Hi Path,
I know your game! You are just being a typical woman!! Trying to talk me into submission!!
Sorry.
I cannot escape my X chromosomes. LOL (Or is it other chromosomes? My whole family is chatty. My grandfather could climb on a soapbox and deliver a rant that would make any woman run for the hills.)
crucially they do have a collective persona as observed from the outside. The US and Islamic nations can be fairly labelled as having governments that openly make appeals to a God given righteousness. And this is what I firmly set my sights on.
I think we must be very careful about how much we perceive a collective persona because of our biases, versus what is actually there. I may be more cautious than most in this regard, because in my field you are slammed if you generalize too much. There is always the awareness that any culture is not really a "thing." It is a heuristic tool to describe a bunch of relationships and trends/patterns. On close investigation, things always fall apart, yet we still need some way to lump stuff for certain analytical purposes. So I understand where you are coming from, but I disagree that the collective persona is as clear or strong as you propose. Even take another long-standing, mainstream Protestant denomination like the Anglican/Episcopal church and compare to Southern Baptist and you'll find really different stuff. And remember, doctrine is not the same as church culture. So while you have the "official" line (ideal culture), that is not the real culture. I find that the real cultures of Christian denominations and churches tend to be far, far, more different from the ideal cultures. While there are many similarities in doctrine, ritual, etc. there are mostly differences in terms of cultural practice (ethics, trends in individual belief, etc.).
As for the US and Islamic nations appealing to God, I too feel this is deeply problematic. I am a firm believer in separation of church and state. Unfortunately, it is not like it's anything new or particularly tied to monotheistic religions either. It is tied to state-based government. There's a whole history of other cultures that had similar conflations of political and religious power with radically different conceptualizations of God(s) and whatnot.
The trouble is I think that the "sheep" of such flocks hold a lot more power and influence than you give them credit. They elected George W Bush..... twice.
This is only because much of the rest of America is apathetic and politically lazy. They only elected George Bush by a very narrow margin (if you buy that it was a legitimate election), and they are only a subset of the Republican constituancy. With a two-party system, the Republican party is able to, by default of any other possibility, unite the religious sheep with the economic sheep. There's just a whole lot more going on here than religion.
But according to all polls I have seen around 75% of Americans claim affiliation to a religion and the swing is away from traditional moderate beliefs to more extreme, hardline interpretations of Christian doctrine.
Actually, those polls do virtually nothing in terms of actual meaning socially and culturally. Many Americans claim affiliation by virtue of being baptized when they were an infant (and haven't set foot in a church since), or going at Easter and Christmas, or because "my whole family is X." Even the Christians (mostly the fundamentalist ones) lament the loss of American religiosity. Most people, from what I've seen, are barely impacted by religion in this country. Their lives revolve around consumerism and nationalism.
And the swing is in two opposite poles, not one. There is a big swing toward people just plain leaving religion and becoming "spiritual but not religious" and there is an opposite swing in people becoming more fundamentalist. This is to be expected. The relative freedom of people who break from doctrine into their own spiritual practice is threatening to people who are insecure in their faith, who then cling more tenanciously to it and make it even more extreme in an effort to strengthen it. Which in turn makes even more moderate people uncomfortable in that religion, so more people leave. There is also an underlying current of why people convert to the more fundamentalist sects. An observation I've made (though I haven't researched) is that many of the most fundamentalist people were most out of self-control before conversion. Your folks with untreated mental illnesses, alcoholism, anger management problems, and so forth tend to obtain a kind of psychological assistance by a rigidly structured community. I saw this in my own grandfather, who had severe anger management issues and problems stemming from being a Vietnam vet. Becoming Mormon made him a better person socially. It gave him the structure and support he needed to overcome a lot of his problems. Later in his life, as he became more secure, he could let the Mormonism go and become more open while still retaining some of the lessons he'd been more or less forced to learn through the structure of the church. I mean no offense to fundamentalist churches, but this is what I have noticed in many cases.
I suspect that if we had better social, health, and economic support in our country, we would not have so many fundamentalists. If we had more of a sense of community and security, these drives would not demand some people meet them in intolerant denominations. Remember, people need safety to be open to learning and rational thinking. So long as our society peddles fear and insecurity, it will have fundamentalism and intolerance. We first must be rid of real insecurity, we must address people's real fears-- these are mostly to do with physical safety, meeting social support needs, health care and disease, and, perhaps the biggest issue- economic stability. People feel so out of control of their own lives in the US (and indeed, their lives are run both through work and consumerism by corporations) that it is not surprising that they wish to feel that these huge forces will be battled for them by God. The alternative is overwhelming to them- that WE must fix these problems.
I would argue that such people would have found the same things had these books not existed. Perhaps even quicker and with less struggle and confusion.
I agree, though I don't think the struggle or confusion is necessarily bad. Struggle and confusion can lead to growth. And even if we did not have these books, it wouldn't matter. The problem isn't the books, it is what prompted people to use them as they do. We can continue to externalize the problem (it is the books, it is religion, it is the elites, it is politics, etc.) but the reality is that these things are a reflection of an internal problem. Society and culture are aggregated patterns and trends of individuals, and while they socially condition us, they are never unmalleable. We must not lose sight of what the driver is-- individual human beings.
[Dawkins] is the 'underdog' in the big debate and I have a tendency to back the underdog.
