Leftism as a religion with its rules about blasphemy
There were some comments recently that were so insightful I thought I’d repost them here, to draw attention to them. The first was in the knitting post. In case you haven’t read that post, it was about a big dust-up in the online knitting community—a community I never even knew existed till now, since I’m definitely not part of it—in which a knitting blogger was chided nastily for some innocuous remarks about India that were deemed insufficiently culturally-sensitive by the mobbish powers-that-be, and she ended up offering an abject apology.
The first comment was from “Henry”:
The interesting thing about this set-to is that it shows how the old laws about blasphemy – which everyone (who counts) had so disdained – have been resurrected in the form of “Political Correctness”. The penalties are no longer physical flogging, imprisonment, and torture with an Auto da Fe, but a more extended and public Inquisition. As of old, it ends with a confession of sin, unaccepted repentance, excommunication, and banishment from the fellowship.
It is as much of an abomination today as it ever was.
And of course, a more recent type of pseudo-religious belief system that comes to mind is Communism, which reproduced intolerance for the expression of anything that deviated from the Party line in even the smallest of ways, and which featured the public humiliation of and confession from, and in many many cases imprisoned and/or murdered, the offenders. The point was not in order to purge their souls as in medieval times, although perhaps that was the pretense even under Communism, but to cleanse the group and set a stern example for others not to transgress. Come to think of it, those last two were probably operative during the Inquisition as well.
It’s been said many times that leftism is a religion, or rather a substitute for the religious impulse when religion has weakened or fled. Nietzsche wrote in 1882:
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
That’s a famous passage and reams have been written about it. But in the context of this discussion and that Nietszche quote, it seems that we’ve invented a great many rituals to replace the old ones, and that one way to look at Communism and all central planning schemes that purport to transform human society into utopia—and fail utterly and completely, accomplishing something quite different—is that they are attempts to “become gods” in Nietszche’s sense.
The second blog comment I want to highlight was at the recycling post, and it was by “RC”:
I really believe that Leftism is the religion* that replaced mainstream Protestantism in America as it drifted away from its faith and became de-supernaturalized.
As “theological liberals” took over the Protestant seminaries in the early 1900’s, the people who still believed in God reacted as conservatives always seem to: Instead of reconquering their own existing institutions through bareknuckle political infighting, they abandoned them, splitting off to form their own new parallel institutions in which they could reassert “the fundamentals of the faith” (like the literal existence of God). They thus became known as “Fundamentalists.”
This meant that the mainline Protestant churches (most especially the Episcopalians, but also the then-differently-named ancestors of PCUSA and ELCA) gradually bled out all their genuine believers, losing them to the newly-launched Evangelical churches and para-church organisations. Two generations later, the mainline leadership consisted almost entirely of persons who didn’t believe but felt that a church was a perfectly fine place to act out their personal inclination for moralizing and social meddling, governed less by Holy Writ than by emotionalism and left-wing politics.
In the last three decades, these churches have seen a profound collapse in membership. The reason is this: Half their remaining members said, “If these leaders don’t believe, why should I?” and started sleeping in on Sundays. The other half said, “If these leaders don’t believe, I’ll go find some others who do,” and departed for other churches…
…[W]what about the folk who started sleeping in on Sundays?
They, too, retained a latent religious instinct. They felt unsettled if they didn’t have:
– a cosmology and metaphysics
– an ethical crusade to participate in
– an apocalyptic eschatology
– a set of rituals to practice
– a way to cheaply buy indulgences to alleviate their feelings of moral guilt
– a sense of community
– a diabolical enemy to struggle against
– a set of sermons to attendSo, their own functional religion evolved, in which those needs were met as follows:
– cosmology/metaphysics: reductive materialism coupled to a purely emotional “spirituality”
– ethical crusade: Save the Planet!
– apocalyptic eschatology: Global Warming Will Kill Us All In Ten Years!
