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What definition do you use? I don't think people arguing woke = religion are necessarily deriving that conclusion from a rigorous first-principles definition of

by nvm0n2 3y ago

What definition do you use? I don't think people arguing woke = religion are necessarily deriving that conclusion from a rigorous first-principles definition of religion. It's more like a collection of observations that sum up to a suspicion: 1. Woke people think that white people are born into sin due to the deeds of their ancestors, which is the doctrine of original sin. 2. This sin can be cleansed by becoming an "ally", "doing the work" etc, this is a bit like conversion. 3. Related: this notion that people are born pure and it's police/law (society) that corrupts them, so if you get rid of the police then crime will go away, this is like the Christian teaching of the Fall. 4. Trans stuff is an assertion that people have a sort of (gendered) soul distinct from their body. 5. The obsession with the virtue of minorities is similar to the story of the Good Samaritan and how Christian's are supposed to valorize the meek and the mild. and so on. There's more of these especially when you get into their actions and not just beliefs, which yeah, do start to resemble Spanish Inquisition albeit with less physical torture thank goodness. So it's a walks like a duck quacks like a duck argument.

flir 3y ago
I think the people saying "religion" actually mean "belief system" (philosophy, religion, political ideology, economic system, scientific paradigm) but they don't have the right language so they're reaching for "religion" as the most obvious example of a belief system. It's just woolly language hiding a very obvious observation: people tend to adopt cohesive ideological packages rather than assembling personalized belief systems à la carte. For example there's no particular reason why "pro-choice" and "climate change" should be bundled together (if anything you'd expect conservatives to be the ones trying to conserve the environment, and progressives to be the ones trying to tarmac the planet) but they have a pretty strong correlation in US politics.
- nvm0n2 3y ago
  It's more precise than that. Pro-choice/climate being bundled together is just the ordinary left/right (or non-left) divide, nothing special there. Progressives see motherhood as conservative-coded and anti-feminist, so control over that to be progress, they also assume anything academics say must be true because they're fellow progressives and "scientists" who thus personify Progress itself. But the people talking about religion mean something more than just an arbitrary ideological package, they mean it has specific elements that are surprisingly close to the beliefs found in Christianity, rebranded. Like the elements in my list.
  - flir 3y ago
    > Pro-choice/climate being bundled together is just the ordinary left/right (or non-left) divide, nothing special there. Are you sure? They don't track together nearly so strongly in, say, France. They don't naturally, or necessarily, go together IMO. In your list, items 1 and 3 contradict each other. Item 4 I read as Cartesian dualism. Mind and body, no soul required (I also seriously doubt your interpretation). Item 5... the Parable of the Good Samaritan isn't about being meek and mild, it's about obeying the Golden Rule, and the Good Samaritan is atypical: he doesn't represent all Samartians. Jesus wasn't making a point about the virtue of Samartians in general. Honestly, I think you're building a straw man here.
    - stakhanov 3y ago
      I don't know about others, but when I compare environmentalism, wokism, social justice warriordom, etc. to religions, I definitely do mean more than just "belief system". If I meant belief system, I would use that expression. My vocabulary is not that poor. I took care not to strictly subsume them under the term of "religion". Specifically, in my initial post I said "overlap with psychology behind religion", I said that people who hold these beliefs are "religious" -- the use of the noun "religion" as an adjective lessens the character of the subsumption so that one reading is that it's just pointing out an analogy or similarity rather than stating a strict subsumption. And I also predicted that these things all have the potential to undergo a similar historical development as religions did, that they have the potential to bring about something similar to the Spanish Inquisition, or the witch hunts. Not all belief systems have that potency. So what I'm doing is pointing out an analogy that comes with lots of implications, not all of which I strictly believe to be true, but all of them are things that I find at least interesting to consider. For example, using the Wikipedia definition of "religion", besides implying a belief system, a religion also comes with behaviours, practices, morals, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations. -- Environmentalism, wokism and social justice warriordom definitely all come with practices as well as just beliefs. Morals and ethics are more than just beliefs. Environmentalism, for example, clearly has prophecies ("doomsday cult" would be an interesting analogy), and it's interesting to think about what that does to the human psyche. There is a lot in religion that trumps rationality in terms of its salience and psychological potency. And precisely this ability to trump rationality makes religions quite a different animal from belief systems that are strictly grounded in rationality. For example, if the divide between the political right and left were just about "free market economy vs communist-style planned economy with redistribution" or "low taxes" vs "high taxes" or "small government" vs "big government", it would be about belief systems strictly grounded in rationality. But now add into the mix the thought that many on the political right are associated with established religions and on the political left things like environmentalism, wokism and social justice warriordom increasingly start looking like religions. Now the distinction between the political right and the left starts looking like a religious divide, and that's a whole other level. It used to be "We can't agree on the proper economic system." Now it's "Help! My identity is under attack!" When I was young, I saw most religious people as bigots, while the message I mostly got from areligious people was that they were preaching tolerance, pluralism, minority protection, etc. But now, doing my best to adopt a stance of tolerance myself, my impression is that the people who think of themselves as areligious have constructed grand narratives that increasingly look like religions, without even noticing that particular analogy, and have increasingly taken to bigotry themselves. That's my central thesis here.

