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The real question we should be asking is whether religion is hostile to leftism? For example, everybody left-of-center seems to like Pope Francis. He's everybody's idealized grandpa. Except that he almost certainly fingered a bunch of actual leftists during the Dirty War. LOL though. Because science can't answer the question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin it doesn't really matter. It's all relative when questioned. That's why religion is evil. You call out people who are actively participating in genocide and you are told to mind their feelings. After all, that's their religious belief and if I were to say that they were evil wouldn't that make me as bad as them? The actual answer is: No, it doesn't. Edit: God's law is immutable, except when it applies to me, then you need to start considering externalities. But this is a good system and one we have to respect because ???
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Shbobdb posted:The real question we should be asking is whether religion is hostile to leftism? People like Francis because it was a shift to a nice old conservative guy from literally the evil Star Wars emperor. He also occasionally pushes good things before reminding us all that no, women are not equal in the eyes of the Church.
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Mar 10, 2017 10:43
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RasperFat posted:People like Francis because it was a shift to a nice old conservative guy from literally the evil Star Wars emperor. At least it's true that neither Palpatine nor Ratzinger are particularly photogenic.
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Mar 10, 2017 11:47
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Bolocko posted:LOL Well not only were they strikingly alike in appearance, but also actions. Like Palpatine, he had his underlings use light sabers on children and protected them from legal consequences.
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Mar 10, 2017 12:51
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At first it did seem like Francis might change the church's tune - he came across as (relatively) supportive of women and gays untill pretty much backtracking and saying that no the church is not budging on this after all. And yea that on a personal level he comes off a nice old guy helps. Avalerion fucked around with this message at 13:16 on Mar 10, 2017 |
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Mar 10, 2017 13:13
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RasperFat posted:I agree, but they problem is almost everyone mostly in agreement. Don't be assholes to religious people irl, things like liberation theology have a long intertwined history on the left, and that maybe religious claims are all inherently silly on some level. Sure but then to get back to the thread topic, what is hostility to religion? If it merely means you should be respectful then I agree but if it means not questioning or being openly opposed to any religious claims then clearly not. Firstly, questioning beliefs is not hostility. In general the more true things and the fewer false things we know the more likely your actions will have the outcomes you want so an understanding of the physical world as close to reality as possible is both desirable and good. As such it is in my own self-interest to know if my beliefs are false and yours are true but if I can't examine your beliefs I can't make that determination. Secondly, hostility to claims you deem harmful is good. I find the concept of Hell an offensive and harmful view of human beings and punishment that I don't want to influence society. I'm hostile to that claim but whether or not it also makes me hostile to one or more religions is incidental.
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Mar 10, 2017 13:54
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I think what bugs me about the continued attack on religion by a lot of self-professed atheists, particularly those of scientific backgrounds, is that they engage in a great deal of whig history. There seems to be a pervasive belief that religion is and always has been anti-scientific, when through much of human history the sciences and human knowledge in general have been pursued and protected by religious scholars. Other things like heliocentrism or the idea of a round planet or the theory of evolution were actually quite uncontroversial when they came about. The publication of Darwin's On the Origin of the Species, particularly, was pretty much a non-event in the religious circles and what little religious opposition there was to it was from what was essentially the christian left of the day due to evolutionary theory's appropriation by imperialists who used it to justify scientific racism and colonialism. It wasn't really until the Scopes trial that it became such a hot-button issue. The earth has been widely considered to be round since ancient Greece and the flat earthers only emerged in the 19th century as part of a counter-enlightenment tendency that also gave birth to the romanticist movement. Another thing I find funny is the idea that (of course) religion should not have primacy over our lives, but that somehow science should. As if we haven't been living under what is essentially a technocracy since the end of the second world war. If you want scientific management don't worry, it's already here and it's expanding, it's the future Silicon Valley's offering. It's automation, it's abandoning this planet once we use it up and loving off into space. It's the transhumanist libertarian hellscape Peter Thiel wants. Capitalists and science-fetishists both want to destroy religion, because religion offers a competing idea of our worth as human beings, of our place in the universe and our duty towards the earth we live on. There are almost certainly other, better ideas to be had, but none of them are as powerful or present right now as capitalism or religion. Think about it. Climate change denialists are in the white house, accelerating capitalism's war against the viability of life itself, while the Holy Father, nominal head of one of the world's largest and most secularly powerful religions is telling his followers that they must do more to protect the environment. https://twitter.com/Pontifex/status/611518771186929664 TomViolence fucked around with this message at 15:04 on Mar 10, 2017 |
