The show this week was going to be about the religious underpinnings of what I call the New Religion of the ruling class, but as I was doing it other things came to mind, so it is more of a survey of the antecedents. In retrospect I probably should rework the show around that idea, but that will have to be another show. As a result, this show is more of a thinking aloud about the roots of social justice.
The odd thing to me is the resistance I see to using the word “religion” to label this mode of thought that dominates the ruling class. The behavior of the managerial class ticks the boxes for a theocratic mindset. The only thing missing is a well-defined god, but all the other behavior mimics religious fervor. If you replace God with “arc of history” the puzzle is complete, as far as a religion.
There seems to be two camps that oppose the religion idea. One camp are Christians who think a religion must have all the things in their form of Christianity, which means most of Christianity is a false religion. The other camp is those who cannot move past the idea that people are motivated by something other than money. In both cases the opposition is about their own needs and desires.
Regardless, there is a case to be made that what we are seeing is religious instinct flowing through an ideology. At the end of the show, I get into this a little bit with the post-Marx culturalism stuff. I think the best cause and effect argument, however, is the Social Gospel Movement through Progressivism to the current woke stuff. That strikes me as a solid evolutionary arc. Maybe that can be a future show.
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This Week’s Show
Contents
- Is It A Religion?
- Transcending A Broken World
- Individualism
- Puritanism
- Social Gospel
- Tikkun Olam
- Post-Marx Culturalism
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OT
Fascinating observation to wrap up the posts for the weekend. (I have to say, the comments on this board are second to none).
The observation is, while watching network television, I noticed that not all of the commercials were inhabited by joggers.
Several actually portrayed real live, home grown, white males.
Guess what they were selling?
Yup.
I guess not enough honkies are signing up to be cannon fodder for the Empire.
Weird. I guess ya gotta be able to read to be an effective military.
Who knew?
I’m sure it’s a coincidence, but this week’s big viral story was libs freaking out about—and a previously un-“woke” corporation banning—an innocent (and frankly retarded) country-boy song about defending your own.
Do coordinated corporate attacks on “heritage America” inspire patriotic feeling? They hope so.
The Barbie movie must be the same sort of thing. Every supposedly popular conservative has made heavily promoted videos about it, and every lib is mocking the tough redneck Soldier of Fortune dudes for being associated with Shapiro et al’s “butthurt” about the pink doll movie.
Does mass-manipulated shitlib defense of heritage America’s corporate enemies inspire patriotic feeling? They hope so.
Barbie is making a ton of money. Until Jason Aldean admits he is signing about n&^%ers, what value is he? He simply reinforces the fatwa against white people.
With all due respect, “Barbie” is not making a ton of money.
It cost 150 million to make, and they’ve done 337 million in ticket sales.
That’s just past break even. And the reality is that the trailers were a complete con job. The ticket sales are going to fall off a cliff.
Check out the reviews by Critical Drinker, Nerdrotic, etc. it’s one of the last gasps of a dying industry.
I must be retarded too.
I don’t think that country boy is retarded.
Haven’t read all cmts yet, but had to put this up …
Don’t know if Z-man has seen this, but his sparring partner Michael Anton is back ….
Posted something that suggests he (Anton) is now gobbling boxes of deep red pills …
From something called Compact:.
“The Pessimistic Case for the Future”
Nowadays even the shitlibs at Salon are talking about collapse. It’s getting to be a popular subject. If so many people are seeing it, maybe it already happened.
The Great Depression must have felt like a civilizational collapse to many in the USA. Many fortunes were lost. Unemployment and homelessness increased a lot. Hundreds of “Hoovervilles” sprouted in the country. There was political hysteria all over, but it turned out that the GD was no civilizational collapse. We know through hindsight that the situation was exploited to concentrate much more power and control in the hands of the ruling class.
Hmm, exploited? or engineered?
Hey Z–I’ve never heard about Judaism proselytizing, much less here in Spain.
Where did you read about this?
The one thing I have noticed ideologues and the religious have in common is a lack of competence.
I have noticed that the competent have no need to worship a skydaddy or other mythical being. The incompetent on the other hand seem to intuitively understand they are at the mercy of others.
As the great scam known as Western Civilization collapses, the scammers (same as the incompetent) of course will have to find recourse elsewhere. Hence comes the 2nd religiousness that Spengler talked about.
It truly is a blessing to be competent.
Listen to yourself. You’re the intellectual equivalent of the internet tough guy whose going to kick everyone’s ass. You’re transparently trying to puff yourself up for reasons that we can all guess.
You only have to read Z Man’s comments section to find examples of smart, competent men who believe in God. I’m not one of them, but they have my respect and attention.
Finally, if you think that our civilization is being brought down by scammers and the incompetent only, you’re not very observant. You are an example of the guys that Z Man refers to who think that only individual greed drives the course of our world. You’re overlooking some of the most significant causes and the ones over which we have the most control.
It truly is a blessing to be competent.
You are correct, I thank God for it everyday.
The competent marvel at intricate systems. Some look at those systems in nature and humanity and see evidence of design in their complexity. I look at your comment, and, well…
“The only thing missing is a well-defined god, but all the other behavior mimics religious fervor”
Eric Hoffer: mass movements don’t need a God but they need a devil.”
All these leftist ideas starting with classic Marxism and now concentrating on wokeism aren’t religions, they are idolatries. And for idolatry to succeed an Idol is required. Stalin was shrewd enough to make Lenin that idol. Hundreds of Soviets lined up every day to see his mummy for 70 years after his death.
Todays wokeism has no Idol in sight to make it successful in the long run. Wokeism is irritating but will be short lived unless “they” find a new version of a chocolate Jesus.
It may not have idols but it does have saints. St Floyd, St Evers, St Mandela, St Aubery, St Trayvon, St Till, and so on. Chicago Jesus is probably not an idol either, but he’s definitely some kind of priest, or bishop, or even pope perhaps.
Their idol is themselves and “the people”.
Short-lived? It’s been thriving, under one guise or another, for almost 60 years. Its chief idol was, and still is to a large degree, Martin King.
Joseph Bottum’s An Anxious Age (2014) explores the link — the “arc” — of the Social Gospel movement and Progressivism. Subtitle: “The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America”.
Putting the Za-roast-ian-ism question in along with the Who Is John Filmer question.
Wasn’t social justice coined (if not invented by) by John Stuart Mill?
There is nothing so evil that social justice cannot justify doing, especially when you mix it together with the modern notion of “secular ethics.” The evil is always presented as a way of reducing some “suffering” somewhere, even when the cure is worse than the disease. It’s self perpetuating because their interventions to cure suffering somewhere always creates new, usually worse problems that need further interventions.
This stuff is always presented in a very one sided and usually emotionally manipulative way. The temperance movement had its victims they paraded around whose husbands were drunks. Poor “suffering” children whose father’s spent all their money on drink. But the “fix” created far more problems than it solved and gave us a 1/2 a century of large organized crime syndicates even long after the mistake was undone. This new problem of organized crime required new laws, new policing agencies, new restrictions on liberty and most of all, more new funding.
Whatever it taps into in our psyches, I think it is done at least some of the times, cynically. Feminism can never go away, it can never declare victory because too many feminists have jobs being full time feminists. This is repeated in many, many progressive causes. Trying to “improve schools” causes schools to get far more expensive and worse at their job, but a lot of full time people get their employment mucking around in “education” The whole “racial justice” thing can never go away because it employees far too many people making large salaries with a vested interest in never solving the supposed problem. No matter how much they make things worse, “FORWARD!” to the next phony issue is their cry.
Take a bunch of folks who aren’t qualified to change the oil in their car, tell them it’s their imperative to Change The World, fund them extravagantly, sit back and watch the fun.
John Stuart Mills indeed fathered that bastard with his “unified” theory of justice expanding the concept to fields outside of the law. John Dewey a generation later would build on that foundation and begin to secularize the political movement we call “progressivism.” People can time travel to strangle Hitler and Marx in the crib all they want, but I want a shot at those two.
Tars, I recently stumbled across the source of your name. I didn’t realize you were such an important guy 🙂
While I understand the dislike of the term “social justice,” that was also the name of Father Coughlin’s magazine.
For those who don’t know, Coughlin was one of the US’s most popular radio broadcasters about 90 years ago. Today, people would probably call him a Catholic fascist, which sounds like a big improvement over what we have today.
In what may have been the first case of media cancellation, he was driven into radio and print silence by the federal government.
I am told he was critical of the chosen. What a coincidence that he was cancelled!
Any word on what is going on with Dr Ed Dutton it’s been over six weeks since he updated his site?
Substack? Perhaps he’s working on some of his side hustles.
He has been regularly posting videos to YouTube.
The impulse to Religiosity or Spirituality seems to be universal in the human psyche. It is probably selected for, or crafted in the image of God, if you prefer. From a sociological standpoint, it allows the individual to better cooperate with people to whom he is not directly related. It also lets him contemplate his eventual demise with a certain equanimity. Without such, we would all probably be insane nihilists (instead of just most of us).
Although it is fun to annoy the left by calling out their dysgenic belief structure as religious, it is rarely productive. Better to call out their Science as Scientism (admittedly, a religion in itself), and correct their factual errors- not that they will thank you for it.
Calling them demonic is probably less offensive to believers otherwise on our side, and probably also more accurate, at least with respect to effect, if not cause.
The benefit of calling them evil is that it is true. Also, a Zman repeatedly points out, morality is the coin of the realm. Finally combating our opponents on a plane that matters (moral sanction or censure) is a huge step in the right direction. Basing the moral determination of evil in God’s Word, in Christianity, is best. The cultural default is that those opposing Christianity are evil.
