DDL on 10/2/2015 at 12:44

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I wish there were more modern pantheonic religions, really. Hinduism's pretty good, but mostly their gods all boil down to a few ubergods incarnated multiple times.

Pantheons don't have to insist god is awesome, for instance.

One big all-powerful all-loving all-knowing god? Hard to relate to.

"I'm the god of booze, loose morals and morning regret! Don't listen to those other fucking gods, listen to meeee! *hic*" -Much more relatable.


(raised in a pretty christian family, here -can't actually recall I time I ever actually bought it, though. I assume I must've done at some stage, but I have distinct memories of sitting in sunday school thinking "this is a ridiculous waste of valuable playtime. What is this nonsense?" Maybe home-counties indoctrination is just too middle-class for real commitment)

froghawk on 10/2/2015 at 15:43

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Except secular schools also indoctrinate kids with society's belief structures. There's no way around that. When I was in school, I was taught that Columbus was a great guy who discovered America, that the civil rights movement ended with MLK, who made great change purely through passive resistance, and then everything was better. That Rosa Parks decided not to move from her seat on a whim - they left out the part about her being a trained activist who did this regularly. They left out the part about Malcolm X paving the way for MLK with violence. They left out a whole, whole lot.

And that even continued into getting my music degree in college. It was only in the last few years that a white man named Gunther Schuller convinced the western high art music world that Mingus and Ellington really are high art and, "hey, their orchestration really is as good as ours! Miles work with Gil Evans - that's ok now, that's in. But the electric period? No, we don't connect with that. And hip hop? How is that music?" I was supposedly at one of the most progressive schools in the country, and yet the music program was myopically focused on the white art canon and I was hearing this kind of crap. I heard professors ask students what Motown was and if people actually perform Hendrix's music. And why is this? Because all of my schooling, no matter how fringe or progressive it claimed to be, was pushing the cultural agenda, and that cultural agenda just so happened to be deeply racist. Just as history is written by the victors, school will always be a form of indoctrination. You're never going to avoid it.

And yes, pop-atheists and skeptics of the Dawkins/Hitchens school are DEFINITELY replacing religion with atheism, which has become its own dogma with its own problems. It's getting to the point where I find most of the dogmatic atheists I meet even more insufferable than the religious nuts, because they're even more dogmatic in their views and even more convinced of their rightness because 'they have evidence', especially since they use those views to try and justify their own (frequently Islamophobic) views. More on that here: (http://laurencetennant.com/bonds/nolongeraskeptic.html)

Religion is frequently used as a scapegoat, but it's just another excuse to take power. Here is the core of the problem:

Step 1: Some small group of people gets greedy and wants more power (or wants to maintain the power they already have). This is the core of the problem.

Step 2: In order to get the people on their side, even though their agenda is against the people's best interests, they use some form of dogma to sway their emotions.

Step 3: Gain power, profit wildly on the backs of your dogmatic followers.

Examples: American Republicans using the issues of abortion and gay marriage to emotionally manipulate poor people into voting for economic policies that are actively harmful to them. Do the politicians or Fox News care about abortion or gay marriage? I highly doubt it (and obviously religion is used as a tool to facilitate this, as well). Nazis creating a racial issue to band people in a country that had been crippled together, allowing them to gain power. Did the Nazi leadership believe in the racial ideas they were spouting? Absolutely not, and they primarily picked the jews because they were the Bolsheviks.

Notice how almost all mass religious violence is inspired by a particular leader, or comes from a particular sub-group (for example, in the case of ISIS and Islamic violence, the Salafids), and is usually predicated on a rather twisted or myopic interpretation of a source text?

The core theme here is that the dogmatic followers are being used and manipulated by a group that's trying to gain power. It's been this way throughout history, and that's the core problem. You can eliminate one of the excuses they use, but that's not going to stop them from finding another. Give people an emotionally-driven ideology that helps your cause and keeps them in their place, and all of a sudden you're rich and powerful.

froghawk on 10/2/2015 at 16:31

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No, 'the civil rights movement was fought and won through passive resistance, and all subsequent movements should be approached the same way' does not count as an 'incomplete fact' - that is a blatant lie. 'Columbus discovered America' is a blatant lie. And even omission of very important details constitutes manipulative dishonesty for the express purpose of serving the people in power.



That was not my argument at all - I agree, let's remove religion from schools. I'm not opposed to that one bit, but it's just a small part of the problem, and we need to go much further than that.



