"“If [transgenderism] is false, then for the good of society, transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely – the whole preposterous ideology,” he said. "
Mr Knowles has said in the past that his rhetoric isn’t genocidal because he doesn’t believe trans people exist, Jezebel noted.
“There can’t be a genocide,” he said on his programme last week, adding that “it’s not a legitimate category of being. They’re labouring under a delusion. And so we need to correct that delusion”.
The exact same thing could be said for the ‘my sky fairy is the true real one’ ideologies. Monotheism is a brain disease.
I’d argue even organized theism and even seemingly banal exercises of worship like heralding political leaders are a brain disease. “Strong men” are almost always bad men.
A lesser brain disease than monotheism for sure, but they are all fruit from the same poisoned tree.
Belief(*) in and of itself is detrimental to a persons perception of reality. It doesn’t matter if it’s Christianity, some other monotheism, budhism, the belief in Karma, rebirth, homeopathy, essential oils, nationalism, political tribalism or flat earth.
All these things exist as memes, as mind-viruses that can be transmitted and change, they are subject to evolution (survival of the most convincing/rememberable) and to competition. They all have another thing in common: they weaken your immune system (your critical thinking skills) and make you more susceptible to other infections.
(*)Belief: The state of being convinced of something that has been proven not to be in accordance to objective reality.
In the context of religion, I prefer the word “faith”.
Faith is a neccessary emotional defense, and it’s necessary to learn anything as well. Not all topics are self-evident, after all, especially when trusting others about social norms growing up.
Though faith should NEVER be a method of reasoning, and that’s exactly what organized religion teaches.
In college I was taught that a belief = a good reason:
Good as in the traditional Greek sense that the end is either the truth or the flourishing of people, including any instruments that serve as a means to those ends;
Reason as in a cause originating in the mind that influences action or behavior.
So if you had a belief of something, you had a good reason to do something. Believing is good reasoning.
Obviously, you can easily devolve into moral relativism here, so I think the Aristotelian school can ground us again, favoring perception, deduction, and induction to get at “objective” reality, like you say.
The issue is when pundits and rhetoricians hijack these projects by basing them on religion or political party, using language and pseudo-logic that can appear as trustworthy to those easily convinced.
I like your description of ideas though. This sort of concept has been jostling around in my head for a few months. Appreciate the illustration!
The concept of civil/civic religion is I think what you’re referring to there.
But yeah I think the idea of religion as this negative external influence doesn’t address how it functions as a social system, like it doesn’t explain very much.
I’m not sure what your last sentence means. Belief as a bare concept isn’t the problem. The problem is when people get together and start reinforcing beliefs that are based in nothing but “faith”.
Religion is bad because it teaches that faith is equivalent to or superior to knowledge. Just by the very act of institutionalizing faith-based beliefs, let alone all of the religions that DIRECTLY say faith is superior.
It’s just that this knowledge/faith dichotomy isn’t something that exists in our cognition, its an analytical framework to categorize, but in real life our minds don’t operate like this. What’s happening with both “knowledge” and “faith” beliefs in practice insofar as they impact human behavior isn’t that different. “Faith” as religions define it is basically a social behavior that has a rational basis, ie “knowledge” can rationally describe why people practice “faith.” The Marxian understanding of it is directly rooted to material conditions as well, as in the character faith embodies is contingent on material conditions.
A belief we could conceptualize as a civil religious one might be something like the “sovereign individual,” and we could look at the Declaration of Independence as a foundational religious text.
Yes, it’s not a dichotomy, that’s why people so easily fall victim to using it inappropriately. It’s why I said it’s part of human experience (somewhere in this thread anyways).
No one can know everything. No one can answer an endless sequence of, “why?”'s. Everyone uses faith.
It’s just some of us try to keep faith away from childish imaginations and moreso, “I think therefore I am.”.
Just wanted to point out that gender dysphoria isn’t an ideology, it is a recognized condition and its treatment is the current state of medical practice.
Saying “transgenderism is an ideology” is as nonsensical as saying “depressionism is an ideology”.