Tarl Cabot: “Better to call out their Science as Scientism (admittedly, a religion in itself), and correct their factual errors – not that they will thank you for it.”
===============
Classically, the definition of “Science” was, “That which is known”.
HOUGHTON-MIFFLIN: Middle English, knowledge, learning, from Old French, from Latin scientia, from sciēns, scient-, present participle of scīre, to know; see skei- in Indo-European roots
MERRIAM-WEBSTER: Middle English, “knowledge, the ability to know, learning, branch of knowledge,” borrowed from Anglo-French science, cience, borrowed from Latin scientia “knowledge, awareness, understanding, branch of knowledge, learning,” noun derivative from scient-, sciens, present participle of sciō, scīre “to know,” perhaps going back to Indo-European *skh2-i(e/o)-, present tense formation from a verbal base *skeh2-, *skh2- “cut open, flay” (if sense development was “cut, incise, mark” > “distinguish” > “know”), whence also Sanskrit -chyati “(s/he) flays, pulls off (skin)” (verbal adjective chātaḥ, chitáḥ) and perhaps Greek scházō, scházein, also scháō, schân “to make an incision, open (a vein), let flow”
===============
What was never really made explicit was the implicit understanding that when speaking of “Science,” we White Christian occidental folk were talking about not just “that which is known,” but, rather, “that which is known to be TRUE”.
And without an underlying foundation in TRUTH, “science” could never amount to even so little as sheer nonsense.
===============
This was all part & parcel of a fundamental pillar of ancient Christian Doctrine.
The three synoptic gospelists all agreed that there was one and only one “original” or “cardinal” or “mortal” sin; only one sin which could not be forgiven:
Matthew 12-31: “Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against THE HOLY GHOST shall not be forgiven unto men.”
Mark 3-28: “Verily I say unto you, All sins shall be forgiven unto the sons of men, and blasphemies wherewith soever they shall blaspheme – but he that shall blaspheme against THE HOLY GHOST hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation – because they said, He hath an unclean spirit.”
Luke 12-10: “And whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but unto him that blasphemeth against THE HOLY GHOST it shall not be forgiven. And when they bring you unto the synagogues, and unto magistrates, and powers, take ye no thought how or what thing ye shall answer, or what ye shall say: for THE HOLY GHOST shall teach you in the same hour what ye ought to say.”
===============
But the synoptic gospelists appear to have been at a loss when it came to explaining what exactly any of that was supposed to have meant.
However, the gnostic gospelist [possibly writing as much as half a century later?] framed the matter thusly:
John 14-15: If ye love me, keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another COMFORTER, that he may abide with you for ever; even THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you.
John 16-7: Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, THE COMFORTER will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you.
And when he is come, he will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment: of sin, because they believe not on me; of righteousness, because I go to my Father, and ye see me no more; of judgment, because the prince of this world is judged. I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when he, THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will show you things to come.
===============
John 8-31: …ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
John 8-44: Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do: he was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the TRUTH, because there is no TRUTH in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.
===============
From this we conclude that the original sin, the cardinal sin, the mortal sin, the only unforgivable sin, was Satan’s invention of lies as the means by which to undermine and destroy Truth, which is to say, Satan’s eternal agenda of undermining and destroying THE HOLY GHOST itself.
In this sense, there is the strong implication that Truth, which is to say, THE HOLY GHOST, is the most fragile pillar of the Trinity, the pillar most vulnerable to assault & overwhelm & destruction.
Now fast forward two millennia [status post the flourishing of the gospelists], and witness our contemporary Sanhedrin filling the minds of young impressionable occidental children with every manner of anti-Truth mesmerizations & hypnotizations & legerdemains & necromancies:
Derrida on Truth
https://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/02/4_derrida_on_tr.html
Those anti-Truth psychological tactics are precisely what the Sanhedrin adopted in order to fool the young impressionable occidental children – primarily via the anti-Truth fallacy known as “argumentum ab auctoritate” [argument by appeal to authorities, such as Albert Bourla & Rochelle Walensky & Mandy Cohen & Anthony Fauci] – in order to convince those occidental children to consent to being poisoned by the most lethal biological warfare agent known to medicine, namely the Sanhedrins’ Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.
===============
ANYWAY, getting back to Tarl Cabot’s “Scientism”, when the Sanhedrin are able to alter the occidental understanding of “Science” away from “that which is known to be TRUE”, and instead engrain into young impressionable occidental minds a new understanding of “Science” as merely being “that which is KNOWN”, then the entirety of Western Civilization is uprooted and the Tree of Life begins to wither & wilt & rot & die.
And sure enough, “Scientists” are all now wallowing in the sewer of the Irreproducibility Crisis, because the Sanhedrin were able to mesmerize & hypnotize & entrance the Scientists into abandoning Truth and embracing cant in Its stead.
There was a video that has been pretty well scrubbed from the internet. It was recorded on June 2, 2020 outside the Connie Morella Library in Bethesda Maryland and shows a huge crowd of whites with their hands in the air participating in a liturgical “anti racist” exercise. Maybe you saw it back then, maybe you remember it. Linked below is the only remaining snippet of it I can find, the full thing was much more alarming and absurd. I figure that’s why they scrubbed it, didn’t want too many grillers to see it. Anyhow, I’m no theological expert, but you can’t watch this and tell me it isn’t a religion. Apologies that this short segment doesn’t do justice to the full length version, but it seems to be all that is left.
https://www.bizpacreview.com/2020/06/03/brain-washed-whites-convulsing-from-white-guilt-make-pledge-of-allegiance-to-black-people-929304/
That’s remarkable. Taking a knee also was a blatantly religious ritual and was downplayed after people noted it.
which hearkens to mind another religious video from a few years back
https://youtu.be/TW9b0xr06qA
Chilling.
Make no mistake: that child is being successfully groomed to smash a rifle butt into your head. All these years later, I almost guarantee you she is fully down with transgenderism and may even being show off a child she going to mutilate.
These same kids would have gladly turned their parents in to the Gestapo, the NKVD, or Mao’s Red Guards for crimethink.
The very worst of brain-addled Hillarian boomerdom on display here. Cringeworthy and tragic don’t begin to describe how far off the rails 2-3 generations have gone. Not a single adult in that room has his/her own thoughts, and they are purposeless without their proselytization.
Haven’t felt this kind of revulsion since seeing the antiwar peaceniks at their sit-ins and the koolaid gang at the final JimJones bash. Of course, in hindsight the peaceniks are laughable because they all – almost to a one – grew into warmongerers for the state: go Ukraine, stop Iraq, go Sandanisas, stop Khadaffi, etc.
Their causes change, but that old fervor remains and here it is again. Now their feeble children are on the cusp of heading the realm.
Fervor – just gimme that ol’ time religion!!
Still one of my favorite scenes:
https://youtu.be/IY1cEZ-jXlQ
“boomerdom” The parent was likely Gen-X. Gen-X is far, far worse than Boomers when it comes to race.
“Of course, in hindsight the peaceniks are laughable because they all – almost to a one – grew into warmongerers for the state: go Ukraine, stop Iraq, go Sandanisas, stop Khadaffi, etc. ”
Peaceniks? COWARDS! They didn’t care about peace. They didn’t want to be drafted. That is all it was. Pure cowardice. Besides, sex, drugs and rock and roll are a lot more fun than being a soldier.
I just threw up in my mouth a little.
if you google the phrase “so sorry for slavery,” you’ll see images of guilt wracked white Wokies and their kids wearing black t-shirts emblazoned with the words “So sorry.” These goodthinker whites and their families are also being led around in chains and manacles by blacks. Apparently, there was a program a few years ago called the So Sorry movement by a group called the Lifeline Expedition which ethnomasochistic white lefties could virtue signal and make an apology for slavery by letting black people lead them around in chains and shackles for a couple of hours in some role-reversal slavery LARP.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeline_Expedition
The hubris of even thinking you can apologize for a historical event that happened two centuries ago may exceed the amount of brainwashing involved.
I dunno. If some yankee apologized to me for the death of my great great great great grandfather at the Battle of Fredericksburg, I think I might appreciate it.
That Yankee would richly deserve the same fate as your ancestor.
I don’t know J.Z., I’d be more inclined to run him through with Grandpa’s Saber.
This is correct. It’s not that the apology is efficacious or particularly meaningful. What matters is that somebody who belongs to an enemy group is abasing himself before you. It’s a form of groveling, and who doesn’t want to see an enemy grovel?
Jeffrey, and how would/could someone, yankee or other, apologize for your grandfather’s death?
We are indeed a morally groundless/ignorant society these days in that few if any know what constitutes a true/sincere apology. “I’m sorry”, or “my bad”, just doesn’t cut it. In fact, unless meant in some jest are adding insult to injury.
First, the aggrieving party must accept/acknowledge complete and full responsibility—no equivocation—and this made specifically to the aggrieved party.
Next the aggrieving party must promise to never do such behavior again and indeed take such steps as to prevent such behavior from recurring.
The aggrieving party must perform recompense and attempt as best as possible to make the aggrieved party whole.
And there are rules for the aggrieved party as well wrt to failing to accept a “sincerely” made apology.
One can quickly see here where apologies are pointless 150 years after the fact. Indeed, in the process I speak of the only crime considered unforgivable is murder as the victim is no longer able to accept the apology—yes relatives of the victim can be apologized to for *their* injury, but that’s not the same.
