevant to the believer, who has every reason to believe private conduct is judged just as much as political or social conduct, and that public conduct is held to an even higher standard once faith in the public is part of civic religion.
There is in any religion two, or perhaps three, initiation rites. The most common and overt are the initiation rites for the mass of believers, which all true believers are expected to pass through if they to be regarded as members worth consideration. The other is the initiation of priests, who are in many ways following a separate religion. A third is less about joining the religion, but for those who are subjected to it. For the initiation of the commons, the rituals are baptism, education and attainment of the overt standard set by a religion, rituals which affirm the basic character of a religion like the Eucharist, praying five times a day to Mecca which affirms the oath Muslims take upon joining. A naive faith may consider initiation "one and done" or believe that initiation is conferred by birth and heredity - something upheld in Judaism and Islam and exoterically denied in Christianity, but privately affirmed among the priests who know what the religion really is. But, regular tests of the believer function as a re-initiation into the religion, lest they lapse, and every so often, the believer is expected to return to the root of their religious commitment as a necessary reference point. The initiation and the idea of such takes on a quality that is far more than anything this dubious invitation meant - and it should be clear that nearly all adherents of mass religions are not there because the idea of religion was intrinsically appealing based on its tenets or public relations, but because mass religions are associations that convert by the sword and by roping their offspring into it and melding it with the rites of education that are common to society. The education rites preceded religion, and share its overall mission - that education approaches an evil of the world, before any acknowledgement of the evil is possible. For education, this initiation is a more degenerate form. It is expected of educators that the initiates in education are too young and completely naive - pedagogy and pedagogy alone insists on either blank slates or the eugenic qualities of students being inborn, and the educator's sole task is to sort the population into grades of civic worth. For the educator, no initiative of the student is to be permitted except on the terms the educator sets out, and this is fixed and eternal among all forms of education that specialize in that task above all others. The educator, without fail, has no regard for religion except as a tool to use and abuse, and does so because their allegiance is always to aristocracy. If he or she does not do this, they shirk the grisly function of education. Educators do not regard the evil for it does not exist - for the educator, there is only power, "above good in evil" in the same familiar Nietzschean faggotry we have already rejected in this writing. The education of religion is aware of this defect, and in turn, the educators of religious orders begrudgingly conform to the necessary learning that religion required regarding the evil. The religious believer must operate independently as a vehicle for the religion and as an entity in the world for whom the question of evil was relevant.
For the priesthood, such ambiguity about education is averted. Priestly initiation has nothing to do with any religious law or the crass superstitions being taken as literal facts. The priest is aware he or she is an initiate into something far more ancient than the tenets of the religion proclaim, and has lived alongside all other religions which contemptlate the same question - the nature of evil and what it means for this one world all of them live in. The priest is aware that by entering this game, the priest fits into a hierarchy and lineage whose true ancestor is outside of time altogether. But, in the mortal realm, the priest is beholden to all other priesthoods, whether they are alien to him or her. One does not "self-initiate" or declare imperiously that suddenly they are a philosopher or priest, like the poor philosophers. This appeal is not made to an institution, which is in the end just information, for the line of religious agents precedes any institution, and members of competing institutions have no "super-divine" protection from each other. The distinction between the layman and the priest is not so much that the priest holds special knowledge or substance or any provable hereditary privilege to know. It is instead a question of devotion and allocation of their faculties to the task, once the nature of religion is understood. The layman does not ever believe "ignorance is strength". The appeal of the religion and priest to the layman is that the priest and religious body would know better than the layman what a religious teaching on the evil or a ritual is or means. The layman is aware that priestly succession harkens back to a general sense of religion's subject matter, and so the priest would be more aware and dedicated to the specialized task of religion.
