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Sharkie posted:"People are assholes" isn't very explanative. Why is it worse now than during 9/11? What have we been doing as a culture that led to this, and what can we do to combat it? People don't really handle well the idea that literally anyone around them, at any time, could possibly pull out a gun or a bomb and kill them, and neither they nor the authorities can do a drat thing about it. When combined with genuine fear, it's actually quite difficult to handle; either you spiral into deep paranoia, or you rationalize it somehow. And one of the most comforting ways to rationalize it is to imagine that only people with some kind of common factor that's easily distinguishable with minimal observation would do that, and that everyone who doesn't have that factor is safe. Once you make that assumption, you feel like it's possible to take control of your chances and avoid such attacks by avoiding people with that factor or focusing government surveillance and official discrimination against them. Who feels more comfortable with their world - the person who suspects everyone on the street as a potential mugger, or the person who crosses the street whenever they see a black person coming and lets out a sigh of relief whenever they see a cop arresting a black person but feels completely comfortable and safe around whites? The latter is a racist, but they feel more in control, because by racially profiling an entire race of people as probable criminals, they feel like they are more able to keep themselves safe by avoiding criminals. 9/11 was a one-time thing, and it it happened in a situation that was relatively easy to control - the inside of a plane. Beefing up airport security made up a considerable part of our coping mechanism for that. Attacks in theaters and malls cant be handled so easily, and terrorists conquering territory and forming their own state is something most people don't know how to contextualize, and Iraq being in such trouble so soon after our decade of freedom-spreading ended opens up a lot of finely-aged colonialist reasonings for racism as well. Also, it happened at a different phase of the election cycle - Bush was less than a year into his term, and by the time the 04 elections started we were already balls-deep in both Iraq and Afghanistan (and even then the R primary wasn't a massive clownshow like now). Also, I think you might be forgetting just how deep the effects of 9/11 were, after 14 years in the post-9/11 world. There was a lot of bigotry and racial profiling, major expansions of the surveillance state under the excuse that "we'll only spy on Muslims", non-judicial punishments like the no-fly list and drone bombings, and more.
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Nov 22, 2015 14:38
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Noun Verber posted:What country are you from? Anyone who's in Somethingawful's typical age range and from the USA grew up in an age where every trip to school could end with a mass shooting. The vast majority of gen Y/millennials don't give a poo poo about the threat of a shooting any more than they care about the threat of rain. School shooters are easy to rationalize away. They're not random strangers (except at colleges) so you know who doesn't fit in - the weirdoes, social misfits, and mentally ill, who the mind can section off as people to be avoided. And, naturally, racial profiling still works as a way to classify some kids as more potentially dangerous than others, as evidenced by the case of the homemade clock. Also, schools are fairly regimented systems where the number of people in one place at one time is carefully controlled, privacy rights are heavily restricted, safety drills exist and are regularly practiced, and authority figures are everywhere. Hell, some schools send people through metal detectors now. In a mall or a subway station, on the other hand, you're surrounded by hundreds of total strangers, with people constantly entering and leaving from every direction, no one knows what to do if there's a disaster, security is minimal, and so on. Even then, racial profiling reigns supreme as a coping mechanism. Just look at the recent terror wave in Israel, where at one point during a shooting attack, an angry crowd lynched an innocent person believing he was a terrorist (for no apparent reason other than that he was black).
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Nov 22, 2015 16:49
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sean price posted:i think comparing every single loving thing to past conflicts that happened before the advent of cars when a whole loving lot has changed in terms of war technology ALONE is p dumb, yea, is that nuanced or spergygoony or whatever you need it to be enough for you? I'm pretty sure that by now humanity has explored pretty much every possible way to be an rear end in a top hat, to at least some degree. We might be oppressing Arabs with drone bombings now instead of Maxim guns or tanks, but the fundamental racism and oppression hasn't changed significantly. History isn't some magic future-prediction device, but it's true enough that few situations are genuinely new, even if people react and behave in different ways to those same-old situations. Manic X posted:As sad as it is to say, I honestly don't think social mixing is a good idea; especially when certain cultures have agressive beliefs and tendencies. "Those other cultures have aggressive tendencies, which is why we need to conquer, ostracise, expel, or crush them with military force because they cannot possibly understand our superior and peaceful culture" - basically every prominent white person ever throughout all of history  An Enormous Boner posted:Are those things "God said so"-based? They can be anything-based. That's the whole point of private arbitration. If two people willingly agree to resolve their disputes outside of court using a mutually-agreed-upon set of rules, the court is happy to support that for various (mostly pragmatic) reasons, regardless of what that set of rules is. There are some issues with implementation, particularly its tendency to lean in favor of large organizations and the possibility that people may be pressured into arbitration agreements, but none of them are inherent to a specific set of rules.
