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Religion is inherently reactionary. Even the "good" parts of religion are better handled by the government. Coercive religious charities are better than nothing but it's hugely inefficient at best and more often actively coercive.
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Mar 6, 2017 17:07
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zh1 posted:You are only one of the two of those! There are way more lefty Catholics than there are lefty Protestants. Protestantism is a death cult.
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Mar 7, 2017 04:42
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It seems like distaste of (male) homosexual behavior transcends religion though. More importantly, homosexual marriage is something that traditionally doesn't make sense because marriage is a property transfer sealed by children. Romance as the driving force behind marriage is a very modern concept and the institution hasn't fully had time to catch up. For more people this doesn't matter because who gives a gently caress?
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Mar 7, 2017 09:17
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France, America and Turkey. All governments run explicitly on a philosophy of logical positivism. Good to know. I learned something new today.
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Mar 7, 2017 19:22
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CommieGIR posted:Turkey not so much since Erdogan is slowly consolidating power and introducing elements of theocracy. Uhhh, I mean, it's true that Edogan is upping the religious element in Turkey, but as a reply to my statement you're pretty wrong.
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Mar 7, 2017 20:28
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CommieGIR posted:I sincerely doubt a state actively jailing large amounts of their opposing parties members in a quest to consolidate a growing dictatorship are still practicing logical positivism. I think a logistical positivist could go either way, honestly. But have you stopped beating your wife?
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Mar 8, 2017 00:15
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The "leap of faith" aspect seems to normalize a very Protestant view of religion. Tradition is a much bigger driving force behind religion. "Doing things the way they've always been done because that's how they've always been done" is reactionary as gently caress and why religion and leftism rarely get along.
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Mar 8, 2017 05:06
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But have you ever considered that maybe your car is actually run by goblins? Maybe the engine doesn't do anything at all but we just think it does because we have blind faith in physics and engineering. Even if we know engines and cars work, do you check your car everyday while it is running? Because if you don't, my "goblin hypothesis" is every bit as reasonable as your "engine hypothesis".
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Mar 8, 2017 05:23
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CommieGIR posted:What the hell? It's a simple yes or no question. Have you stopped beating your wife?
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Mar 8, 2017 07:11
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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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Mar 10, 2017 10:02
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What is the good of religion?
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Mar 10, 2017 19:14
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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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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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When it happens, it's usually in spite of not because of religion. I'm having a hard time thinking about one motivated by religion. I'm sure you'll go straight to MLK and Gandhi but while their language was clearly religious I can't say they were motivated by religion. You don't fight against oppression because of religion (if anything, religious teachings normalize and enable oppression). And for every abolitionist Quaker you've got ten Baptists saying the slavery is a divine institution. But what about those "good ones," the minority of seemingly motivated religious good people? So what? Liberal churches bleed membership like crazy because religion is necessarily hostile to leftism. It's like Hillary going after suburban Republicans. You have a hostile group that is not going to get on board with the program and catering to them will alienate allies.
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Mar 11, 2017 00:20
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Bolocko posted:So, if they were motivated to do bad, they were motivated by religion, and if they were motivated to do good, they were not motivated by religion? Is it any surprise that institutions that teach xenophobia, tribalism, anti-modernism and tradition end up resulting in people more right wing? That's the system working as intended.
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Mar 11, 2017 01:09
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Cingulate posted:Shbobdb are you saying everything that's not leftist is bad? That the only way to be good is to be leftist? Yes, absolutely. quote:What about charity work, aid work? Random acts of kindness? The good kind of pro-life activism, e.g. the church stopping Nazi euthanasia? What do you think of these? The bolded portion is hardly restricted to religion. And religion tends to overly complicate them. Was Mother Theresa's aid work in Indian better than secular groups like MSF? On the latter, when you have to reach for the Nazis (one of the most evil regimes in history) for an example of "good" religious people your argument might not be as strong as you'd like. In the modern world and throughout history religious institutions have been willing handmaidens to the most reactionary regimes. The juice of "what about these weird and rare outliers" is absolutely not worth the squeeze of day-to-day injustice. Including injustices on a massive scale.