For a priest to be a priest, he or she hails from some line of succession, whether it is hereditary or adoptive. Priests are only initiated by priests who are already aware of the subject matter, and very likely prospective priests would be aware of this subject matter before they are initiated. They would know that there is no great mystery to be sold as a commodity. The priest is a student of the evil, of the power religion holds over the mind and soul. The priest does not have any monopoly on this knowledge of the evil, but any knowledge of the evil would make clear that such a succession and initiation exists. It would not be possible to speak of the line of priests without an origin of the priesthood. Anyone who "self-initiates" would form a new religion, which is beholden to the long history of religion and religion as a concept. A very large church like the Christian church would reach back into Antiquity, to the apostles, to members of the hierarchy who were initiated into something that grew big well before the religion was legalized. Those priests would be aware they are competing against every other mystery cult and the ancient aristocratic religion, which was for students of the mysteries a story they knew parts of and whose nature was not in doubt. No one enters religion thinking they are studying natural science or a fad. To take religion as any serious proposition means dealing with the evil and the power such evil would entail, whether it is the power to harness evil or ward it off. No one enters religion, as a priest or layman or as someone who is an enemy of the faith, thinking that Ignorance is Strength. To be ignorant on this matter is no excuse, and brings woe to the conquered.
Of the third group, the hangers-on, little of faith or religion is expected. This group grows in size because the souls of the people are contested by religion, and eventually this group has to believe in something simply to regard an evil pressing into their lives. They may find something in the religion, and usually repurpose religion for whatever purposes they have. As a rule, this group is not really "in" the religion, but a parodic initiation is conducted because this satisfy a religion's requirement to claim souls, if it has such a claim. Not every religion makes conversion a goal or even cares what outsiders think, but it will have to contend with those outside of the religion who latch on to its teachings and structure, even if only because they exist around it. Religion will always have this question - what is the stance towards the outsiders, and towards particular groups of them, whose religious teachings do not line up with their own? The exoteric facade of a religion is its public relations arm, rather than the religion of the layperson. By proper initiation, the layman begins receiving the religion's esoteric teachings, and also enters the religious association and becomes familiar with the figures and history of that association. The names and places and persons and entities pertaining to a religion are not truly esoteric knowledge - they would have names outside of the religion - but their significance to the religion is not immediately evident to outsiders, and an entrant into the religion will learn of the proper names of things. Within the religion, names and their associated entity are things of power and markers of some evil or potential regarding the evil.
What the third group gets out of the arrangement is temporary security - that as long as they are "good people", they will not be a target of the evil. This does not always take the form of a threat, but for those who consider religion an association like any political association - and they are always going to be that if they are to survive and fulfill their purpose - a passive attitude towards the unwashed masses is no comfort. There is also a very real difficult of a religion taking on clients that it cannot initiate properly, and who do not need full criteria to rise through the ranks of the religion. This may not be a great menace to the third group, who likely saw religions competing and believed that the world, in its way, provided the best security. A religion's presence need not be hostile, and most religions in the world do not invoke menacing political fronts. Even the virulent religions separate religion and state because this is prudent and allows religion to regulate its domains, and the state to best regulate its. What a state or economic management is terrible at, religious faith and its moral claims are very effective at regulating - for example, moral attitudes towards production, which always carry religious implications and can never be separated from them, regardless of ideological games and treachery.
