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kore wrote (edited )

I think the point that Dumai was trying to make is that there's a huge difference between religious experience and organized religion and so-called religious anarchists find value in the former more than the latter.

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kore wrote

right, and I also think that by not treating the abstract as concrete you accept that pre-discursive experience can never be explained, and often religions do well by being unapologetic about that ineffability.

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raindropq wrote

maybe similar to how Social anarchists square society or Civil anarchists square civilisation or anarcho-communists square Communism? .

authoritative organization / psyche-social discipline isn't necessarily hierarchical or static, i think; one can be authoritatively anti-authoritarian in Love.

institutions of centralized authority / hierarchical constructs have obviously been dominating and not exclusive to the churches and states which appropriate natural powers like pride and devotion toward economic profit and Hatred.

many religious teachings call-out idolatry and moral judgement yet followers continue to worship words and images.

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GaldraChevaliere wrote (edited )

Norse heathen beliefs, Asatru in particular, put heavy emphasis on the importance and sanctity of community and family, which are defined in very different terms from the modern dominionist concepts of these things. Many of us see ourselves as bound to our immediate neighbors and friends before we have any kind of obligations to the gods. Theodish types especially maintain that individual contact with the Gods in any terms that could be interpreted or understood is a very rare and potent thing, and the point of a priest is less to interpret omens and prayers and more to just get everyone together and praying in the first place. You wouldn't notice a single ant unless it did something unusual that caught your attention, but you'd definitely notice an ant-hill.

My personal take on this is that my relationship to the Gods on an individual level is one of covenants and mutual benefit, when I can even get their attention. I take right action and be brave, I attract their positive notice. Right action is defined as doing what's best for my chosen family and refusing to lie or cheat if lives don't depend on doing so. Since right action has long term benefits in the immediate and material, there is no reason for me to not do the right thing. I earn the trust of my community and the favor of the Gods, and ensure the people I love are well cared for. Anarchism on a religious level suits me because the Gods lay completely outside of human authority and comprehension, and I cannot think of a more brave and righteous thing to do than to openly oppose the corrupt cowardice and pointless cruelty of the rich and powerful.

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nijntje wrote

I like "protestants do "good actions" by love of gods creation and not because they are threatened of going to hell if they're bad.", although I think the bit before that is different when you ask different people. It's not that they don't need good actions, it's that if you've got faith, if you truly believe, then you'll act accordingly. And if you're not acting accordingly, then your beliefs might be off.

For a consumerist example: I would like to buy things that are eco/fairtrade/all that jazz, including clothes, but in practice it's… well, I was gonna say it's too hard, or impossible, or whatever, but in the moment I realise I want/need new clothes and it's "too hard" or "too expensive" to do the right thing, and I buy cheaper/'worse' clothes, I know that my acts are influenced by other beliefs than the ones I claim to have. Apparently there's a belief that my comfort/ease of buying things in that moment is worth more than my moral beliefs that I should buy more eco/fairtrade/whatever clothes.

So I can either start punishing myself over doing the wrong thing, or just see it as a symptom that apparently my beliefs need to be readjusted, i.e. I need to take a good look at my values and steer those more towards a state where it's easier for me to do the right thing next time.

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nijntje wrote

I think mostly people tend to see them as very intertwined. And about 'earning' or not, people debate a lot but afaik… well… consider it like a chicken/egg problem, it's interesting to debate and talk about, but the fact is that if you've got a chicken now, or an egg now, you'll have the other either right with it or at least following up very soon. So it's better to make sure chickens & eggs keep happening, and thinking about which leads to what is secondary. It'd be like debating the physics of how parachutes work while you've just jumped off a plane—sure it's interesting, but you know that if you pull the cord stuff will happen, and you want that to happen.

that being said I come from a christian background, but fairly diverse in terms of denominations/thoughts so maybe that's just the way i've seen it, seeing a lot of different opinions.

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UpTickInDowngrade wrote (edited )

In many cases religion is a form of resistance. Religions were the perfect answer to bondage. Religions have been the antidote to oppressive measures for thousands of years. Before religion became the jailer it was in the hearts of the jailed and enslaved. Many of the religious leaders and martyrs and prophetic types of the past preached and taught a lesson of revolting. The ideals of a lot of religious teaching is to have compassion... even when it is in diametric opposition of the leaders and so on. Religion was the world's first codification of morals. Before there was written laws, humans were organizing morality into folklore and mythology and spirituality, and this in it self was the first resistance to hierarchy. Before that happened tribalism and hierarchy were the norm. It is a strange idea to consider a point where mythology and "spirits" and "gods" of the wind, sun, air, water etc were all just notions of explaining nature and then through out time those notions evolved into morality, polytheism then monotheism and finally ending up full circle.... a tool to control and excuse plundering and exploitation. The feeling people get from religion (literally the dopamine buzz as it triggers the reward center) coupled with the other instrumental aspects it offers a believer surely has to be a powerful experience if it allows the believer to withstand the cognitive dissonance as they see all the contradictory effects destroying the world around them.

