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So, uh, bit of mouthful here, let's break it down. So I agree with a lot of your points, I suspect not a lot of others in D&D will, they may or may not respond. There's something I still want to challenge you on. I agree in the abstract that religion by necessity creates unnecessary tribalisms - an example here would be the persecution of gnostics, practically whether 'gnosticism' is true or not doesn't effect your daily lives, yet people did kill each other over these sorts of things. But these things wouldn't exist or continue to propagate if they didn't serve some kind of social function. They'd be supplanted by something else fairly quickly. So when you say "well god is not worth a single person", well what is god here? That's not a rhetorical question, or a simple one. If we take it to be the most explicit, 'the assumption of an extra-dimensional creator' or whatever, then your statement is fine, but that perspective doesn't explain its social function. If faith is simply an intellectual assumption, then why is it publicly broadcasted with fervor? Religion is public, not private, so as with anything else in the public domain, we have to ask 'what is being communicated'. Not just directly, but indirectly, perhaps subconsciously. In the case of religion, we have a set of assumptions not just bound up with metaphysics, but morality. It's also impossible to ignore the historical position of religion when related to ethics, to even simple things like swearing on a bible. So to proclaim religiosity is not to express your belief, but to communicate to anyone who will listen, that you are a good person. And that's something people want, they want others to know they are good people, because they know if others don't think that, they may not like them. And no one wants to be alone. Thing is, this extends beyond religion. Essentially anything can be used to express this, even something like dress. If you dress like a member of a biker gang, and you meet another gang member, you're going to feel like you have something in common beyond that dress, with things like behavior, values and so on. But logically, those two things are unrelated, there's nothing magical about leather that increases aggression, integrity and stubbornness. Yet so long as that charade continues, you may trust each other, without basis, because you both feel you may have some in common. All because you're wearing dead cow skins studded cosmetically and impractically. So when people kill 'for god', they're doing it for what god symbolizes, not for the thing itself (I mean they've never personally met it, on account of it not existing, and killing for a stranger is normally unusual). It could be the values, but more often than not it's for the community that accepted them. The ideas aren't 'immutable' because of anything to do with them personally, but that they community they come from has reached a consensus on that. It's immutable for them because to convince that community by themselves is something beyond their control. So when you ask 'well why aren't we really looking at religion', well it turns out it's more complicated than that. I think, and I've said this in the Belgium thread, that there are particular problems within contemporary islamic communities that are equivocated away, I feel unfairly, probably for a fear that that would generate more prejudice against muslims. But the issue isn't really religion or religiosity, that's just one expression of the same set of problems - how can you be inclusive without being exploited, how can you encourage convergence without oppression, how do you trust without being betrayed? I'm not sure I have the answer. rudatron fucked around with this message at 12:41 on Mar 25, 2016 |
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Mar 25, 2016 12:38
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Stinky_Pete posted:Never before have I heard someone from the liberal camp express defense for the idea that Islam should be the overriding power structure throughout human civilization. Who's saying these things? Are there any liberal luminaries such as Robert Reich or MHP saying these things?