It’s been awhile so I might have missed a point or two. Others can fill in and correct as they deem necessary. Point here being, apologies for such grievances by people so far removed from the time, place, and manner of the injury are merely virtue signaling and can not be considered sincere in that they are not a party to such an event.
But you wouldn’t respect him.
Bethesda MD is the beating heart of wokeism in the DC area. There are still angry hoards of Karen maskatarians roaming the streets and driving their Audi SUVs recklessly through the Whole Foods garage.
Hrrrrrmmmmm. As an outhouse Christian I am not sure I care one way or another if the tall foreheads call it a “religion” or not. At first glance wokism certainly manifests itself as a religion I suppose. I think the burn comes from Christians thinking that you are equating their faith to faggotry, shithouse science, or any of the other foundations of wokism
From my place in the outhouse of the universe, I don’t talk to God, but I am convinced I’ve seen His hand move as He goes about His work, and I’ve felt His presence. It’s left me a better man for it too. If someone wants to call me superstitious and bigoted – fill your boots. Contrary to your idea that Christianity seeks to spread itself…sure it does. But it also talks about “casting pearls before swine” and cautions the faithful about addressing the sliver in your neighbor’s eye while ignoring the log in your own.
The cult of wokism does no such thing. The difference between cults and faith are subtle…but they’re there.
Dysfunction overload and the problem of analysis paralysis.
When a civilization is in decline, there is no shortage of problems to contemplate. And cogitating on these problems is a Hell of a lot easier than taking action, so deep analysis becomes an addictive pastime. Underlying this “habit of mind” is a belief that something good will come of it. And all of this mental entropy is enabled by prolonged affluence. As long as the plates keep spinning, nothing in the environment will force people into tangible action. Hence the root problem is a dysfunctional environment that no longer exacts an existential penalty for laziness and stupidity.
As an example, the secular religion of wokeism is not going to be talked out of existence as a result of precise analysis and strategizing. At some point, something tangible has to occur in order to excise this pathogenic cancer. So how do we get to tangible action as opposed to endless debate? Well, you control you. Start there.
Collapsing civilization: the original first world problem.
At least that’s how it starts to look.
TomA: “At some point, something tangible has to occur in order to excise this pathogenic cancer.”
I’ve been obsessed with fertility rates for about two decades now, and I see no evidence whatsoever that sh!tlib/libsh!t Whites are procreating at anywhere close to replacement levels.
In fact, the cynic in me is convinced that the depopulationists have been pushing s0d0my & sapphistry on the public at large not just because of the depopulationists’ own all-consuming paedophilia, but also because of their innate hatred of mankind in general [likely to include a bizarre hatred of themselves], and the moar their little boys are convinced to grow up to be ph@gg0tts, and the moar their little girls are convinced to grow up to be bu11dykes, the fewer offspring they will have, and the moar their populations will continue to self-de-populate.
Getting back to TomA’s “at some point”; barring e.g. a USA-China or USA-Russia nukular exchange, or a new & improved version of COVID which continues to spare the (((ACE-2 folks))), i.e. barring a sudden catastrophic collapse of the population, all of us are likely simply functioning as witnesses to a 75- to 100-year very slow collapse of sh!tlib/libsh!t total fertility rates [beginning with Griswold in 1965 & Roe in 1973 and continuing on out towards 2075 and beyond], in which case, to paraphrase Douglas MacArthur, we won’t be seeing a sudden death of the sh!tlib/libsh!t personality type, but rather we will be watching the sh!tlib/libsh!t personality type slowly fade away into extinction.
Anyway, that’s one possible future.
Hopefully we won’t have to suffer the thermonukular exchanges, nor the utterly nihilistic wrath of the (((ACE-2 folks))) and their control of the pharmaceutical industrial complex [with the understanding that a laboratory-created bio-toxin such as COVID would have to be classified as a pharmaceutical].
===============
PS: Here are the 2021 polling numbers on v@xxination rates:
Gallup, DEM: 92%
Kaiser, DEM: 86%
Gallup, IND: 68%
Kaiser, IND: no data
Gallup, GOP: 56%
Kaiser, GOP: 54%
So if there’s any truth to the idea that the “lipid nano-particles” of the v@xxines are designed to head straight to the ovaries & the testes so as to sterilize the v@xxine recipients, then DEMs will be about twice as likely as GOPers to suffer from any subsequent infertility.
Well, that’ll be the excuse for the shitlibs to adopt Somalians, Cambodians, etc.
You know, so the “family line” doesn’t disappear.
JJ, for some reason your kkk0mment just smacked moi upside the metaphorical head.
I dunno, maybe it’s because I’m still half asleep.
But there was something about the sheer absurdity of what you wrote, the lunacy of it, that would make absolutely perfect sense in Klown World.
A surreal nihilism of
grotesquery.
An existential lie.
BREAKING NOOZ…
(((FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried’s younger brother)))… considered purchasing the island nation of Nauru in the Pacific… to protect (((his philanthropic allies))) and create a genetically enhanced human species… in the “event where 50%-99.99% of people die”…
https://tinyurl.com/94fzew5s
===============
Fascinating tribal factoid here: This apocalyptic article, about the (((the grinning hand-rubbing cosmopolitan merchants))) was written for CNBC by a street-sh!tter [i.e. from the point of view of a competing clan of grinning hand-rubbing cosmopolitan merchants].
I’m telling youse Bros, the Ghost of Charles Darwin always has the last laugh.
the secular religion of wokeism is not going to be talked out of existence
—
True, but it is another arrow in our quiver. Inferred elsewhere is that the wokeists hate religion and it helps to force them to explain why their faith and belief in fuzzy-facts like “White Supremacy” or “central nervous systems of all humans is the only physical racial attribute with no genetic differentiator” are not religious tenets.
My ex-girlfriend went all in on Woke Christianity. She attends a local congregation of the United Church of Christ. Their beliefs seem to be about ninety percent Woke ideology and ten percent very watered down, almost vestigial Christian tenets. Reading their Facebook posts, it looks like sacralizing blacks, promoting LGBTQIA+ identity (especially among the young), fighting “white supremacy,” and mitigating climate change are the most important issues confronting the United Church of Christ — NOT adhering to Biblical scriptures as written.
Lutheranism has gone this way. They even have changed the God. I can’t remember what they call it now, but it is some hippie description of a God who just accepts everything. It is a very thin veneer over a cheap hippie prayer circle. Just love man. Just show up and love everyone.
Pastors are wearing a stole that looks like something they got at the jungle ayahuasca center gift shop and writing bios that don’t mention Christ. It unraveled very quickly.
The pastor at The United Church of Christ congregation I mentioned is a militant homosexual. (It’s de rigueur today that leftist Christian churches have an LGBTIA+ preacher.) He mentions in his capsule bio that one of his primary goals as a pastor is “queering the universe” (whatever that means). I seem to have missed that line in the Bible where God commanded his believers to sally forth and queer the universe.
None of my business Oswald…but you need another girl friend. The gal you’re with is going to be a train wreck if she isn’t already; and you want to be parsecs away when they inevitability implode.
She’s no longer my girlfriend. She’s my EX-girlfriend. She got married to some schlubby starving artist a couple of months ago. I give them two or years tops before she runs him through the divorce court wringer.
Look for a girlfriend in the traditional Church of Christ, without the United in front of the title, you will be more likely to find a prospect for a traditional wife, the traditional churches of Christ are male only in leadership, they are generally more based.
What’s more, the choirs and organists are world class. (-;
I get the joke re: CofC music. Going to a friend’s funeral here in Middle TN a couple of years ago found me wondering WTH was going on when the huge video screen displayed the lyrics to a hymn and the song leader popped up. My non-profit org uses the church hall for several programs each year, but you mustn’t ever serve alcohol in the place, even tho’ they claim to have “Holy Communion” as part of their service. I get that female sermonizing could be tedious, but males in this denomination are not that inspiring either.
That would seem to be a pretty accurate description of most mainline denominations and many of the ancillary ones as well. Hence, Christianity, in its organized form, is all but dead. It survives mainly in the hearts of the faithful.
Home School.
Home Church.
Homo.
Nope. Belay that. Doesn’t quite work.
Well Ostie, perhaps we should schedule concerts on Sundays and just forgo the speechafying?
Weeeeell, depending upon the sermon…
Auld Mark: “perhaps we should schedule concerts on Sundays”
Ostei Kozelskii: “depending upon the sermon…”
I could be all in for a Christian church which did nothing but perform sacred music on Sundays [and maybe read some sacred poetry, although it would be even more challenging to provide novel music for the sacred poetry, in the style of e.g. JSB].
A church service consisting of one great big sing-a-thon, with maybe a fish fry or a pork barbeque afterwards, and beautiful young virginal White Christian girls [no tats, no student loan debt] wandering around in sundresses [preferably ditching their sandals and walking barefoot through the grass].
Talk about some Total Fertility Rates…
Amazingly, Nextdoor, is far more toxic than Twitter could ever dream of being. It’s full of neurotic people posting things like “I saw a car I didn’t recognize drive by today, be careful out there!” and everyone replies on how walking outside will almost certainly get you raped.
The idea of NextDoor was you would be nicer to people close to you and you at least had a mild acquaintance with. The truth is, these crazies don’t leave their house and will ruthlessly enforce their anti-life bubblewrap mindset on everyone. Need to be safe you know.
I use Nextdoor for intel. I signed up during the Covid farce to see how many Karens or other garden variety sh1tlibs live in my immediate area. Let’s just say I was expecting it to be bad and it exceeded my wildest expectations.
It was sobering tbh… but that is a good thing! It’s going to be impossible to fight back against any of this if we are ignorant to the true scope. At least.. .that’s what I tell myself.