– ritual system: Recycling, Buying Priuses
– buying indulgences: By promoting leftist political policies, I prove that I Am One Of The Enlightened White People, and get a pass on the sin of being white
– sense of community: Left-wing political activism and Following All The People On Twitter Who Exhibit My Same Tribal Markers
– enemy to struggle against: Republicans are demons, and Trump is the devil himself
– a set of sermons to attend: TED Talks and attending lectures during Sex Week on campusI defy anyone to offer a better explanation of the above behaviors than as a surrogate for the religious instinct they inherited from their grandparents, but for which they had no other outlet.
An excellent summary, and not the least bit limited to recycling and global warming and the like as the quasi-religious causes. It’s also correct as a summary whether or not the threat of global warming is real, because it’s the behavior around it that is quasi-religious, although in the case of AGW that religiosity is wrapped in the cloak of science.
There’s a parallel story of post-Enlightenment Jewish assimilation in which left/liberal ideology replaced Judaism as a “civic religion”. The modern Jewish denominations – Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist – are the Jewish Episcopalians.
As seen here:
https://grrrgraphics.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/shrine_of_the_statists1.jpg
The only thing missing from RC’s excellent analysis is “What does ‘salvation’ look like in the leftist religion?
Humans are inherently “religious” and we invent “religions” with reckless abandon. What we see in post-modern leftism is another permutation of that. Again…expertly described by RC.
Such an excellent synopsis. In 2007, when visiting family in Vancouver, B.C. a brother-in-law’s grandson, age 10 was with us. I will never forget how thoroughly
afraid he was of the coming apocalypse, a result of global warming. I was already aware of the correlation of environmentalism = religion by way of Michael Crichton’s writings, but this was a living testament to it.
Without postulating leftism as a form of religion, it is hard to explain the existence of the various taboos in contemporary discourse, or the need of leftists to hunt for heretics.
As a former member of a church which replaced its religion with leftism, I concur with RC’s summary. As to “salvation,” it’s in the here and now, in the confidence that one is “on the right side of history.” Repentance isn’t even required; deviations from the new orthodoxy are covered by saying the right things in public.
Joseph Bottum, in An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America, points out that many secular people of our time, while they no longer follow the mainline religions of their grandparents, share with their grandparents a concern with belonging to the “elect.” For their grandparents, belonging to the “elect” meant following church creed. The secular grandchildren believe that believing the social creed de jour puts them into the “elect.”
I recall the mother of a childhood friend who was the daughter of a Congregational minister. She no longer went to church, but she was very earnest in leading Ban the Bomb demonstrations. Some years later, after several of her children made the Indian guru trip, she became a follower. For all her earnestness, she was self-critical and could laugh at herself. While she may have condemned certain policies, she didn’t condemn acquaintances who didn’t agree with her. Because she was earnest but not self-righteous, we were fond of her.
There is no doubt it’s a religion, but it does have an interesting feature difference compared to traditional religions based on reasonably ancient and unchanging writings, such as the Abrahamic faiths. Leftism is constantly malleable – changing its views on individual topics as needed with little to no attempt to explain or justify the change, or evolve in an outwardly logical fashion. It is the ultimate “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia” belief system, in which its adherents have to be willing to spin at a moment’s notice and have 100% emotional investment in the opposite of what they were saying yesterday.
Leftism is an ideology. Pro-Choice, selective, opportunistic, is a religious/moral philosophy (i.e. behavioral protocol). An ethical standard which is relative in time and space. Then there is faith (e.g. Twilight or conflation of logical domains) and factional traditions.
John Guilfoyle states, “The only thing missing from RC’s excellent analysis is “What does ‘salvation’ look like in the leftist religion?”
Kate answers, “As to “salvation,” it’s in the here and now, in the confidence that one is “on the right side of history.”
That’s accurate enough but I would add that another thing missing from RC’s excellent analysis is secular leftism’s missing substitute for traditional religion’s promise of an afterlife.
Secular leftists have NOTHING to look forward to, no basis for hope, no basis for optimism. Thus secular leftism is inherently nihilist because existence without hope for a better ‘tomorrow’ is pointless. Yes, the idealists hope to pass on a better world to posterity but… they won’t be here to see and enjoy it…
And that is I suspect, the underlying motivation for the ubiquitous hate on the left. In their heart of hearts, they hatefully rail at a God they don’t consciously believe exists but subconsciously fear does exist. It is literally, the ultimate philosophical contrariety.
