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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| With that sort of personality I lean towards |
If you know it is your personality that is dictating your analysis of the world I don't know how you can sleep at night.
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Grant
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How do you know if your views are tantamount to a religion?
Do your strongly held opinions make you
1) feel superior to your fellow man?
2) feel your life has a reason
3) want to meet fellow believers and unite in a sense of common purpose
If the answer is yes to all these it’s a religion.
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Grant
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Recognising that your personality tries to dictate your views is the first step to rational thinking. We all want to believe what it’s good for us to believe.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I can answer, hand on heart, 'yes' to all three of your 'Is it a religion?' criteria. But what do you call it if it is your own religion?
| Recognising that your personality tries to dictate your views is the first step to rational thinking. We all want to believe what it’s good for us to believe. |
No, the first step is doing something about it. How are you getting on?
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N R Scott
In: Middlesbrough
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A religion is just any political system that seeks exclusive control over morals. Of course, this isn't the dictionary definition, but it's what we actually mean when we use the term pejoratively in discussions about politics; though no one consciously understands this. All the world's religions are just defunct political systems, but ones that had no scope for differing opinions/morals/cultural values - i.e. no clear concept of individual rights.
So, if Greta believes in global warming that's her belief ..but it's not her religion. However, if she believes in global warming and wants to impose this on others with no tolerance for their personal choice it is religion. That's the difference.
So when we say the left are behaving like a religion, but the right aren't, this is what we really mean. The left and right both have strong beliefs, but the left are currently censoring opinions on Twitter, etc, whereas the right are not (at least not to anywhere near the same extent).
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N R Scott
In: Middlesbrough
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Same with Communism and Nazism. We can describe them as "religious" as they didn't tolerate opposition. They suppressed or exterminated it.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| A religion is just any political system that seeks exclusive control over morals. |
I can't accept this. In the first place all political systems seek exclusive control over morals. I live in one so I should know. It passes laws to that effect and it does not allow anybody else that right. Just because its ideas of 'morals' is historically widely drawn and just because it allows its citizens to sign up voluntarily to organisations with tighter restrictions does not obviate this. But there are plenty of religions that allow their adherents to do pretty much as they please so long as they obey a few rituals. Isn't the Church of England one?
| Of course, this isn't the dictionary definition, but it's what we actually mean when we use the term pejoratively in discussions about politics; though no one consciously understands this. All the world's religions are just defunct political systems, but ones that had no scope for differing opinions/morals/cultural values - i.e. no clear concept of individual rights. |
I actually agree with this. Operating a human society is a fearsomely difficult task and it was discovered very early doors that 'religion' was an absolutely essential weapon in the herding-cats armoury. It is only in very recent times when technology has made the task easier that religion can be let go.
More later.
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Grant
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Let me turn the clock back to 50,000 BC. There are dozens of humanoids. Some are dwarves, some have more muscles than Mike Tyson. But the most successful is a weak, spindly creature which is soon to supplant the others. How does it do it?
It does it by forming large groups of 100 plus who work together, unlike the Neanderthals who live in family groups no larger than a dozen. These tribes are united by the stories they tell each other and by the silly gods they worship. It’s all bollocks of course, but it doesn’t matter provided these beliefs unite the tribe.
Now we in the West no longer worship Jesus many of us are desperate to find new creeds to unite our people. We live in a multicultural mess so let’s pretend that diversity is strength. We’ve been watching nature programmes since we were children so let’s develop a nature-worshipping religion called environmentalism.
Women have had a rough time, so feminism might add a bit of meaning to our lives.
All of these creeds are ultimately doomed because they are fundamentally nonsense, but that didn’t stop Christianity lasting two thousand years.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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I just do not accept the "break" from Christianity you lot identify. The full range of wokeism, environmentalism, anti imperialism, globalism and feminism is just one logical product and progression of Christian thought. It's all just a variant of New Jerusalem/ Apocalypse, etc which has happily circulating since Christianity started about 500 years ago. (Grant's dating is more conventional)
There is nothing wrong with this, you have to keep your empire glued together somehow and it's much beter than force.
Your secular folks are mostly just trying to reinvent the existing, rather embarrassing to them, origin of their paradigm, not overturn it. Hence they still want the New Jerusalem. Good luck with that.
