are you an atheist?

the buddha was pretty adamant about not being a "god" or anything like that. he was interested in method.

so none of these should be restrained or challenged either?

I'm saying their demonstrably worse and should be challenged first

Fair enough, though I think they all can be challenged simultaneously.

meditation = auditing, I guess, if we're following these similarities

It's a bit of a shibboleth for the religious to feel that w/o the restraints of an explictly revealed morality, atheists in power will devolve into monstrous Maoists or nihilistic solipsists or fatuous materialist pigs or get into eugenics or whatnot.

it's not hard to imagine tho that after the atheists 'get rid of' religion they might have some other ppl they want to get rid of too.

eh I don't think religion's restrained any of those impulses in our leaders, atheists or otherwise

"but the longer the endure, the more like other religions they become"
this can't be the qualifier since capitalism's been around for as long as scientology (and you could argue capitalism is the root ideology on which scientology was grafted the same as christianity is to mormonism)

religion is a person?

I personally feel that ppl manage to get pretty despicable even when religious but at least the tradition of 'our better angels' has an often good effect of society that might be lost in an atheist one though I think for a society to actually become atheist 'organically' they'd have to have pretty extensive literature and arts that might serve much the same function.

ideology purges tend to involve the people who ascribe to those ideologies.

it's not just a question of duration - it's the way they're set up and how they operate. they have a liturgy, a central text, a mythic leader figure, institutionalized practices, etc. and the longer they stick around the more those things become central to the practice. it's all these things in combination. (also it's kind of lol to bring up Scientologists arguing that it's not a religion - they sing a different tune when it comes to the feds, or when they feel persecuted)

xp

well then your honor i'd like to state for the record i am against getting rid of any people due to their ideologies.

but hey thanks for ascribing mass murder intentions to me, that's swell

ideology purges tend to involve the people who ascribe to those ideologies.

"You're doing our ism wrong!"

I am not in favor of purges though I sometimes wish the influence of churches was less than it is and that they paid taxes when they decided to get political.

how do you intend to eliminate religion? xp

so mao is somehow less mythic and his little red books less inspiring than l.ron?

I also wish relgious ppl would stop whining about persecution when secular society points out the fringier lunacy of some of their positions

if you seriously cannot imagine a way of "getting rid of religion" (a phrase which I've never seriously used...esp not if eg Buddhism is a religion) that doesn't involve mass murder, you have a very limited imagination

I can imagine other ways, but they involve forcible re-education, penalties for teaching religion to children, etc.

so mao is somehow less mythic and his little red books less inspiring than l.ron?

maoism had no ideology beyond absolute fealty to Mao. this is quite different.

Moaism isn't religion just like scientology isn't religion just like Judaism isn't a religion just like Buddhism isn't a religion. 'Religion' is just a construct used since the Enlightenment to compare things that are as dissimilar as they are similar. It's such a silly argument to have.

I can imagine other ways, but they involve forcible re-education, penalties for teaching religion to children, etc.

think bottom up, not top down and long term, not within a generation. The world has been turning less and less religious and AFAIK it hasn't been due to mass murder, forcible re-education, etc.

The world has been turning less and less religious

lol America is not the world

take out China and the former USSR (both countries that used policies of genocide + reeducation to eliminate religion) and i'm not sure there's any trend towards the world being less religious

Europe, America, Canada all becoming less religious means the world as a whole has. lol?

Ha, what constitutes more or less religious?

"maoism had no ideology beyond absolute fealty to Mao. this is quite different."
1. absolute fealty strikes me as about as pure an ideology as you could get but
2. purges and great leap forwards and treatises on dialectics don't strike you as pointing to some grander ideology at work?

i'm not sure there's any trend towards the world being less religious

there is

I cut down on smiting the infidels; only six dead this week.

i love when I get into arguments on ILE where people object to facts that have been verified by like a billion studies/stats

Or when we say less religious, do you mean the percentage of ppl that self-identify as religious? Or that actually follow their faith's theology and tenets?

Our society is certainly laxer and more tolerant than it was a hundred years ago.