KyndyllG states, “It is the ultimate “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia” belief system, in which its adherents have to be willing to spin at a moment’s notice and have 100% emotional investment in the opposite of what they were saying yesterday.”
That’s the reason for and purpose of the “liberal reset button”.
Some, seem to have convinced themselves that the promise and contemplation of personal extinction and of materially re-merging with the undifferentiated, non-conscious cosmos, is reward and satisfaction enough; and one that they may enjoy right now. In fact, a reward that they only can enjoy right now, before it happens.
For it is quite certain that once their consciousness is no more, then they will not be able to enjoy their imagined gift of themselves to Nothingness; not any more than Jethro Bodine would have been able to enjoy the wailing remorse of the girl who got away from him, which he had gleefully anticipated, had Uncle Jed actually permitted Jethro to drown himself in the “cement pond”.
Dear progressive,
If you reject the idea that your consciousness is more than a meaningless epiphenomenon, and that you possess intrinsic value and rights, why should I, at least as far as your personal case goes, insist otherwise ?
RE: RC: “Sense of community: Left-wing political activism and Following All The People On Twitter Who Exhibit My Same Tribal Markers”
RE: RC: “Enemy to struggle against”
IMHO, these comments are spot on. Many people are disconnected from any sense of community. Many hardly ever talk to our neighbors. Many people are bitter in their loneliness, and many others don’t have friends and associates that they can really talk too. It gets worse when people retire, as their work friends are gone and they don’t have that sense of being part of a group working toward a common goal.
Human beings are social animals: our brains are wired to come together in groups, and often, these groups are formed to go fight other groups. We need to be part of a tribe, and our tribe is needed to defeat that other tribe.
The only mistake is the implied assumption that leftists are the only ones. Don’t believe me? Try telling Trump voters — ever so nicely — the President could have communicated better or jumped on this problem earlier. Most cannot tolerate the slightest suggestion that their guy isn’t 100% right; every argument must be destroyed; and it’s dangerous to talk about it.
The problem isn’t THEM . . . it’s US.
An escape from the burden of being a self, in a world it has not created.
The two paths then are either the extinction of the self, or the re-creation of all reality.
However, what escapes their notice is that in the latter option their will to power is not really their own in any coherent sense. They did not somehow will to will, from some standpoint outside of themselves. They, no matter how much power they accrue, even to the point of virtual immortality, are still contingent beings capable only of using or misusing what was already there before they emerged in their life world.
Their imagined Nirvana is going to be just as defective as any road to hell can be.
How to read Nietzsche’s sense, neo? Or the mantic’s, for that matter?
What was the knifing deed itself — the God killing stroke which has “not yet reached men’s ears”?
If, as I suspect of this chapter 3 (solely on a too quick perusal today, and how crazy is that, given it’s Nietzsche for the love of god?) we’re meant by Nietzsche to find ourselves plopped down in the midst of Plato’s cave metaphor? Was then the killing deed Plato’s success itself?
I don’t know.
Still, holding onto that cavy context it shouldn’t be a great surprise to us to find our modern leftist contemporaries no further along than the paraders of ghostly images on those old cave walls, for this imaging parade business seems to be the premiere requirement of politics, all politics, every politics: a straightup sine qua non. So how not here too?
Or is the “… There never was a greater event, and on account of it, all who are born after us belong to a higher history than any history hitherto!” our clue to turn our gaze toward Hegel to find the killing blow? Doubtful, yet possible.
Or something other altogether? What’s he up to, Nietzsche? Teaching clouds? New gods?
“The only mistake is the implied assumption that leftists are the only ones. Don’t believe me? Try telling Trump voters — ever so nicely — the President could have communicated better or jumped on this problem earlier. Most cannot tolerate the slightest suggestion that their guy isn’t 100% right; every argument must be destroyed; and it’s dangerous to talk about it.
The problem isn’t THEM . . . it’s US.” kevino
Uh… no. A few Trump supporters are unwilling to acknowledge Trump’s flaws but if you first assure them of your support for Trump and have come to believe him to be the only one of the republican candidates who could have achieved as much as he has and have withstood the tsunami of abuse directed at him… then Trump supporters will happily acknowledge his flaws and weaknesses.