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Mar 10, 2017 14:56
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For a look at a particularly boring part of the globe, I don't think the mainstream protestant churches in Northern Europe deserve to be labelled "standing in conflict with science" - their position w.r.t. scientific knowledge is about the same as that of "general leftism", e.g. they're not so hot about those aspects which can run counter, or at least orthogonal, to some egalitarian arguments made habitually, and there's maybe sometimes a greater willingness to encompass some wishy-washy new agey crap, maybe there's somewhat less willingness to be a hardcore utilitarian on bioethical issues than some STEM people would be, but by and large, but there's no intentional effort to systematically undermine science, there's a general willingness to synthesize their claims in a sensible way, there's no actual conflict worth the name going on. Ok, maybe I'm saying all of this cause I'm a lefty and the protestant church is lefty and I'm a scientist and culturally a protestant. Maybe I'm just saying these things cause protestantism and I just so happens to share our biases. But yeah, I think this is defensible. So what does that mean? I think the most optimistic interpretation is to say, something can be genuinely a religion and yet readily exist in a modern society that is sufficiently secular. This also goes along rather well with this idea of a religion that's just an expression of societal stances, rather than having an influence on it: northern europeans just so happen to be secular rational cultures, so their churches are also cool. Then you look at the US, which traditionally has a somewhat more right-wing bias, and there's churches that are great enemies of science and of reason everyone hopes die off eventually. (On the other hand, of course, the causality might run the other direction.) I'm absolutely willing to believe that in practice, Gould was right: religion can largely retreat to its own "magisterium". It would be wrong to say it does that in its essence; a lot of religions are in active conflict with science, and I have very little sympathy with or tolerance for that. I don't want to say something like "islam needs a reformation" or whatever, but I will say that all those religions or religions communities which do - actively - oppose science, must change in major ways, if we are to get anywhere any time soon. And I think this by necessity falls out of any kind of progressive values. Most of us here will agree that for various reasons, there should not be a state suppression of religion per se, and even state suppression of science-hostile religious groups is an extremely dangerous issue - suppressing religious expressions has such a terrible history that we should be more tolerant on religiously motivated idiocies than on idiocies motivated in some other way. But you can easily find areas where the only acceptable option is to come down on the side of restricting freedom of expression of religion. E.g., creationism in the class room. And "soft" politicis (e.g. not legislation) - speeches and symbols - should somehow counter, should be conducted under a spirit of countering, certain anti-scientific religious communities. Ok, and here's what's perhaps my most controversial conviction here: currently, the best societies in the world are the most secular. This means something. It matters. It's not a super convincing argument by itself - after all, historically, atheist-in-name regimes don't have such a good track record. But you can't ignore the fact that the best societies in the world are the most secular, and this correlation holds rather well globally, at this time.. Cingulate fucked around with this message at 15:30 on Mar 10, 2017 |
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Mar 10, 2017 15:28
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Cingulate posted:Ok, and here's what's perhaps my most controversial conviction here: currently, the best societies in the world are the most secular. This means something. It matters. It's not a super convincing argument by itself - after all, historically, atheist-in-name regimes don't have such a good track record. Explain what you mean by "best" societies. When I look at the secular liberal west I don't see a gleaming city on a hill, I see one whose ostensible greatness is built on a foundation of corpses. The west boasts the "best" societies because it's made much of the rest of the world a great deal harder to live in, to suggest that we have better lives because we're relatively secular puts the blame for this squarely on the victims of our own imperialism, painting them as regressive bumpkins doomed from clinging to their retrograde beliefs. See, this is why I say religion is a nexus of resistance to capital's overreach, often it's the only thing left to those it butchers, exploits and discards.