They banned my first account within two days after I politely told them maybe they shouldn’t try to destroy someone’s business with review bombing because they saw a guy whose mask didn’t cover their nose there.
For my current one, I keep quiet and use it the same way you do.
Run silent, run deep.
I signed up for the exact same reason. I was also interested in hearing about the neighborhood crime, which I knew was increasing and which I don’t trust the local government to report on.
It’s essentially the online version of the place where the village women gather to gossip. In the current gynocratic society though it became a way for them to force their insanity on everyone during the mask mandates, which went on longer here in Oregon than any other state.
It’s a truly disgusting place overall – a window on the insectoid soul of the local bugmen. There are a few people, like the Boomercon I talked about yesterday, who do a valuable service by posting news, usually with minimal commentary, about just how revolting the Portland area has become. I don’t comment anymore because my posts just get deleted or I get banned but I will post a “sadness” or “agree” emoji on these stories. There are a LOT of people who do that.
It’s truly sad that this is about the extent of “free-expression” available on local affairs. It has made me aware that the population of Western Oregon is too far gone to salvage. Nextdoor is a microcosm of the whole society though. As Chet says, the ideological engine of Nextdoor, and now the whole of the larger society, is a group of perpetually online lunatics whose vision of paradise is a padded room occupied by people wearing straight-jackets and padded helmets. There is a much larger group of sane people but they are only allowed to occasionally nod in agreement with the few mild heresies that the overseers allow.
Finally, though it’s been said before, Nextdoor’s padded room dystopia IS what you get when women set the tone of a society. If there’s any way out of the current mess and we somehow get a chance to rebuild our society, we absolutely must make sure that men and men’s values dominate EVERYTHING.
It sounds like NextDoor should be renamed Locked and Triple Deadbolted Door.
Yes. It’s just porn for people who are paranoid about the world around them. Basically two types: the left-centrist Karen busybody, and the right-centrist Fox News “back the blue” uncle.
Yeah, the Boomercon guy whose posts I upvote is probably the latter type. They at least post stories that reflect what happens to a place where the former type makes all the decisions. The latest trend is to moan about the “homeless pods” the local government is using to destroy what’s left of the safe neighborhoods and make sure that if you’re walking down the street and suddenly feel a need for a used hypodermic needle or cap of fentanyl, you can always find one. It’s all so depressing. The site does at least help make it obvious just how determined the local populace and government are to wreck the place.
The difference between me and Uncle Fox is that I don’t think any amount of fox-posting will change anything.
I agree with you about the craziness of nextdoor, but my experience was that it suppressed and shamed the sharing of useful information.
In the all white semi-rural town that I lived in, we would mention suspicious strangers that we observed. After Trayon, if you mentioned that the person who was aimlessly wandering down the street was black or latino,you were swarmed with liberals attacking you, in very personal ways, for racial profiling. These people were filled with berserker intensity and made nextdoor unpleasant and useless. I remember one old retired white guy who updated this profile photo to show himself in a Trayon hoodie.
I side with Z Man in saying that these people displayed a religious fervor, although I’d rather not argue about the semantics of “religious.”
Perhaps Satanic might be more descriptive. The love of the lie.
Good point:
“But my religion doesn’t have a god”
Ahh, but there is a religion exactly like that.
Yeah, I subscribed once, but got too depressed with the content of NextDoor. Last exchange I had was with one women that wanted the coyotes removed from the neighborhood. She moves into the desert and immediately wants to remove all the wildlife she moved in with eliminated.
The older I get, the more I realize how much I love my coyote. Not to mention my Gabon viper.
I’m kinda fond of my gila monster.
Compared to the average Leftist, yon gila monster would make mighty fine company.
My experience with nextdoor was that it was heavily infested with liberals, but actual do-gooder liberals trying (in their mind) to improve the community as opposed to the usual slacktivist current thing shitlibs you see on twitter.
Now you’d think “gee that’s better, at least they’re earnest and actually doing something”. Nope, it’s all these fruity things like putting one of those little “neighborhood library” boxes in their front yard, or having a thing for distributing garden produce to “the poor”. Then invariably when some teenager sticks a porno mag into the library box, or a Mexican steals all the food put out, those loving, caring, liberals go absolutely apeshit and are right on nextdoor screeching their lungs out about it.
Back before society collapsed these people were the local church busybodies starting massive quarrels at the bakesale because someone brought something with peanuts in it.
Ha ha! A capital post. However, this wacky peanut allergy thingy seems to be a pretty recent phenomenon. I don’t remember any hullabaloo about it in the 80s.
For all intents and purposes, peanut & tree nut allergies are unique to the (((YKWs))).
Demanding the removal of peanuts & tree nuts from goyische society is just another power-flex/goyische-humiliation-ritual on the part of the (((YKWs))).
Those stupid little mini-libraries are EVERYWHERE in my neighborhood. It’s such a stupid, obvious way of saying “see, we’re liberals, we REEEEEEEEAD stuff, we’re edumacated, and we care enough to edumacate you, Mr. MAGA, to put a bunch of decaying paperbacks out for you in a wooden box on a post.” Of course, it’s also extremely tempting to pop a copy of the Turner Diaries or just good ol’ Mein Kampf in there. I’m sure some of them are honeypots with cameras intended to give the local Stasi an idea who the local “nazis” are.
You want to see some serious book humblebragging, watch the PBS News Hour. They still do interviews over Zoom because covid is still killing ten billion people per day, and all the shitlibs and swamp creatures they interview make sure to line up all their most pretentious books behind them so the camera can catch it all.
We have one of those little libraries in our neighbourhood, and I don’t mind occasionally contributing a used mystery. What else am I to do with my book overflow? My public library has a little area where they sell used books to raise money for the library, but who wants to fund the library these days? They’re all in on every sort of woke lunacy. The thrift stores probably throw away 2/3 of what they receive, and I’ve no idea what sort of charities they’re contributing to anyway. If someone in the neighbourhood wants to read my old Agatha Christie novels, they’re welcome. The last book I contributed was ‘Bad Blood’ on the Theranos scandal. A good book, but I likely wouldn’t read it again.
We have one too. Don’t knock them. The mothers with children walk through the neighborhood and stop to browse. Mostly children’s books. It’s a community thing I suspect.
We often lament that we must build community—well this is one way, and I think a positive way.
Put a copy of Mein Kampf in it.
I can only imagine what ND must have been like during the Covid Captivity. Mrs. Kravitz threatening to call the FBI if she saw a schnauzer walking down the street without a mask on its muzzle, no doubt.
Yes. Con Inc is a sect. Its key tenant is colorblindism. Of course, what we have to remember is that all of these sects have the same God – The State. We are at the Popes of Avignon phase. The system is vile and deeply corrupt. Every actor who has a voice with any kind of sanctioned role or pulpit is acting on behalf of some faction angling to get something out of the God’s House – hijacked force of arms and/or money.
This article over at the Israeli Mind is a very clever and interesting example: https://amgreatness.com/2023/07/21/barack-obamas-success-how-his-election-created-the-modern-democratic-party-and-transformed-america/
While I agree that Obama was an abomination there is nothing in this article that is over any target. It avoids the rot. I believe it is on purpose. What are the great transgressions he mentions? Obama did several things that harm Israel. Notice the mention of Tim Scott multiple times and the careful construction of his image. I suspect this is the beginning of a long term strategy to promote Tim Scott as the real black redeemer that Obama was not. He is the humble messiah, raised in the South Carolina manger unlike that other false prophet. Of course, he will be every bit the neo-con stooge that Obama was. Perhaps more of one. Don’t buy it. Obama was the racial antagonist and tension inflamer. Tim Scott will be the great analgesic – Saint Preparation H.
If you haven’t seen his outrageous performance on the Tucker Carlson debate/interview format thing, it is worth a look. I think Ramzpaul covers it.
I think that if you could identify the most significant trend in 20th to early 21st century American politics, it would be the minstrelification of the body politic. Someone has found blacks very useful as a tool to gain the moral high ground and to subvert and distract the majority so that their country could be hijacked for other purposes.
What is most sad is how thin the veneer has been. That sainted philanderer guy said colorblind, but the entire project was predicated on making color the center of focus. Of course, we must not say race, we must use its euphamism, color. The American Nation has been bamboozled and manipulated. “Don’t see color”, they say. Then they do all they can to get you to see color, and elevate the darker hues so that you can prove that you have been redeemed. You must constantly be re-baptized and re-affirmed at their holy communion. The tricksters and hucksters send their emissaries from the capitol that resides on foreign soil and put them in the Blue and Red parishes.
They keep the holy credo of colorblind front and center and fill you with guilt by smearing stains on the masterworks from your past. They desecrate the once beautiful frescoes that adorned the people’s temples and chapels. The levers of guilt are pulled. The pangs that clamor for redemption are aroused. And so you are offered communion – vote for this guy, clap for this gal of the most holy and righteous color to prove that you are free of the ultimate sin. See color so you can prove that you don’t.
And for what? To subvert you so that you transfer your house of worship to their God’s parish – The State. There they lay in wait, and they transfer your wealth and power to their vaults and temples – to house of the God that serves them.
In the Red parish, the parishioners stagger about sickened by the rotten flesh and rancid vinegar of this profane and putrid communion. Over in the Blue parish they perform their rites. They prove their goodness by hating themselves and the bad whites to prove they too have been redeemed. Unlike the Red parishioners, who must be focused on the Cult of Minstrels, the Blue parishioners focus on hatred and eradication of The Great Devil – white man and his civilization. The great white devil lurks everywhere, and with him bloodshed and death. He dwells in the Red parish. He and his house must be burnt.