The idea that you could replace all this with democracy, or, say, secular individual rights, is of course equally bonkers
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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All this sociological theorising is well and good (or ill and bad) but it's not what AE is about. What you have to do is make sure none of it applies to yourself. Just adopt an anthropological view of what all these weird people are doing. Don't get involved, just observe. Soon you'll know what's going on, or at any rate know better than they do.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| So, if Greta believes in global warming that's her belief |
Actually, AE says it is not her belief at all. Merely the normal clutter to be found in any contemporary Scandinavian teenager's head. At most, you could call it a choice between two competing beliefs but even that would be pushing it.
| ..but it's not her religion. |
Technically, I would imagine that would be Lutheranism, agnosticism or atheism. It is difficult to see what functions Global Warmism offers that any of these do. Nobody's obsessional about Lutheranism, agnosticism and atheism. I thought that was rather the point of them. People forget religion is hardly ever important other than as a badge.
| However, if she believes in global warming and wants to impose this on others |
So the dictum is: it is mind clutter until she picks up that first loudhailer. And lo! it is a religion.
| with no tolerance for their personal choice it is religion. That's the difference. |
Would Christianity cease to be a religion if the Archbishop of Canterbury said, "You know what? Please yourselves." Although thinking about it, there could be some mileage in this.
| So when we say the left are behaving like a religion, but the right aren't, this is what we really mean. |
I'd be more receptive to the argument if I didn't constantly hear mirror-talk from left wing people.
| The left and right both have strong beliefs, but the left are currently censoring opinions on Twitter, etc, whereas the right are not (at least not to anywhere near the same extent). |
I'd be more receptive to the argument if I didn't constantly hear mirror-talk from left wing people.
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N R Scott
In: Middlesbrough
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | So the dictum is: it is mind clutter until she picks up that first loudhailer. And lo! it is a religion. |
It's fine if she picks up a loudhailer, it only becomes "religious" if she stops other people from picking up a loudhailer.
| Would Christianity cease to be a religion if the Archbishop of Canterbury said, "You know what? Please yourselves." |
These days the Archbishop of Canterbury basically does say this. (Even ignoring the wokeness) he essentially says "We're Christians and we believe this, and we think you should too ..but if you're Muslim, Atheist, Jewish, etc I totally respect your right to hold and express those opinions."
Christianity still remains a religion under the general definition, but this isn't what people mean when they accuse political opponents of behaving "religiously". What they mean is that their opponents are behaving like a pre-Enlightenment Archbishop of Canterbury would: "We're Christians and we believe this, ..and if you're Muslim, Atheist, Jewish, etc you're a heretic."
People don't understand the separation of Church & State because when they hear words like 'church' and 'religion' they just think God. When in this context they need to think politics and any state ideology. Changing the phrase to "the separation of state & ideology" or something similar would help people grasp things a lot easier. Though it wouldn't be accurate as there's still an underlying ideology ..just an ideology that seeks to tolerate many ideologies.
So I don't really know what language to use, but because we don't have the right language we just throw the label "religious", when what we're trying to say is "not respecting the boundary between church and state" ..but now the church is something else. (A vague sciencey-type religion, made up of people that don't believe in God.)
| In the first place all political systems seek exclusive control over morals. |
This ignores the difference between the system and the government. A government can have a moral ideology, but that doesn't necessarily make it the state's. A Conservative Christian government can be elected and pursue policies and laws according to those moral values, but they can still respect basic fundamental rights. Such as freedom of worship and freedom of expression, and so forth.
Anyone that's content to respect these basic rights doesn't want exclusive control. They acknowledge and respect some sort of boundary.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Here's one of the more urgent questions of the day
How to Avoid Becoming a Fascist Douglas Rushkoff
https://gen.medium.com/how-to-avoid-becoming-a-fascist-8c0132483151 |
With the BUF, the Italian Fascisti and the German Nazis no longer actively recruiting I suppose not signing up to the BNP will have to do. But in America it is not so straightforward
| This week, while I was watching the U.S. House committee debate contempt charges against former Trump aide Steve Bannon, a surprising email popped into my inbox: an invitation to appear as a guest on Bannon’s podcast The War Room: Pandemic, to talk about transhumanism. His people said he admired my work, my book Team Human in particular, and that I would be indispensable to any discussion of excessive uses of technology. |
Chance would be a fine thing.
| No, I did not accept. Of course, and kind of sadly, my immediate thought was that going on Bannon would get me “cancelled†by my peers, readers, and the wider public. |
Those fascist bastards. You did well to avoid their clutches, Doug. Now about Steve Bannon...
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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Folks in vague groups like "Lefties," actually now have so little in common, they need to identify by who they are not. Not being a fascist, imperialist, racist, patriarch etc is the way they are herding. You might think it's weird that they do that by cancelling or no platforming, or not engaging with debate, but it is just a normal group reaction, ie you don't want a wolf amongst the sheep.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Most human beings think according to their political beliefs. This is not what they think they do. They think their political beliefs are common sense (with an ethical component) and therefore a matter of common observation (and common decency). What they think is the result of the workings of their brain. There is no connection between the two. That is what most people think is going on.
AE-ists understand it is the other way round. What people think is the result of their political beliefs and their political beliefs are learned in adolescence in the normal way i.e. by rote learning from authority figures.
However, AE-ists are faced with a problem most people do not have: judging their own political beliefs. They know the 'common sense' bit (and the 'ethical' bit) are just internal components of the political ideology; they know they themselves may have acquired their political ideology from dubious sources, but what the hell can they do about it...
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