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tnstaec wrote

Most religious anarchists I know avoid institutionalized forms of religion. Some people call this "spiritual, not religious" but I don't like that semantic formulation. The Christian anarchists I know focus on the collectivist teachings of Jesus and the early Christian community. They emphasize that Christianity was hijacked by the Roman empire and turned into a hierarchical institution, but wan't so originally.

I've been getting into Daoist anarchism more recently. I read a book about the lives of prominent Daoists. About half of them became members of the bureaucracy of whichever state/ dynasty they lived in, but the other half went to great lengths to avoid the state entirely.

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boringskip wrote

I'm a member of The Satanic Temple, so I get to skip all those problems. These are our tenets:

  1. One should strive to act with compassion and empathy towards all creatures in accordance with reason.
  2. The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.
  3. One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.
  4. The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo your own.
  5. Beliefs should conform to our best scientific understanding of the world. We should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit our beliefs.
  6. People are fallible. If we make a mistake, we should do our best to rectify it and resolve any harm that may have been caused.
  7. Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word

Feel free to join me in the related matrix chat

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UpTickInDowngrade wrote

When reality is too complex the mind can see a pattern that is not really there. People use myths to digest the unexplainable. Thats why there are so many different cultures that arrived at the idea of gods existing. Superstitions have helped humans cope with complexity for a very long time.

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nijntje wrote

I've been thinking about this because it's still on my front page and I realised that raddle is the same problem, or the same solution.

Also highly organised (into subfora, wikis, etc), hierarchical and authoritative because there's mods, and admins, etc.

So it depends more on how that is set up, I guess. The issue lies elsewhere, but I've yet to exactly figure out where.

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raindropq wrote

is reality ever simple enough to be objectively seen? if the mind can see a patterning, who's to say whether it's really not happening? how does reality come to exist and how is It sustained? how does perceiving a pattern among the natural complexity help (humans) to adapt and make-out ? is this metaphysical-mystic sense of environmental awareness and personal integrity necessarily superstitious if said liquid is observed as comprising of relations between all the things ?

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UpTickInDowngrade wrote

Reality doesn't "come to exist." Matter exists. Our understanding of the physical world is built on layers of investigation, observation, and experimentation and testing. Your ability to conceive the facts of matter depend on your intelligence levels and learned understanding of the subject. A lot of animals can recognize patterns - any animal that can be trained can, to some degree, "recognize" a pattern. Having the ability to recognize patterns allows the animal to detect threats and survive. For a human to see a pattern that is an illusion is not that useful, because it makes the person doing so operate based off a reaction to a fear that is so strong that it has over ridden their ability to investigate the truth and facts of reality. So far there is zero proof of any of the mythologies that people put faith into. Faith is the opposite of logic because rather than arrange the information and arrive at a fact based conclusion people with faith reach an illogical conclusion before they begin to investigate information in the pursuit of truth. These people with faith are told by a religion that they must never question the conclusion lest they be in danger of angering the god they are supposed to have faith in. Religions are dominated by patriarchy and hierarchy. Look into the great chain of being. This was a concept first fleshed out by Aristotle and Plato, but peaked in medieval times among Xtians. The concept codifies the hierarchy of all things from God to angels to humans all the way down to precious stones and dirt. Its been stated that racism is modeled off The Great Chain of Being in some ways, or perhaps the fundamentals of racism borrow from it. Genocide is easier to swallow when you can compartmentalize the victims as less than human savages unfit to live due to their savage ways of life. Native Americans went through genocide because they were supposedly filthy savages. People should not accept these dangerous tools of death - religion, racism, hierarchy, empiricism, etc just because other people don't want to learn and investigate and observe. If you think you can muddy the waters on what religion does to the world by bringing up subjective and objective reality then you are mistaken. This line of apologetic reasoning is stale.

"Oh those people didn't have a better idea, so umm, you sorta gotta give em a pass... which by extension means you have to allow people that believe in god today a pass... cause they just don't know any better, and their hearts mean well!"

Thats the general argument I see from you. The idea that because some people are ignorant they should be allowed into the conversation with those that are not - simply because they "mean well." You nor anyone else is given a pass to participate free of ridicule simply because you aren't "hurting anyone." If you have a point then make it, dont flounder asking obtuse and vague philosophical questions as if that is a debate or argument. I get why you would do such a thing, its a lot like a rebel flag supporter. You know the true meaning, but you have to obfuscate such and offer an alternate meaning as to excuse the truth.

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