All who encounter religion will see, regardless of its claims, that every religion contains within it degrees of advance within the organization. These may be a tiered dissemination of the religion's knowledge and honors, or they may be specializations in some field of knowledge the religion deems worthwhile. This quality of religion is unavoidable due to knowledge itself requiring this initiation and rise up the ranks, when concerned with an institution which is alien to something that would have been natural or right, where the moral concern is something other than evil. The distinct grades of knowledge do not mix easily. One builds off the last or some common base, and because the knowledge pertains to the evil, evil is jealous and does not freely mingle or share knowledge for goodwill. An initiate might be told that procession through the degrees happens at their own pace and by a path of their choosing, but the reality of any knowledge base is that, even if it were pursued for a good cause, every knowledge entails evils and limitations which preclude linking the different degrees and specializations. If we were freely speaking of a knowledge base created in our leisure, out of a sense that knowledge and systems were intrinsically interesting, this limitation is relaxed considerably. When the subject matter is the evil, caution and limitations of access become necessary. Obfuscation and barriers which seem nonsensical or purely retarded are expected, and then imposed by the high priest or grand wizard to ensure the religion's secrets and knowledge of its members are best protected. Absent this concern, the degrees present a clear curriculum to follow, whatever the degree might entail. A prescribed course is mandated, and deviation from that degree and its function is forbidden. Linking disparate areas of knowledge is only permissible when the evil has been ruled out. This may, but does not necessarily, imply a higher authority regulating this exchange, so that all believers, laymen, and those subjected to religious law against their will, only concern themselves with their specialization. If this sounds like the ideal city's technocracy, then gold star for you. Nothing about this splitting of the mind is useful or necessary for knowledge itself. It is knowledge of the evil, and the moral guide which would steer intelligence on its own accord, that requires this. Over time, the degrees are insinuated over the most trifling of knowledge so often that it appears natural, and the true believers are convinced that procession through the degrees will attain some cosmic high score record, and this struggle up the ranks becomes the overriding purpose of any of this. What it was really for becomes secondary to that next rank, that next secret, which will grant access to new powers, new protection, new wisdom, however dubious this offer may be.
What is contested is never "true wisdom", but property which is adjudciated by the body with a true claim to it - the priesthood. The attainment of degrees is never done simply because they were fun, but because they were an initiation into associations of those who have that mark, and thus doors open. It is this property which is spiritually coveted far more than any other, however worthless it is for utility. The true utility is social rank and distinction within the religion, which must then be imposed on the whole world. Only in this way can a religion perpetuate its structure. Without degrees of initiation, even if they are few in number, reproducing a mere text has no substance. The members of a religion are not just ideas or abstractions of some impulse, but people who would behave much as people would in a material world. If there were no degrees of initiation, there would be a breakdown where spiritual authority is questioned.
What is seen here is the basis for most political treatises and understanding regarding it - that, beneath all of the excuses, politics is only politics because of a religious convinction that this behavior is worth something other than a statement of fact. Before any observations of natural law can be observed, there is a tacit or explicit admission that all of this exists because there were forces who wanted it so, either because power was its own reward, or because this way wards off an evil that humans would want to fight. The causes are not limited to these, but what is not arguable is that the religion is wrong in its most fundamental claims, or that religion as a whole could be wrong. Now, it is not just life which is at sake, but eternal life and eternal souls, and the reason why we would be here to do this - or the reasons we would have to fear things in this world. If there is a general fear, it would not be a general fear of dying, but a general fear of the evil which we know to be much worse than death. Such a thing would not be a trifling thing that would be opened to public inquiry or any pleb who thinks they know better than the established hierarchy.
This is a necessary method for religion, but it is not needed to establish spiritual authority in total. Religion itself is aware of this, and that its degrees are really about the institution's viability rather than "the point" in of themselves. The initiation and hierarchy are a liability for the religion's long term survival, but necessary to prevent foreign taint from entering a religion and perverting its teachings. No law and no praxis can substitute for this necessary genetic function. What happens when the eugenic interest overrides all others and makes a foul alliance is for a later time, but all religion faces this problem, and the hereditary claims always entail a religious reverence for some evil to defend them. If someone is an aristocracy, this hereditary claim can be weaponized to defend an adoptive elite, which can be purified of any tie to the past - until that adoptive elite edits the past freely and makes real any claim, no matter how preposterous.
All levels of a religion - from the highest degrees to the externalities that result from its existence - are things which can be known against the will of the religion, and there is no defense against this scrying no matter how elaborate the ruses and how terrifying the threats. It becomes necessary to view the whole community and effect of the believers for what they are and what they do, and it is for the world to judge in the final analysis. What happens when a religion cannot hide its secrets? It is laid bare and becomes a plaything of all who would declare the emperor has no clothes, and don't care if the emperor says nudism is in. A religion of secrets is a fickle and hopeless creature, for everyone by now suspects the worst of such an evil contraption.
