View Single Post
Old 04-12-2006, 10:37 PM   #130
sleeper
Minion of Satan
 
sleeper's Avatar
 
Posts: 8,799
Default

i see exactly what youre saying. weve already sort of covered the idea of politics as religion, but i get what youre saying with religions as poltics. a religious belief is fine if it is contained on a personal level, and politics is never personal. i

but then again maybe religion is always beyond the personal and takes on broader, quasi-political currents. i mean that its, by definition, institutional and deals with things, metaphysical or physical, that are outside of oneself. beliefs (about god or otherwise) can be personal, but maybe not religious beliefs. this is just semantic though. i dont know, im just trying to weasal out the difference between a belief and a religious belief. i mean if only one person idiosyncratically believes something, it cant be "religious." its just a "belief", am i wrong. i dont know. i just dont see religion and belief as being interchangable, i just cant figure out why


yeah i agree that theres much more value or need attached to identity in this age. or it seems that way at least, ive only been around for 20 years so i cant really say with any definitiveness. but i find this whole idea of identity in our time really interesting. theres certainly no shortage of material to work with on this notion given the kind of 3 ring circus we have going on outsider of our doors all hours of the day. i feel kind of cheesy or silly openly displaying this interest because of how much this topic has become the subject of grandiloquent eulogizing by all these bloggers and other douchebags and everthing (from my experiences, at least), but its still endlessly ponderable and will only become more so


we kind of talked about this last thing before as i remember. of course there are a panoply of different beliefs and values within religions and its always risky indiscriminately lumping things together in one supposedly representative category, i agree, but there is, as i think i said, a common denominator with all of them, theyre not all 100% unique in and of themselves, and that denominator is significant. i mean if were talking about "religion", its not wrong to say that they all, being religions, share something in common beyond name. i dont really want to get into what i perceive that to be (unless you want me to) because i can see myself coming off as pretty chauvinistic or whatever. i think you maybe have a kind of exaggerated perception of where im coming from on this. i joke about it this way a lot so i cant blame you, but its not like i think anyone is who checks the "religion" box, so to speak, is automatically the scourge of mankind or a horrible person, i just believe that it, alone, means something. something really important, actually. they really cant just be tagged "belief" and afforded these kind of all inclusive protections. thats kind of what im challenging here

 
sleeper is offline