wingdingspringking
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User ID: 1348
wingdingspringking
7d ago
I guess it's not all that surprising though if you've never encountered a religion like that. It's the quintessential black swan fallacy. If every religion you've seen has a deity, you'll assume that it's an essential feature, not a useful adaptation.
wingdingspringking
7d ago
Why do progressives still want to fight dead battlegrounds? For the same reason that Jehovah's witnesses keep knocking on doors. It's the nature of religion. Keep doing what is "good", so that you yourself remain "good".
A lot of people seem to think of a religion as something that addresses big spiritual questions like death and meaning. But I would argue that the defining feature of a religion is a monopoly on morality, just as the defining feature of a government is a monopoly on violence. And because of this societal confusion about what constitutes a religion, the "woke" religion has been able to fly under the radar without calling itself what it actually is.
When you look at it this way, it makes a lot more sense. When you believe in the absolute morality of what you are doing, the odds don't matter. The pay doesn't matter. Nothing matters besides doing what is "right". It doesn't take too many of this kind of true believer to tip the scales on an issue, since they are willing to push the cause forward at great personal cost (friendships, jobs, family, etc).
I think historically this is probably why most states were unwilling to tolerate other religious systems anywhere near the levers of power. The monopolies of violence and morality are most stable when they walk hand in hand. But here we are, buried under centuries of enlightenment thinking, unable to see something so obvious that a peasant from the middle ages would have likely scoffed in disbelief before shuffling away to thresh more wheat. So why do progressives still want to fight dead battlegrounds? Short answer - John Fucking Locke.
How many societies allowed open condemnation of the gods by philosophers? Ancient Greece, maybe. But even there, if you pushed too far, you ended up drinking hemlock.
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