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Mar 27, 2016 02:52
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But there's a categorical difference between 'They do these attacks because Islam' and 'They do these attacks because of political currents within Islamic communities', yet both of those arguments are treated as exactly the same. The main focus of the effort after these bombings is on trying to minimize the effects of 1, without offering an alternate explanation that's frankly believable. Like we're not just looking at an unemployment crisis as a cause of bombings, yet that's the only explanation ever put forward. The problem is geopolitical, it is political, ti's foreign affairs, it's ideological. It's not any one of those things alone, and it's not something it's fair to say it's the fault of the countries they happen in, or that it necessarily results from a failure in domestic or foreign policy - Belgium was not a member of the coalition of the willing, yet it was still targeted. So if you don't want to help the bad guys, fine, don't help them, work against them. While you're doing that, don't give them ammunition. That's what you're doing when you say the problem is just unemployment, because it's not, and everyone can see it's not. rudatron fucked around with this message at 08:32 on Mar 29, 2016 |
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Mar 29, 2016 08:29
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Well if they didn't have that kernel, they wouldn't be in such a dominant position today. What's an evangelical religion without something to push that evangelizing? But given the slow spread of these structures, it's almost a logical necessity that they're totally outdated by the time they obtain hegemony. So the risk of regressive fundamentalism seems like a mathematical necessity of the particular thing that religion present itself as, rather than anything to do with any particular religion itself. Your problem is you're still painting this as primarily a problem of domestic policies. Materially, belgium muslims live a better life than the people they identify without outside belgium, and conversely, belgium (and the eurozone in general) is better on all those issues than any other country they could immigrate to, where they can't identify with the majority. It's not perfect, but relative to the rest of the world, it's quite good. The EU in general doesn't support Israeli policy - yet all this apparently isn't enough. You call 'the nebulous everyone' (read - the demos, ya know, as in democracy) 'super reactionary', but I think that's incredibly elitist and infantilizing. Of course most people aren't well informed on these issues, it's not their job to be, but they have concerns that aren't being addressed. You're handing them platitudes, without telling them how they could both be moral and safe. You want to do that, you have to tell them something they can believe. Saying 'you, the people, have failed, because you weren't tolerant enough' isn't going to work, and it's wrong. When you perform this maneuver, you are giving the opposition (by which I mean far-right) ammunition, because you're out of touch. Let me give you an example of something that does work, and isn't infantilizing - These attacks are a result of regional actors in the middle east making power plays, namely Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iran. The first two are guilty of either ideologically justify, creating a space for, or using, groups such as ISIS, for their own narrow benefit. These groups are ideological organizations that have a fundamentally antagonist relationship with the West, on not just a strategic or geopolitical level, but a cultural level. Areas of this conflict range across gender, sexuality, religiosity/secularism, and governance. These attacks are part propaganda, part recruiting, and partly financial, in that they motivate foreign donors. These attacks are not strictly a failure of domestic policy in the countries where they occur, because that ignores that these organizations have agency, goals, an ideology - in short, a mission. They are not purely reactive phenomena from an Evil West that must still take the blame. To perform that dodge is to both ignore the wider context to this conflict, and legitimize these organizations as a 'natural' part of the global Islamic community, whose griefs you are now claiming they represent. They don't, they're assholes, recognize that and move forward. rudatron fucked around with this message at 06:47 on Apr 3, 2016 |
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Apr 3, 2016 06:42
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I'll agree with your observational assessment, but disagree with your interpretation. I think the pretty clear difference with pagan religions is that paganism was very social in nature - these are our gods, those are their gods, if we beat them then our gods were better, but neither was invalid. It wasn't just a matter of reinterpretation, though you get that, but a direct association between one specific political/cultural grouping and a pantheon. Christianity by contrast is it's own, specific, transnational grouping, which can lay claim to every single human being. So the roman trials represent two very different interpretations going on at a kind of subconscious level - the pagans see this insanity of not acknowledging the power structures you're in, the reality you inhabit, because they're refusing to make an even token effort to respect that society. The Christians otoh, seeing themselves as part of an (undefeated) transnational grouping, cannot bring themselves to betray that group. So in my mind, it's not the 'truth' that's in play here (I don't think the pagans thought that what they believed wasn't true, or that not knowing what is true might not be bad for you - not doing sacrifices sounds like a bad idea!), it's "who do you lay claim to?", who does that truth apply or not apply to. With the evangelizing, it's 'everyone', with pagans, it's 'the family' (whoever that is). Something to note though: you see this exact stuff in Liberalism, international Communism, etc. All enlightenment derived ideologies functionally derive from evangelizing religions, by which I mean Christianity, so maybe you can think of Christiantiy and Islam as like an immature version of a political ideology, it has the impulse without the more practical grounding. Juffo-Wup posted:But you haven't done this either. All you've done is reassigned blame from Western interventionism to the geopolitical motives of the Islamic-majority regional powers. And maybe also laid some blame on the fact that Islam is an evangelizing religion. But assigning blame, even correctly, is not the same as a giving plan of action. And the line I've been pushing in this thread generally has been that, in this particular case, it isn't even a necessary precondition for developing good policy responses. edit: Do you know why those anti-muslim groups are gaining power? Because of the lack of an effective response, that doesn't blame the people who feel scared as the source of the problem. Surprise, that breeds resentment. If you keep assuming that the public are incurably racist and stupid, you're not giving a realistic response, you're throwing a temper tantrum. You even do it here. 'Well what can I do', yes what can you do when you have done nothing wrong, made no error, yet everyone else has? I'm sure that's not a self-serving excuse. This is what I mean when I say 'giving ammunition', not making the far-right hate the left (they will, always, because that's what they do), but pushing the center right, by assuming that they're already 'super reactionary' when they loving aren't. They just want an effective response that solves the problem. rudatron fucked around with this message at 01:55 on Apr 4, 2016 |
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Apr 4, 2016 01:37
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Sethex posted:If you made ISIS a different religion you would likely have unrest but it would look completely different but certainly less vicious an barbaric.