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Nov 27, 2015 04:55
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Talmonis posted:This sort of thing makes right-wing propaganda about sneering liberal academics effective. Most people who are afraid of Muslims are earnestly afraid, not just stupid bigots. Though we certainly have a shitload of those too. You can thank 30-40 years of negative news coverage on Islamic terrorism (the vast majority of which against other Muslims) and 14 years of acute screaming from the Republican party and propaganda wing. "Earnestly afraid" and "stupid bigots" are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they typically go hand-in-hand. They're earnestly afraid because they're stupid bigots who just blame the terrorism on skin color or religious beliefs, just like KKK members are "earnestly afraid" of black people. For example, most of those white people who shoot unarmed minority teenagers are honestly afraid and feel that they're acting in self-defense, but the reason they're afraid in the first place is because they're racist. PT6A posted:Of course other religions are equally bad. Sometimes worse! That doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't criticise those attitudes no matter where they come from. In that case, why mention religion at all? If you're just saying that anti-gay is bad and should be criticized, regardless of what religion the person is, then why even mention the religion at all? There's no reason to do so unless you're interested in singling out a specific religion. And why do that? By saying "Islamic homophobes are bad, as well as other homophobes" you are already treating Muslims differently.
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Dec 14, 2015 17:13
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PT6A posted:Because religion often informs people's attitudes toward homosexuality. I mentioned Muslim homophobes specifically because we are discussing the Muslim faith and Islamophobia here. If we were discussing Christianity or Haredi Judaism instead, I would be mentioning homophobes and sexists from those religions as well. Religion, typically, is not an aspect of philosophy, it's an aspect of culture. And criticizing someone's culture is often just a dogwhistle for criticizing their race. Also, the last few hundred years of Western history have involved a lot of instances deeming other cultures as "inferior" and attempting to oppress, eradicate, or assimilate them. As a result, culture is somewhat of an incredibly touchy subject in the modern world, and people who aren't assholes generally shy away from criticizing entire cultures based on the actions or beliefs of individuals within those cultures. Blaming all of Islam for Saudi Wahabbists being anti-LGBT is like saying that all of Christianity is racist because Dutch Santa has a black slave. PT6A posted:I don't think it's fair to say you don't like black culture just because some elements of it are problematic and harmful to the black community as much as anyone else, but of course it's fair to criticize the problematic elements of that culture (homophobia, often aided and abetted by religious beliefs, being one significant problematic element). That doesn't mean the entirety of black culture needs to be eliminated, just like Islam's problematic elements do not mean that Islam itself is completely bereft of merit. That begs a very significant question. Is homophobia actually an element of Islamic culture, specifically? After all, there are plenty of non-homophobic Muslims. Maybe it's an element of Middle Eastern culture? Or maybe it's an element of Arab culture? Or maybe it's an element of Saudi culture? Or maybe it's got nothing to do with culture at all! Maybe it instead stems from fundamentalist ideologies which have been enforced upon those countries via armed conquest or revolution. To single out Islam out of all those potential sources as the one and only cultural factor, despite the large number of non-homophobic non-Saudi non-fundamentalist Muslims, seems intellectually lazy at best.
