The serious gains start with stacking and blending. Hold on to your top-hats and petticoats: Here be dragons.
The problem with most aggressive criticism of religion is not that religious beliefs are inherently above criticism, but that
- everyone you’re likely to reach has already heard the most common arguments before
- religious beliefs are deeply tied up in personal identity in a way that makes them especially resistant to change
- in the western world, people have come up with all sorts of clever ways to disentangle religious beliefs from ethical and political beliefs, so the latter can often be shifted without major reevaluation of religious tenets
which makes it an almost uniquely unproductive topic for changing anyone’s mind. Additionally, due to the ways in which it is related to personal and group identity, such arguments can easily be read as (and easily devolve into) mere aggression between different groups rather than an attempt at truth-seeking.
To be clear, criticism of religion can serve other functions besides deconversion, and in particular I think it’s really important that people who have been harmed by religious beliefs and practices have space to talk about those harms.
I don’t disagree with this as far as it goes, but I think there’s a key place where the 3rd bullet point doesn’t apply – criticism of religious institutions.
Like, @argumate has been yelling at Catholicism lately, and a lot of that yelling has been about actions of the Catholic Church itself. This makes a big difference. With a holy text, one can always imagine alternative interpretations (or point to those who believe in them); for any given piece of the picture, you can almost always imagine swapping out that piece for something else. But there is nothing you can swap “the Catholic Church” for. There is exactly one such church, and it takes certain actions in the world, and Catholics mean that entity when they recite the Nicene creed.
For one thing, this means that the Church can be criticized on purely external, worldly terms – the way one might criticize a repressive regime, a pyramid scheme, etc. – without inherently getting mired in muddles over the nature of belief or the intrinsic qualities of the belief system. It also means that believers cannot respond to such criticism by disowning the “bad apples” and saying they don’t represent the religion as a whole, since they, well, do represent the religion as a whole, that’s kind of the point.
(Also, I am not entirely pessimistic about the potential of such criticism to change minds and make things happen – it certainly worked for Martin Luther et. al., and anti-clericalism was a big part of the Enlightenment)
Never doubt that a small group of people yelling on the internet can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
Related:
“My feeling is that John defines academic blogging’s possibilities. Reading him makes me feel like I’m in the 18th-century coffeehouses in London, looking at pamphlets, talking to Samuel Johnson.”
Holbo says Burke’s analogy is accurate, right down to the debates that take place in the comments section. “Those coffeehouses were incredibly thuggish, to the point where people got punched,” Holbo says. “We think of it now as a very elegant gathering, where the Internet is down in the mud and people have ridiculous names. But coffeehouses were exactly like that: an insane mix of brilliant people, lunatics, and savage thugs.”
(source)
I’ve been sitting in my apartment cackling while muttering “The Mooch has fallen” to myself. Pls help.
The problem with most aggressive criticism of religion is not that religious beliefs are inherently above criticism, but that
- everyone you’re likely to reach has already heard the most common arguments before
- religious beliefs are deeply tied up in personal identity in a way that makes them especially resistant to change
- in the western world, people have come up with all sorts of clever ways to disentangle religious beliefs from ethical and political beliefs, so the latter can often be shifted without major reevaluation of religious tenets
which makes it an almost uniquely unproductive topic for changing anyone’s mind. Additionally, due to the ways in which it is related to personal and group identity, such arguments can easily be read as (and easily devolve into) mere aggression between different groups rather than an attempt at truth-seeking.
To be clear, criticism of religion can serve other functions besides deconversion, and in particular I think it’s really important that people who have been harmed by religious beliefs and practices have space to talk about those harms.
I don’t disagree with this as far as it goes, but I think there’s a key place where the 3rd bullet point doesn’t apply – criticism of religious institutions.
Like, @argumate has been yelling at Catholicism lately, and a lot of that yelling has been about actions of the Catholic Church itself. This makes a big difference. With a holy text, one can always imagine alternative interpretations (or point to those who believe in them); for any given piece of the picture, you can almost always imagine swapping out that piece for something else. But there is nothing you can swap “the Catholic Church” for. There is exactly one such church, and it takes certain actions in the world, and Catholics mean that entity when they recite the Nicene creed.
For one thing, this means that the Church can be criticized on purely external, worldly terms – the way one might criticize a repressive regime, a pyramid scheme, etc. – without inherently getting mired in muddles over the nature of belief or the intrinsic qualities of the belief system. It also means that believers cannot respond to such criticism by disowning the “bad apples” and saying they don’t represent the religion as a whole, since they, well, do represent the religion as a whole, that’s kind of the point.