But right wing folks like to spout any nonsense so long as it seems to support their hatred and hurt the target thereof.
I think religious belief qualifies as ideology and I would argue that the abrahamic religions have been shown to lend themselves to regressive, hateful thinking time and again.
I personally think religion is simply an artifact, maybe even a side effect, of our evolutionary adaptations. One that is not too well adapted to life following the neolithic era and especially poorly suited to modern global existence.
Addendum: one does not need to experience gender dysphoria to be transgender/anywhere outside the gender binary. Cisgender people can experience it too, like if you look in the mirror and feel that your body doesn’t match your gender as much as you internally feel it should
PS: the quote I was responding to is from the Conservative Political Action Conference. Which was full of similar hate…
Based church
If [transgenderism] is false
The way these self-confident charlatans talk, you’d think they believe every thing they don’t like must be its own ideology, complete with ivory-tower academics dispensing it from a great height.
I’m seeing a bit of this kind of referential language elsewhere too, decrying such bugbears as ‘evolutionism’ and ‘abortionism’- which, when you think about it, seems contrived to give people who read the title and don’t read content the impression that there are whole fields of study, replete with cult followings, devoted to these things.
Rhetoric of this kind has a way of getting people to file away contingent-possible notions (that is, it might or might not be a thing but I don’t have time to understand it now so I’m filing a placeholder in my head for later) Having those things filed away in your head has a way of putting you on the fence about whether they’re true or real or not (they’re neither true nor false, just contingent)- and when you’re on the fence, partisanship can readily decide the matter without having to supply any evidence.
The purpose of rhetoric like this is not to inform, but to flood its audience with contingent-possible bullshit, to exhaust their critical capacity and render them receptive to even the most counterfactual nonsense you can contrive.
They are too ignorant to have intent. If they knew what they were doing, they’d realize the futility in doing it.
“Why commit yourself to a war you know you’re going to lose?”
Because their blind hate and stupidity compels them, not intentions.
Plus, you know… money. It’s always about money.
No, do not do their work for them. Republicans have been leaking their plan to do a whole lot more worse things if Trump wins. The followers might be dumb, but the leaders ARE NOT dumb and DO have a plan to take power and do terrible things with that power.
In other places, China has been slowly buying up Africa and other developing nations with loans they can never pay back. Christofascists are creating little fiefdoms in Africa, too. Russia is still a world power with intent on building a new empire.
They don’t have to have a perfect plan that cannot be defeated before they’ll try to do it.
Enacting their own will is THE ENTIRE POINT. They don’t care if people push back.
They can’t maintain and hold power because it is illegitimate to the will of the people, so they will fail. If they knew this, they wouldn’t be fascist authoritarians. I.E. They are too dumb to know what they are doing will fail. Ignorance is the banality of evil.
No, do not be the ignorant one. They have jerrymandered many places to hell and they do not need to perpetually keep power to fuck things up for decades, anyways.
Or are you so naive that you think Trump’s damage was over the moment he was out of office? Does stacking the supreme court not hurt everyone? Does normalizing fascistic laguage not hurt everyone?
Not everything has to be written in to law for politicians to royally fuck things up.
That’s only about the US. Do you seriously think Russia or China are going to have a revolution soon?? What about all of the religious rulers in the middle east? Not all authoritarians can be removed. Your view is incredibly narrow and naive.
K
Naive it is then. Sad. Pathetic, even.
I agree.
Great minds discuss ideas;
average minds discuss events;
small minds discuss people.
Indeed. Though the negative connotations on ‘K’ are powerful. Odd way to concur.
Right-wing ideology is neither blind nor stupid.
It exists to protect the status quo. That is it’s only reason for existing. And the people at the top is perfectly conscious of what it is they are spouting.
Pretty based thing for a church to say
So, about the Crusades…
Just curious where this was?
I think it might be in Allendale /s
I believe that what’s being taught as history is actually pro establishment rhetoric with stances baked in to convince everyone that effective opposition is “mistakes that never worked before”.
