Yeah, I can’t change your mind on any of that then, it’s already made up. Just don’t complain when some Rastafarian or some zen Buddhist monk or some Sikh accuses you of religious discrimination. I don’t really tend to be very religious either, I’m an atheist, but I’m also not willing to pretend that I’m above or totally separate from religion. Secular ideas that we carry around which were invented by philosophers who were religious, scientists who were religious, and their ideas and cultures still carry the taint of that. Ideals that are inseparable from the religious principles on which they were founded. Even without religion, we all carry it’s specter.
I’m also not willing to make the blanket generalization that all religion is bad. I have seen too many people give up things plaguing their life, totally turn around, for that to be the case, and I don’t think that’s a role that you could fill with a “secular alternative” to religion, because such a thing would just end up looking like religion, because it shares all the same practices. There is a psychological strength to ritual even if it’s meaningless in reality, there’s a security there.
The sexist and patriarchal practices which have become deeply integrated into most religions over time have become so through centuries of baggage and cultures which have had those patriarchal norms because of the random circumstance of their material reality as it played with their culture, and it is by happenstance we are screwed with this, and not with something better. I wouldn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater though, just because it has ingrained cultural baggage much like everything else you might historically pick up, and I kind of doubt you even could. The Bible has different readings, there’s not just one Bible. There’s different metanarratives imposed on it. Different translations, even, different books included that change it’s fundamental literal form. There’s different historical context that you can throw out to substitute your own values, or choose to include. I’m not going to generalize some like, evangelical protestant version of Christianity to encompass the entire religion, despite it being the shittiest version, much as I won’t do the same for Islam, and I refuse to make that snap value judgement just based on someone’s manner of dress. There are plenty of major cultural movements, secular ones, where the majority of participants are shitty people, that’s basically most things, because people suck and we live in a system which rewards them sucking. I’m not gonna chuck it all out or shit on all of it broadly just because of that.
Yeah, I can’t change your mind on any of that then, it’s already made up. Just don’t complain when some Rastafarian or some zen Buddhist monk or some Sikh accuses you of religious discrimination. I don’t really tend to be very religious either, I’m an atheist, but I’m also not willing to pretend that I’m above or totally separate from religion. Secular ideas that we carry around which were invented by philosophers who were religious, scientists who were religious, and their ideas and cultures still carry the taint of that. Ideals that are inseparable from the religious principles on which they were founded. Even without religion, we all carry it’s specter.
I’m also not willing to make the blanket generalization that all religion is bad. I have seen too many people give up things plaguing their life, totally turn around, for that to be the case, and I don’t think that’s a role that you could fill with a “secular alternative” to religion, because such a thing would just end up looking like religion, because it shares all the same practices. There is a psychological strength to ritual even if it’s meaningless in reality, there’s a security there.
The sexist and patriarchal practices which have become deeply integrated into most religions over time have become so through centuries of baggage and cultures which have had those patriarchal norms because of the random circumstance of their material reality as it played with their culture, and it is by happenstance we are screwed with this, and not with something better. I wouldn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater though, just because it has ingrained cultural baggage much like everything else you might historically pick up, and I kind of doubt you even could. The Bible has different readings, there’s not just one Bible. There’s different metanarratives imposed on it. Different translations, even, different books included that change it’s fundamental literal form. There’s different historical context that you can throw out to substitute your own values, or choose to include. I’m not going to generalize some like, evangelical protestant version of Christianity to encompass the entire religion, despite it being the shittiest version, much as I won’t do the same for Islam, and I refuse to make that snap value judgement just based on someone’s manner of dress. There are plenty of major cultural movements, secular ones, where the majority of participants are shitty people, that’s basically most things, because people suck and we live in a system which rewards them sucking. I’m not gonna chuck it all out or shit on all of it broadly just because of that.