LOL. Atheism is not the underdog in anthropology. My position is far more the underdog. And my position is the underdog in greater US society too. I mean, I'm basically just a hippie that was born too late saying "peace, love." I'm against consumerism and the materialism that makes our economy tick. I'm against the nationalism that makes our politics tick. I'm against the separatist doctrine that makes much of our religion tick. And yet I am, at my core, spirit. I deeply, deeply experience God and being a part of It. Which makes my own colleagial group of mostly atheistic humanists uncomfortable with me too. LOL I'm not alone in my position, but I'm part of a very, very small group. I can only hope that group grows. I can say one thing... we'd find a whole lot of peace, joy, and love if it did. I'm by no means perfect, but I am loving. No offense to atheism, but while I have felt many atheists I know to be loving, the position of atheism is cold and not loving at all. Unless it is a Buddhist flavor of atheism (or something similar). But I fail to find the love in Dawkins, and so I find his stuff useless. In fact, his books have only heightened the fear and anxiety of fundamentalists and driven them further into their irrationality. I am pragmatic about change in human consciousness and society. I've learned that loving people works. Unity works. People feel safe when they feel loved, and the safety opens up their mind. I've seen it work time and again. I have not yet seen Dawkins' way of approaching the issue help anything. So far as I can tell, he has a good career and he's sold a lot of books by playing into the same system of fear and separatism, but just at the other end of the spectrum from the fundamentalists.
My own motto to myself is, " do not be afraid to be wrong". i try to listen and adapt my overview as new information becomes available. Nothing in this whole wide multiverse is static, why should I make an exception for my views!!
I agree!
So they are so unrepresentative that they hardly figure.
I choose to be more hopeful. I've seen people become more open- people I meet on the street, at airports, my students, my co-workers- because I am committed to loving them and to bringing back a sense of wonder at life and the earth. I may be unrepresentative and hardly figure, but I did not make any impact whatsoever when I simply was depressed, anxious, and angry over the state of the US and the world. Now, I recognize the injustices of the system and try to fix them. Even if that is only getting to one person a year, it's more than the alternative. And it gives me hope.
I simply could not survive when I did not hope in this way. I must hope that the small but rapidly growing population of people who are striving toward awareness, sustainability, unity and love is the vanguard of a much greater movement. It does no harm to have this hope, for it is not a space of complacency but of joyful action.
My hope is that technology will re-instate the idea of community identity on a global level.
I would put forth that technology is only tools. It cannot reinstate anything, just as a knife cannot prepare dinner on its own. We must use technology for the vision of global identity. Without changing the consciousness with which we use tools, we are stuck.
If people are made aware of how they are being religiously duped it is a tiny step to see how they are being politically manipulated.
It happens just as well (if not better), in reverse. Better still, there are ways to cut to the chase and simply awaken people to unity directly. The rest follows automatically as they become self-reflective. I've found that by emotionally connecting people with others and the earth, they automatically begin to question religion and politics and their own role in it. It's a gentle approach that generally is able to get around the defensiveness you run up against if you just attack religion or politics.
By talking to people round the world we come to realise we are all the same, with the same needs and desires and that it is not us that create the divisions, but our leaders who milk us and kill us with divide and conquer ideologies.
YES!!! (And also by just seeing, really seeing, others.)
I think a key to doing so is to persuade people that they will not find God in a book or preaching from a pulpit. And that if only they talk to each other across geographical and cultural boundaries they would realise they are all brothers and sisters.
I whole-heartedly agree. But you see, you needn't get rid of God, ritual, and the rest to show people that God isn't found there. You only have to reveal to people the difference in themselves, that they internally feel, between connection and religion. The rest follows on its own. People then, even if they remain in a religious tradition, are open to others, having recognized the difference. And again, for most people, when they experience a sincerely loving person up close and personal, they begin to see that the differences in belief are meaningless in the light of this love.
Communism, of the Stalinist or Maoist type were religions. No crucifix with Jesus nailed to it but endless statue alters of their divine leaders.
Only if you expand your definition of religion to one that is generally outside the acceptable definitions. Here, it is perhaps more apt to say that religions and something like Stalinist Communism are both philosophies, and have associated cultures. My point was that your original argument tied up religion, spirituality and God and said these were the problems- people needed to ditch a belief in God to overcome divisiveness. I am pointing out that God has nothing to do with the matter. It is the attachment of individual identity to philosophy that is the problem.
Religion has defined and maintains these stereotypes.
Some of them yes, and some no. Religion does not cause consumerism, for example. The identity as a consumer is one of the first things kids learn, and one of the most imprisoning.
**Cacophony of claxons, sirens and bells rings** Presenter with designer suit and brilliant white sparkly toothy smile stapled to his face walks forward and hands Path of One the prize for using the word "reify" in a debate.
Why, thank you, thank you. [Does little bow.] Now, who to thank. I thank my ninth-grade English teacher who made us memorize countless SAT words...
Maybe we should start one!!
The thought has crossed my mind, to be honest. I am starting a non-profit this year, but it's more immediately practical- an institute for focusing on solving social and environmental problems with grassroots, local solutions. But I do have grand hopes for what might come out of those local solutions once enough momentum is reached...
How about the Dept. of Peace campaign? That seems like it might be a good one?