"'Religion' is just a construct used since the Enlightenment to compare things that are as dissimilar as they are similar. It's such a silly argument to have."
I think it's critical to distinguish between harmful movements and non-harmful ones, and if religion is the closest word we have available, I don't think it's unreasonable to use, though I'd welcome less divisive alternatives.

http://www.google.com/search?q=people+less+religious+now&rls=com.microsoft%3Aen-us&oe=UTF-8&startIndex=&startPage=1&rlz=1I7ADFA_enUS468&oq=people+less+re&gs_l=heirloom-serp.3.1.0j0i30l3j0i5l6.4953.8734.0.10656.18.11.2.2.2.0.266.1469.3j6j2.11.0...0.0...1c.1.D3KHUc4GRz0

I have a less divisive alternative! "Harmful movements."

Now there might be confusion between that and painful bowel movement but if you clarify I think people will understand.

Religion' is just a construct used since the Enlightenment to compare things that are as dissimilar as they are similar.

i think this point cannot be emphasized enough. it's really only a relatively recent that "religion" constitutes a differentiated social system a la art, politics, etc. one might call this "modernity"! that is, a certain pluralism that isn't going anywhere any time soon.

2. purges and great leap forwards and treatises on dialectics don't strike you as pointing to some grander ideology at work?

I've read a fair bit about mao, in pretty much every case the goal was simply to consolidate power in a single set of hands. like Stalin, Mao just used the handiest ideological tools available at the time. This has pretty much continued post-Mao as well fwiw (does anyone honestly think there's anything at all Marxist/Communist about the PRC? Sole goal is the concentration and persistence of power).

xp

in the abstract it's less divisive, but i feel like calling Mormonism a "harmful movement" would get some hackles raised all the same.

Political and economic ideologies don't tend to make the metaphysical claims that religions all make, do they?

If you're calling for the elimination of Mormonism I don't think there's a term you can use that will make Mormons okay with it. So maybe stick to the term that makes intellectual sense and not the one you have a hard-on for? xp

being wrong about how humans behave and how societies work vs. being wrong about how the universe works
xp

it's really only a relatively recent that "religion" constitutes a differentiated social system

Huh? You can argue that several hundred years ago, pretty much everyone expected religion to be as decisive a force in public behavior as politics and many actively encouraged it but ppl certainly knew about disbelievers and heretics and other religions and days other than the Sabbath and pastimes more entertaining than worship.

wk - if you have a broad enough understanding of "metaphysical claims" then you could argue they do. but you dont need to go that far. you'd simply say that those ideologies are only capable of "observing" after their own distinctions. they remain blind to other factors. economics isn't able to identify the non-economic causes of phenomena.

post-Mao PRC seems to be Dengist "get rich" capitalism, but you don't feel that's religious-y either. Aren't there still Maoist rebels around, though?

there's an intrinsically metaphysical component to capitalism. "money -- how does it work?" instead of magnets

If you're calling for the elimination of Mormonism I don't think there's a term you can use that will make Mormons okay with it. So maybe stick to the term that makes intellectual sense and not the one you have a hard-on for? xp

who are you talking to??

I don't think money is metaphysical. It's just a convenience so you don't have to take cowrie shells or your cattle down to the gas station.

Granny, I've been fasting for 23 hours now so I may be feeling more testy than normal. I was speaking to Philip who bumped this thread to argue that Maoism + Capitalism are religions like Mormonism and Judaism are religions. (Incidentally an argument that would indicate that religion has grown exponentially and not dwindled at all.) I have continually tried to argue that the very term 'religion' is a problematic inheritance from Hume that obscures more than it illuminates. It was an attempt to compare a variety of unrelated phenomena (such as Buddhism and Calvinism). In that sense, Philip is using the term correctly - by trying to compare things that have nothing in common besides his feeling that they are similarly destructive.

"in pretty much every case the goal was simply to consolidate power in a single set of hands."
I don't necessarily agree this was the case with Mao (because frankly he seemed a little nuts),
but why don't you allow this to be a valid religious ideology?

also, money is faith! it's one of the few examples of literal magic.

mordy, totally agree with your posts about needinga diff term. Go eat something!

hour and a half to go. i've got bagels, lox, cream cheese + white fish in the fridge.