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Mar 10, 2017 15:43
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TomViolence posted:Explain what you mean by "best" societies. When I look at the secular liberal west I don't see a gleaming city on a hill, I see one whose ostensible greatness is built on a foundation of corpses. The west boasts the "best" societies because it's made much of the rest of the world a great deal harder to live in, to suggest that we have better lives because we're relatively secular puts the blame for this squarely on the victims of our own imperialism, painting them as regressive bumpkins doomed from clinging to their retrograde beliefs. See, this is why I say religion is a nexus of resistance to capital's overreach, often it's the only thing left to those it butchers, exploits and discards. All civilization is built on a pile of corpses. Such is the nature of human history. The only moral thing we can do about it now is to try and produce less of them.
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Mar 10, 2017 16:12
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This is bullshit, we don't live under 'scientific management', we live in a capitalist society, dominated by capitalist ideology. Talking about opposition between religion and capitalism is also bullshit my friend. Right now, the strongest climate-change deniers are the religious right in the US. Guess who even keep promoting libertarian vampires like Thiel? The religious right. This even extends to other religions, Islam right now is under the thumb of autocrats who use political islamism to cement their power base. The worst of the worst, the KSA, has some of the strictest and most fundamentalist religious leaders anywhere in the world. Rather than formulating an opposition, religion has historically, and continues to be, complicit in further entrenching the power of capitalism, and the hierarchy of society. The one counter example of that is the Pope, and I don't know if you realize this, but it was actually very unlikely that Francis would have gotten into the top job, under normal conditions. The reason he did, was because he was the only 'outsider', and the catholic church at the time needed a distraction from child abuse scandals. They needed to put someone in who definitely couldn't have been involved. Outside of that context, there is no way he would have been chosen, and no way any of the other choices would have done half of the things he's done. And guess what? He has internal opposition, that has found new allies in the Trump whitehouse. Do you think that's a coincidence? Here's what Steve Bannon said to members of the Catholic Church, who invited him to speak: quote:"We're at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict, of which, if the people in this room, the people in the church, do not bind together and really form what I feel is an aspect of the church militant, to really be able to not just stand with our beliefs, but to fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that's starting." rudatron fucked around with this message at 16:22 on Mar 10, 2017 |
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Mar 10, 2017 16:13
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RasperFat posted:Well not only were they strikingly alike in appearance, but also actions. Like Palpatine, he had his underlings use light sabers on children and protected them from legal consequences. Eh, Benedict was very conservative, but he was actually better on not coddling child rapists than either JPII or Francis. People just give those two a pass because they seem friendlier.
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Mar 10, 2017 16:14
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TomViolence posted:Explain what you mean by "best" societies. When I look at the secular liberal west I don't see a gleaming city on a hill, I see one whose ostensible greatness is built on a foundation of corpses. The west boasts the "best" societies because it's made much of the rest of the world a great deal harder to live in, to suggest that we have better lives because we're relatively secular puts the blame for this squarely on the victims of our own imperialism, painting them as regressive bumpkins doomed from clinging to their retrograde beliefs. See, this is why I say religion is a nexus of resistance to capital's overreach, often it's the only thing left to those it butchers, exploits and discards. Maybe this sounds incredibly bourgeois to you. So maybe none of them have achieved Full Communism, and maybe these nations still consume resources at an unsustainable rate. Ok. But unless you're an accelerationist, I think it's hard to avoid the fact that on most measures of quality you can think of, there's a rough negative correlation across nations between how religious it is, and how it ranks on that measure - both within the 1st and the 3rd world, and across. I understand you probably don't have much interest in doing a ranking of nations, and you're probably not gonna aim to put a few 1st world capitalist nations on top of anything, particularly not other nations. But if you think of any kind of measure, and you rank countries on it, don't you think this is what it eventually comes down to for almost all progressive measures?
