Allan Kurzberg And The Paradox Of Organized Religion, Part 1.

“…the Chinese had a good idea of their origins, related in a creation myth concerning one Pangu, the first(almost human) being, who spent 18,000 years chiseling out the universe from chaos.  When he died, the vermin on his body became the human race.”–Richard Gunde

 

 

 

Before we try to examine Allan Kurzberg’s approach to organized religion, we would do well to review his entire system and think about each part carefully.

 

New Definition of human being:  A Human being is an irrational being that is mostly capable of rational thought.

Postulate 1.  The ability of humans to think rationally developed late in human history.

Postulate 2.  No perceivable living creature on Earth lies, prevaricates, or pretends more than a human being.

Postulate 3.  All human beings are “Other” creating biological entities.

Postulate 4.  All human interactive behavior is the result of the dynamics between inclusive and exclusive relationships.

The Corollary of Human Existence or The Five Motivational Forces:  The five motivational forces that govern all human behavior are:  E+, E-, OE+, OE-, and r.

The Corollary of Instability:  The five motivational forces are unstable and at any point in time one force may change into any of the other forces.

 

It is important to note that although Allan believed the above definition, corollaries and postulates were necessary and sufficient to analyze all forms of human interactive behavior, he admitted that additional postulates and corollaries might be discovered in the future.  He also believed that the language he used in the above parts might be altered or refined to make the concepts even clearer.

We shall now look at one of the areas of human interactive behavior that Allan had a particular interest in:  organized religion.  To take all emotions away that might hamper an objective analysis of organized religion, Kurzberg reverted to symbols OR-1, OR-2,,,  OR-n, where n is finite since the number of human beings is finite. Allan thought that the naming of individual ORs was the main reason studies of ORs have not been objective, since they conjure up emotions that necessarily interfere with rational thought.  An OR is required to have at least two or more members (by definition of “organized”.  Each OR contains elements  that are common to every other OR.  Fundamentally, all ORs contain a finite set of beliefs whose purpose is to link each member of an OR’s life with the universe and to endow it with meaning..  Let us now state the paradox of ORs that Allan examined and pondered over.

 

The Paradox of Organized Religion:  Although every organized religion purports to make people more moral, no organized religion can ensure the moral behavior of any of it’s members at any point in time.

 

By the Corollary of Human Existence, we know that OE- must be present in each member(they are all humans), and by the Corollary of Instability, we know that any of the five motivational forces can change into any of the other motivational forces at any point in time.  OE- by definition is the state where rational thought is overwhelmed by destructive emotions.  Therefore, we have proved The Paradox of Organized Religion.

Kurzberg’s query was how do we try to undo the paradox?  What must each member of an OR do to ensure moral behavior?  It’s clear that the task of every OR would be to find ways to limit OE-, especially that described by P 3.  To avoid “Otherness”, each OR would have to find ways not to judge or create inclusive and exclusive relationships by P 4.  A difficult if not impossible task to be sure.  But without a conscientious effort on the part of an OR to do the above, the paradox displays a contradiction as to what each OR purports to do and what it actually can do.