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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.
This is the most satisfying definition I think I've ever heard for religion. Most have trouble with the fact that there exist "religions" like (some of) Taoism and Confucianism that don't rely on the existence of divine deities per se.
Not all religions have a commitment to the supernatural in this sense. Theravada Buddhism has always remained a classic “atheistic religion.” You can split hairs further if you want to just call it a moral philosophy, worldview, philosophy of life, etc., but as a religion it’s still suitable.
Morality is still the major game religions play, and only because we’re never going to recover the original trappings of a pious life, circa, say 300 B.C. The demoniac theory of possession is gone for all time and has been taken over by neuroscience.
Religion today is full of items we no longer pick off the shelf of our holy books. We walk with what is relevant or want to be true in the present day and then claim that’s what the religion is and has always been.
No it isn't. There are exorcists running around today. People go to them.
Oh yeah. People do that. But if I ask you if you start hearing voices in your head one day are you going to go to an exorcist or a neurologist, I’m pretty confident about what kind of answer I’m going to hear.
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I'm not even sure it holds for the pre-Christian world? The philosophers at the time criticized the traditional depictions of gods as immoral and you could go to a philosophy school or learn something like Stoicism parallel to your existing religion and not replacing it. Religions did have moral content (the first commandment being to be good to your god so they'll be good to you) but they don't seem to have been totalizing.
The inordinate focus on morality in all dimensions seems to be a particularly Judeo-Christian thing.
The Greek religion at least did seem to have a moral code- woefully incomplete by our standards, but the gods were believed to punish transgressions against sacred hospitality, certain sexual taboos, cannibalism, etc quite harshly.
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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.
Epicurus got away with it. So ancient Greece yes.
Epicurus claimed to believe in gods, though. His gods were just non-interventionist. It's also clear from the works of Philodemus that early Epicureanism had a much more accommodationist approach to traditional religious rituals than later Roman Epicureans like Lucretius did.
Heck, even the Stoics got away with some "blasphemous" ideas, since they seemed to believe that temples and other houses of worship were unnecessary, and that the Logos/God/Zeus could be found out in the natural world. They were pious and impious at the same time.
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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.
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