Blue parishioners are called to arms. Destroy the Devil and his people. The most rabid in the Blue parish are unwitting tools who must prove their faith by being the most vociferous in renouncing and destroying The White Devil. This sect is writing a new Deuteronomy. They are weakening the sons of the great White Devil and preparing for the day where God will rejoice when they have done as he commands – eradicate this white devil and take his lands.
That is the religion. It is all a facade for the most base and fundamental forces of biology – ethnic conflict and territorial conquest. It is time to wake up from the back pews and chart a just and effective heresy.
If the “I voted for a Black man for president, so I’m no racist” works a second time, we are indeed lost. Some people never crack wise.
“Fool me once, shame on— shame on you. Fool me… You can’t get fooled again!”
RealityR, I fully expected your last paragraph to conclude that ONLY Michelle Obama will do as Annointed One 2024. Not just for world class glass-ceiling-smashing, but the ultimate black! woman! victim!
Michelle can (and has a duty to) save Empire from having to choose between 2 candidates running under indictment (fake or real) or even jail – a rather bad look, even for a banana republik. Move over Tim Scott and false prophet Obama I, we have Obama II, Queen of all communities! Karens be saved! Si Se Puede at last!
That easily is the best comment I have read anywhere in recent memory, Reality.
They are at war with us and we are not yet at war with them.
Yeah, but, but, mini camp is starting!!!
Leftism has no holy text. It has no God or even gods. (No, Gaia doesn’t count.) In fact, it is largely atheistic. It has no clearly delineated and established religious services and houses of worship and communities of faith. It has no eschatology, no heaven, no Hell, not even any concept of reincarnation or transmigration of the soul. And I’m sure I could come up with further dissimilarities with religion, if I tried.
Now, I’ll grant you that the puritanical impulse is a key component of Leftism, but it is puritanism shorn of religion, which is mere zealotry or fanaticism. And this zealotry is channelled through postmodern ideology. Prior to the second half of the 60s, the vehicle for Leftist fanaticism was Marxism, another non-religious phenomenon.
People who call Leftism a religion do so for the same reason Leftists call their opponents racists or fascists–it is simply a punitive slur. To call people (Leftists) religious believers is to label them irrational, which is painful for people who pride themselves on their so-called “rationality.” In fact, they are as irrational and psychologically primitive as any haruspical tribe in Papua New Guinea. And, because it wounds Leftist pride, I fully support labeling them religious, even though the allegation is false.
At one time the Jewish people had very few texts of their own with which to define themselves. They were still in the process of living the history that would one day be recorded in those texts. No houses of worship — wandering, wandering, wandering — and some community standards about this and that learned from experience, not contemplation. Every religion has an early history in which its activities and dogma were very inchoate, and the conditions of which bear great similarities to the emerging cultic activities around us today. Look not at the developed product, but its origins, to find the similarities. Did the very early Christians have a creed, for instance? Was Jesus of the same substance as God? They hadn’t gotten to it yet.
Well, Jews did actually have a god. I suppose that counts for something. What’s more, literary production is slightly more advanced right now than it was 1500 B.C. For a phenomenon putatively a religion, Leftism has precious little excuse for not producting a definitive doctrinal holy text.
When Mohammed was getting his band together, he wrote about this very thing. He found it wildly hilarious that Christians in the desert couldn’t really explain the Trinity or whatever. I always have maintained the Big M was the L. Ron Hubbard of his day as a direct result of these encounters.
“People who call Leftism a religion do so for the same reason Leftists call their opponents racists or fascists–it is simply a punitive slur.”
That’s not true at all.
There are a number of non-theistic religions. Jainism is one. It seeks to purify the soul. I would argue this is the one closest to Leftism. Confucianism is very much a religion and has no god or deity. Buddhists argue they do not although it arguably worships the Buddha. A good case can be made that Talmudic Judaism is godless and worships a people. The Torah admittedly references Yahweh at points.
As I wrote below, the difficulty with defining Leftism as a religion is its constantly evolving philosophy or lack thereof. It is more the behavior that is important than the creed. But, again, that’s true with many faiths.
I do not refer to Leftism as a religion to slur people of faith. In fact, that reference wounds leftists–which is good, but not the intent.
You misread me. The slur is directed against Leftists, not the religious, although, as ID points out, doing so maligns both groups albeit perhaps inadvertently.
Whether Confucianism is a religion is very much a matter for debate. I don’t think it is.
Jainism’s emphasis on the soul puts it in the realm of the metaphysical and therefore makes it a true religion. The large majority of Leftists, I dare say, would deny the soul’s very existence.
Gotcha, I did misread you on that point.
Their God is Progress, and if they keep faith in progress the promise is that they or their descendants will get their brains copied into a computer to live a simulated immortal life of endless pleasure for a near eternity until their machines can no longer extract useful energy from the environment and the universe dies.
It’s the retarded overly-optimistic futurism that replaces all the woo woo stuff in traditional religion.
Their god ultimately is their self. They are malignant narcissists.
“You don’t see people going up to your door and asking if you have a moment to talk about our lord and savior Zeus”
Even as a Catholic, I would find this hilarious and invite him in for a beer. Get an Odinbro in there too and we’re talking about an entertaining conversation.
No, Tom Wolfe had a character in “A Man in Full” that did exactly this after a stretch in prison. He reads Marcus Aurelius and goes from there. The book hasn’t aged well, because Atlanta has become a crap hole and the whites have just moved out entirely. But the Zeus part was very amusing.
Protestants have a particular kind of nutty, but nutty itself isn’t unique at all. What is pretty unique, as Z noted, is the historical situation since the end of the Cold War— the unipolar world.
I agree about EMJ’s view of race. Any random Northern European is clearly something different from any random sub-Saharan African, any random East Asian, etc.— granted peoples tend to blend a little at the frontier, but that seems to support the idea of race to me. No gray without black and white. But I am a huge fan of his idea of a revolutionary spirit.
He talks about Logos, and while I haven’t read his books, I gather from listening to him that the idea is about order and limits. Take away limits, and some people will want to screw around, because they’re dickheads.
Kind of related to VD’s critique of science, and his comparison of it to engineering as science you can trust, because it has to work. If you want to discover what’s true, especially what’s universally true, stake your life on it. It’s out there, but I bet there’s much less of it than is supposed.
tl;dr, idle hands are the devil’s tools. Pain is moral, labor keeps you honest.
Not so, Z-Man. The objection is to people like yourself using the term ‘religion’ as a pejorative that means “other people’s unexamined superstitions that I think are stupid.” Obviously, nobody is going to put up with that, and one of the ways they fight back is by defining religion away from this obtuse and shallow definition. If you cannot see that in speaking this way you are lumping sincere and genuine religious people in with the very Leftists they despise, then you have some serious self-examination to do. Religion regards Leftism as a compendium of many sins and rejects it on that very basis.
Unfortunately, ‘religion’ in the vernacular can be defined broadly enough that it can be made to include absolutely anything depending on the exigencies of the speaker’s argument. This leads only to nonterminating and endlessly frustrating verbal brawling. The only way to stop the free-for-all is to use ‘religion’ in the technical sense and make it absolutely clear that you are doing so.
Now, ‘religion’ in the technical sense means “the virtue which prompts man to render to God the worship and reverence that is His by right.” When we define it thus, we see we have a big problem in the way we moderns usually talk about such things.
Moderns seldom talk about religion; instead, they talk about “a” religion, meaning a bundle of beliefs, texts, dogmas, rites, and other bric-a-brac considered as a noun, a sort of sociological index. If we’re going to call these social units “religions,” then there’s no reason that Leftism can’t be just another one. This deconstructive view is the basis for the entire modern concept of comparative religious studies, which surveys the whole field from some (ostensibly) higher vantage point.
But religion is actually a virtue not a belief system, which means it is a property of individuals and it’s more of an adjective than a noun. From this understanding it follows that Leftism isn’t really a religion because it isn’t a virtue, although it is a “sociological unit.” Leftism is a very refined form of vanity, a social club for people who have and desire power. This is sufficient for explaining its cohesiveness and prescriptive beliefs and fervor. All social units have these things, but not all social units are religious.
I suspect this is one of those things that sincerely religious and sincerely non-religious people just can’t discuss without talking past each other.
Actually believing in the capital-G God one is going to see Zeus, Cthulhu, Marx, and Saint Floyd as simply not in the same category and reasonably take offense to such comparisons.
Not exactly. None of these things are even the same.
Zeus: An imperfect conception of God admixed with human errors, but not entirely wrong and useful as a preparatio evangelium.
Chtulu: Fictional and nonexistent.
Marx: Wrong about many things, but right about more than is generally acknowledged. There is a reason why Marxism attracted so much first-rate intellectual talent in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Saint Floyd: Nonentity who has already been forgotten by everybody except the Dissident Right, strangely.
The fact that you would write such a list really illustrates the absurdity of calling Progressivism a religion. People today simply have no idea what they are talking about.
“Saint Floyd: Nonentity who has already been forgotten by everybody except the Dissident Right, strangely.”
Heh heh. Come now. Do you actually read everything you write? And I say that as one of the few here who agrees with you that Leftism is most definitely NOT a religion.
I can be conversed with, you know. I can even be convinced from time to time. So, if you think I’m wrong, please point out the error instead of just snarking.
“The objection is to people like yourself using the term ‘religion’ as a pejorative that means “other people’s unexamined superstitions that I think are stupid.”
