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Alright, but does it fit that definition? Either DEI or whatever parent religion you would say it represents.
I don’t think so. The comprehensiveness and the “fundamental questions” are missing. It gets closer to “duties of conscience,” but anchors them in materialism.
I think in practice it's comprehensive enough and addresses fundamental questions, particularly about how we humans relate to one another, and one of its great innovations is in doing so in practice while having the actual written-down tenets not actually look like they're as comprehensive and totalizing as they are. Likewise, I think, at best, one can say that its duties of conscience are anchored in something that has a veneer of materialism, but underneath that veneer is a fundamentally faith-based belief in immaterial forces that guide human relationships. And even if we could quibble about just how comprehensive it is, I think the fact that it is fundamentally anchored to a faith such that its tenets exist necessarily downstream from that faith makes it fit the category of "religion" for the purposes of limiting the US government's promotion of it. I objected to public schools teaching intelligent design on this basis.
But IANAL, so perhaps I'm mistaken on exactly how US 1st Amendment gets applied. If so, this seems like a massive hole in the law; if faith-based cults can get government sponsorship just by not being sufficiently comprehensive in their tenets, this would provide a mechanism by which the US government would be allowed to promote virtually any religious view. Perhaps what we're observing right now in real-time is a religion that has managed to exploit this security hole and US society and legislators scrambling to patch it before the exploit causes too much harm.
I have a hard time seeing it as a veneer of materialism. The “immaterial forces” are something like justice or fairness. I think those have a pretty solid foundation in materialism.
Compare to American civic religion, which is grounded in various enlightenment values. But the government is allowed to cite life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness, because they’re fundamentally material.
(Though…the whole “endowed by their Creator” thing raises some questions.)
So when DEI asserts that something is good because it is “fair,” it’s grounded in a material value rather than a spiritual one. You don’t have to subscribe to any particular metaphysics or doctrine to recognize fairness as a value. It’s too useful for bargaining and cooperation, so it shows up again and again in secular contexts.
Maybe this is just plausible deniability. @desolation had an example extremist who was explicitly grounding DEI rhetoric in religious principles. I don’t have a problem with banning that from government speech. For the average advocate, though, I don’t see what immaterial grounds are being used.
I was actually referring to "oppression" (or "systemic -ism" or "patriarchy" or "white supremacy" or other similar terms). It's certainly the same word as one that's used to refer to a real concept with a solid foundation in materialism, but as used by the religion in question, it refers to an essentially magical concept due to how it is claimed to have impacts on interactions between individuals, while lacking the sort of scientific backing to support such claims. Again, I think this is ingenious for its ability to convince otherwise secular/materialist people of this supernatural force, but it is a veneer, and scratching the surface reveals that it's magical thinking that fundamentally rests on faith, not dissimilar to a belief in an omnipotent God that works in mysterious ways.
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