It’s when you offer legitimate criticism of Trump without acknowledging his overall rightness, that a Trump supporter will conclude that you’re a never-trumper, one of those for whom Trump can never do anything right.
So, it’s NOT US. It’s them because they don’t want to work to improve an imperfect system, they want to destroy it while calling it “fundamental transformation”.
I view the left pantheon of the ever morphing beliefs of the left as a dogma of superstition. “When you believe in things you don’t understand, you suffer.” And they mean to make everyone suffer as they wallow in the self righteous superiority of their ‘wisdom’. Thus their silly belief in “the arc of history” bending to conform with their utopian dreams. Huberis 10E6.
When you believe for 5 decades life as we know will be over due to the consensus of science, and you need to keep pushing back the time of TEOTWAWKI, you might as well to self identify as a zombie.
We can’t help it. http://www.brainblogger.com/2016/02/15/the-god-brain-is-religion-hardwired/
A key issue is that the PC-believers don’t all believe all the same stuff — they are like a myriad of protesting churches against the current Christian-Capitalist establishment.
For many it’s Global Warming /climate change.
For many it’s sexual/gender inequality, injustice.
For many it’s economic Social Justice.
They’re all part of the PC-Klan — enjoying “moral superiority”, in their own mind. Mixing and matching as they feel, and to deflect criticism. Like Protestant churches, new ones can be quickly formed and set up following any particular charismatic leaders. “Charisms” is even a big issue in the Church.
All believers believe they have morality on their side, which empowers and gratifies them. Most smart people, including here on this smart (fantastic!) blog, want to be morally superior.
Only religions give the desired “moral superiority” to allow condemnation of the sinners, the heretics, the unclean.
Nice people need a reason to condemn some, tho not all, of the Others.
Rod Dreher labels this MTD – Moralistic Therapeutic Deism
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher-tags/moralistic-therapeutic-deism/
It’s not a god-brain — it’s a god shaped part of every person’s heart.
And it’s the feelings, not rational analysis, from the heart.
Tom Grey,
I’m not morally superior, I simply have my feet on the ground and recognize reality, and the lessons of history. That does not make me superior in anyway. It makes me sane. Sanity demands awareness, including self awareness. AOC, for example, lacks self awareness. When one lacks self awareness, a person is capable of all kinds of evil mischief.
“That’s accurate enough but I would add that another thing missing from RC’s excellent analysis is secular leftism’s missing substitute for traditional religion’s promise of an afterlife.”
GB – that’s another way to ask the question I was asking…What’s the payoff/reward…goal – ultimate destiny? aka “salvation/heaven/afterlife”
And my thought is built around…well ok, you’re trying to “save the world or save the whales or save humanity heal the racial/sexual divide” but you’re not having kids & you’re not enjoying this life much at all…so saving it all for what? toward what end?
My guess is they can’t answer that…all their roads lead to Hunger Games…or something like that?
There’s a whole “Thank the Universe” phenomenon out there now, and it seems to be growing, keeps popping up on TV shows, etc. And it’s not just an unthinking, uncaring universe, but godlike. Check out this website, where you find stuff like this:
Some very confused folks out there!
“Some very confused folks out there.” That is an understatement. 😉
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The reason the First Amendment was first is that the Founders had observed the endless European wars of religion, and their recent history included continual efforts by Roman Catholicism to take over the British Crown, Cromwell, the Long Parliament, and the Glorious Revolution.
This informed their effort to create a government prohibited from involving itself in religious affairs. As Jefferson wrote: …frugal government that prevents men from injuring one another and leaves them otherwise free.
Leftism is a religion and the First Amendment must be applied to block its endless attempts to use government power to crush the heretics and force compliance with the current manifestation. Government should not have the power to force someone to bake a cake.
It is hard to beat a belief without an alternative belief.
The alternative belief that I hope can find wide public acceptance is the Non-Aggression Principle. It is the core of the libertarian movement. Simple stated it says that to have the best possible human society, no one should initiate force against another, or deceive them so that they do something they would not otherwise do.
The proper role of government is preventing force and fraud.
Beyond this government itself becomes the problem.