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Dec 14, 2015 22:13
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PT6A posted:Not really, but where people's homophobia is informed by their understanding of the scriptures and practices of the religion they follow, you must eventually cross the bridge of "how do we get these people to stop believing in this one specific lovely part of their religion?" This leads to an interesting question, though - is this homophobia in fact informed by Islamic scripture? They may say it is, but they're often lying in order to make their beliefs harder to assail by putting a divine edict behind them. And yes, I realize that I'm being a little unfair here, since you talked about people's understanding of the scripture, rather than the scripture itself. Thing is, that's a useless measure, because people can twist and distort their own understanding to convince themselves it validates whatever they already wanted to believe. Two hundred years ago, for example, it was common "knowledge" in the American South that racism and slavery were divinely ordained. There were all sorts of bits in the Bible that they would point to (with extensive and often-convoluted reinterpretation, of course) as proof that dark skin was a divine mark of inferiority or unforgiveable skin, and therefore oppressing black people was the Christian thing to do. Is that a knock against Christianity? Of course not - it's a knock against the culture of the American South in the 19th century, which essentially made up its own interpretation of Christianity to act as a justification for elements of their own culture. Incidentally, it goes the opposite way too - when groups come up with a Bible verse they don't like, they redefine and reinterpret the text until they come up with some convoluted reading that suits their lifestyle or cultural preferences much more closely. For example, the fairly clear and straightforward criticisms of wealth and riches in the New Testament have been reinterpreted and twisted in a number of different ways by various groups in efforts to make them compatible with pro-rich ideologies. Does that mean that Christianity, as a whole, is pro-rich? It is absurd to criticize an entire religion based on a single group's interpretation of that religion, because people can twist religion to fit just about any set of beliefs they please, and tend to alter the meaning of religious decrees freely in order to fit religious beliefs into their existing belief set. It's an utterly impossible standard. You might as well blame the theory of evolution for the Nazi interpretations of it. Main Paineframe fucked around with this message at 22:49 on Dec 14, 2015 |
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Dec 14, 2015 22:42
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PT6A posted:Wow, then it sure is a good thing that I made explicitly clear that my criticisms of one part of a religion don't involve criticizing that entire religion or criticizing everyone who follows it! What "part" of Islam are you criticizing, then? I'm fairly sure the reason you're having a problem here is because you're using some wildly unconventional definition of the word "part", because as far as I know, a "part" is one part of a whole, directly and vitally connected to that whole to the point where criticism of the part also reflects poorly on the whole that the part is part of. That's why no one is understanding you - because criticizing "part" of Islam because of the Saudis' horrible beliefs makes about as much sense as criticizing "part" of evolution because of the Nazis' horrible beliefs.
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Dec 14, 2015 22:56
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PT6A posted:The theory of evolution does not tell people who believe in it how to behave, so your comparison makes absolutely no sense. Plenty of people's understanding of the theory of evolution was that it does, in fact, tell you how to behave. Maybe your understanding of evolution is different, but you've already said that one person's understanding is enough to condemn the whole thing, even if it was an incorrect understanding.
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Dec 15, 2015 01:45
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PT6A posted:Religion tells you what you should and shouldn't do. A description of how a certain part of nature works does not make any claims as to how you should behave as a result, although of course people are free to use that as a basis while deciding for themselves how to act. Oh, so that's your understanding of those things? Great, good for you! I have a different understanding of those things, though. And since you said that a concept can be criticized based on people's understanding of that concept, even if it's a flawed and incorrect understanding that most people don't share, the theory of evolution is horrible and evil because a bunch of people took it as guidance to do horrible things 80 years ago, even though you and most people totally disagree with their understandings! Wow! As it turns out, it's ncredibly easy to criticize anything on the basis of "someone once understood it to mean something bad, or did something bad because of their understanding of it, regardless of the correctness of that understanding", and nearly impossible to counter said criticism without abandoning that principle or declaring that it doesn't count for anything besides the thing you want to criticize! Main Paineframe fucked around with this message at 14:17 on Dec 15, 2015 |
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Dec 15, 2015 14:14
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PT6A posted:You seem to be missing the point: evolution does not tell anyone to do anything. No theory does. Yes, it's flawed inasmuch as the conclusions some people drew from it were awful. When theories are flawed, we change them and fix them. That flaw does not make evolution bad or wrong, no more than Islam's own flaws make Islam itself bad or wrong. Plenty of theories tell people to do things. Just look at all those people who adjust their diets constantly to fit the nutritional fad of the month. No, the giant floating head of science didn't descend from the clouds and proclaim that Thou Must Not Eat Trans Fats or whatever, but if the theory states that acting in a certain way will most likely lead to an outcome the person considers positive (for example, loving longer by not eating a certain thing), then they will act in that way because their understanding of the theory says that they should. It's not much different from fundamentalists who think that God will curse their society and bring all manner of calamities on them if they tolerate homosexuality. They don't do it "because Islam told me to", they do it because they believe that lots of negative things will happen if they don't - just as eugenicists believed that letting poor people and minorities live was destroying society. Fundamentally, the gap between fundamentalists who want to institute sharia law to rejuvenate society and eugenicists who wanted to sterilize people to rejuvenate society where closer than most people realize. I don't care if Islam is perfect or not, although the very fact that you can call a religion "flawed" because it doesn't match your personal belief set makes me doubt your ability to argue this in good faith. The reason I disagree with you is that you haven't actually proved that the things you are complaining about stem from Islam rather than any of the other groups, belief systems, etc that the people who do those things are involved in! If only the Wahabbist understanding of Islam declares some restriction, then the issue there is with "Wahabbism", not "Islam", and I'm taking issue with you tarring all of Islam for the crimes of the Wahabbists. It's like saying "VW cheated on emissions standards, which is a problem with the entire car industry everywhere".