That’s not true at all. As I replied to Ostei in a comment stuck in moderation hell, any number of religions do not have a god or deities. Leftism greatly resembles Jainism, which seeks to purify the soul and more or less rejects the supernatural. The narcissism mirrors it, certainly. Some religions that started with deities evolved not to have them. I would argue this is true with contemporary Shintoism, which has keep the ancestor worship and largely discarded the deities. Talmudic Judaism arguably has discarded Yahweh and evolved/devolved to be a people worship.
I hope Z ties this up when he addresses the Social Gospel movement, because that represented the beginning of the full separation of traditional Christianity from Leftism. The Catholic version manifested in Central America during communist revolutions.
Yeah, the key element is the object of worship. Everyone is worshipping something and a religion is a collective common worship. But like I said, no one wants to accept the other categories as valid because their personal object of worship is the only real one.
“The other camp is those who cannot move past the idea that people are motivated by something other than money. In both cases the opposition is about their own needs and desires.”
Paging Steve Sailer. Paging Steve Sailer.
KD at Market Ticker is another convinced that stuff like the coof hysteria was about nothing more than money.
“Follow the money!” explains a lot of petty crime and retail-level corruption, so it must explain everything.
This is what conservatives actually believe.
I’ll give Sailer this: Some of his intellectual blind spots correspond with a strong conviction, much stronger than he expresses, that black people are *incredibly* dumb. He can’t quite say that, and he can’t follow the implications of it—if black Americans lack the capacity to strategize but they’re clearly executing a strategy, who put them up to it?—but it’s there in his evasions, as clearly as on his dork-ass graphs.
A sociopathic liar would know (how) to hide that. Sailer’s a normal guy, watching TV and complaining about it. Nerd dad.
From “Ride with the Devil” (1999), adaptation of “Woe to Live On,” by Daniel Woodrell:
Mr. Evans: You ever been to Lawrence, Kansas, young man?
Jack Bull Chiles: No, I reckon not Mr. Evans. I don’t believe I’d be too welcome in Lawrence.
Mr. Evans: I didn’t think so. Before this war began, my business took me there often. As I saw those northerners build that town, I witnessed the seeds of our destruction being sown.
Jack Bull Chiles: The foundin’ of that town was truly the beginnin’ of the Yankee invasion.
Mr. Evans: I’m not speakin’ of numbers, nor even abolitionist trouble makin’. It was the schoolhouse. Before they built their church, even, they built that schoolhouse. And they let in every tailor’s son… and every farmer’s daughter in that country.
Jack Bull Chiles: Spellin’ won’t help you hold a plow any firmer. Or a gun either.
Mr. Evans: No, it won’t Mr. Chiles. But my point is merely that they rounded every pup up into that schoolhouse because they fancied that everyone should think and talk the same free-thinkin’ way they do with no regard to station, custom, propriety. And that is why they will win. Because they believe everyone should live and think just like them. And we shall lose because we don’t care one way or another how they live. We just worry about ourselves.
Jack Bull Chiles: Are you sayin’, sir, that we fight for nothin’?
Mr. Evans: Far from it, Mr. Chiles. You fight for everything that we ever had, as did my son. It’s just that… we don’t have it anymore.
Brilliant dialogue and brilliant use of it. That could not be produced little more than 20 years later.
If you read the writings of the abolitionists, quite a bit totally ignored the black slaves and angrily focused exclusively on their white owners (non-white slave owners were ignored). A constant fixation was slaveholders getting busy with the help, which did happen and should have been condemned albeit for totally different reasons. Highly educated Confederates reference Yankees in terms we now understand mean totalitarian.
1999?
People were too busy grilling and trying to figure out if Britney Spears or Jessica Simpson was the hotter blonde pop star to notice this film.
Based on this snippet, it definitely sounds like it is worth a viewing.
1999 is a different and largely unrecognizable world, Geese. If you could travel back to then and show a clip of Drag Queen Story Hour to even the most leftwing lunatic, they would laugh or be outraged by it. There is no doubt that today the same loon is promoting Drag Queen Story Hour at their local library/pedophile nest.
No, it did not do very well. And parts of it have been censored since; they have removed the magical N-word from two scenes, I believe, on the Criterion Collection version.
But I watched it with two liberal friends of mine back then in the theater, and they loved it. The mind virus had not settled over the land yet.
Find an old DVD of it somewhere, preferably the director’s cut, which goes into more detail at the outset of the film (the marriage scene) about Union incursions into Missouri and the bad blood that was already boiling.
On the question of whether Woke/Progressivism is a religion or an ideology, I generally agree it is a quite deranged faith, a form of secular Puritanism gone wild. Yet “religion” seems somewhat inadequate because this largely is behavioral (which, granted, both ideology and religion are to some degree). The act of proselyting in and of itself is far more important than the actual substance of the theology being foisted upon the unbelievers.
Americans love to quote De Tocqueville but elide over his criticisms (that also indicates their secular religiosity), which were the most important observations he made, I think. This one looms large:
“I know of no country where there is in general less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion than in America.”
Absolutely true, and this was here from the beginning and has only grown worse. Woke/Progressivism is, at its core, a religious faith, which is perceived to be so true it cannot be questioned. It was most pronounced, as you mentioned, in New England and is a direct result of Puritanism. While Americans are quite mobile, that trait is far less pronounced in the South and Appalachia, where natives have watched New Englanders and other Americans migrate into their areas simultaneously to laugh at the local religiosity only to turn around and try to impose their far more unhinged, near-psychopathic fanaticism.
Americans have done the same throughout the world. Yes, they have promoted and prolonged the Ukraine war in part due to their greed and bloodlust, but this also is a religious war in that the Russian savages must be brought to the light. Similar attempts were made against the Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan, who clearly recognized the rival and even sicker religious fanaticism of their invaders.
In fairness, quite a bit of good has come from the zealotry, but on the whole it has been a cancer and it has now metastasized. It only makes sense that at the end stage of empire, Progressives would step up their campaign to bring the light to the great unwashed even if it ends in a nuclear flash or genocide of the heritage population.
Whether they are pushing abolition or transgenderism or chastity, the proselytizers are gonna proselytize. These are the most malignant narcissists the world has ever known.
Which is why it will never end. No matter how many victories they accumulate, winning the next new battle will be the difference between progressive utopia and a fascist dictatorship. Their lust for proselytizing will never be fulfilled.
Exactly right. The act of proselytizing is the only point. Whoever claimed liberalism is a mental illness (Alex Jones?) was onto something.
I remember hearing Michael Savage say liberalism is a mental disorder 20 or so years ago. Don’t know if he was the first, but that’s the first time I heard it.
Since there is a break between belief and observable reality in these individuals, then yes one can accurately describe the condition as mental illness. This is also why it is fruitless to attempt to argue facts and reason with such people.
@Compsci
Yeah, feelings don’t care about your dumb facts!
Nobody has ever went on a killing spree to defend 2+2=4! But just try insulting their god!
@compsci:
Spot on. That’s the textbook definition of insanity.
But the ultimate catch to the Woke-social justice religion is that it’s a death cult..American settlers were handed an incredibly rich continent, protected by two oceans… They have thrown it away with insane wars based on fraudulent morality, and by allowing the influx and the promotion of incompetent and anti-American groups over their own posterity…That’s not happening in Russia, China or India, so they will be the winners and America will become a tourist destination only….
Russia, China and India have their own problems.
“There seems to be two camps that oppose the religion idea. One camp are Christians who think a religion must have all the things in their form of Christianity, which means most of Christianity is a false religion. The other camp is those who cannot move past the idea that people are motivated by something other than money. In both cases the opposition is about their own needs and desires.”
Hmm. Who are the Christians “who think a religion must have all the things in their form of Christianity?” Because I don’t encounter many people like that. I also don’t encounter many Christians who object to the idea that the left has created a secular religion. That’s practically a meme in Christian circles with which I am familiar. I also don’t know any Christians who think other religions aren’t religions because they don’t have all the things their form of Christianity does. Buddhism may be a false religion, but it’s still a religion.
Also, the second part of that sentence; “which means most of Christianity is a false religion.” I don’t know any Christians who deem most of Christianity a false religion — who are that doctrinally exclusive. I’m sure there are a few tiny cults, but are we really here to talk about the beliefs of extremely tiny minorities? The vast majority of Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox Christians view the other branches as perhaps doctrinally wrong on some issues, but fundamentally still Christians. Yes, there are sects that deviate so far from core Christianity that significant numbers of Christians don’t consider them Christians, but that’s not the usual — it usually means they deny the divinity of Christ, which is a big sticking point, or something equally foundational.
Finally, I think the biggest group that objects to the identification of the left as a religion, by many orders of magnitude, is the left itself. It’s part of their religion that all their beliefs are “the science” — reasonable and rational, often self-evidently true.
The comments already have some examples. many more will follow throughout the weekend.
I concede! I still think they’re very much a tiny minority, though they may be vocal on the internet. Just as we have to remind ourselves “the fanatics on Twitter are not representative of the real world.”
I challenge you to point them out directly. There are few comments. It shouldn’t be difficult.
Seriously?
Luber: “The idea that it’s a religion is pretty naive and ignores good theories from sociology about how religion actually works…”
What’s your real goal here? Just stir things up?
To enjoy a well mixed martini on a Friday.
Z’s comment, as it applies to mine, doesn’t. If he meant it to apply to mine, it’s a slight of hand and blatantly dishonest. Read his comment and mine again.
You nailed it. I really don’t follow the objections, either.