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Apr 4, 2016 04:43
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Sethex posted:The left wing reductionism of religion to being a 'worldview' label rather than a psychological disposition that impacts people's behaviour and actions alienates a lot of people. What constitutes bad or good theology isn't your choice to make, ultimately the text you're starting from is vague enough to go both ways, meaning it's the authority figures that always get to say what is 'theologically accurate' at any point in time. They'll be disagreement, of course, as there is within Islam, so you exploit that.
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Apr 5, 2016 02:04
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Why would an 'underlying content' exist without the ability to resolve differences? And how could humanity as a whole move in roughly the same direction yet still remain isolated & alone, on a 'fundamental' level? The probability of that happening has to be very low, you may as well expect to quantum tunnel through the earth.
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Apr 5, 2016 04:59
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I don't know how you can say secularism is a 'spent force' when there's more people unaffiliated today than ever before, and there is zero loving chance that religious dogmatism is going to be any more likely to prevent catastrophic climate change than anything else.
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Apr 6, 2016 03:03
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Religious dogmatism, indeed any kind of dogmatism, is a fundamentally dangerous force. Naively thinking you can 'put a happy face on it', is being arrogant enough to think you can control something that can't be negotiated or reasoned with. Even supposing you can get what you want (unlikely, it's just as likely you swallow you up as well), there'll be side effects you can't predict. Getting people to think critically & rationally is the better route, both for current crises, and for the crises to come.
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Apr 6, 2016 04:01
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What do you think the map shows? They're all the same religion, broken up into little camps on account of familiarity. Hell, turn the whole argument around: that country you're covering shows a wide variety of geographies and biomes. Would you accept an argument that said that the climate of the east coast necessarily made them more liberal than the climate of the south? No, you wouldn't, because it doesn't make logical sense. Apply the same logic to religion, taking into account all of recorded history. At different points in time, and you'll see that Islam has been more progressive than Christianity and Buddhists have been malicious. The constant are political ideology, which can attach and detach themselves from any metaphysics if you're clever enough about it. But who gets to do that, at any point in time? Community leaders, religious leaders, 'thinkers'. If there's a problem, it stems from them, not from some intrinsic nature of whatever religion you're talking about.
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Apr 7, 2016 00:51
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It's just a different way to communicate. Human beings search for intimacy and that's normal, you're as much as slave to that as you are a slave to hunger. There's no need to be afraid of that desire, everything will work out okay. There's no end to politics, and AR/VR isn't going to change that.
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Apr 7, 2016 03:07
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Why is it necessary to read it 'in its context'? Its context no longer exists, and we have a multitude of much better tools to examine life today and solve problems. There's nothing of value to be gained. Hell, the people reading it today don't read it in its context, they read it in ours, that seems like a more important thing to consider.
