Submitted 13 hours ago by Luffy879@lemmy.ml to rant@lemmy.sdf.org
Religion:
Democracy:
Now why the actual fuck are people still saying that religion is less than a threat to Democracy? Like, everyone who just even mentions that he got their opinion from the bible should get a lifelong unpaid vacation from Europe straight to Dubai.
Religion is the enemy of choice, education, and thought. It’s regressive, anti-medicine, anti-science, and anti-logic. Everything about it is designed to destroy and support hate, while supporting priests that are compulsive liars.
Religious people lie about their religion’s threat to democracy. If they’re truly religious, then their god’s laws are the only laws - and they think they don’t need a government, just a religion. Which is stupid and false, but their priests keep lying to them.
I don’t love religion but this is completely false. Religious institutions were the centers of science and human intellectual progress for centuries.
I’d love to be more tolerant but religious people just can’t help themselves but prove to everyone time and time again that they cannot be trusted in positions of power without swinging their dogma around like a dick. I was born into a country run by christian nationalists that used the bible to justify their apartheid. And in every step of my life since, christians are always the nastiest, most authoritarian, most closed minded and racist and patriarchal people that I’ve known. Whether it’s teachers in school or farmers that treat their workers like animals. And now look at what they’re doing to the USA.
As someone that generally prefers believing in reality to fairy tales, c reality has taught me over and over that religious people are the enemy of a multicultural society where everyone is supposed to get along and respect each other.
You have a flawed understanding of both systems. Why do you think democracies have no leaders when elections to select a leader are part of democracy?
Probably because we don’t have any democracies, by that definition anyway.
I think religion(s) is(are) dangerous as well, but you’re comparing monotheistic, proselytising/missioning, dogmatic organised religions on the one hand and liberal, antiauthoritarian consensus-based political systems (post-democratic) which have yet to manifest on the other hand.
Given your instance, I’d recommend you to continue your research so that apologetics of both organised religion and authoritarian democracy have a harder time convincing or refuting you.
Solid rant!
sj_zero 10 hours ago
I think you're making a number of major errors in your rant.
Your base assumption "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state" is explicitly fascist, from the lips of Benito Mussolini. Ideally, culture is not the state, and religion is not the state, and the market is not the state. Many enlightenment thinkers who helped produce modern liberal democracy believed in a small state the protected people's rights and believe that such a state could only exist alongside a culture and religion that resulted in people who were good enough when nobody was watching that they didn't need a powerful state to micromanage them. In the absence of that, tyranny would be required and inevitable.
One consequence of this train of thought is you're trying to narrowly define what epistemological basis people are allowed to use to come to opinions. Their opinions are only acceptable if they came to their opinions through the exact same method you personally did. What, exactly, privileges your epistemology over others? Why is it that someone who listens to their pastor is somehow less than you, listening to corporate news?
It appears that you're stuck in the modernist fallacy -- assuming that we need to find one grand narrative and stick with that and through that we'll achieve utopia. Democracy is good, so everything must be democracy or it's bad. This is the totalitarian fallacy of modernity, and we have overwhelming evidence it's false, given how many millions of people totalitarian modernity killed.
Your second assumption "Religion is about not having opinions of your own, just following the opinions of the leader and spread the opinions of the leader" is deeply flawed. You're not describing a religion, you're describing a cult, and a cult that isn't represented in western religious history. In orthodox Christianity, Catholic Christianity, and Protestant Christianity, it is a base axiom that humans have free will and will not always do what their pastor, their cardinal, their bishop, or the pope says. The metaphor of the pastor is that you can't guide a flock with an iron fist, you can only hope to guide them and it's inevitable that some will stray regardless. This way of seeing religious leadership is incompatible with your statement that individuals aren't allowed to have their own opinions.
It is an important counter-point to your formulation that Protestant Christianity exists at all -- it was a schism where people had different opinions to the catholic orthodoxy and instead of just continuing to have the opinions the pope told them to, they created their own sect -- and today there are many different protestant sects of Christianity.
Your "Final Solution to the Religious problem" is wildly authoritarian and hypocritical -- Apparently under your conception of "Democracy", people shouldn't have to agree with their pastor's opinions, but they do have to have the same exact opinions as you or they can be expelled forcibly.
To assume that democracy is always good is also a shaky premise. American democracy formed their new United States with slavery centuries after Europe had essentially banned it under their monarchies and imperial frameworks. Greek democracy had many positives, but it was a slave state and acted deeply dishonorably with respect to the Delian league -- the Parthenon, the symbol of Greek democracy, was effectively built using embezzled funds from the Delian league that were supposed to be used to protect the Hellenic world from the Persians.
Under democracy, there are leaders for sure, though the degree of formalization of that changes based on the form of democracy -- democratic republicanism has democracy, but it is used to elect wise individuals to be the representative leaders. Even in pure democracy, there were people recognized as leaders -- Individuals skilled in rhetoric and logic may not hold formal power, but they could sway the voters to vote in one way or the other, becoming de facto leaders regardless of their formal standing.
The idea that democracy is a telos in and of itself, that it is a moral good in and of itself is to mistake the means for the end -- The end being individuals living a good life.
What you're doing here, which you might not realize because we are the fish made of the water we were born in, is trying to replace theistic dogma with secular dogma -- but the mechanism is equally religious. "Secular religion" might sound like a contradiction in terms, but as an example, Confucianism in China is religious in structure, but non-theistic as when for example you complete a Confucian ritual, it is in pursuit of social harmony rather than because a god or a clergyman told you to.
Your rant is a wonderful screed of the urban monoculture faith -- you took the idea that democracy is good and therefore all things must be good and democratic or they must be destroyed, and really hammered it home. Like a screed about how Jesus loves you and therefore you should work even harder to be a good Christian, it rings hollow for those who don't follow your faith.