China Cat Sunflower said:
The truth is that we are these almost god-like creatures who have to sh**, and die, and waste this great capacity for intelligence that we have evolved because we haven't got time to truly make use of it. The truth is that we had to learn to cooperate with each other to be able to hunt large game successfully. The golden rule didn't come from religion, it evolved out of a necessity to preserve property rights. Religion preserves class stratification, that's it's real purpose. The truth is that we want so badly for there to be some continuity of personality beyond the grave that we can't bring ourselves to abandon the fairy tales that were acculturated into us to prepare us to sacrifice our own interests, bodies, livelihoods, and very lives for causes which benefit power structures over which we have no control, and which have no interest in our individual well being.
Hi Chris! I remember talking about this with you in a thread some ways back, but my outlook has since been changed. I want to bounce an idea off you. It is totally related to the various things going on in the thread, and it relates to the nature of fundamentalism.
Instead of religion existing to preserve class stratification, religion existing to motivate people to continually seek improvement. It does this by establishing humanity as slightly less than imperfect so that it must seek reconciliation with Perfection. Let me suggest the obvious that society either progresses slowly forward or regresses to an unintelligent minimum -- a ground state -- like an electron in an atom. In that ground state women are property of us men, and children stay out of our way. Slavery and violence make sense in that ground state. Religion seeks to ratchet society up, up out of the ground state, by incorporating more and more people into seeking to better themselves and thereby, society. It seeks to reach up into Perfection, which no one has seen, and to take some of that and apply it to the real world to make it better. To accomplish this, the religion says we are all sinners and need improvement.
Unfortunately a fundamentalist approach naturally arises, counter to the religion's purpose. It turns the whole thing into a giant guilt-fear factory and occasionally a radical excuse for the destruction of infidels. Now there is hate involved, and now we can no longer seek change. Think of it as counter-current generated by upward motion through a viscous material (which is humanity moving upward). Society moves upwards, there's always a backlash of misunderstanding and apprehension. Oddly, we've no control of whether it occurs within or without a religion. It is hard to define who is conservative and who is progressive. Hate is always counter-progressive however.
I don't hate the fundie, either; and I have more reasons to hate. I have family caught up in the counter-current, so I've got a more balanced view of whether hate is appropriate against fundamentalists. If anyone should hate them it is me. I don't actually believe any of this garbage about hating fundamentalists -- its ridiculous. I understand what happens when society changes, because I live in the South of USA. I was on the bus the other day, and a retarded 50 year old man was still talking smack about blacks. He had no clue and was just parroting; but he was part of the natural counter-current.
GlorytoGod said:
we are all fundamentalist in one way or another
We are all either moving forward or backward. Hatred moves us backward, so lets not use that word.
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