I don’t know, I have been around Protestants a long time now but was raised as a Catholic, I kinda wish Christians would fight with each other more over doctrinal issues, like everything else manly fighting has not been as prevalent as it once was in the Christian faith.
I know that I see the Orthodox on Twitter proclaiming their version of christianity as the way to go, but out in Protestantism it’s more subdued in the modern age.
We need a Cromwell to lay into the wok-esters like he did the Irish Catholics but I am afraid we only get mostly feminized men in Christianity now days.
I’m interpreting it in the following way:
Western Christians — who are otherwise loath to talk about doctrinal differences with other Christian faiths any longer (no one’s fighting over the Filioque ever again), and basically don’t acknowledge them any longer — suddenly get very defensive when you label what’s occurring out there as a “religion.” Suddenly they’re medieval theologians again in their energy to draw distinctions between faiths, and to even deny that the Woke even *have* a faith.
I’ve encountered this was milquetoast right-of-center Catholics in my social circle over the last year. They really, really don’t want to use the word “religion” to describe this phenomenon. I’m curious as to why, since in all other matters their religious indifferentism is the only remaining part of their own faith. Why do they care?
“…encountered this *in* multiple milquetoast right-of-center Catholics,” I meant to say
” They really, really don’t want to use the word “religion” to describe this phenomenon. I’m curious as to why, since in all other matters their religious indifferentism is the only remaining part of their own faith. Why do they care?”
Same. There may be a good reason for the opposition to the label, but it totally escapes me. The religious fanaticism of the secular fundies seems glaring.
I suspect that it’s because they cannot imagine fighting it, and in order to cope with that, they are chalking it up to a temporary fad that will soon die out. “See, Bud Light is tanking, people don’t want it any more. Have some ribs. Say grace first.”
If the others are false, what makes theirs true.
Folks:
Wokesterism is Lucifarianism (aka Promethianism).
Having to (1) acknowledge and then (2) confront this is…disquieting, shall we say…to “Milquetoast” Christians – who, having abandoned all notion of “the guy with the hoofs and horns” are essentially paralyzed at the obvious manifestations thereof.
(What’s the old chestnut about the devil’s greatest trick?)
I deny Leftism is a religion because it’s not, not because I’m insecure about religion in general.
Thanks for the compelling demonstration of your reasons for holding this belief.
“Why do they care?”
They’re already jumped through hoops to convince themselves that all the major world religions believe in Yahweh somehow so they can be colorblind and tolerant of heathens. Problem is with atheistic religions like Communism and Wokeism you can’t push that square peg into the round hole.
Well said, Ploppy.
Better than I think most know.
They are forced to face the limits of a Prime Mover mindset.
‘Limits’ is not the best word; to peg everything on a single source solution works very efficiently at one level, but keeps the exploration mired at that level.
It creates contradictions that cannot be resolved, so too many questions go unanswered.
It’s Semitic software, a poor fit for a megalithic star-charting mason.
Good for social circles, but we won’t be building any more active pyramids with it, nor any accurate ziggarauts either.
“Good for social circles, but we won’t be building any more active pyramids with it, nor any accurate ziggarauts either.”
Nor should we want to. Our current crop of would-be god-kings is more than troublesome enough. 😉
Best to leave such monstrous constructs mired in the contradictions of the pre-Christian past where they belong. There’s your answer, and resolution.
Can you please explain how it is that Judaism and Christianity are both religions, when the central claim of Christianity around which it is built is explicitly denied in Judaism?
And using that same criterion and procedure (which I’m going to guess will cash out with both being designated as religions, regardless of the explicit DENIAL of the message of the Christian faith by Judaism), please explain how western liberalism over, say, the past 30-50 years is not a religion. I say “criterion and procedure” because when Christians attempt to argue that Judaism is a faith — which nearly all do, naturally — they look at the commonalities, not the differences.
Thus, to argue that this liberal fanaticism is not a religion requires you to list its commonalities with religion first, in the syncretic fashion of modern Christians vis-a-vis Judaism. Only then can you move to a discussion of the differences between them, which would presumably disqualify Wokeism as a religion to you.
Was that question intended for me? Because I think my post was in agreement with most of your comment.
Judaism and Christianity are both religions despite being mutually exclusive because there is no requirement that something needs to be true or consistent with other religions to classify as a religion. That would pretty much restrict the term religion to whatever one thinks is the One True Faith.
“Religion” is a pretty expansive term. Religions are often sets of beliefs about the nature of the world, its creation, morality, man’s place in the world, an afterlife, spirituality, and even day to day life and political organization, but not every religion contains every element of what people think of as religious belief.
How many characteristics of a religion does a belief system have to lack before it’s no longer a religion? I don’t know … and I don’t care all that much.
In my opinion, recognition that the radical leftist project is a religion is *useful* because it frames things in a way ordinary people can understand: people have a belief system that is a fundamental world view for them, and it is not amenable to be reasoned away. It’s evangelical and very importantly it attacks directly religious belief systems that come in conflict with it. In fact, now that I think about it, maybe that more than anything else defines it as a religion to me — its hostility to competing religions.
I’m not here, and I don’t think Zman is, either, to write an academic paper on the boundaries of religion.
Leftism isn’t hostile to competing religions, it is hostile to religion, tout court. And that is another item of evidence suggesting Leftism is not a religion. Hell, even Moslems respect Christians and Jews because they are at least “people of the book.” Leftists, on the other hand, they view with repugnance and contempt because they are not believers.
I’m gonna say leftism is hostile to Christianity only, not to any other religion. Not to Islam, certainly not to Buddhism, it embraces Buddhism, not to Hinduism etc. etc. et al
This is actually a response to Jeffrey’s post. I think American Leftism seems like it’s only hostile to Christianity because it’s roots (going back to Marxism and 19th century socialism) were always “Christianity without Christ”. As such, if it’s a religion, it’s a Christian heresy and naturally directs its rage mostly at real Christianity. It may seem to accept Islam, Buddhism, etc… but still mainly as a way to weaken what it sees as its real enemy.
If you look at third world and Muslim world leftists, they are quite hostile to their native supernatural beliefs. They don’t worry too much about Christians because they just don’t have that many around.
Finally, I think it’s important to note that American Leftism has essentially swallowed all the other forms of Leftism in the Western world and increasingly around the world. So it’s going to be hard to disentangle “essential Leftism” from the extremely bizarre and self-contradictory form that has been riding the coattails of the GAE since the end of the Cold War.
Vizzini: How would you distinguish between a religion and a cult? I generally agree that leftist wokism has the characteristics of a faith, but their exclusionary fervor and proselytizing seems more cult-like to me. How would you (or Zman) define cult anyhow – as a subset of a religion or something more exclusionary or more all encompassing? Because I see both in the woke.
The number of members is what differentiates a religion from a cult. According to my seminary educated career minister uncle.
The one differentiator that comes to mind is that cults are generally (always?) built around a person and the belief system, if there is one, is secondary.
With the caveat my memory has mileage on it, a theology professor decades back explained to me the difference between a cult and religion. To paraphrase him, possibly incorrectly, cults tended to be under the sway of an individual who has access to secret knowledge shared only within an in-group. Some religions do not prosletyze, including the one that would cause this comment to go into moderation, but they tend to be larger and not to limit access to their knowledge to such a degree.
Given how widespread Woke is and the missionary zeal, religion better defines it than cult.
“In fact, now that I think about it, maybe that more than anything else defines it as a religion to me — its hostility to competing religions.”
Bravo.
Now, consider that statement in the context of “Wokeism as (thinly disguised) Lucifarianism…
“the central claim of Christianity around which it is built is explicitly denied in Judaism?”
Both have a messiah as a central aspect
Someday Messiah is going to come to establish a new world order kingship to punish the bad guys and make everything wonderful for the insiders. There’s been a number of jewish messiahs.
Both feature an unjust-persecution trope.
Both have the last will later be first trope.
Christian (“to rub, smear; to anoint” i.e. a buttered potato.) is a flavor of jewism. It’s just a difference of the name of the jewish superhero.
And more, but this will get you started.
From a scientific standpoint, religions are sociological phenomena. Different religions have different doctrines. That one religion has a different doctrine from another hardly invalidates it as a religion.
At the height of the vaccine battle in the summer of 2021 I told an advocate for making it mandatory in the office he was a religious zealot. He is otherwise not religious, it made him so angry he practically had steam coming out of his ears. Believers in “The Science” are very invested in it not being considered a religion.
There seems to be two camps that oppose the religion idea
—
Yes and there’s a third camp, as you note, who hate religion, or at least Christianity, and calling their ideology a “faith” is like telling them their god doesn’t exist (or, does exist, who knows with those zealots).
Yes, that third group is the most dangerous, as they have the spirit of ISIS in them without even knowing it.
Second most dangerous group is the one that won’t call the third group a religion, in order to avoid confronting it. Instead, they’ll spend their Fridays drinking a martini, playing with words, and stirring up shit on here.
It’s like equating them with Christians, a people they despise.
I underestimated (to the point of dismissal!) my ex-wife’s “fear and loathing,” which didn’t really come to the fore until we (I…) began sacramental induction of the offspring.
Boy, does she hate Christians!
And the more Orthodox/Catholic the Christian, the greater the vitriol.
I expect that this is quite common among these witches.
During vaccine mania, one line I would use was “my religion has only 7 sacraments”.
Yep, people like that despise religions and people are are religious. Call their beliefs a religion and that they are true believers in that religion is about the biggest insult that you can throw at them.
In their mind, you’ve just called them a stupid dirt person – and there’s nothing that they hate worse than a dirt person. You also simultaneously calling their religion false.