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Mar 11, 2017 09:03
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Cingulate posted:
What is your conception of good such as it can be evenly distributed all over humanity? Republicans who want to steal from the poor to give to the rich are as likely to be good as socialists who want to redistribute unearned wealth to the masses? Violent Neo-Nazis are as likely to be good as public defenders fighting against civil rights? This is really weak "truth is in the middle" bullshit.
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Mar 11, 2017 20:29
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Cingulate posted:I didn't say "evenly". I'm suggesting that nobody in here, nobody you know, nobody you've ever seen, has all the answer. There are very moral people on all sides. Maybe - I hope so - we on the left have more of the right answers. But to be super confident that we have a total monopoly on good answers, and everyone else is 100% wrong 100% of the time, strikes me as extremely unlikely. Again, I don't see what conception of "good" allows for people supporting economic exploitation, racism and xenophobia to fall into the "good" category. Can someone who supports the modern Republican Party be "good"? If so, how?
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Mar 11, 2017 21:05
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I care less about the vagaries of some individual's imaginary friend or metaethics and more about what they do. It isn't about the individual. Who cares about the individual? That isn't the atomic unit of society so trying to understand society on an individual level won't make sense. Liberal churches don't have appeal because religion, as an institution, is necessarily reactionary.
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Mar 11, 2017 21:42
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Eichmanns Was Eichmann a good person? I mean, his Jewish Emigration program in Austria probably saved 100,000 people from concentration camps. Does it matter that he apolitically switched from emigration to deportation and then to extermination?
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Mar 11, 2017 21:48
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Cingulate posted:So would you call the lady I described "good"? Given that she's voted R, nope. Bad person. It's an easy test. If you vote Republican you are not a good person. Edit: Just like Eichmann, she's not necessarily a "bad" person by the flawed ethics you seem to be presenting. After all, she's just going through the motions. The motions she's going through are loving monstrous though.
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Mar 11, 2017 22:01
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She's actively enabling the Republican regime. That's not everybody. Just evil people.
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Mar 11, 2017 22:32
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Avalerion posted:That particular example would be down to ignorance more than anything I think. So? It's ignorance that has been supported by the actively evil system that is supposed to be providing her with an ethical framework. The purported benefits of religion in this thread are: 1) Providing community 2) Teaching Ethics and 3) Hedonistic joy. The community provided is vile and xenophobic and the ethical teachings are, at best, insufficient. In the case of the "nice woman" I'd argue actively evil. And it resulted in a person supporting and aiding an evil system. What we normally would call a bad (if not evil) person. I can't argue with hedonism. Except that there are other ways to have fun that don't actively make society worse. I could see a liberal and certainly a libertarian struggling with that sticking point.
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Mar 11, 2017 22:54
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I'm a sentimentalist. And I actively opposed Obama's drone strikes but yes, I absolutely share responsibility in their moral reprehensibility. Thankfully, I voted against Obama in 2012 and for lefty candidates in the primaries. I'm doing what I can to make the system better. The woman you are describing isn't doing anything other than deepening the poison while using making a few individual lives better as a camisole lotion.
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Mar 11, 2017 23:02
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Republicans won in 2012?
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Mar 11, 2017 23:26
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Have you ever considered that fighting against injustice and losing is morally the same as actively enabling injustice and winning? -- A defense of religion as a means to teach ethics.
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Mar 12, 2017 00:04
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Cingulate posted:How does sentimentalism get you to a place where you striving to do good, and in the end contributing first to Obama drone striking weddings and then Trump getting elected is good and my Christian Example Lady aiming for the good (all the children in the world happy, educated and well fed) and failing, bad? How am I helping get Trump elected? Obama '08 was still better than McCain '08 (downticket votes were anti-Republican Dems since I was living in Indiana at the time and while centrist Dems are bad, Republicans of any stripe are an existential threat to the country) Peta Lindsay '12 was better than Obama '12 and Romney '12 (downticket votes were for lefty single issue stuff like Rent is Too drat High and Juan Bosch legacy since I was in a Dominican neighborhood in the Brox. Juan Bosch is a cool dude and Trujillio is a bad dude so supporting his legacy was cool). Your lady is aiming for good but so what? She's actively doing evil. More importantly and in the spirit of the thread, you seem to agree with me that Churches do favor rightwing indoctrination. Rather than try to find some way I'm a hypocrite leading to a nihilistic "who cares, maybe evil is the same as good?" why not stand for something?