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Dec 15, 2015 18:46
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shrike82 posted:OK.... I wonder if all those countries have anything else in common besides some of them being Muslim (and some of them not being Muslim). Nope, not even going to look at other possible common factors or sources that could be driving the practice! Just going to blame Islam for FGM, in spite of the fact that non-Muslim countries do it too, many Muslim countries don't do it, and there are other fairly obvious common factors for the practice to originate from!
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Dec 15, 2015 20:35
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Potential BFF posted:Atheists saying mean things on the internet sure is the issue here. The real problem we need to tackle is all these nasty secular organizations that are devoted to destroying reproductive rights, reversing the supreme court's decision on gay marriage, and getting prayer in and evolution out of schools cause these totally exist. They used to, though not in the US. Most communist and fascist states were not only secular and atheist but actively anti-religion, yet they were still typically just as anti-LGBT and anti-abortion as the US, if not more, and of course there were plenty of instances of science being removed from the curriculum and replaced with propaganda. Da Mott Man posted:Their are atheist Jewish people. When you adopt something as an identity, especially a regional area like Israel, it is no longer tied to your religion. So I'm going to call this a straw man. No offense intended. Depends on who you ask. As far as Jewish authorities in Israel are concerned, non-observant Jews are not Jewish at all, regardless of their own sense of identity. It's actually a significant social problem slowly simmering in Israel - there's an large of people who were considered Jewish enough by the immigration authorities to get a free pass into Israel, but discovered once they arrived that basically every other state agency considers them non-Jewish, because the Law of Return has much broader conditions than everything else. Nori_Takeshi posted:Goalposts never shifted, your aim is just off. I haven't heard of anyone going out to suicide bomb solely because "I'm Muslim, therefore I must suicide bomb" either. Nobody is suicide bombing simply because they're a member of a religion or culture. Tei posted:Generally non-religious activist try to cause terror attacks without dying. While religious terrorist may think that dying don't matter much because they will acquire the reward after dying. The reason is because many religious persons believe in a after-life. This is not only false but patently ridiculous. The concept of sacrificing your life for your country, people, organization, or cause has been around for literally thousands of years, long predating Christianity, and was even present in peoples whose religions declared that the afterlife was just a miserable cosmic garbage can. The concept of an afterlife has little to do with it, and it mostly comes down to devotion to the group, social and societal pressures within it (for example, self-sacrifice for the group even at risk of one's life is often an aspect of ideas like "honor" and "courage"), and often a certain level of hopelessness and misery in life.
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Dec 16, 2015 17:10
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Jastiger posted:You're right, but that doesn't mean in contemporary society that its still true. Banning homosexuality was a relic of Orthodox teachings and Lysenko was a cult of personality that was ultimately a failure because of the scientific ramifications of his junk science and pipe dream promises. It was self correcting. Religious ideology is not. Banning homosexuality was done because it was considered to be some combination of (depending on the country): a choice, a mental disease, or associated with pedophilia. In the Soviet Union it had precisely nothing to do with the Russian Orthodox Church. There were worries about its impact on population growth, especially if social tolerance of homosexuality caused it to somehow spread. As for Lysenkoism, it was not a "cult of personality" that was destroyed by its own bad science - it rose because the prime political leader liked it (partially for ideological reasons) and fell because its political patron was dead and no longer able to force everyone to abide by it or else. You're making a critical mistake: you're assuming that religion and faith is the only kind of irrationality in all the world, and therefore anyone who is truly not religious must necessarily be a totally rational being who makes every decision without the slightest hint of irrationality. Moreover, since you're working from that basic assumption, you (and others, like Tei) rationalize anything that would seem to contradict that with a "no true atheist" fallacy - since y'all have started from the core assumption that all atheists are perfectly rational, any irrational behavior from an atheist must simply prove that they somehow weren't actually a real atheist, which leads to absurdities like declaring political ideologies to be religions or claiming that all suicide attacks are ultimately driven by belief in an afterlife no matter what. Zanzibar Ham posted:Wait what? I lived here practically all my life and have never had an Israeli authority not regard me as Jewish. I've always been secular. Probably you were either born there, immigrated as a very young child and converted while you were still too young to get the full lifestyle probing, or are just lucky enough to be halakhically Jewish by blood. A huge number of self-identified Jews worldwide aren't considered "Jewish" by Israeli rabbinical courts for various reasons and would need to convert in order to be recognized as Jewish anywhere in Israel besides the border authorities, and the Israeli rabbinical courts are tremendous assholes about conversion, sometimes going so far as to retroactively revoke someone's Jewishness because their lifestyle (or even their mother's lifestyle) isn't Jewish enough, or blacklisting foreign rabbis and refusing to recognize any conversion or proof of Jewishness offered by those rabbis. Most American Jews, as well as a majority of the former-Soviet Jews who immigrated to Israel, aren't considered to be halakhically Jewish by blood and are therefore forced to convert - even if they're quite happy to be non-religious and secular, certain important functions (particularly marriage) are handled exclusively by religious authorities with no non-religious civil variant.