I’m not surprised that he was pissed. I’ve seen similar reactions. If you want to have some fun, just mention to one of these people that their belief that all races are equally capable directly contradicts the Theory of Evolution, which puts them in the same camp at Christians who believe God made the earth 10,000 years ago.
That really pisses them of.
I am a Soft-Trad Catholic, and my ExWife is a Velvet-Glove Wokester (the most dangerous type, btw, as you want to give them a pass on account of their good manners).
By way of illuminating something something or other, I put the following question to my 16 year old: “Who’s more “religious” – me, or your mother?”
I got a wise chuckle, and a nod, and that ole’ spark of recognition and illumination in the eyes.
(More accurately, I could’ve asked “who’s more doctrinaire?” But, I was making a broad point to a bright youngster, and “religion” worked better.)
“ Believers in “The Science” are very invested in it not being considered a religion.”
OK, so don’t believe your science/scientism is a religion. But when you defend/promote your science/scientism with the same negative methodology (persecution, force, sanctions, censorship, etc) as historically done in those “bad” religions you decry, then be prepared to suffer such analogy.
The idea that it’s a religion is pretty naive and ignores good theories from sociology about how religion actually works (check out Atran for starters to see why it doesn’t meet the bar). This idea also relies on what amounts to crude pop atheist beliefs about religion and belief, which have their own motivations.
Finally… Christ is King.
Your last sentence sums up the mindset Z is speaking of quite well: There are no other religions because Christ in King. Everything else is false.
This unwillingness to engage with reality and your enemies is not only un-Biblical (something about wolves, I believe), but it will permit great harm and evil to be done before you realize you must act.
Your eyes are on the sky, not the ground. You want to live that way, that’s fine. Just stay out of the way, please. These people are BOUND (look up the etymology of the word religion) to something that has the force of early Islam behind it. Wake up, Lazarus.
And your comment sums up your poverty of intelligence on the subject, as well as Z’s.
I mentioned a well respected scholar on the subject of modeling religious belief, one who’s also an atheist himself. You and Z have given us nothing but your pop culture guesses.
Then you slight of hand to present the conversation as something else, simply because I profess any belief at all.
Tip your fedora, friend.
I am a member of SSPX. You have no idea whom you are speaking to, and the Reddit-tier insults show that you have no understanding of philosophy of religion, sociology of religion, or anything else except your desire to imitate Fuentes with this juvenile “Christ is King” LARPing.
You resort to the fallacy of appeal to authority (“a well-respected atheist scholar!”) and then dip into silliness.
>SSPX
Oh, so even worse, a trendy meme sect.
Also, that’s not how fallacies work, you dolt. Read what I said. You’re either very stupid or very dishonest.
In either case…
SSPX is not a trendy meme sect. Obviously.
You’re just a troll here to agitate and argue. Most of us here have enough of that in our own lives. Sod off back to Reddit.
Geez, where do these people come from? If one has read this blog long enough, one realizes that there are all sorts of people here who disagree (without being disagreeable) wrt religion—even the Jewish question. And that include atheists—and some Jews.
We, disagree, share opinion, then move on to the next topic. Name calling happens, but from a new commenter? At least build some credibility first.
@compsci, I’ve been reading this blog for a very long time, probably longer than you. It isn’t much more than a hideout for ex-grillers who have finally seen a glimpse of reality but who pine for the days when they knew the grill.
However, some of us saw reality of the empire a long fucking time ago, friend. The dude above me calling FALLACIES while saying I’m from Reddit is a great example. Is anything more Reddit than FALLACIES and CITATIONS!
Engage in good faith or stfu.
Luber, you prove my point. Keep digging. Thanks.
“The force of early Islam…”
Just thank God – or, your Lucky Star(s), if you must! – that our antagonists have a very poor “authority-to-grit” ratio.
Be grateful – very grateful! – that they’re not hardcore desert Bedouin. That lucky strike…may be the ONLY thing that…
I like that last analogy about a big river with multiple tributaries flowing into it. There is definitely both a religious and secular tributary feeding todays zeitgeist. Good show.
“there are many roads up the mountain, but they all lead to the top”
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@Z Man – “The odd thing to me is the resistance I see to using the word “religion” to label this mode of thought that dominates the ruling class. The behavior of the managerial class ticks the boxes for a theocratic mindset. The only thing missing is a well-defined god, but all the other behavior mimics religious fervor. If you replace God with “arc of history” the puzzle is complete, as far as a religion.”
Can’t you see the absurdity of what you are doing here?
Let me replace Religion by Science, and you get this:
“The odd thing to me is the resistance I see to using the word “science” to label this mode of thought that dominates the ruling class expertocracy. The behavior of the academic research-management class ticks the boxes for a scientific mindset.
“[i.e. students, universities, research institutes, research grants, white coats and gowns, doctorates and professors, laboratories, statistics, papers and monographs, citations and referencing, conferences, Nobel Prizes etc etc…]
“The *only* thing missing is the goal of Truth, but all the other behavior mimics rigorous science.
“If you replace Truth with “peer consensus” the puzzle is complete…
“[Ergo it is valid to call the ruling class Scientists.] ”
My point is that removing God from “religion” is closely analogous to removing Truth from “science”.
What is left *after* this core-subtraction, may have any number of similarities with what existed *before* the removal – but what remains, is of its essence a *completely different* entity – and the resulting institution of “religion” or “science” performs a function that is almost-the-opposite of what it was before the core-subtraction.
I don’t think you’re making the point you think you’re making.
The thing is that the ruling class expertocracy *doesn’t* object to using the word “science” to label their mode of thought. In fact, they insist on it, despite the fact that they have indeed stripped out the “Truth” and replaced it with “peer consensus.”
You’re correct that their science is no longer science. It is religion.
You’re making a category error with “My point is that removing God from “religion” is closely analogous to removing Truth from ‘science’.”
I guess I was wrong in the comment I just posted. There are Christians who think something is only a religion if it has all the forms of their particular form of Christianity. I still think you’re very much in the minority.
The term “religion” is used to encompass all forms of belief systems, most of them not true (either defiitionally, because they believe mutually exclusive things, or demonstrably false things, or from my personal perspective as a Christian). Some of those religions don’t depend on a god, or have such radically different concepts of god that it isn’t recognizable in Christian, monotheistic terms. They’re still religions. God is fundamental to Christianity, but it is not fundamental to religion.
A previous poster mentions sociological ideas “about how religion actually works” and recommends we “check out Atran.” I don’t know who Atran is and have no plans to check him out, because it’s totally unsurprising to me that in academic circles they have rarified definitions of “how religion works” that are inaccessible to ordinary dirt people like me. Down here in the dirt, we meet a Buddhist and we say his religion is Buddhism, even though the form of it is pretty much incomprehensible without study to a typical American Christian. I don’t need an expert opinion to tell me how I ought to think about it.
Dirt people like me have been dealing with the religious fervor of secular humanists all our lives. We don’t need to be told “Akshully, that’s not religion.”
That someone could encounter Fauci or Diangelo or Kendri and not perceive Torquemada or hear a secular version of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” is amazing. I must be missing something.
You’re not. We have a Southern Baptist troll on here right now. These are the people who have stood aside as our country has been invaded and done nothing but go on friendship tours to Israel. It offends them to hear something they don’t approve of described as a “religion,” as their definition of religion is self-referential and logically cannot include beliefs they themselves do not hold.
A remark re: a vocal performance of a “standard”: “that rendition was awesome – what key did you transpose to?”
I often point out to people “The digital music streaming services are frequently messing with BPM (tempo) – what, you don’t HEAR that? “Night Moves” was upped at least 5 BPM…never mind “why” – you don’t hear it, do you?
(You Don’t “Hear It”… as intelligent as you are, you lack sensitivity in the perceptual apparatus…
Oy Vey…)
Is he a troll, or just a very dumb person who must revert to name calling in place of sound rebuttal? I vote for the later since good trolls need few words to excite the comment section.
I’m less concerned with the question of what religion *is* than what it (can) do. It seems obvious to me that there’s something eerily similar about all of the following (a medieval Crusader, the 9/11 hijackers, the most hard-core followers of Stalin and Mao, the most insane Covidians). The former two would aggressively assert that their God is real, the middle two would be equally vehement that no such thing exists, and the last group might not care as long as you agreed to get vaxxed.
Note that I’m not equating religion with these extreme manifestations but it does seem that some kind of religious impulse is a necessary though (thankfully) not sufficient condition to drive them all.
A religion will always begin with a set of unprovable assertions. So does mathematics though. Some people will take these assertions as guides to leading a good life and loving and helping others while some will twist them into a rationale for power seeking and crushing those they don’t like. That said, I do think that some “religions” such as Communism or Covidism are structured such that the dark path is practically the only one available. A good indicator of this is an almost complete lack of any introspective tradition or sense of humility.
But belief in God or gods, in some shape or form, is necessary to religion. The fact that the form of those gods is rather alien from monotheistic concepts does not nullify their religious essence.
That’s a definitional claim about religion—which is a social affair in any case. Also, I think you need to add something about reverence for or the worship of gods. Otherwise you don’t exclude religions such as Buddhism, which rejects a creator deity and subordinates any and all gods to a common law of existence.
That religion is a social affair is true but also banal. And, at any rate, it does nothing to confute reverance for God/gods as its sine qua non. Now having said that, I would backtrack somewhat by substituting belief in the supernatural for belief in God/gods. Animism, for instance, is a religion, but makes no particular reference to God/gods, per se. Religion without the metaphysical is no religion.