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Apr 8, 2016 03:17
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If you find you have to keep using figurative language and complex word games, then it's likely that you're projecting. 'In its context' in then just code for 'ignore these bits, because I said so'. In fact, by trying to excuse some parts because of 'context', you're making an explicit effort to willfully misinterpret what it's actually saying, because it's inconvenient for you to take it at face (read: actual) meaning. All of which ignores that the conceit - in its context it's totally okay (dubious) - is worthless because we don't live in that context, we live in this one. You read what is presented, not what you want to be presented.
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Apr 8, 2016 04:11
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Basically, its the responsibility of the communicator to communicate clearly and expressively, not the listener to divine/magic/'interpret' what is being said in a way that is beneficial to the ego of the communicator. If the words in the holy texts of religions are inaccurate, they should be corrected. But that's not going to happen, because religions rely on their 'archaicness' to grant them legitimacy. They want to present themselves as holding 'timeless truths' - contradicted by the fact that they emphatically do not hold those truths, and are in fact outdated. So there's the conflicting desires of not wanting to undermine that legitimacy, but not being able to ignore any longer the falsehoods and immorality presented. Hence this constant drive to move the literal into the metaphorical, without textual basis, to save the political power of religion, without in turn providing anything of value to society as a whole. The whole thing's just a game of narrow self interest and convenient lies.
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Apr 8, 2016 04:21
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I'm critiquing what is presented on its on terms. If I have better beliefs and values and facts available to me than they did, that's their problem, not mine. It would be unfair to condemn them, history is a process, shoulders of giants etc. But that doesn't stop me from being able to identify stupidity. Pretending that it's not there, through this game of emphasizing what you like and de-emphasizing what you don't, is just lying to yourself. Footnotes or 'more accurate translations' aren't good enough, because you're still not accepting the text for what it actually is. The only way forward would be to disown certain sections, as things that were wrong and immoral. But that would be admitting that these texts cannot be divinely inspired, and therefore, that the entire religion is a lie. Which it is, but these things tend to preserve themselves at the expense of everyone else. So that's not going to happen. It should though, because I think pretending that human beings fell from grace or whatever is a toxic & wrong idea. The truth is in the future, not the past.
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Apr 8, 2016 04:37
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There's no coherent definition of West, which is something that's obvious once you consider what exactly is East. If you think the term is positive, then the countries you like are Western, and contrawise if you think the West is negative. None of which changes the fact that Mein Kampf wasn't that outlandish for it's time, yet we don't use that to excuse it, instead we condemn the thought of that time as immoral, along with the ideology produced then. There's no reason not to do the same for any other text.
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Apr 8, 2016 13:03
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You use your brains. The answer was never out there, it was inside you all along. Personally, I don't think there is a 'place' in the cosmos in a normative sense, simply live as you must until either an accident, illness, or entropy kills you. You should come to your own conclusion.
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Apr 8, 2016 13:25
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Fionordequester posted:Oded Borrowski was born in Israel in 1939 Majorian posted:I'm not arguing that anyone should believe as I do, though. I'm just asking blowfish and all other r/atheism types to stop being dicks towards religious/spiritual/theistic/whatever people, as if we're all Pat Robertson fans or whatever. It's disrespectful to lie to people, and that's still the case when telling them the truth could make them angry or upset- you're just demonstrating that you only care what they think about you. If that is what you want, if that is how you think human beings should talk to each other, behind fake smiles, then by all means, leave D&D. Why bother arguing anything? Go find a serene park bench, sit down, and wither away. If you don't want that, then stop complaining about people being 'dicks' just because they think other beliefs might be wrong or stupid. Life is suffering. We can compare scars later.
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Apr 9, 2016 01:05
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Daaaw, you're a sweetie. But you misunderstand, I'm never offing myself. Anti-vaxxerism is a deep, cherished belief for anti-vaxxers. Sometimes it's necessary to attack deep, cherished, internalized beliefs. I of course expect the same standard from you, but this refrain of 'well those atheists are just being dicks calling religion stupid' is absurd. If everyone gets their own special cop-out from criticism if they can fit into a majority group, then majority insanities are here forever. rudatron fucked around with this message at 10:39 on Apr 9, 2016 |
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Apr 9, 2016 10:33
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