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Mar 10, 2017 16:27
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Religion can be used equally well to advocate resistance or oppression. Religion can *do* good things but that doesn't mean it *is* a good thing.
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Mar 10, 2017 16:28
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rudatron posted:Here's what Steve Bannon said to members of the Catholic Church, who invited him to speak: And organized religions are very different. Even the catholic church is not well aligned with Trumpism. European Protestantism, much less so. Wahhabism is bad, but the Ahmadiyya are very different. Bates posted:Religion can be used equally well to advocate resistance or oppression. Religion can *do* good things but that doesn't mean it *is* a good thing. That's not actually respecting religious people as autonomous agents.
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Mar 10, 2017 16:32
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rudatron posted:Rather than formulating an opposition, religion has historically, and continues to be, complicit in further entrenching the power of capitalism, and the hierarchy of society. Yeah, like all those black churches in the civil rights movement, the diggers, the levelers, Gandhi, Jean Bertrand-Aristide, Leo Tolstoy, Martin Luther King and Malcom X all prove, religion is the preserve of the willing handmaidens of capital and empire and can never serve a radical, democratic or socialist agenda. rudatron posted:You still loving sure organized religions going to be any kind of opposition to that worldview right there, of ignorant I never once referred to organised religion, save for mentioning the pope, who as you say breaks from the established values of the catholic church. Should leftists be hostile to the religious right? Yes. Should leftists be hostile to organised religions that pursue reactionary political agendas? Yes. Should the left be hostile to religion in general? gently caress no. Y'all make the mistake of generalising religion as this big monolithic thing, where your only points of reference as whitebread Americans are things like evangelical megachurch protestantism or scary Wahhabist Islam from those Bad Countries over there. There's more to religion than that and that y'all group them all up into this one loving monolith to serve your prejudiced worldview is incredibly ignorant and frustrating to deal with.
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Mar 10, 2017 16:35
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Ehh
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Mar 10, 2017 16:36
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TomViolence posted:Yeah, like all those black churches in the civil rights movement, the diggers, the levelers, Gandhi, Jean Bertrand-Aristide, Leo Tolstoy, Martin Luther King and Malcom X all prove, religion is the preserve of the willing handmaidens of capital and empire and can never serve a radical, democratic or socialist agenda. I'd also guess on average, religions come down somewhere on the reactionary side though. TomViolence posted:Should leftists be hostile to the religious right? Yes. Should leftists be hostile to organised religions that pursue reactionary political agendas? Yes. Should the left be hostile to religion in general? gently caress no.
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Mar 10, 2017 16:42
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Like my criticism of Dawkins, Hitchens + Co is essentially the exact same criticism I'll level at you: you're not taking ideology into account, and because you don't, you end up with everything going backwards. Eg - "Only religion can motivate mass action!" Not true, the french and russian revolutions were very anti-clerical, and I wouldn't exactly say they 'lacked motivation'. It's a weird early-enlightenment ideal to adopt, when it was the exact inverse implication of that statement (the issues of zealotry) that was their main criticism against religion. It also doesn't stack up against reality. In reality, ideology motivates action, and any ideology will do. Another example: "the science-fetishists are pro-capitalism!" They'll be about as pro-capitalist as the religious, because they're not aware of the space of ideology and the position they occupy with in it. They simply believe that their beliefs are 'natural', 'normal', 'non-ideological'. It's this lack of self-awareness, of the assumptions people implicitly make, when people talk about human behavior/nature/society/whatever, that's part of the problem.