There is no court to try religion, for the courts with jurisdiction are religious courts. There is one appeal - to the world's known judgement of religion, which is shared by all people, regardless of initiation. From the damned to the holy, all make their judgement. This is not the court of "public opinion", but the court of judgement against the whole world. The damned give no shits about a public or the insinuations of "peer" pressure from assholes who glorify the thrill of torture. A Satanic race like humanity deserves no sanction and could only raise by election the qualities aristocracy desires - hence why elections were the perfect way to destroy democratic thought, by presenting the people an obviously farcical "choice" and few options except to go along with it. In serious political thought, elections are expenditure for an elaborate charade, where those within the political class and outside of it read the tea leaves to see what really rules in a republic. A majority of assholes is by the judgement of the world a majority of assholes. Those who would assert that a majority vote in a rigged election is a "mandate" despise the idea of democracy and make that known with every filthy word that comes out of their mouths. But, what claim does democracy in the genuine sense have to any authority? The only claim is that the demos of believers is a fact, while the claim of an elite institution or leadership is a convenient fiction until proven to be an association outside of the community of believers. The association above the community forms a world apart, but cannot truly be a thing that is sacrosanct and immune to the actions of the lower orders of a religion. If the grubby adherents at the lowest rung of a religion commit crime, or there are those who commit crime in the name of the religion, it is the religion as a whole which is accountable to this. It would not do for a religion to be assocated with pederasty and the lowest filth, which tends to be the case with humans.
It is this community which religion offers more than its knowledge and force, to exist as something worth following. Knowledge is easy to reproduce once scryed, and force can be generated by any religion or by any evil or a machine used for any purpose. The community offers salvation and dread depending on what is needed. We can see here that what was really the hermit's position has been claimed not by the aristocracy at the top, but by the commons. In this way, the assets and labors of the hermit, which were detached from society for the most part, are now subsumed in the study of religion. This proceeded because the world could be enclosed, and at heart, the enclosure was not driven by any economic necessity. It was not driven by the conditions of Empire. Historically, empires consolidate their territories by whatever means are appropriate for a time, place, and the conditions that empire can call upon, including the qualities of their people. The empires that did expand rapidly through violence did so not because the empire was a religious matter. Very often the stage of rapid imperial expansion came from powers who were considered outside of civilization, like the Hunnic and Mongol empires; or they were the ambitions of men who sought to enrich themselves at the expense of their own people, and "empire" was unseemly rather than something glorified. This describes the Romans. The true motives for enclosure were never about anything but a religious zeal, starting from religious backing of the earliest money and the long-run motives of the commercial classes. The commercial classes never are there to give others nice things, whether out of the goodness of their heart or because of the imperative for profit. The commercial classes are not uniformly motivated by the same religious zeal - their typical character historically is that they want everything including that which contradicts every other tenet they hold dear, and the bourgeoisie like many prior commercial classes were faction-ridden and quick to turn on each other, which led to the past century turning out as it did. But, the largest religious groupings - and secular so-called religions of science are highly superstitious and fad-ridden if one has the misfortune of knowing what their adherents really think about the world - have a mission that has little to do with class struggle or the hitherto acknowledgted motives that a political class or intriguers would want to believe operates to push the buttons of other people. It is this which grants to any religion its power. But, to gather that community, it is not a given. A community does not exist without moral believers, and religion cannot generate that by any pre-existing asset from the tool handed to labor. That comes from the people themselves.
It is this which grants to religion its substance, and allows it - if it so chooses - to become a mass religion, counting its virtue not by any merit of its ideas or those who are devout, but by the sheer number of souls buying into it and their wide reach. In this way, religion finally manifests as a political force, paired with the association which at first was a political contrivance. There was not, by nature, any preferred association that would have formed for an ulterior motive. The natural law shows that on their own, associations flitter in and out of existence, lacking any serious history and little to recommend them except the general fear, which in primitive conditions relies largely on insinuations and lacks institutional hold.