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Mar 12, 2017 00:30
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Dr. Fishopolis posted:[spits mouthfuls of blood] You're really, really, really stretching here. There was no evidence whatsoever that there was any such thing as a popular abolitionist movement in the time of Jesus. There's equally no reason whatsoever to think that Jesus or any of his disciples would have been a abolitionists, or thought of slavery as anything other than a fact of life. Slaves show up in the background of just about every book in the New Testament. They're disposable, they suffer beatings, they're killed with no consequence, and there is no moral commentary on any of this that could possibly be interpreted as an argument against slavery on moral terms. Cingulate posted:The opposite reading is true… The opposite reading is true. I’ve been to college.
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Mar 12, 2017 00:44
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Who gives a poo poo? Religion isn't a book, it's an institution.
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Mar 12, 2017 00:47
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Brainiac Five posted:Shbobdb, someday your web of dishonesties will choke you to death. It would be better for you to abandon them now. Nah. I'm immortal.
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Mar 12, 2017 00:52
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Straight to the character assassination. It's a common refuge. Go for it. Have fun.
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Mar 12, 2017 00:56
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At worst, my activities round down to zero. Republicans do very real harm every day, as "truth is in the middle, both parties are the same" folks like you are being so forcefully reminded in the current administration.
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Mar 12, 2017 01:11
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Brainiac Five posted:The obvious explanation for why religious people would be more traditional is that religion is traditional and atheism is not, and nowhere has mass atheism been a phenomenon long enough to become traditional and thus for conservatives to flock to it. But this would suggest that religion is ultimately a neutral force rather than an absolutely good or bad one, and most people would rather not think in such a ternary logic. You don't think "conservative" ought apply to ancient institutions resistant to change?
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Mar 12, 2017 01:13
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Nude Bog Lurker posted:you cast your vote in 2012 in a way that you knew would make the election of a republican more likely NYC wasn't going to not go Obama. But letting the centrist Dems know that they can't take my vote for granted is an important message. If they had heeded that lesson in '16 and tried to energize their leftist base as opposed to appealing to Republican suburbanites, they would have won.
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Mar 12, 2017 01:19
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Brainiac Five posted:I think rigged questions are one of the few good arguments for the death penalty. Seriously though, do some research. It isn't leftism that's hostile to religion, it's religion that's hostile to leftism. In America, as Churches go left their membership declines. "Adapt and die" is a very real phenomenon.
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Mar 12, 2017 01:21
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Nude Bog Lurker posted:people who vote (or don't vote) to empower republicans are fundamentally evil though??? Just people who vote Republican. Not voting is bad but not evil. It's not hard.
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Mar 12, 2017 01:24
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We need non voters because they are redeemable. It's not that hard to figure out. Republican voters, on the other hand, should be executed.
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Mar 12, 2017 01:28
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Nothing immoral about smashing the olds and removing reactionaries through violent class struggle.
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Mar 12, 2017 01:30
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I agree, the individual is quite powerless. That's why it's important for the groups we join as individuals to not be those that actively aid and support evil. If you join institutions that support xenophobia, wars of choice, racism and economic injustice you are supporting evil. You are evil.
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Mar 12, 2017 01:36
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Bolocko posted:This is more complicated, and the Christianity thread was just talking about this very thing the other day. Go check it out. In the meantime, one quick reason for declining membership is that liberalizing churches, in the name of disrupting some old order, tend to also adopt very bad aesthetics in addition to watering down the Christian message. And by watering down I mean stuff like "I'm OK, you're OK, we're all OK; I mean we're sinners, sure, but we're OK. We love everyone! Here's a sports analogy!" all relayed in a room that looks like a cafeteria with pews. So you end up with a toothless institution unable to enact positive change. Why should we try to rehabilitate it?
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Mar 12, 2017 01:44
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