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Mar 10, 2017 16:53
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TomViolence posted:Explain what you mean by "best" societies. When I look at the secular liberal west I don't see a gleaming city on a hill, I see one whose ostensible greatness is built on a foundation of corpses. The west boasts the "best" societies because it's made much of the rest of the world a great deal harder to live in, to suggest that we have better lives because we're relatively secular puts the blame for this squarely on the victims of our own imperialism, painting them as regressive bumpkins doomed from clinging to their retrograde beliefs. See, this is why I say religion is a nexus of resistance to capital's overreach, often it's the only thing left to those it butchers, exploits and discards. God: You may live in one of two places, little consciousness. The first is a technologically advanced Western democracy with robust social safety nets, but it comes at the cost of existential guilt over your country's exploitation of the world's poor. The second is a postcolonial nation rife with corruption and riddled with crumbling infrastructure, but you will be possessed with a righteous indignation over your nation's treatment by the bourge-- Spirit: SWEDEN
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Mar 10, 2017 17:02
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It's also weird to bring up black churches as proof of success, when you're dealing with a racial struggle that has also racially segregated religious structures. Had those churches not existed, would that struggle not have existed? I doubt it. But turn it around - what about the role of religious institutions in white oppression? Can you honestly say that, on balance, the existence of quote unquote religion actually helped the situation? I doubt it. I mean, you really want to draw a line between good religions and bad religions, and then just say 'look we'll only have the good ones and not the bad ones'. It doesn't work like that. The 'good' ones are only good by happenstance, and the 'bad' ones have a tendency of overstaying their welcome. That's what it means to say 'religion is bad', not that every instance of religion or the religious is negative, but that the overall tendency is negative. And you don't have to look far to see what I mean.
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Mar 10, 2017 17:11
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rudatron posted:Like my criticism of Dawkins, Hitchens + Co is essentially the exact same criticism I'll level at you: you're not taking ideology into account, and because you don't, you end up with everything going backwards. Anti-clericalism need not be anti-religious, by abolishing priests and the primacy of institutional religion we don't abolish god. My argument for religion as a vehicle for mass political action does not require there to be a church hierarchy, in fact it couldn't happen without the destruction of the existing church hierarchy. My main point is that we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater, religion has a powerful grip on many people's lives and that's not in itself an evil thing we need to extirpate to make a better society. rudatron posted:In reality, ideology motivates action, and any ideology will do. Right, but the current move towards a deterritorialised, dehumanised future that capitalist society is undergoing is driven by technological innovation and those who fetishise it as a panacea for all problems. If they do see themselves as having an ideology, that ideology is "I loving love science", however much or however little actual science is involved. rudatron posted:It's also weird to bring up black churches as proof of success, when you're dealing with a racial struggle that has also racially segregated religious structures. Had those churches not existed, would that struggle not have existed? I doubt it. But turn it around - what about the role of religious institutions in white oppression? Can you honestly say that, on balance, the existence of quote unquote religion actually helped the situation? I doubt it. A fair point, I guess, but that those churches did exist as organising spaces for a mass political movement must have been somewhat helpful, you've got a captive audience on the pews every sunday for your political program. You don't have to post up flyers or phone anyone, you know exactly where they'll be. To go a bit further back, it's worth pointing out that much of the popular opposition to slavery, the root of generations of American white supremacy, in the first place was from religiously-motivated abolitionists. TomViolence fucked around with this message at 17:23 on Mar 10, 2017 |
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Mar 10, 2017 17:12
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Well, more strictly speaking, the path towards an atomized existence is laid out by the drive for profit, technological innovation is just a by-product. You don't actually even need technological innovation for the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, so long as you can keep increasing your capitalization, but obviously it does help. But, in a practical sense, exactly what you fear has to occur before emancipation. Only after people are 'deterritorialized', free of illusions, can they then create a state that no longer requires illusions. Take what you said: "religion has a powerful grip on people's lives" - that is exactly the problem. That 'grip' you're referring to is the source of all problems mentioned, because that 'grip' represents power, over someone, wielded by someone else. True emancipation means being free of all such 'grips', all illusions.