Of course... and by the same token, the militant religious != most religious people.

And how are you qualifying Nazism as being religious in nature when they were explicitly anti-religion? Yes, most Nazis were Christian, but religion and Nazism were allowed to coexist as a 'temporary compromise' and the party line was opposed to it. Would you argue that the kind of groupthink used to support the invasion of the middle east post-9/11 is also religious in nature? That MOST fascist regimes throughout history have taken power through religion? No, I don't buy it. Maybe these things were somewhat related to religion, but it certainly was not the prime cause, which was political.



Why don't you tell that to all of the civilians getting murdered by American drone strikes in Pakistan? Or all of the civilians that were wiped out by our nuclear strikes in Japan, or by our bomb strikes on German civilian cities? Or all the people that were murdered by dictators we installed in South America? Or how about the people that were killed by radical groups that we armed because they were the enemy of our enemy (and now are our enemies as well)? Sure, that last example constitutes a religious group, but who put the guns in their hands, and why? Again... political motivations.



I'm not saying that at all, because I don't agree with your analogy one bit. I find the underlying secular political motivations behind all of this to be far more dangerous than the religious facade placed on top, so if anything, religion is the knives. Ban the knives? So what! You've still got guns, and they're more powerful.

froghawk on 10/2/2015 at 16:48

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I'm not exactly proposing that we do that, because it's impossible. You're proposing that we remove religion from school to keep people from teaching their erroneous beliefs to others - and I'd agree that that's a good thing, especially when those beliefs serve the people in power (which religious beliefs do, as do the racial examples I brought up). The core problem is that no matter what you teach people, you're telling a story, and that story is always going to have some spin on it. Even if you try to remove religion from the curriculum, if a religious person is teaching, they're liable to put their spin on things.

You could give oppressed minority groups input into curriculum in an attempt to keep it as objective as possible. Have an independent group evaluate curriculum for bias and factual inaccuracy. Of course, this could create its own set of problems and also lead in a fascist direction, so I'm not sure there's a good solution. Even if you make sure all of your teachers are properly educated before allowing them to teach, then whose narrative are you teaching them? Someone's always going to provide a dominant narrative, and parts of it will always be untrue (or at least subject to perspective issues).

And therefore it's a moot point to me, because the education problem is a symptom of larger power imbalances, and you need to tackle the core of the problem to truly eradicate the symptoms. So I don't have an answer, but the deepest root of the problem that I see is people feeling the need to gain power. If we can stop people from feeling the need to do that, then an enormous swathe of problems will be fixed. I'll be the first to admit that I have no idea how to go about that!



Haha, what? How did those two things get conflated? No, not at all. That list I gave had nothing to do with militant atheism specifically - just general secular motivation / political power grabs.

froghawk on 10/2/2015 at 17:04

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Absolutely! They are a terrible idea. The only reason I'm arguing is that the religious narrative is very easy to fight, because some of the things they're teaching are so blatantly ridiculous, whereas the more subtle secular cultural narratives get a bit more deeply entrenched. I don't have numbers on this so I could be way off base, but you see a lot of people turning away from religion after growing up and realizing it's nonsense, whereas you almost never see people realize that they've been taught a narrative that perpetuates racial oppression and change their beliefs on that. And at the end of the day, there's a secular motivation behind every seemingly religious motivation, even if that motive is only present in the leadership, so I highly doubt you'd see any significant change if you got rid of religion. I'd be happy to be wrong about that, but I see people raging against religion as the core problem far too often while ignoring all of the secular/political/historical context for particular situations.

For example, I mentioned salafism - I highly doubt they would have been able to take power if the middle east hadn't been arbitrarily divided into countries ignoring cultural boundaries, followed by Israel coming in and displacing a ton of people with western support (and enough foreign aid from us to develop a huge military), and all of the recent occupations/drone strikes/etc. It's easy to point to Islam and 'oh, what a violent religion they have!' while ignoring all the imperial/colonial factors that created the violent Salafid mindset. It's easy to point to the Hebdo bombing and look at religion while ignoring the violent French colonial history in Algeria and resulting tensions. Or even to claim that the rise of Nazism was caused by racism, instead of the way the country was crippled by the British after WW1 and the fact that the Jewish population tended towards leftism. But which do you think is the real underlying cause behind all of these examples? Religion/ideology, or imperialist mindsets?