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Tuxedo Catfish posted:"Language subtly affects your values and how you think about the world" isn't really an implausible scenario either. So the jargon of a specific religion is used to contextualize political motives w.r.t stuff like gender, sexuality and economics, which will suppress (good) ideas that can't fit in with the existing jargon, or are distorted by that jargon. I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing, ultimately any ideology does the same thing (see: marxism, liberalism), but it's definitely something to be aware of and, in the case of religion, the extra burden of metaphysics confuses everything in a way that pure political ideologies don't get confused. Basically any use of religion in the area of politics is doomed to failure, and public secularism as well as government secularism should be seen as necessary for any kind of social progress.
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Apr 12, 2016 05:38
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 12:54 |
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The mindset that idolizes traditions is one that will tend to be both religious and right-wing, and somewhat regressively so. Furthermore, religion communities dominated by people with such mindsets will enculture regression. If you recognize religion as a community as well as a simple set of (vague) beliefs, you can see how it's still okay to say that religion does inform the politics of a vast number of people, and that this is a bad thing, and it should be seen as bad. Being overly defensive here doesn't help explain anything, the people doing the oppressing do so in explicitly religious terms. While it's not correct to say that any particular religion or religiosity necessarily relates to regression, it's also incorrect to say that they're necessarily unrelated, or that the way a religious community thinks about its religion or itself doesn't translate into real world politics. There is ideology at work there, you can look and talk about it, while acknowledging that it's dynamic and contingent. Like I'm not convinced you can disentangle the phenomena of a religious right and bigotry, or that doing so leads to greater explanatory power, because I don't think bigotry is itself a force independent of its justifications/rationalizations. If you do believe that, then I wonder why you think you could ever rid the world of those bigotries. Like the usual excuse here is one of total externalization, i.e. 'abortion is about women not about the fetus', but that's too clunky an explanation because the (projected) reasoning here of pro-oppression isn't capable of surviving on its own, it's needs that cover of legitimacy to protect itself from the light of day, which the religious beliefs provide. That's not even touching how demeaning it is to declare that you know why people think more than they do, not just because you might be wrong, but also because if you're right - you're over simplifying the dynamic of bigotry (think for a second: why does it even need a rationalization?) and, in turn, essentialize the beliefs as 'just what those bigots do', which is then expressed through whatever you declare as transient means to express that - religion, opinions on warhammer, etc. Is that an orientation capable of changing the world for the better? rudatron fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Apr 12, 2016 |
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Apr 12, 2016 16:27
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Any definition of religion that involves the practicing community necessarily means that 'religion' cannot be cleanly separated from 'politics', therefore handwaving away any possibility of one informing the other is misguided. Even if you believe that they're 'misusing' scripture (what exactly constitutes misuse as opposed to use is debateable), you're still admitting that the religion and the bigotry are codependent structures - the bigotry needs the religious covering to protect it from criticism, which therefore makes it an functional part of the perpetuation of the bigotry. I think it's possible to be nuanced here in saying that there is a relation, without having to declare that this relationship is intrinsic or essentialist, which it patently cannot be.
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Apr 13, 2016 13:21
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Well what is law, right? In one sense it's imposed morality all the way down, so there's functionally little difference from banning murder and banning gay marriage from the perspective of 'you're forcing your standards on myself', but obviously for a lot of people there's levels of disagreement they'll accept. So you have personal morality as what you prefer, but cannot justify forcing on another, and public morality, which you can do both with. What separates the two? I'd argue there's 3 reasons: a self-assessment of your accuracy of that morality, practical trade-off of side effects with policing and the degree of how much you really care. You feel confident that murder is bad, you can't think of a situation in which you're wrong, and you can't see how anyone else could really justify it for themselves without making a lot of bad assumptions. But if you're a liberal person, while you may not like smoking yourself and think it's dumb, banning it would be bad (nevermind the practical effects). Then you come to free speech, which you prefer because of it's society-wide effects that are largely beneficial, and the precedent your setting, rather than the individuals of a certain case. So the religious person is still applying that same logic, but are so absolutely wrapped up in their own view, that they're not acknowledging the possibility of being mistaken, or the practical side effects of their policies. Abortion is automatically a crime, but there's no interrogation of the logic leading to that stance. What else would that imply? Are you really that confident? Can you expect everyone else to share that same confidence? computer parts posted:It's silly to claim being anti-LGBT is religious because plenty of nominally atheist libertarians have called for an ending of all marriage.
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Apr 17, 2016 08:26
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I don't have a good reason to think they're lying, so I think they actually believe what they're saying. This is in general how you should treat other people when they are discussing their ideology, especially when it's not exactly mainstream. But 'harm = bad' is part of a set of moral beliefs, conceivably you could have a set of aliens who believe the opposite. Even in human societies, that's not always the case either, for example harmed caused in the process of justice is usually ignored, so long as it was proportional and justified by circumstance. Also your idea of consent as almost limitless is kind of dubious, I have no problem sending someone to jail for assault if they assault someone, regardless of whether or not the person 'asked for it' - it's a really bad excuse open to abuse, and even if true, I don't think consent always overrides the responsibility of justice that as state has, there are limits. I'm also not sure it's the prevention of natural disasters is driving force behind anti-LGBT stuff, that's more done after-the-fact. They are not like you, they do not have a harm-based moral system, it's one of a strict set of codes that are bad because reasons, which they aren't willing to interrogate. it's that lack of skepticism and emotional attachment to those rules that are the reasons they want to make it law.
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Apr 18, 2016 00:07
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Projecting that onto them is not justified, maybe some have that response, maybe some don't, doesn't change the fact that that position will probably have more to do with the attachment to libertarianism as an ideology than anything else. I mean there's got to be some people who are pro-marriage, yet still find 'gays icky'. That's what is meant by 'tolerance' after all.
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Apr 18, 2016 00:20
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 12:54 |
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Yeah, but there's a difference between belief in the magic of the free market, because material power relations somehow don't factor into actually-existing liberty, versus using the beliefs as a deflector shield against honestly held bigotry. It's stupid on it's own terms, you don't need to project onto them.
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Apr 18, 2016 12:45
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