Benjamin Cain
1 min readMay 27, 2021

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The answer is no. Not everything that religious people do is automatically funny. That's hardly my thesis. I wrote here that Christians and Muslims lost the plot, renounced the Jewish satirical perspective of the underdog outsider, and picked up on the totalitarian potential of monotheism, politicizing their religions, inheriting an empire or conquering territory.

For example, the article says, "Christians forsook that premise, exchanging the humble role of the downtrodden, self-deprecating outsider, which is proper for comedians, for the lofty, unfunny ones of the elite insider and of the totalitarian persecutor. Consequently, the worst, dystopian aspects of monotheism came to the fore in Christian theocracy, in a process that was repeated in the seventh century with Islam, with Muhammad the conquering prophet."

And I go on and on about how Christians and Muslims lost the plot (the satirical aspect of monotheism): "Christians and Muslims emphasized the mere literal and therefore unspiritual meaning of their myths, using them as political instruments in the old, pre-Axial and polytheistic manner, to justify their political domination."

The seriousness and oversensitivity of Muslims deserve a separate article, which I'm going to write soon.

However, I do also try to imagine a fully enlightened, transhuman perspective on events, and I doubt that that perspective would be particularly moralistic. More precisely, I suspect an enlightened person's morals would be aesthetic, so the trick would be to view even tragedies and crimes artistically rather than comedically. There's good art and there's bad, cliched art. The rest of morality may be hot air.

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Benjamin Cain
Benjamin Cain

Written by Benjamin Cain

Ph.D. in philosophy / Knowledge condemns. Art redeems. / https://benjamincain.substack.com / https://ko-fi.com/benjamincain / benjamincain8@gmailDOTcom

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