Maybe this can all end with a restoration of limited government.
Tucker Carlson, over a decade ago, was a frequent guest on a “shock jock” radio show, where he made some vulgar remarks.
Media Matters is now using those to target him.
He’s NOT apologizing. His 6 min. show is consistent with most of the comments here, tho not about religion, rather noting that the Left wants power. That’s what they want. Power. Control of your thinking.
They are calling him, essentially, a heretic. He wants to fight it.
https://video.foxnews.com/v/6012802083001/#sp=show-clips
He’s among the most reasonable, watchable news persons now.
parker, when AOC was discussing her socialism, part of her claim was that she had “moral authority”. Among the critiques, one of the strongest was that morality needs to be based on facts.
It’s not clear that factual authority, and seeking it, is much different than moral authority, which is closely related to moral superiority. And it’s no surprise that Dems are constantly trying to achieve “factual superiority” — which is why the Fake News jab against them is so strong.
Steve Hayward: https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/03/socialism-and-the-experts.php
Quoting Leszek Kolakowski — “. . . Almost all the prophecies of Marx and his followers have already proved to be false, but this does not disturb the spiritual certainty of the faithful, any more than it did in the case of chiliastic sects: for it is a certainty not based on any empirical premises or supposed ‘historical laws,’ but simply on the psychological need for certainty. In this sense, Marxism performs the function of a religion, and its efficacy is of a religious character.”
Marxism is a result of rationalization or rather Western enlightenment’s focus on ideological premises that replaced their observation of the Heavens. Instead of seeing the world with spiritual eyes, they could only see the world with physically impure senses. And after awhile, even that was depreciated by mathematical illusions and theories such as gravity.
Humanity can be in a sense seen as a degraded, not evolved, format, in which higher level entities descended to this plane of existence to do something, got stuck in physical avatars that corrupted their souls, and couldn’t get back out of it. Permanently logged in. If you try to log out, your avatar dies, and then your actual user behind the computer dies as a result.
The soul is logged into the physical avatar. Not something scientists know how to figure out or test.
I also find it ironic that people want to talk about this topic now of all times. Whenever I raised the Leftist alliance being a religion not a political faction, people just went strangely silent before 2012. They only started piping up, I realized, after 2013.
One of the little side effects of incarnation, whether it is reincarnation or degraded resurrection, is memory loss. Remember the Greek legend about drinking the water of a river and then dying and forgetting? Well that already happened due to Adam’s eating of the fruit juices. Every soul comes to Earth and then promptly forgets everything of the past.
Even China has the same legend about Moupa whatever soup. Drink it, die, and forget.
Geoffrey Britain:
RE: A few Trump supporters are unwilling to acknowledge Trump’s flaws … ”
A few!?
RE: “Then Trump supporters will happily acknowledge his flaws and weaknesses.”
It is certainly not my experience. The attitude by many of President Trump’s supporters is that we live in dangerous times and that any criticism undermines the man who is going to save us. This is silly. First because any successful organization or venture must have the ability to objectively look at themselves, see what can be improved, and do it. Secondly, I’ve never seen an idea that is so dangerous it can’t be talked about. For example, if you think socialism and racism are bad ideas, I agree with you. They are easily disproved, and they should be. And finally, your idea appears to be: “If you’re seen as a never Trumper, many will refuse to listen to what you say”. That basically makes my point for me. It’s an example of tribalism. Assigning labels to people as “leftists” and “never-Trumpers” is a way of discrediting and dehumanizing others as members of an out-group, even if they are independent people acting freely.
RE: “So, it’s NOT US. It’s them because they don’t want to work to improve an imperfect system, they want to destroy it while calling it “fundamental transformation”.”
A stunning example of tribalism, with us against them in full view. I also don’t agree with your summary of many leftists methods and motives. For one thing, the reference is made to the Obama administration. They, like many leftists, were not seeking to improve the existing system, nor were they trying to destroy it. I believe that they were results oriented. They had specific problems that they wanted to address; they didn’t have the power or the skill to affect change; and they did an end-run around it.