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Dec 16, 2015 18:15
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Zanzibar Ham posted:Okay, but your original claim implied that all unobservant Jews are considered non-Jewish, which is demonstrably false. The fact that rabbinical courts (the Jewish authority on Jewishness in Israel) have literally revoked people's Jewishness due to non-observance is a pretty good indication that unobservant Jews are considered non-Jewish by Jewish authorities. khwarezm posted:Second, assuming it does, so what? Most people don't know much about their religions, but that doesn't mean they aren't sincere about their belief. That they are uninformed is a nice idea that they are straying away from some platonic ideal, but do we if that really makes a bit of difference in the end? Yes, absolutely? Blaming Islam for that poo poo makes about as much sense as blaming evolution for eugenics, which was a massive human rights violation committed in the name of science and evolution. Jastiger posted:It has nothing to do with Christianity harming me personally, really. I was really neutral to religion most of my life. But we look at things in our species and think "What would make this better". We find examples like learning about our solar system, giving women more power in societies, allowing free expression of ideas and sexual liberation and everywhere in the religious texts are prohibitions on them. Its bad epistemology. It leads to dead ends and regression of the Human Condition. For much of history, religious organizations were a major driver of science and education; it's only in the last couple hundred years that it's taken a backseat as the growth of capitalism and the centralization of power in governments have led to society taking an active interest in the general progression of science. The Catholic Church, for instance, was a major sponsor of astronomical research in Europe, since they were just about the only entity with any reason to actually care. The well-known rulings against heliocentrism had less to do with Bible verses and more to do with the immature state of science and philosophy at the time, flaws in heliocentric theories, failure to provide evidence against key counterpoints, and (in the case of Galileo) gratuitously insulting large numbers of people who had been supporting his research up to and including the loving Pope.
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Dec 16, 2015 21:41
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Potential BFF posted:The eugenicist was basing their ideas on a flawed understanding of the contemporary science. The science did not prescribe eugenics, that was a personal understanding of the best way to implement the ideas of the time. They were wrong of course, and eugenic ideas were rightly thrown out because scientific theories are subject to change with the acquisition of new data. Actually, eugenics ideas were "thrown out" because a certain political group committed such vast crimes that the entire eugenics movement was tarred by association, weakening eugenics' political support in other countries enough that various civil rights movements were able to force their governments to slowly chip away and dismantle their domestic eugenics programs over the course if the next two decades, leading eugenics to finally mostly peter out in the 1970s or so. Science had jack poo poo to do with the fall of eugenics - it was entirely a political shift. Jastiger posted:Right, but now that we've emerged from our reliance on the church (since the church appropriated all of the wealth and social capital since it represented God) it seems like a great time to get rid of all of its bullshit, no? Just because it did a good thing 300 years ago doesn't mean we should respect the underlying faith. Same for Islam. The anti-science reputation of Christianity is vastly exaggerated and mostly false. There have been times where science has been attacked by the Church on theological grounds (particularly during major theological conflicts such as the rise of Protestantism, when one sect might latch onto a theory just to stick it to a sect they disagree with that endorses a rival theory), but that's typically really a political matter rather than a religious one, and secularism certainly didn't prevent science from becoming a tool of political sectarianism. And no, the reason the Church was a leading figure in science wasn't because it stole money or some poo poo like that, it's because the movements of the stars and moon were totally and completely useless to just about everyone in medieval times...except for religious authorities, who found astronomical understanding to be essential for putting dates to holidays. Something like the size and curvature of the Earth was utterly unimportant to most people (at least until a certain C. Columbus hosed up a unit conversion and thought he'd discovered a new trade route) - but extremely critical to Islamic scholars, who needed every piece of data they could get in order to calculate the direction to Mecca as accurately as possible. As for the current crop of anti-science Christians, blaming Christianity for that seems a little off - Catholicism has long acknowledged that religious doctrine should shift to fit scientific discoveries, and even if it hadn't, Protestantism is basically all about telling traditional Catholic doctrine to gently caress off and making whatever changes