【中英翻译】人类简史 Part 3 The Unification of Humankind – The Worship of Man (中文版没有这一部分)

The Worship of Man

人类的崇拜

The last 300 years are often depicted as an age of growing secularism, in which religions have increasingly lost their importance. If we are talking about theist religions, this is largely correct. But if we take into consideration natural-law religions, then modernity turns out to be an age of intense religious fervor, unparalleled missionary efforts, and the bloodiest wars of religion in history.

过去的300年常常被描述为一个宗教影响力日益衰微，同时世俗主义具有了越来越大影响力的时代。如果我们讨论的仅仅是对神的信仰，那么这个结论在绝大多数情况下是正确的。但如果把由自然法影响所产生的宗教也考虑进去，那么我们引以为傲的现代性实则充斥着宗教狂热和传教性质，而且曾上演或正上演着史上最血腥的信仰之争。

The modern age has witnessed the rise of a number of new natural-law religions, such as liberalism, Communism, capitalism, nationalism and Nazism. These creeds do not like to be called religions, and refer to themselves as ideologies. But this is just a semantic exercise. If a religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order, then Soviet Communism was no less a religion than Islam.

现代社会伴随着一系列受自然法影响的宗教的兴起，也就是所谓的“主义”：自由主义，共产主义，资本主义，民族主义，纳粹主义等等。人们不会将这些“主义”当作宗教或者信仰，而是称之为意识形态。但这只是一种语义上的文字游戏。如果我们同意宗教的定义是一种建立在超人秩序之上，用来规范人类行为和价值的系统，那么苏联并不比伊斯兰教逊色。

Islam is of course different from Communism, because Islam sees the superhuman order governing the world as the edict of an omnipotent creator god, whereas Soviet Communism did not believe in gods. But Buddhism too gives short shrift to gods, and yet we commonly classify it as a religion. Like Buddhists, Communists believed in a superhuman order of natural and immutable laws that should guide human actions. Whereas Buddhists believe that the law of nature was discovered by Siddhartha Gautama, Communists believed that the law of nature was discovered by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

伊斯兰教当然和共产主义不同，因为伊斯兰教把万能的创世神当作世界的最高统治者，而共产主义显然不信神。但佛教对神的关注也并不多，而我们仍将其归为一种宗教。和佛教徒一样，共产主义者信奉自然而永恒的规律对人类行为的规范。只不过佛教徒相信约束自己的真理是释迦摩尼发现的，而共产主义者相信这是由卡尔马克思、恩格斯和列宁发现的。

The similarity does not end there. Like other religions, Communism too has its holy scripts and prophetic books, such as Marx’s Das Kapital, which foretold that history would soon end with the inevitable victory of the proletariat. Communism had its holidays and festivals, such as the First of May and the anniversary of the October Revolution. It had theologians adept at Marxist dialectics, and every unit in the Soviet army had a chaplain, called a commissar, who monitored the piety of soldiers and officers. Communism had martyrs, holy wars and heresies, such as Trotskyism. Soviet Communism was a fanatical and missionary religion. A devout Communist could not be a Christian or a Buddhist, and was expected to spread the gospel of Marx and Lenin even at the price of his or her life.

两者的相似性还不止这些。就和其他的宗教一样，共产主义也有自己的“神谕书”和“启示录”，比如马克思的《资本论》，在书中他满怀信心地预言：无产阶级将在不远的未来获得绝对胜利。共产主义也不缺自己的节日，比如五一劳动节和十月革命周年纪念。同时，共产主义更不缺对马克思的唯物辩证烂熟于心的“神学家”，而且苏联军队中的每个班都配有“随军牧师”，称作“政委”，他们的工作是控制士兵和军官的政治倾向。共产主义也讲殉道（烈士），圣战（浴血奋战）和异端邪说（不一致的声音），比如托洛茨基主义。苏联共产主义令人狂热，且具有传教性。一名虔诚的共产主义者不仅不能同时信仰基督教或者佛教，而且被鼓励为传播马克思和列宁的思想而抛头颅、洒热血。

Some readers may feel very uncomfortable with this line of reasoning.

If it makes you feel better, you are free to go on calling Communism an ideology rather than a religion. It makes no difference. We can divide creeds into god-centered religions and godless ideologies that claim to be based on natural laws.

But then, to be consistent, we would need to catalogue at least some Buddhist, Daoist and Stoic sects as ideologies rather than religions. Conversely, we should note that belief in gods persists within many modern ideologies, and that some of them, most notably liberalism, make little sense without this belief.

有些读者朋友们可能会对以上列举的原因感到极为不适。不过没关系，这只是作者的个人吐槽，你们仍旧可以把共产主义仅仅看作是一种意识形态，这并不影响那些基于自然法的原则本身。我们可以将它们简单分为两类：以神为核心的宗教和无神论的意识形态。如果持这种观点，为了避免双标，那么我们应当承认，部分佛教信徒、道教信徒、斯多葛派（讲究清心寡欲和苦修）也属于意识形态而不应被归入宗教。反过来说，有一个现象是：在很多现代的意识形态中，对神的信仰发挥了不可忽视的作用，甚至有一些“主义”，尤其是自由主义，没有对神的信仰，整套理论都会坍塌。