——–
My point is based on solid science: human beings are designed by evolution to form groups, and those groups frequently form to oppose other groups. And the cure for this is to: (1) realize this, and (2) step outside your tribe and re-evaluate your own pre-conceived notions, data, and conclusions. That’s very hard to do if you think that you’re always right and your fellow countrymen are evil.
“If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between “for” and “against” is the mind’s worst disease.” — Sent-ts’an
Does that mean that nothing is worth fighting for? Of course not. Our Republic, Western values, and human rights are definitely worth fighting for. But it is a good thing to have open discussion without dehumanizing people. And nothing is more toxic to the debate than simply dismissing alternative views because that opinion doesn’t support the tribe or is at odds with the tribe’s thinking.
Socialism has always been promoted as a religion.
http://www.heavenonearthdocumentary.com/resources/commentary_socialism_vs_religion_07-14-02.pdf
Hey, Neo (and everyone),
Thanks so much for highlighting my earlier post!
The post was an application of ideas I’ve been musing about for a while, not just in relation to Gaiaist Leftism or Leftism-in-general, but human ideologies and worldviews as a whole.
I call it “functional religion.”
About Functional Religions
My thesis begins with the idea that humans intrinsically need a holistic worldview that can “ground” their decisions about what they do, the habits they adopt, and ideas about how they fit into the world.
(That much is obvious, I suppose. But it’s always best to start an argument from premises that everyone accepts.)
Now the only “holistic worldviews” that can match these requirements are those which provide their adherents:
– a metaphysics
– an epistemology
– a cosmology
– an anthropology
– an ethics
– a set of tools for dealing with amoral evils (inside & outside oneself)
– a set of tools for dealing with moral evils (inside & outside oneself)
…and, because humans are culture-forming, discursive, social animals, these things naturally lead to…
– a set of habits (arts and disciplines) for learning, maintaining, and strengthening the above views in oneself
– a set of habits (arts and disciplines) for working in concert with others sharing the same views
– a set of habits (arts and disciplines) governing one’s advocacy of those views to others, especially one’s own children
To the extent that a “holistic worldview” is MISSING some of the above requirements, it is incomplete: If no surrogate appears to fill the unoccupied role, the person will find himself unsettled in his approach to life. That is why it’s an intrinsic need of humans: Both practical and felt.
Now any serious “name brand religion” (Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, Jainism, whatever) is going to provide most or all of these functions in a person.
But, a person who doesn’t follow a “name brand religion” still needs those functions filled.
He needs, in short, a “functional religion.” (He may reject the term “religion,” but whatever he adopts will fulfill all the functions of a good, solid religion in him.)
Building A Functional Religion (for fun and profit!)
Very often, he’ll assemble his own “functional religion,” like a computer hobbyist who goes to a computer-store to assemble a Gaming PC from hand-selected parts, with his own homespun Linux distro as the OS.
The upside of this is: He can pick (what he believes to be) the best of all the parts, install or build-from-scratch his own favorite Linux distro, and wind up with something especially well-suited to his needs.
The downside is: The “functional religion” he thereby creates is “Version 1.0” and might be “buggy”: The parts and OS (i.e., the metaphysics, habits, etc., he adopts) he puts together may have unexpected incompatibilities. These may not reveal themselves at “first boot” (i.e., for the first few years of his adherence). Some very serious flaws may be too subtle, or too slow-building in their negative consequences, to reveal themselves inside of a single human lifetime.
I think everyone winds up with a “functional religion.” (The alternative is just wandering through life unthinkingly, devoid of principles, introspection, and consciously-chosen pursuits.)
I think the “four horsemen of the New Atheism” (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennett) from a few years back had a “functional religion” in common, and thus, unsurprisingly, served as evangelists for it.
And, as I expressed in my earlier post, I think college students are drifting, and to an extent being propagandized, into Leftism as their “functional religion.” Irreligious ones often come to college already believing most of it; but once there, previously-religious students often become “converts” through peer pressure.
Logical Consequences of the “Functional Religion” idea:
1. If this idea — this obvious truth, I’d say — were better-recognized in American law, we’d quickly see that much of what passes for “separation of church and state” and “secular education” in America is actually an establishment-of-religion (albeit a “functional religion”) being foisted on society, with government subsidization.