or updates they want. While anti-science Christians typically cite Christianity as their justification, that can't be all there is to it, because it's almost exclusively an American phenomenon, largely originating from the evangelical movements but spreading to a ridiculous degree well beyond that of most other Christian countries. There's some other cultural factor there that takes American Christianity to uniquely ridiculous levels, such as KJV originalism (the belief that the English text of the 1611 King James Bible was provided to the translators directly by God himself, and therefore is the best Bible translation that will ever exist because God told the translators how to write it), which can't be explained wholly by religious factors. Absurd Alhazred posted:No, it doesn't. It means that they are suspicious of Jews who have converted and judge them by a higher standard. Good luck convincing the Rabbinical court that, being unobservant, you are not a real Jew if you're a natural-born Jewish couple going through divorce in Israel. You will not get very far, and I have known many unobservant couples who have undergone this ridiculous, humiliating ritual. Fair enough, I guess that makes sense.
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Dec 16, 2015 22:50
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Jastiger posted:You're right its mostly an American thing now. Well American and Catholic thing. Why is that? Because America and the Church (and many developing countries) are the most likely populations to adhere to religious teachings. Its absolutely because of the religious intertwining that go on, not because they are simply American. As I said before, moderate faith allows other bone headed faith ideas to take root by providing social "cover" for faith. The less religious a population, the less cover, the less legitimate it is in civic, academic, and social avenues. You're just shifting the question without answering it. If your answer to "why is this stuff practically unique to Americans" is "because they're way more religious", then why are Americans way more religious, way more likely to go for fringe beliefs, and way more likely to buy into crazy cults like Mormonism and Scientology? If the answer is "because they're more religious", then why are they so much more religious and so much more willing to really get crazy with their religious beliefs? There's some cultural or social cause to it beyond "ha ha those dumb god lovers are so dumb"; the religiousness is just a symptom of that larger cause, not the cause itself. computer parts posted:No, plenty of actual scientists believed in eugenics too. It requires an axiomatic belief to exist (i.e., some races are fundamentally inferior than others), but that's not a high bar to clear, especially if you're not a scientist in the field of biology. It doesn't even necessarily require that! Eugenics wasn't just about ethnic cleansing - it also targeted the physically and mentally disabled, people with a wide variety of mental illnesses, criminals, people with low IQs, poor people, women who had too many children or were receiving too much welfare, people who were considered to be "idiots" or "imbeciles", and the "feeble-minded". There certainly were quite a number of racists who saw non-whites as inferior and used eugenics for ethnic cleansing, but they weren't the only victims; mental hospitals in particular were hotbeds of forced sterilization. Jastiger posted:I have grasped that a while ago, I don't know why you're so hung up on it. I feel like you're so mad about some tiny detail that you're ignoring the larger argument being made. Religion is "special" in that other cultural aspects haven't been around for 2000 years and are given tacit approval as "moral and good" the way (Abrahamic monotheism) has been. Christians are A-OK mocking Scientologists, but Islam or Mormonism (though less so) is somehow moral and noble. Religion is unique because it gets special status. No it doesn't. Ascribing social ills to the culture of a minority group is just as frowned upon as ascribing them to a major religion. Even more frowned upon, in fact, which is why no one does it except for people who aren't trying very hard to hide their open, virulent racism. Religion doesn't get any special protection not available to other cultures - a presidential candidate who went up on stage and claimed that drugs and gang violence were caused by black culture would draw an even more polarized reaction than even Trump and his anti-Muslim bigotry.
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Dec 17, 2015 20:03
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Jastiger posted:I kind of touched on this. Because religiosity has been intertwined with a lot of the population, so its more socially acceptable to be religious here than it is in say, the UK. Why? Why is this the case? That is the question. By saying "it's because they're more religious", you're not actually addressing the question of what makes American behavior so different from other countries, you're just changing the mysterious factor you don't know the reason for. Why are people more religious in a country with constitutional separation of church and state than they are in the UK, a country which to this very day has an official state religion supported by the government? What are the social and cultural factors that cause Americans to be so much more religious than Europeans?
