And I was not intending to slate you for the omission to emphasise the huge struggles and recognise the progress as progress. Its just the way it came out.
That's OK, but figured I'd elaborate. I'm afraid I may have initially been too "short-hand" and left too much of the complete thought in my head. It's not your fault you're not a mind reader.
I think if we progress a little with this we would find we hold virtually identical views on the economic realities you highlight. Your posts here so far have absolute clarity and I cannot dispute the rendering of your thinking. So given your clarity, and practicality, how do we solve the economic question whilst keeping the big religions?
I think we've talked past each other for a while. I'm not for keeping the "big religions." I am just not for doing away with spiritual life and religion altogether.
I'd like to see humanity as a whole move beyond labels and divisionary lines of all sorts- move beyond religious labels, political ones, social ones. My pipe dream is a world where people just meet and see others for who they are, not some box we check on the census or the national boundary in which we were born.
That said, I don't think the answer is in ending human spirituality or even the communal aspect of this spirituality that is religion. It's just in stopping our collective obsession with dividing everyone into groups and then hating or mistreating each other based on it.
Personally, I can see far more similarities between myself and a mystic of any religion than I can between myself and people within my own religious background. I can see more similarities between myself and others of my personality type than I can between myself and other "Americans." I find the labels useless except that we currently need them to communicate in a world that deems them important.
I think what I rail against in your line of thinking is your drive, if I understand you correctly, to think that people have to give up any sort of spiritual life and belief in the supramundane. I believe that we can already see evidence historically that contrary to this, some of the people who have most moved beyond the negative parts of the human condition have been spiritual people. The problem, from my point of view, is not that people are religious, but that they are generally not spiritual enough. All the atheists I've known that have been very ethical, compassionate beings have been spiritual people with unifying experiences. They just don't interpret them the way I do.
I'm basically for getting past the differences in our interpretations and stopping with the notion that we all need to have the same
ideas, and move into a space in which we focus on the same goal of alleviating suffering and being compassionate in our awareness, thoughts, feelings, and actions. Otherwise it seems we just set ourselves up for the age-old problem: my way is better than your way, and everyone should agree with my ideas.
Almost all of us are wage slaves whether stretched between compliance and starvation or between and employer and the bank. When we get to the bottom of the ladder and find brutalised people we can look and see that they are the most poorly educated people and are often religiously marginalised. The aspects of religion I address here are those that help to perpetuate that system. They do not really show their ugly face in our western secular paradise, and our news is criminally sanitised, but globally they are being rigorously policed. Religions do people management rather well to serve their business interests. When that fails armies are called in. Within the cadre of control there is always a religious influence. Some of these little masonic style groups are now very powerful and have honed their expertise to where they are manipulating more than one major religion. Or are duplicitous with other cadres in globe-spanning alliances. But they all make sure you do not think that any other thing is possible except a money based system dependent on scarcity, on keeping the majority poor. If you give everybody economic equality then the cadres are no longer alphas. Yet we in the west are having our progress threatened, and to me there most certainly has been real progress, on several fronts. From the rise in Fundamentalist and evangelical 'rackets' to the dismal fall in educational standards I see warning signs. All these things Obama preached before he was elected we need them and more implemented globally.
Well, yeah. That's what I was saying earlier. The problem is not a human belief in God or the supernatural or whatever. The problem is not spirituality or communal spirituality, which is to say religion.
The problem is how religion is used for power. And until we rid ourselves of the underlying compliance with the power structure and systems that maintain it, we will perpetuate it no matter what ideology we hold, be it religious (having to do with transcendence and the supramundane) or secular (ordinary life). We can get rid of religion, and a new ideology will spring up to replace it and maintain the power structure.
At this point, voting with ideology does virtually nothing. We have to be willing to sacrifice convenience and desire and vote with our cash, committing ourselves to not supporting those that harm others. People give only a teeny amount of their wealth to churches. They give the bulk to the corporations and the government. Follow the money- that's where the power is. Religions are, at worst, a pawn in the game. At best, they rebel against the game... at least until someone figures out how to then make the new religion a pawn again. I can provide a reference or two if you want to read about it.
We need free quality healthcare, that includes the calories to live healthily and a safe home for every living person. The right to a free education to whatever academic level the individual wants. We need something like the American declaration of independence but for humanity. And to this time really make it work. It wont work with alpha authority having any say, so it needs removed first.
I agree. But how is the million dollar question. How can anarchy work with a global economy, specialized division of labor, and population of 6 billion plus people? So far, it can't. And therein lies the dilemma.