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The idea of "encouraging virtue among peers" is stronger than ever, but for different definition of "virtue". People are very strongly encouraged and pushed every day to be more woke, more anti-racist, more anti-Trumpist, more active LGBTQ+ ally, more climate activist (insert another current week-month-year causes).
Yes, you would say that Christianity was not replaced with scientific reason and logic, but another religion, much more crazy and insane.
This is not good argument for Christianity - if it was so easily defeated and supplanted by something as absurd as bouquet of modern woke causes, then it was no barrier and no protection at all.
Well the original sin of the progressive religion is that it is not founded on a shared reverence to optimal experience, which all monotheistic religions are
What does this mean?
There is no communal ritual in wokeism where the adherents focus on the absolute good, what they are striving towards. No woke church. Just virtue through signaling and destruction of enemies.
Yes there are.
Lack of colorful rituals and celebrations is the least problem with woke faith.
Better criticism of wokeism is that wokes do not breed, that full woke society would die off.
Christians of first centuries had similar problem - they refused to kill.
Pagan Romans saw it as absurd - every empire is built on oceans of blood and pyramids of skulls, every empire needs professional soldiers, torturers and executioners. If the empire was Christian only, it would collapse in a fortnight.
Well, Christians took over Roman empire, and quickly reconsidered this part of their teaching, quickly discovered that shedding blood in the name of Christian Empire is holy and glorious.
No reason why woke religion cannot manage similar plot twist.
Nope, this is a very poor rebuttal. Sure the most ardent of the woke folks get together once a year or so to have large festivals and holidays. That is nowhere near the same in terms of personal impact as going to a church every week, being in a direct community with others, and collectively having an experience of the sacred.
In terms of your criticism of Christianity, sure. It killed a bunch of people. The twist is that it actually set us on a path towards less killing and finding different ways to work out our problems, which I'll say is pretty damn good compared to the rest of the belief systems out there.
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The secular anti-homophobia and anti-racism can indeed be seen as virtues, or at least the tenets of a moral code. So they do check each other’s behavior, which is a point against my assertion that talking about virtue has died out. But these virtues are not rooted in a shared experience (attempted imagining) of the Greatest Being. The virtues wind up being political (trans rights) and rule-based (never misgender). There’s no interest in growing the antiquated virtue of caritas, pure love for others, because there’s no attempt at collecting in the mind the idea of Perfect Love, and there’s no unitive story of love that binds the community together. So the virtue of authentic love for others degenerates into adhering to political rules, merely to not be publicly crucified by your friends for something politically incorrect.
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