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Dec 17, 2015 20:47
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Jastiger posted:I think one of the major reasons it is like that TODAY is because of the ability of certain factions to control the American myth and perpetuate a Christian history for an entire generation. The United States wasn't always as overtly religious as it is today. The cold war had a lot to do with it too since "us vs them" became "Jesus vs Atheism" for a lot of people, even though that wasn't really the case. McCarthyism helped push this along, then came the backlash against social liberation in the 60s. Groups like the Moral Majority and mega churches helped monetize faith into big business both for economic and political purposes. Throw in a few select quotes from the founding fathers on religion and boom, you have a myth of a country that is not only Christian, but HAS to be Christian. Thomas Jefferson, John Jay, and Thomas Paine were all religious - and so, for that matter, were the vast majority of Americans, with many of the colonies having been founded by strongly religious people or groups. Not only that, but weirdo fringe groups (by the standards of the time), tended disproportionately to immigrate to America because they were frowned upon by the Church of England. Separation of church and state was not meant to protect people's right to nonreligiousness, it was a guarantee that people could come up with whatever weirdass new flavor of Protestantism they wanted without having to worry about contradicting an official state religion. The size and isolation of the US only encouraged religious weirdness, as regional variations developed between religions, even the most inspirational preachers usually couldn't get their speeches all the way across the vast country, and there was an immense frontier for particularly weird movements (like the Mormons) to pack up and journey off to if need be. On top of that, internixing and blending between these numerous sects led to even more new movements, as preachers were inspired by different facets of various movements and mix-and-matched up their own flavor. Religion faded from national politics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as political power shifted northward to the educated, urban, capitalist, industrialized, immigrant-heavy New England, but a number of religious awakenings and new movements sprouted up during this time period, mostly in the South or on the frontiers of American settlement at the time. By the early 20th century, evangelicalism and fundamentalism were sweeping through what's now known as the Bible Belt. Naturally, when the civil rights struggle and the Southern Strategy that resulted from it made the South into a major political player once more, it's no surprise that it's around then that religion suddenly rose to become a major political issue. Since religion hadn't been previously been an issue particularly affiliated with one party or the other, the Republicans were able to leverage that formerly non-political demographic (along with Southern discontent at the Civil Rights Act) to finally take the South back from the Dems. In England, on the other hand, its much smaller size and much less isolated boonies meant that a group too extreme to be tolerated by the mainstream couldn't just march a couple thousand miles to the West like the Mormons; instead, if they wanted to get away from British society, they had to hop on a boat and go to America. Meanwhile, the state-run official Church of England was able to play some role in suppressing the growth and proliferation of crazy religious movements, and the much smaller distances in England limited the ability of religions to regionally diversify anyway. In the end, America ended up being a dumping ground and petri dish for British cults and religious crazies, and the vast expanses of shithole boonies and sparsely populated frontiers in the US allowed those numerous sects to interbreed and evolve, free from any organized government effort to rein them in. When those areas finally regained political importance as a result of unrelated shifts in regional politics, the strong yet unorthodox religious and cultural beliefs that had baked in their bigoted uneducated backwaters for a hundred years, left behind long ago by the economic and political power centers if the country, were suddenly turned into political issues as a way to curry the region's favor for quick, cheap votes, and we've suffered from that ever since.
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Dec 17, 2015 23:25
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Tei posted:Okay. But something I have learned in this thread is to ignore what the official text say and pay attention to what the actual practicers of a cult believe/do. This isn't just true for religions and cults - it also applies to organizations, political parties and movements, and just about any other group organized enough to write things down about itself. Even if the group's beliefs and rules later change, it's often politically or procedurally impossible to change the founding texts and declarations, and therefore the group either changes its official interpretation of those words or mutually agrees to ignore the founding texts and stick to the informal, up-to-date rule lists instead. Also, sometimes the founding texts aren't realistic descriptions of the group's beliefs in the first place - for example, the Declaration of Independence was criticized almost from the very beginning for praising liberty and equality while colonists (including Jefferson himself) worked to preserve slavery and expel the Native Americans. Surprisingly enough, the whole idea of the Bible as being exactly and literally true about everything is a relatively recent phenomenon, only a bit more than a century old. Catholicism has considered the Bible to be largely metaphorical and subject to varying interpretation for a long time, and most Christian traditions have been cautious of the fact that the Bible they know is most likely a translation of a translation of a translation. The idea of every single word of the Bible (as well as certain specific translations of the Bible) being literal and direct truth actually comes from the Evangelical movement in the late 19th century and the Fundamentalist movements in the early 20th century.