2. Any “functional religion” which fails to recognize itself as such is insufficiently introspective to quickly find its own internal contradictions. It’s not that its adherents won’t have a metaphysics. They’ll have an unexamined one, and probably a pretty bad one. A lot of modern secularists share a common functional religion; but a lot of them are Positivists, in spite of the fact that positivism was found unworkable, self-contradictory, and fundamentally irrational by serious philosophers decades ago. He who fails to recognize he is doing philosophy will make freshman errors.
3. Any self-described practitioner of a “name-brand religion” is always in danger of replacing one part of his declared religion with a surrogate adopted from the surrounding culture. In Catholicism, for example, a lot of left-leaning American politicians who describe themselves as “Catholic” have clearly adopted consequentialism as their ethics, producing incompatibilities with “Catholicism” as traditionally defined. These politicians still have a “functional religion”; but it isn’t Catholicism any more: It’s a self-assembled hodgepodge of pieces from disparate sources, with the cultural hallmarks of Catholicism left intact.
4. Recently-minted Leftist “functional religions” (from SJW-ism to Maoism) are prone to violence (when they get big enough) in a way that Christianity (for example) isn’t. This may seem an over-bold assertion, given the behavior of the Spanish Inquisition! But 3 things are required for a “functional religion” to exercise restraint on the human instinct to tyrannically oppress “the other”:
– the religion’s ethics has to oppose that kind of thing (not all do);
– the religion has to have been on the receiving end of that kind of treatment before, but not so recently that it’s a stinging memory craving revenge;
– the religion has to have at least one past instance where it was guilty of being tyrannical, has repented of that, and retains the memory of its own earlier hypocrisy as a cautionary tale.
Now Christianity has all that, and for all its many sins in this area, there are more instances of comparable restraint. (The Roman Inquisition, for example, unlike the Spanish, produced the fairest courts in Europe for centuries. People accused by their rustic neighbors would intentionally say something heretical or blasphemous in court in the hopes of getting a change-of-venue to an ecclesiastical court: They reasoned they had better odds of not being railroaded or lynched by a hostile neighbor who was the judge’s second cousin. And once the church-court was in session, they could always say, “Oh, sorry about that, I don’t know what I was thinking, saying the Holy Spirit isn’t fully-divine like that. These theological notions confuse me, but I didn’t mean any harm.”)
Now leftist “religions” often want to kill all the unbelievers…but that ethic isn’t spelled-out up-front, so recent converts aren’t aware of it. They also don’t recognize Maoism, Stalinism, etc., as the same kind of thing…so they don’t have the benefit of the “cautionary tale.” And they’re recent-enough that, if they have big-enough numbers to persecute, they probably also have recent, stinging bitterness at being out of power.
They are among the most intrinsically dangerous of the “functional religions.”
That was a good link, and it covered the bases nicely. Especially good were the outright admissions quoted from Marxists that their own driving impulses were emotional and eschatological.
You can find some religiously tinged sentiments in Marx’s anti-religion [the proper object of worship for man is man, etc.], and plenty of metaphysical suppositions or claims in his anti-metaphysics, but this kind of puling over brotherhood and a glorious social dawning, with the outright acknowledgement that Marxism is their conscious substitute for a metaphysically [in both the euphemistic and rigorous senses of “metaphysical”] based morality and worldview, is not found so far as I am aware in Marx’s own writings.
“Building A Functional Religion (for fun and profit!)”
L Ron Hubbard nods in agreement.
Since you are talking about religion, I would like to recommend a religious bio I recently read about a non-lefty. Its Eric Metaxas bio on the German Martin Luther. His earlier one on Dietrich Bonhoeffer was great also. Excellent book. Inspiring actually, to be willing to boldly say what you know to be true. (I did see one error where Metaxas attributed a verse to something about the Apostle Paul that was before his Road to Damascus experience. ) http://ericmetaxas.com/books/martinluther/
As an atheist, I have had many debates with people who argued that that religion was necessary for this and many other reasons. And when I ask, “But is it true?”, they further expound on why it is necessary for individuals and society.
The truth is that people’s belief in religion is every bit as Orwellian as the left’s belief in their doctrines.