[Lie]

Originally Posted by sleeper

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

Okay, well, let me put it like this: organized religion, is, by nature, something that requires a certain amount of mental and social suppression. If this is close to what you're getting at or implying, I would agree. But the wild card is that beliefs, even within an organized religion, can never truly be controlled or suppressed, at least not without a person's consent. When it is with a person's consent, well, honestly I think we all, at some time or another, use something or other to suppress certain thoughts, information, eventualities, etc. If people ever succeed in somehow being 100% unique in and of themselves (and it's sort of mind-boggling to even think about what that means), well, it's not just because they chose to drop religion.

But the bottom line is that I think to remove that element of natural self-suppression totally almost speaks of acseticism and therefore brings us full circle back into the realm of perfecting a self to the point of dogmatizing. I think I've known enough people of various religions and been through enough of that kind of thing myself to conclude that religion doesn't hold any kind of definite (spiritual) power over people. There is a certain type of "religious" person that tends to annoy me, or a philosophy of religion, if you will, that I think people use like a spiritual drug, or a tool of denial and coping, etc., but I think that a) in certain doses or circumstances, this is not always a bad thing, and b) this is not something that is defined by the act of "belonging" to an actual religion. I've met declared atheists who have displayed this same trait, so when people rail on against "religion" in general it often sounds incredibly inconsiderate and ignorant to me.

It's also true that other factors may hold as much sway over a culture as religion or religious beliefs. For example, there's the ever-popular worn-out hokey comparison of television in the American world to being synonymous with religion. In a sense, that's true, or at least that kind of cultural phenomenon shows how religion can work on a social or political level. But in spite of this kind of manipulation, or the use of physical force, for example, in the Muslim world to enforce laws that are essentially dictated by religious doctrine, you can't really get into peoples' minds and find out what it is they really think or really believe. Even if you put two people in separate rooms and read the same parts of the Bible to them and they both appear to absorb the information directly and "believe," you can bet that there are probably two different things going on in their minds, perhaps not in terms of spiritual brain process, but in terms of what mental faculties are and are not employed or abandoned. I think you tend to realize and find these things out when you start asking people in detail about their beliefs. People interpret everything differently, and from a totally scientific standpoint, I think some people might not be able to "handle" religion the way that some people just can't "handle" alcohol, whereas for other people it may be beneficial (I realize I'm stretching it here, but whatever).

So, like you, I probably would categorize a certain group of people who are "religious" and therefore share this common denominator, but I think it has less to do with actual religion than some people might think. Religion often means all different kinds of things to different people. Sometimes the act of going to church is simply something sacrficed for family relations. I'm not saying that I personally find that sort of act very admirable, but I can imagine certain circumstances under which it would certainly be no big deal. I will readily admit that if I'm talking to someone and they mention something very serious about themselves being religious, I have a natural "oh shit" reaction, but that's more on the level of "what can I say to this person, what can I not say, what kind of conversation can we have here." I actually think a lot of people in the U.S. are religious in a sort of a back-of-the-mind kind of way, which in some circumstances make it more annoying, in other cases less so.

With all of that said, I will also admit that I am aware of the real-life monotony of the way actual religion is conducted, that people who are religious rarely seem to care about the intricacies of their own beliefs, and that it's one of the easiest ways to put on the blinkers and just drift through life. But I prefer to see people as seperate from their religious associations (even though I am interested in the way they act in relation to religion) and see what they do and think and act like because of that, and I have seen some incredible anomalies. I can't imagine not thinking of it like that – it almost seems to forfeit any criticism of the way people themselves act as well as an opportunity to observe how people act IN RELATION to their religions. To put as much weight on the idea of religion and make it synonymous with so many different things would almost seem to challenge the definition of my own uniqueness (you're not the only one who feels cheesy right now). I mean, it sounds cheesy, but it's true.

I also do have a sort of mental funny bone that tends to be triggered by people attacking or blaming religion for things that people themselves are very clearly reponsible for, or displaying a certain amount of (perceived or real) typically liberal shallowness that involves harping on other peoples' personal beliefs as a method of argument in itself, which I see as being about as shallow and irrelevant as any argument that religion + disciple could ever achieve. It's just a sort of very obvious hypocrisy that bothers me.