Pre-modern Pagan Fascisms. Islam Is One Amongst Many.

One of the mysteries of the modern world, is the fetish that society, and pop culture has for true fascism. Real fascism is of course the destruction of the individual, and the sublimation of the person into a cult be it one run by the state, a party, or an elite professing 'spiritual faith'. Fascism in the industrialized world emanates from Marxism, Socialism and Statism. It is a left-wing construct in which the resources of the state are used to deny the individual, and elevate the communal. In pre-modern theologies such as Islam the state is crude and barely exists, so it is the pagan cult; its liturgy and 'spiritual' writings; and its rituals or 'laws' and pagan-celestial worship, which must be followed. In the pagan world, the person, free-will, free-thinking, independence and rationality are all sacrificed to the 'communal good'.

Islam is not the only non-faith paganism which has called itself a religion. Most Asian political-theocracies throughout history have been named 'religions', though a cult based on pagan beliefs, is not a religion at least not in the Western sense of that word. Christianity for all its faults, was the only philosophy in man's history in which reason came out of faith:

The mountain of evidence points to the contrary. Compared to other theological and spiritual movements, Christianity is the only framework in the history of man to generate three key insights which encouraged Europe to create the modern world. The first is that the pursuit to understand faith can only be fulfilled through reason and inquiry. The second is that free-will and the right to life, to own property, and to manage one's own 'fate', is central to living. These two cultural insights lead to the third tenet bequeathed by Christianity, namely a belief in progress, a good future, and the optimism that positive change is possible not only spiritually but materially.

No other system concocted by man ever generated these three key points which was the basis of the European supremacy in culture, spirituality, and ethics.

Pagan constructs do not contain the essentials of what is a true religion. A true religion has to lead to reason, humanism and individualism. If not it is just another collective, another cult, another way to crush the individual.

Most Asian theologies are very similar to Islam. We can see throughout history that Asian cults are veiled in unbridled mysticism and ritualization of life around non-human objects. In Islam believers are prostrating themselves to the moon idol of Mecca, a pagan symbol which pre-dates Mohammed by millenia. We see the same celestial, non-humanized worship in Hinduism, Shintoism, Mongol Sky God worship, and the animisms which abounded in East Asia for thousands of years. Within all of these cults there is the anti-individualism embedded in the worship of fate, appeasing the God's or God through rituals and offerings; and the absolute denial of free-will and humanized aspiration. When you deny free-will you can't possibly create a true religion. By substituting rituals and idol worship and denying an anthropomorphic form of spiritual observance, you have a paganism.

'Pagus' is the Latin word roughly meaning 'country illiterate'. It defined non-urban, and non-Christians in the late Roman empire. It was meant to be a criticism of those who were uneducated, unenlightened and who were outside the Christian church practicing polytheism. The defining characteristic of the pagus was thus someone who did not possess much knowledge and could not reason or rationalize, and who engaged in bizarre rites of superstition in order to keep various 'Gods' happy. They were laughed at by the urbanized and supposedly educated Roman Christians, just as Ivy League educated atheists today jeer at Christians and portray them as mindless robots following a superstition and unable to come to terms with reality and science.