(Also, I am not entirely pessimistic about the potential of such criticism to change minds and make things happen – it certainly worked for Martin Luther et. al., and anti-clericalism was a big part of the Enlightenment)
Usually, on the grounds of existing grey relations, grey elements, grey
numbers (denoted by ⊗) one can identify which Grey System is, where
“grey” means poor, incomplete, uncertain, etc.
Preston’s curious addiction to Pepsi-Cola is never clearly explained. The novel starts with him bulk buying the stuff and fantasising about drinking 300 cans a day. He drinks it for comfort and for energy. Sometimes though he uses it as a substitute for living: At fourteen years old wherever he turned, he somehow failed to develop any sense of adventure and remained statically serene with the drink he called the “high life”.
The Recognition of Śakuntalā (sometimes known as ‘the Śākuntala’ – i.e. ‘the play about Śakuntalā’ – but more popularly simply as ‘Śakuntalā’, after its heroine) is generally considered to be the best of [4th-5th century writer] Kālidāsa’s dramas and, by consensus, the paradigmatic Sanskrit play, a work of poetic brilliance and complex structure which has provided a benchmark for all classical Indian literature. Indeed, Śakuntalā has a cultural cachet in India similar to that associated with Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the world at large, although it is a very different kind of play. Yet to say so hardly reveals the true extent of Śakuntalā’s cultural significance. In the words of one commentator, it is judged by the tradition itself to be ‘the validating aesthetic creation of a civilization’, a play whose form and content unite to ‘express persistent cultural verities’.
(W. J. Johnson, introduction to his translation of Śakuntalā)
This … seems like something that ought to be more widely known than it is?
Speaking as an Indian, I don’t observe any such special love for Shakuntala’s story.
The Mahabharat has thousands of stories and incidents, and this one doesn’t occupy much more space in the general consciousness than others.
Kalidas’s play is of course great; it’s in fact his Disney-fied version that all of us grow up with rather than the rawer, more ambiguous one from the Mahabharat, and apparently it’s his version that popularised the story (though I’m not sure how clearly established this statement is, since stuff was never written down back then only recited by the Brahmins ((the first written version of the Mahabharat is from the 10th century for example despite it being around 2000 years older))).
While I don’t know the specifics of the case here, I suspect it’s just the standard academic Inflatese.
In particular, it’s notable how this version has none of the moral depth or ambiguity of Hamlet. This is pretty far down on my list of old Indian stuff that should be more widely known. I suggest Sangam poetry. Mahabharat is on the top of the list but it’s freakishly long and i haven’t read the actual thing despite having read multiple textual analyses; but Peter Brooks’ play, which is 5 hours long, is a good introduction – it condenses it while still conveying a lot of the feel that this is a great story about petty kings – and it’s pretty easy to find bootleg recordings online; there’s also an Indian TV show by Ramanand Sagar that is the end product of both the Disney-fication that Kalidas was a pioneer in and the streamlining of Hinduism (the current product of which is Hindutva, the brand of fundamentalist politics sweeping the nation right now ((this series is much more innocuous than Hindutva politics don’t worry))) that happened in the attempt to make it more legible as a religion rather than an extensional description.
Also, personal axe note: you’ll notice that I write male names without the customary a at the end. In Sanskrit every male name ends with an “aha,” where both as are pronounced like the English word “a.” In modern North Indian languages, however, this part has been dropped: while it still technically ends with an a that should be pronounced like the English word “a,” the correct pronunciation had so little emphasis on this last a that no one actually pronounces it (South Indians do pronounce it). Anyway, the end result of the English version containing a holdover from an old pronunciation is that most people, Indians and otherwise, pronounce it as “aa,” as in the sound you make in the dentist’s office. In fact, you may call someone you know Ram and the hero of the Ramayan Ramaa. This annoys me, and so I’m trying to popularise the spellings without the a at the end.
(via saamdaamdandaurbhed)
baroquespiral replied to your post
OK what actually is this
John Cowper Powys, “A Glastonbury Romance”
The result of the coiling of John’s soul round the soul of Athling as he walked by his side along this hot dusty path, towards Cardiff Villa, was that he realised that nothing could conceivably ever make Athling understand the mystical ecstasy of destruction and the deep metaphysical malice with which he longed to undermine the Grail Legend.
