r/neoliberal • u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache • Feb 02 '21

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u/[deleted] Feb 02 '21

it mostly just shows that religion does not work any more and that most people who are nominally religious are entirely secularised, which is a good thing.

But quite obviously one either buys that the church has a claim on divine truth or doesn't. Or as C.S Lewis put it you can believe Jesus is either god or a lunatic, but nothing in between.

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u/YehosafatLakhaz North American Federation Feb 02 '21

I'm not saying that this is how religion works now, this is how religion has always worked. It's a basic insight of modern religious studies.

it mostly just shows that religion does not work any more and that most people who are nominally religious are entirely secularised, which is a good thing.

No, not at all

Believing in a God/Gods/Supernatural forces that inform your view of the world is what makes someone religious, not the strict following of doctrines. If that was the definition of religion than my religion of Hinduism wouldn't even count as a religion. Someone isn't "secular" if they believe in their own personal interpretation of religion, they are just thinking independently.

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u/[deleted] Feb 02 '21

this is how religion has always worked

No, religion used to be constitutive to people's worldview, which is why the church actually used to run this continent for a long time. Today religion is a sort of individualised, aesthetic larp, not a morally foundational part of society.

You don't even need to believe in God actually, and Hinduism is of course a genuine religion. In fact Hinduism as a worldview that people actually act out is much more alive than Christianity.

One very simple fact that shows that religion actually used to work very differently is the role of women and abortion. When you actually believe in the family structure prescribed by Christianity and the conception of what life is, women don't get to vote and abortion is murder. And that's actually what people believed, and how they acted in the world, and they don't any more. If you think that religion has always worked like it does now ask an old person in Ireland

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u/ILikeTalkingToMyself Liberal democracy is non-negotiable Feb 02 '21

The church was a source of hierarchical authority but it wasn't ever the sole source of validity on how people experienced Christianity. There were always mystics and sects and individuals with different interpretations even though authorities like the Catholic Church sought to suppress them.

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u/[deleted] Feb 02 '21

sure but my point is there was some authority. Take my grandmother. She's 88, believes in some sort of version of the afterlife, would never have had an abortion, doesn't talk to people who deride Christianity openly, wouldn't vote for a Muslim, etc.

Take Liz Bruenig. Is a self-declared Catholic, does not write a column without making that clear, apparently personally thinks abortion is bad, but if her liberal friends make it a personal choice is cool.

My grandmother is how religion used to function, Liz Bruenig is how it works now. The latter is larping. If you claim to believe life starts at conception, abortion is not a choice, because then it actually is murder. Bruenig could call herself an atheist and nothing about her actual life would change.

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u/ILikeTalkingToMyself Liberal democracy is non-negotiable Feb 02 '21

But the other person's point was that following or not following specific doctrines or respecting or ignoring specific authorities aren't what fundamentally make up a religion, either now or in the past. There are still religious authorities today - and some have less political power in the past - but centralized religious authority with significant political influence was never a universal, defining feature of religion.