Mass Production

After I discussed with God last week a little of what capitalism and religion have in common, he took some time this week to point out some other similar things. Not things that are essential to capitalism or religion but things that are in the same vein.

The main thing he talked about was the production side of things.

Mass production is how capitalists keep their costs down and allow us to buy an incredible array of things for prices that just about anybody can afford. Mass production is about taking your design work and amortizing its costs over a whole lot of essentially identical copies. In religion it’s about having one guidebook, a bible, if you will, that everybody works from. It used to be that every tribe had its own shaman and he pretty much got to make up whatever stories got across his vision of the gods, but along came organized religion and suddenly your spiritual leaders have a codified book or set of books that they have to work from. They still get to vamp and improvise, but only so long as they don’t move too far afield from the core reference work.

Another important thing about production is incremental improvement. You don’t just come out with a new model of car and then keep selling the same thing year after year, you find ways to improve it, or at least to change it so it keeps seeming like something new. In “western” religion we didn’t just come up with the Torah and say there it is, we’re done. We came up with derivatives and new works that took the old works as given. We’ve got the Koran, we’ve got the Christian Bible (in any number of translations), and we’ve got the Book of Mormon, and that doesn’t even take into account the variations that people like David Koresh and Jim Jones never got around to writing down.

So remember, God may be eternal and unchanging, but not religion, you can always find something new in religion.

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