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Dec 18, 2015 17:10
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Jastiger posted:I agree but with one caveat about your part about the historical interpretation: Certain parts have always been considered canonical and literally true, namely the existence of Jesus, Jesus being the son, and the existence of some form of trinity. A lot of the rest has risen and fallen, but its important to note that there has always been (and almost has to be) a literal interpretation of religious texts. The difference in sects is often not so much interpretation but rather how much you consider to be literal. More a sliding scale than a modular choice. There are plenty of sects that have taken issue with even those basic facts - the most well-known probably being Unitarianism, which rejects the idea of the Trinity and (depending on the particular Unitarian sect) sometimes the divinity of Jesus. Disputing his existence would be pointless, since it's a fact with some historical evidence behind it, but his divinity and relationship to God have been disputed and disagreed upon by many different groups. Also, different sects may have different forms of the text - aside from the whole question of transcription errors, translations, and later edits, there were plenty of tales and stories and works and gospels written about Jesus and his teachings and the apostles in early Christianity, as well as plenty of dubious Old Testament-ish stories, and no real, wide-ranging statement of which ones were canon until the 4th century or so, when the centralized religious organizations that had risen by that time began to enforce a fixed canon among the entirety of their religious hierarchy - though various weaknesses in those religious organizations led to differences. The Catholic Bible is different from the Orthodox Bible (and there are even regional differences in Orthodox Christian canon as well), and naturally the Protestants just did whatever the gently caress they wanted with canon. For example, Martin Luther made at least one change to the original text when he wrote the Luther Bible, as well as dropping several books of Catholic canon completely and relegating several more to the back of the book. On the other hand, the Czech Bible has a couple of books that other Catholic and Protestants Bibles don't, because the translators included a couple of books from the Orthodox Bible. Jastiger posted:Right and they came later after the traditional interpretation was normalized in historical churches. I'm not saying that every sect believes the same thing, I'm saying the original foundation of Christianity as we know it in broad terms relies on Jesus and certain aspects of Jesus, namely the son, divinity, and the trinity. Aren't you tired from moving those goalposts so far? Isn't it easier to just admit that your original assertion that all Christian sects interpret those parts of the text in the same way was ill-informed, instead of tacking on a million caveats and trying to sneakily replace all the "all" with "most" and trying to exclude everything that doesn't fit your claim as a meaningless outlier? Why not just say "oops, I didn't know about that" and move on? Jastiger posted:Would you consider them Christians though? Would you consider Christians to be Jews?The difference between "a sect of another religion" and "a new religion entirely" is an entirely subjective line to draw.
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Dec 18, 2015 19:07
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Jastiger posted:I knew it was contested but not to the point it was sure. I was wrong to list out such specific points, though from what I see, it still seems to be a majority view of Christians that they matter to some extent. My main response to you was more that they still consider the words in the Bible to be Canon and they each drew from that book. They were for the most part working from the same source material. Perhaps it was wrong to go further than that, but in reference to YOUR post before hand, thats where I was going with it. Which Bible? There isn't just one! The core material does in fact contain significant differences between sects, and its importance varies widely by sect as well. How important scripture actually is happened to be a major factor in the Protestant Revolution. There isn't such a point, and fundamentally there can't really be such a point because there is such wide-ranging diversity of theology and such denials are often part of theological conflicts. Different sects have different ideas of what it means to be "Christian" or "Muslim" or even "Jewish" and what fundamental points of faith must be agreed on to fall under their umbrella. The reason that Christians are not Jews, even though they originated as a Jewish cult, is because Christians themselves did not want to be called Jewish, and managed to amass enough influence to make that stick among Romans.
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Dec 18, 2015 21:04
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PT6A posted:Between the police, the juvenile detention people, and everyone at the school, it's amazing that not a single person went "HEY! GUYS! THIS IS ABSOLUTELY hosed AND YOU'RE ALL CRAZY!" If you're in a position of authority at a school and dismiss a threat as "eh, it's probably nothing" and ignore it or turn it away with only a cursory investigation, and it turns out to be something serious, people could possibly be injured or killed and you and your organization will definitely get your pants sued off. If you treat it seriously and it turns out to be nothing, you've inconvenienced some people and can blame the whole thing on someone else. It's the reason stuff like swatting works.
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Dec 22, 2015 21:10
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