by nvm0n2 3y ago

flir 3y ago

I think the people saying "religion" actually mean "belief system" (philosophy, religion, political ideology, economic system, scientific paradigm) but they don't have the right language so they're reaching for "religion" as the most obvious example of a belief system. It's just woolly language hiding a very obvious observation: people tend to adopt cohesive ideological packages rather than assembling personalized belief systems à la carte. For example there's no particular reason why "pro-choice" and "climate change" should be bundled together (if anything you'd expect conservatives to be the ones trying to conserve the environment, and progressives to be the ones trying to tarmac the planet) but they have a pretty strong correlation in US politics.

nvm0n2 3y ago
It's more precise than that. Pro-choice/climate being bundled together is just the ordinary left/right (or non-left) divide, nothing special there. Progressives see motherhood as conservative-coded and anti-feminist, so control over that to be progress, they also assume anything academics say must be true because they're fellow progressives and "scientists" who thus personify Progress itself. But the people talking about religion mean something more than just an arbitrary ideological package, they mean it has specific elements that are surprisingly close to the beliefs found in Christianity, rebranded. Like the elements in my list.
- flir 3y ago
  > Pro-choice/climate being bundled together is just the ordinary left/right (or non-left) divide, nothing special there. Are you sure? They don't track together nearly so strongly in, say, France. They don't naturally, or necessarily, go together IMO. In your list, items 1 and 3 contradict each other. Item 4 I read as Cartesian dualism. Mind and body, no soul required (I also seriously doubt your interpretation). Item 5... the Parable of the Good Samaritan isn't about being meek and mild, it's about obeying the Golden Rule, and the Good Samaritan is atypical: he doesn't represent all Samartians. Jesus wasn't making a point about the virtue of Samartians in general. Honestly, I think you're building a straw man here.
  - stakhanov 3y ago
    I don't know about others, but when I compare environmentalism, wokism, social justice warriordom, etc. to religions, I definitely do mean more than just "belief system". If I meant belief system, I would use that expression. My vocabulary is not that poor. I took care not to strictly subsume them under the term of "religion". Specifically, in my initial post I said "overlap with psychology behind religion", I said that people who hold these beliefs are "religious" -- the use of the noun "religion" as an adjective lessens the character of the subsumption so that one reading is that it's just pointing out an analogy or similarity rather than stating a strict subsumption. And I also predicted that these things all have the potential to undergo a similar historical development as religions did, that they have the potential to bring about something similar to the Spanish Inquisition, or the witch hunts. Not all belief systems have that potency. So what I'm doing is pointing out an analogy that comes with lots of implications, not all of which I strictly believe to be true, but all of them are things that I find at least interesting to consider. For example, using the Wikipedia definition of "religion", besides implying a belief system, a religion also comes with behaviours, practices, morals, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations. -- Environmentalism, wokism and social justice warriordom definitely all come with practices as well as just beliefs. Morals and ethics are more than just beliefs. Environmentalism, for example, clearly has prophecies ("doomsday cult" would be an interesting analogy), and it's interesting to think about what that does to the human psyche. There is a lot in religion that trumps rationality in terms of its salience and psychological potency. And precisely this ability to trump rationality makes religions quite a different animal from belief systems that are strictly grounded in rationality. For example, if the divide between the political right and left were just about "free market economy vs communist-style planned economy with redistribution" or "low taxes" vs "high taxes" or "small government" vs "big government", it would be about belief systems strictly grounded in rationality. But now add into the mix the thought that many on the political right are associated with established religions and on the political left things like environmentalism, wokism and social justice warriordom increasingly start looking like religions. Now the distinction between the political right and the left starts looking like a religious divide, and that's a whole other level. It used to be "We can't agree on the proper economic system." Now it's "Help! My identity is under attack!" When I was young, I saw most religious people as bigots, while the message I mostly got from areligious people was that they were preaching tolerance, pluralism, minority protection, etc. But now, doing my best to adopt a stance of tolerance myself, my impression is that the people who think of themselves as areligious have constructed grand narratives that increasingly look like religions, without even noticing that particular analogy, and have increasingly taken to bigotry themselves. That's my central thesis here.