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Mar 10, 2017 17:27
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Cingulate posted:Ok, and here's what's perhaps my most controversial conviction here: currently, the best societies in the world are the most secular. This means something. It matters. It's not a super convincing argument by itself - after all, historically, atheist-in-name regimes don't have such a good track record. I wouldn't necessarily say that. Much of the Islamist chaos in the Middle East is in part a response to decades of oppression from local secular regimes as well as a long history of political interference from secular Western governments, and many of the worst-off countries are countries that were secular at one point. Aggressively secular regimes, which promoted nationalism and suppressed religion, not only failed to improve societies but caused deep social resentments against secularism as a result. What distinguishes the most prosperous (let's not even say "best", it's way too subjective) societies today isn't secularism but tolerance. Their laws aren't secular out of opposition to religion or commitment to atheism, they're secular as a neutral ground that treats all beliefs or lack thereof equally.
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Mar 10, 2017 17:52
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the trump tutelage posted:God: You may live in one of two places, little consciousness. The first is a technologically advanced Western democracy with robust social safety nets, but it comes at the cost of existential guilt over your country's exploitation of the world's poor. The second is a postcolonial nation rife with corruption and riddled with crumbling infrastructure, but you will be possessed with a righteous indignation over your nation's treatment by the bourge-- Intriguing how your conception of the divine is that any god would necessarily believe in white guilt. Your gods are made in your own image, and yet you believe that people are subject to religion.
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Mar 10, 2017 18:04
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Main Paineframe posted:I wouldn't necessarily say that. Much of the Islamist chaos in the Middle East is in part a response to decades of oppression from local secular regimes as well as a long history of political interference from secular Western governments, and many of the worst-off countries are countries that were secular at one point. Aggressively secular regimes, which promoted nationalism and suppressed religion, not only failed to improve societies but caused deep social resentments against secularism as a result. What distinguishes the most prosperous (let's not even say "best", it's way too subjective) societies today isn't secularism but tolerance. Their laws aren't secular out of opposition to religion or commitment to atheism, they're secular as a neutral ground that treats all beliefs or lack thereof equally. The distinguishing feature seems to be Freedom of Religion. Secularism has a lot more to do with protecting religious communities from each other than suppressing them but without Freedom of Religion you can suppress them if you want to.
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Mar 10, 2017 18:24
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Please let's all keep the productive discussion going in spite of Brainiac's return.Main Paineframe posted:What distinguishes the most prosperous (let's not even say "best", it's way too subjective) societies today isn't secularism but tolerance. Their laws aren't secular out of opposition to religion or commitment to atheism, they're secular as a neutral ground that treats all beliefs or lack thereof equally. I think secularism is a necessary step for maximizing tolerance. It would be much harder for a religious nation to be as tolerant as the West's best. Main Paineframe posted:I wouldn't necessarily say that. Much of the Islamist chaos in the Middle East is in part a response to decades of oppression from local secular regimes as well as a long history of political interference from secular Western governments, and many of the worst-off countries are countries that were secular at one point. Aggressively secular regimes, which promoted nationalism and suppressed religion, not only failed to improve societies but caused deep social resentments against secularism as a result. Sure, in the past opposition to colonialism has been conducted under an islamist banner, but that doesn't say much about secularism in itself I think.
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Mar 10, 2017 18:39
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What is the good of religion?
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Mar 10, 2017 19:14
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Easy access to community and a simple ethical program. I don't think secular society really has anything comparable at the moment.
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Mar 10, 2017 19:24
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On a personal level we can't deny that it makes a lot of people happy either.
