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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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Max Lynn Stackhouse, when defining religion, called a religion "a comprehensive worldview or 'metaphysical moral vision' that is accepted as binding because it is held to be in itself basically true and just even if all dimensions of it cannot be either fully confirmed or refuted."

This is an absurdly broad definition of "religion." Under this definition why isn't utilitarianism, for example, a religion? Libertarianism? Heck, philosophical liberalism? Kantianism? Virtue ethics? If your definition of "religion" is so broad that it contains not just those things thought of traditionally as religion but functionally any normative system I have to question the utility of your definition.

Restrict Atheist speech in the same way that religious speech is restricted. One should be just as loathe to say that there is no God as one is to say that there is only one. The traditional point of conflict is Biology class, which I think is a case of religions failing to adapt to facts, one can make evolution about the way the world works rather than how it started quite easily.

What about people whose sincerely held beliefs cannot be easily squared with the facts of how evolution works? Is school biology class required to be scrupulously neutral between "Animals evolved the way they did due to natural selection processes without any divine input", "Animals evolved the way they did in accordance with a plan set out by God", and "There's no such thing as evolution, all the evidence of it is a lie told by Satan"? And what about non-Christian or non-Abrahamic accounts of how animals and the world came to be? Are schools required to teach all of them equally?

Restrict claims of religious faith to those who hold genuine religious beliefs more strictly. The phenomenon of fake religious trolling by atheist-Jews claiming that abortion-on-demand is a religious rite, or fakakta Satanists putting up statues of the Dark Lord because someone else put up one of the Ten Commandments, needs to reined in. How do we do that without instituting Santorum-Iran? I'm not sure.

I am in need of clarification. Do you think putting up statues of the Dark Lord or a religious rite for abortion on demand are things that cannot, due to their nature, be sincerely held religious beliefs or merely that no people who claim they are sincerely held beliefs are being truthful? If the former, what about them means they cannot be? Especially if "wokism" is a religion, entitled to all the protections you mention here. If the latter, can you give me the evidence you apparently have of insincerity by all the people espousing this belief?

More generally, do we really want courts (more) involved in the question of sincerity? It seems like this could easily go in a direction that would be against what you want. "We find defendant's beliefs that his religion requires him to avoid entanglements in gay weddings to be an insincere cover for his hate for gay people. Bake the cake bigot."

Make and allow for more non-sectarian expressions of religious belief. I was an Eagle Scout, and for years the Chaplain's Aide of our troop, I've given tons of prayers in the name of a faux-Lenape "Great Spirit" that stood in for the member's of my troop for our personal beliefs in God, Allah, Jehovah, or Krishna. That worked, we all understood what was meant. How do we develop that secular stand-in that would work universally? Maybe we choose to honor Amerindian beliefs as a nation, invoke the Great Spirit? We should expect our presidents and our politicians to invoke a God, and assume everyone has the maturity to understand that it also means their God. Make America Believe Again.

From my atheist perspective there is no such thing as a "non-sectarian" expression of religious belief. Their are perhaps ones that are more or less inclusive of various kinds of beliefs but there is no such thing as a religiously neutral expression of religious belief.

This is an absurdly broad definition of "religion." Under this definition why isn't utilitarianism, for example, a religion? Libertarianism? Heck, philosophical liberalism? Kantianism? Virtue ethics? If your definition of "religion" is so broad that it contains not just those things thought of traditionally as religion but functionally any normative system I have to question the utility of your definition.

Welcome to the world of legal disputes when it comes to question of religion. For instance in 1961 during Torcaso v. Watkins the Supreme Court indeed defined religion very broadly in the famous footnote number eleven.

Among religions in this country which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God are Buddhism, Taoism, Ethical Culture, Secular Humanism and others” (Torcaso, supra, 495, note 11).

I like how James Lindsay thinks about religion as defined by its theology. The role of religious theology is to organize related epistemology, sociology, axiology and cosmology in one united view, it gives it a direction and coherence. In that sense theology incorporates ontological definitions of what is reality and what is human, it explores people's moral duties and ways to organize in society including in accordance to its system of knowledge. So for instance in Christianity the world and people were created by god, they have moral duty in accordance to god's laws as revealed in holy scripture, they should organize themselves in churches overseen by clergy that provide specific guidance for local policies and they should study scripture and god's creation for further expansion of knowledge of god and the world.

If I would take upon myself constructing similar "woke" theology, it could look as something like this: Our [social] reality is a social construct imposed by society that was is in turn created by man in his attempt to bring his ideas into practice - The Theory and Praxis dichotomy. Our current [social] reality is very imperfect as it was created by privileged people who posses privilege of certain class, race, sex, sexual orientation in their various intersections and who oppress the population in order to reproduce this imperfect society. Our moral duty is to criticize the current society, center the marginalized people who posses both slave and master side of the knowledge in order to promote Social Justice. In that sense the knowledge as well as other things needs to be looked upon through lenses of power relations of oppressor/oppressed. Our society should organize so that we create special departments to promote Social Justice and promote Social Justice in holistic approach ranging from schools to corporations in order to engage the population in the process of conscietization where everybody will able to engage in dialectical Theory/Praxis process where they act and then reflect upon results of their action through The Theory to perfect the society.