xssve
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Religion really isn't the issue per se, it's Deism vs. Theism - a deists are capable of operating on faith, and tolerating other religions, and seekers, after all, nobody really has all the answers, the only answers we can get can only be gotten through science, and while this allows to better understand "how things work" on the physical level, science is not a particularly social activity, religion is.
Theists believe in an interventionist Deity, and that tends to lead to a lot of dispute - disputes with other religion, even within a religion over who is saved, how to be saved, etc., etc., and so on, to the point of bloody war over what are, from and empirical standpoint, fanciful abstractions - empiricism would tend to look for some other kind of explanation for this sort of behavior given that any definition of salvation itself is pretty fuzzy.
In the end, you're talking about belief, by process of elimination - you can't argue the facts, there aren't any, we, as a culture, have been through all this already, hashed it out, salvation through faith, grace, or works, or some combination thereof because anything else is building sand castles.
And really, these things, faith, grace, and works are the core of all of the religious politicking going on on the religious right, theological arguments going back to the Middle ages - protestants are, for the most part do not believe in works as a path to salvation, whereas it's an integral part of the Catholic faith - and as an example, whether or not you accept works as a valid path to salvation is going have a lot of influence on how you conceptualize public policy issues.
At the moment, the dialogue is hovering around stewardship, which is the more liberal view of the environment, cultivation and conservation of resources, and dominion, which has much more possessive and rapacious connotations - you can probably guess which side fossil fuel interests are going to back.
It represent two entirely different worldviews: one is based in free will as a challenge of responsibility, the other free will as carte blanche, license to consume, deplete, ravage, and waste, and the devil take the hindmost, it's not a community, it's a death match.
Given the exemplars of this model, it sort of strains the definition to even call it religion, all it is is making a virtue of avarice; so as a religion, it's closer to some kind of orgastic phallic worship, a symbiotic parasitic bond of gluttonous jackals and anal retentive Brahmins.
What would Jesus think, I wonder?
And, what happens in the end, as a particular instantiation of a religion, reaches a point of truly mass appeal, it fragments into spitefully feuding competing sects, it's always been that way, that's how religion works - Branch Davidians, remember? They were like the tail end of a theological thread dating back to the reformation at least, propagating, mutating, and dividing, to it's terminus point.
That is one great structural weakness of theocracy as a political system, it imposes something called "Gods Law", but it isn't ever really clear exactly what that is, as it is not arrived at by reason, and consensus, a mutually acceptable compromise, but through revelation, and ultimately, Charismaticism, which is a pendulum that has a really wide fucking sweep, in the end it can't really sustain itself as anything but tribal feudalism.
Thing is, Charismaticism is fun - like Black Southern Baptists, they really do it right, they have it down to an art, and nobody worries about a Black Charismatic minister going all Jim Jones on everybody - White men can't dance so more often than not, it just turns stupid and ugly, I dunno what it is, but I'm much more comfortable with deism - or music, I'll take either one.
< Message edited by xssve -- 3/1/2012 9:32:12 PM >
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