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Mar 10, 2017 19:26
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rudatron posted:It's also weird to bring up black churches as proof of success, when you're dealing with a racial struggle that has also racially segregated religious structures. Had those churches not existed, would that struggle not have existed? I doubt it. But turn it around - what about the role of religious institutions in white oppression? Can you honestly say that, on balance, the existence of quote unquote religion actually helped the situation? I doubt it. People intimating that black churches are proof of success is incredibly strange. They were born out of oppression supported by white churches, and the reason they were Christian at all in the first place was their master's were all Christian. The Bible was one of the strongest defenses for American slavery. Both indentured servitude and chattel slavery are considered a-ok by God, and the plantation owners in the South can use those passages very easily to prove they aren't immoral monsters. It's impossible to accurately partition every one of the millions of variations of religions into neat good and bad categories. However, the overall trend seems to link increasing religiosity with being a shittier person/society. Just take a look at this Pew breakdown of votes by religious affiliation where it seems like religious people vote in asshats. Trump and Bush rode in on a train of highly religious people. They got 79/81 percent of the evangelical vote. Trump got 58% of the general Protestant vote, and 61% of the Mormon vote. He only got 26% of the non-religious vote, and only 24% of the Jewish vote which is a far more secular practice than the overwhelming majority of Christian denominations in the USA. Obviously these numbers aren't a bash on every religious person (except maybe White Evangelicals, yikes), but it does intimate that being less secular leads to shittier outcomes.
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Mar 10, 2017 20:31
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Cingulate posted:Please let's all keep the productive discussion going in spite of Brainiac's return. No, let's leave "best" out of it. It just invites shittons of largely-irrelevant nitpicking, since I'm absolutely positive that you haven't done enough legwork to say with any degree of real confidence that there isn't a single religious country with "good" social policies and there isn't a single secular country with "bad" social policies. This thread's having enough trouble staying on track without inviting Effectronica to give his thoughts on cultural relativism. The reason a non-secular state has problems with tolerance isn't because it's religious, it's because it's written policies specifically favoring one group into their laws. Secular states don't necessarily shun religion, they just stay religiously neutral and avoid picking or playing favorites. No, what it shows is that it doesn't work to enforce atheism upon a nation, whether the majority of its people approve or not. There's a huge gap between the US's separation of church and state, which prohibits the state from infringing on people's right to religious choice and exercise, and the Soviet Union's anti-religious persecution, which sought to stamp out religion altogether.
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Mar 10, 2017 21:07
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Squalid posted:It's something many religious people will say repeatedly, it's no secret Christianity is founded on the Bible. Of course there are many religious traditions with no texts, their practitioners typically appeal to tradition as a justification. Just catching up on the thread but whoah whoah whoah, hold your horses there. Your fundamental supposition is incorrect. Christianity was most certainly not founded on the Bible, but rather the Bible was something that grew out of Christianity after a couple of centuries. This is important.
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Mar 10, 2017 21:27
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Mr. Wiggles posted:Just catching up on the thread but whoah whoah whoah, hold your horses there. Your fundamental supposition is incorrect. Christianity was most certainly not founded on the Bible, but rather the Bible was something that grew out of Christianity after a couple of centuries. This is important. Yeah, this is actually a hugely important distinction.
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Mar 10, 2017 21:45
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the trump tutelage posted:Easy access to community and a simple ethical program. I don't think secular society really has anything comparable at the moment. This is where we run into issues because the "ethical programming" is generally a pretty vile package. I'm sure you can find a small church somewhere with acceptable views but so what?  If would seem that the ethics being taught by churches is evil more often than it is not. The community aspect is also coercive as gently caress.
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Mar 10, 2017 21:47
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Coercion is good, though.
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Mar 10, 2017 22:22
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RasperFat posted:People intimating that black churches are proof of success is incredibly strange. They were born out of oppression supported by white churches, and the reason they were Christian at all in the first place was their master's were all Christian. Shbobdb posted:This is where we run into issues because the "ethical programming" is generally a pretty vile package. I'm sure you can find a small church somewhere with acceptable views but so what? Are you both seriously saying that all religion is downright evil because white Christians are more likely to vote for Republican presidential candidates? Putting aside the mountain of things you're taking for granted in that conclusion, what about the fact that the data doesn't support it? I notice that "Hispanic Catholics" are just as likely to vote for the Democratic candidate as the non-religious voter, and the overall Catholic lean toward the Republican is largely the result of the fact that "White Catholics" heavily skew Republican. The other religions aren't broken out by race, but the fact that they specifically called out white evangelicals for the heaviest Republican leanings rather than all evangelicals suggests that the trend holds true for more than just Catholics.
