The Cathedral Fallacy

There’s a persistent false cause or false attribution fallacy that goes like this: “Since Christianity inspired such majestic cathedrals, it must thus be true and righteous, right?” Nothing could be further from the truth.

The same ‘appeal to awe’ appears again and again in other value systems: “If Islam inspired the Taj Mahal, or if Rome inspired the Pantheon, or if ancient Hellenism inspired the Parthenon, then they must be great and right?” And if satanic cults inspired cabalistic temples and majestic world domination structures, then satanism must be great and righteous also, right? Even though all these belief systems are mutually exclusive.

So which is it?

Architectural or technological feats have been achieved under almost every regime or ideology. Does this mean that every single good thing achieved was due to the regime/ideology, or despite it? And what about the bad things, then? Are we as intellectually fair as to assign the bad — as we do the good — to the ideology under which it occurred, or are we just cherry-picking?

Oh, and don’t forget the favourite appeal-to-awe fallacy of the statists: “The state managed to take us to the moon! Take that, sceptics!”

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I hate to break it to you, but — and I’m truly sorry — it wasn’t Christianity that inspired the beauty of cathedrals. It was the ruling classes’ need to propagandise, to conduct psychological operations of awe to inspire a sense of “authority” in them in the eyes of the naive, gullible masses. The mesmerising light dynamics, the enchanting acoustics, the intricate architecture that can only be otherworldly (almost)…

All this lush serves a purpose: To impress the impressionable masses and thus make the rulers of a belief system appear to be legitimate, much like certain academic charlatans bamboozle us with techno-babble mumbo jumbo, not because they know what the fuck they’re talking about, but because they have invented a way to appear more knowledgeable than the rest of us.

It’s all theatre, like a fat dude’s suit and tie, or transvestite’s excess makeup; they are all designed to hide an underlying ugliness, and to create false impressions.

Whether cathedrals, pyramids, pantheons, or moon landings, these are all just a small part of some ruling class’s content marketing strategy to appear as an authority. Nothing more. Impress people with perceived superiority, and they will follow you anywhere. And the irony is that these massive projects were paid for by the people’s own labour, no less. We are propagandised with our own money, taxes taken from us by force.

The brilliance of a cathedral, or any great work of state-sponsored art — either the Sistine Chapel or the Parthenon — are not a testament to the greatness of a religion, culture, civilisation, philosophy, or morality of a given era, territory, or ideology. They are a revelation of the state’s desperate motivations to propagandise the naive masses (and of the gullibility of the masses as well).

Beautiful awe-inspiring cathedrals were not created because of Christianity, but despite it. They were funded from forced labour (taxes) and conceived by master-manipulator masons who understood human psychology, and how majestic temples structured the illusion of God-given authority.

This is the exact case for Helleno-Roman temples, Egyptian temples, and the Islamic mosques (the latter being a cheap patchwork of Hindu and Eastern-Roman architecture).

The brilliance of the Sistine Chapel, Saint Paul’s Cathedral, Notre Dame, and my favourite — the Pantheon — are sadly the result of theocratic monarchies and their desperate motivation to bamboozle impressionable masses, to create an air of “spirituality” and “authority”, just like all charlatans do, including academic hacks with their manufactured exclusivity to spew untestable, unprovable mumbo-jumbo.

Even after reading this, the naive will double down and take this as an argument in support of state authoritarianism. They’ll think: “If the state can create works of wonder like great architecture and moon landings, then state authority must be good!”

But this is an argument as psychotic as it is deluded. What about all the cathedrals that were not built due to state waste and socioeconomic suppression? What about what we’ve lost due to centralised “authority” and its inorganic, violent redistribution of wealth into wasteful activities like war, embezzlement, by-design stagflation, and the symptoms of anarcho-tyranny we are experiencing since the dawn of the scam of statehood? What about all the art and technology that were not developed due to those inefficiencies from arbitrary state interventionism?

Next time you admire a cathedral, or any other beautiful work of state propaganda, try to think of all the accomplishments that were stolen from us to make that happen, things that would have been possible without the crippling inefficiencies of government.

Lastly, about the despicable non-argument that “the state took us to the moon”: You’d have to prove that, without the socioeconomic suppression of state interventionism, we wouldn’t have gone to the stars by now. The burden of proof lies on you, since non-statism is the default null hypothesis, and the state is the alternative. So far, all indications point to the state being a plague on humanity.