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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   20051 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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Religion has always been a part of political identity. Atheists have a hard time with the concept. I recall Hitchens telling an irish joke, the punchline of which was "Protestant atheist or catholic atheist?" He then waxed eloquent as only Hitchens could about what a ridiculous mental construct that was. But it never made any practical sense. The Irish don't hate Protestants, they hate the Scots-Irish. They don't like catholic or agnostic Scots-Irish any more than protestant ones. Religion isn't an a la carte thing, it's part of a cultural and often ethnic identity. Whatever your personal metaphysical beliefs are does not really move the needle for anyone but you.

Religion isn't an a la carte thing, it's part of a cultural and often ethnic identity. Whatever your personal metaphysical beliefs are does not really move the needle for anyone but you.

This really depends on time and place, in the Roman Empire, Historical China the Modern West and many others Religion absolutely is/was a la carte because it's not the baseline value of society so people are free to mix and match as long as they maintain a few festivals and civic virtues. In highly sectarian societies like Northern Ireland and Lebanon it's exactly as you say but whether it is or isn't depends on time and place and is definitely not a universal.

Hadn't heard that story about Hitchens, but there's something similar with Dawkins. And, speaking as myself, it's very damn skating on thin ice for a couple of Englishmen to tut-tut about the Paddies like that, when youse are the fuckers who made such distinctions so important in the first place!

Just because your society now has dumped any pretence about being more than vaguely culturally Christian (but it's still important that you're ex-Anglicans not ex-Roman Catholics, though to be fair to Hitchens he did seem to be as opposed to Anglicanism as any other faith, all of it being part of the irrationality of religious belief), does not mean that over-rides centuries of penal laws and persecutions and deliberate stirring up of partisan strife for political ends (see Lord Randolph Churchill and playing the Orange card).

The important part is that your personal beliefs don't have anything to do with the religion you belong to. You belong to a cultural identity associated with a religion, whether you believe in it or not.

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