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Mar 10, 2017 22:26
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Shbobdb posted:If would seem that the ethics being taught by churches is evil more often than it is not. I'd like to look at this "religious -> evil politics" thing on a more global scale. How does going to church correlate with voting for Trumpist parties in Europe? How does support of Putin (or worse) correlate with being really Orthodox? I guess it holds in the middle east, although I've heard the most religious people are too interested in theology, preaching and praying, and taking their religions' prescriptions against violence serious to be engaged in violence, war and terrorism. How does it hold in China? How in South America? In Africa? Main Paineframe posted:No, let's leave "best" out of it. It just invites shittons of largely-irrelevant nitpicking, since I'm absolutely positive that you haven't done enough legwork to say with any degree of real confidence that there isn't a single religious country with "good" social policies and there isn't a single secular country with "bad" social policies. This thread's having enough trouble staying on track without inviting Effectronica to give his thoughts on cultural relativism. So maybe you don't like "best", then I'm going for: more peaceful, free, prosperous, scientifically productive, better able to guarantee civil rights, more inclined and capable of avoiding offloading its externalities upon the rest of the world, a better place both to live in, to have as a neighbor, and to share the globe with; all of these are currently positively correlated with secularism, and I think there is a causal factor here too. Main Paineframe posted:The reason a non-secular state has problems with tolerance isn't because it's religious, it's because it's written policies specifically favoring one group into their laws. Secular states don't necessarily shun religion, they just stay religiously neutral and avoid picking or playing favorites. So you'd first have to found a new religion that's not like that, or grow a minor super tolerant one. Main Paineframe posted:No, what it shows is that it doesn't work to enforce atheism upon a nation
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Mar 10, 2017 22:57
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Main Paineframe posted:Are you both seriously saying that all religion is downright evil because white Christians are more likely to vote for Republican presidential candidates? Putting aside the mountain of things you're taking for granted in that conclusion, what about the fact that the data doesn't support it? I notice that "Hispanic Catholics" are just as likely to vote for the Democratic candidate as the non-religious voter, and the overall Catholic lean toward the Republican is largely the result of the fact that "White Catholics" heavily skew Republican. The other religions aren't broken out by race, but the fact that they specifically called out white evangelicals for the heaviest Republican leanings rather than all evangelicals suggests that the trend holds true for more than just Catholics. I never said that religious people were evil. I said increased religiosity tends to correlate with shittier decisions, like voting in Republicans. I agree racism is a huge factor in voting R, and Hispanic voters voting against the party that is literally tearing children from their parent's arms isn't surprising. Hispanic Catholics vote D largely for this reason. If you want to break down more specifics, here's a breakdown of Hispanic Americans by Pew It sure is a wild coincidence that religiously unaffiliated Hispanics have a higher portion of registered Democrats, favor the right to choose, think men don't get the final say in the household, favor same sex marriage more, etc. If you want to look for positive data that secularism has better social consequences, it's pretty amazing that atheists make up .1% of this prison population while representing 3.1% of the total population. I'm not arguing atheism automatically makes people more moral. People that identify as atheist are far more likely to be educated and not poor, making them far less likely to commit crimes in the first place. But still that's pretty striking.
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Mar 10, 2017 23:11
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Putin and Front National have huge support from the Orthodox and Catholic communities, respectively. Putin's gay bashing is to give the Orthodox part of his base "red meat". It's not localized to Christianity either. Theravadan Buddhists in Thailand support a lot of really regressive policies. And then there is the issue of the Yasukuni Shrine in Japan . . . Plus religion seems to give a conservative shift to everything. If you compare non-religious whites/blacks/hispanics to their religious counterpart every time you end up a lot more liberal on the "non-religious" side. The values taught by religion are straight up evil.
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Mar 10, 2017 23:37
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