All of the political thought through associations is at heart some sort of religious mission, or comparable to it when the genuine study of evil is replaced with pure opportunism. When civic religion is purely opportunistic, the evil is replaced with the general fear, and the general fear can be simulated with impostors. It is for this reason that those who hold a religious association as a monopoly will lie to the unwashed masses, seeing them as unworthy of being "saved" or admission into their club. To do so grants to the student of religion far more staying power than someone whose motives are strictly material and quasi-scientific. To be willfully ignorant is itself a religious stance, however ill-formed it is. The true "neutral" stance is naive atheism which opens one to investigation of the evil, coming to the conclusion that human evil is a clear and present danger, and that the agentur of evil certainly have connection to something to allow them to do this. The greatest modern lie is that all of this is "random", a lie always dripping with contempt and familiar as a tactic of in-groups. The first duty of those in the association to those outside of it, no matter what public statements are made about honesty, is this: always, always lie to the infidel. It does not matter if the lie serves any purpose or whether the infidel sees through it, of if the infidel even cares about your fruity cult. A momentary lapse of the core superstitutions and dogmas of the religion, and all lies necessary to uphold them against hostile critics, is forbidden. This is most felt with the "religions of science" which are neither science nor proper religion, for they are nothing but faggotry and insults to destroy any thought about the evil or about science, killing both with the same machine and the same motions. Truth may be permitted so long as it is truth on the terms of the association, and internal disputes within the religion - within the Party - are permitted. While there is no "democratic centralism" of the religion, "where we go one, we go all" - the perfect behavior for mobilizing a phalanx, or herding beasts who think they're joining an association, like the Trump fags - and they are pure, unmitigated fags if they actually believe in any of that nonsense.
Aside from the core lie to protect the religion at all costs, there are few firm rules for what practices make a religion. In this way, members of the religion are promised a form of freedom, within the law of the religion and at the mercy of those who hold degrees within it. Outside of religion, all are slaves to political forces. Within the faith, political intrigues can be temporarily abated, being incompatible with the association that religion requires to function beyond mutual self-interest or naive assumptions. This freedom from politics is only possible so long as the association has faith, and it is local to a cell or congregation. The whole "nation of believers" or every single person claiming to be a believer cannot be summoned, simply by the nature of how religious information is disseminated, and the necessary chain of command and organizational structure for this to work as anything other than words. But, there is a shared understanding between believers in different cells, and some understanding between believers of different religion, so long as their religions are compatible. Among the freedoms of religion is that the truth is possible within those confines, and the religion may say the truth to the unwashed so long as this does not jeopardize the whole project. The lie now has its direction, where before the lie was aribtrary and not limited by anything. Only here can doublethink appear as intended - or, religion proclaims it "resolves contradiction", which is silly because humans made the contradiction due to their own fucking stupidity.
Generally the practices of a religion reinforce initiation and the degrees one learned. The merit is made sensical because the degrees link to something useful for the purposes of the religion. This does not map on to the personal sentiments of the believer, who is set against themselves for the "greater good". We can see the inversion of the circle in mass religion, where the degrees which are nothing are given moral weight, but the daily practices of religion are themselves demonstration of those degrees and reproduce the structure of the religion. The believer has moral reasons to do this, but because the evil became dominant in their thoughts, their native moral sense will be overridden by the religion's values - institutional values that are alien to the believer. A religion might value moral autonomy and decision making, and usually has to, but the believer is free mostly to choose the correct position the religion mandates and nothing else. You can choose wrong, but you'd be wrong, and therefore evil, and the wages of sin are death in one way or another. There is no mercy in associations, and of course, the ancient rule of humanity still applies - "once retarded, ALWAYS retarded".