we_protect_each_other (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
we_protect_each_other) wrote2017-10-22 02:54 am
we_protect_each_other) wrote2017-10-22 02:54 am
Entry tags:
On sincere belief, "Organized Religion," and the Left
Also hey I got a new laptop battery, but it isn't filled with unlimited power, so I'm going to try to make this brief. I really don't have another outlet to write this down, even though thinking about it has made me consider a blog on a different platform or something. I certainly don't want to post it directly to tumblr because I don't want the nightmare of reblogging it would become OR to feel like it stings when it gets ignored entirely.
I'm putting it under a cut since we usually try to be polite and filter these topics.
So there is a transgender YouTuber whose content I absolutely adore lately. However, she is completely unsubtle (and it occasionally comes up) about how against religion she is, ideologically. Now, I majored in Philosophy in college in the Bible Belt, so believe it or not I spent my days among a lot of individuals who basically went into my department to major in Learning How to Rail Against the Religious Background They Were Coerced into Participating In. And, like, I get that. I am completely acknowledging that being forced to participate in a religious tradition against your will is a kind of unfair coercion, but as someone who did not drop the sincere beliefs at the door, it was difficult to constantly correct people in that, no, my religious beliefs were not somehow purely a thought exercise I didn't actually believe because I was too smart and couldn't possibly.
I was watching part of this video earlier, at last, though not all of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihl5QxfeqDk
It is on the topic of Islam, Anti-Muslim Bigotry, and LGBT+. The YouTuber whom I enjoy a lot, ContraPoints, was having a discussion with another person who does a podcast and I'll let the description box explain it to you if you're interest. But in being concise, I want to express my own counterpoint and thoughts about something that has bothered me since college which gets dredged up again when I hear ContraPoints reference opposition to religion on some kind of movement-level (which, to be fair, she seems to have indicating a hedging away from in the above-linked video, though I don't know what her conclusions are).
I will fully admit that growing up in a socially conservative religious region of the country does have a major impact on the way I processed growing up and coming to terms with myself. I am bisexual and a Christian, and I absolutely will not give up one of those to favor the other. I honestly do not care what kind of cognitive dissonance someone tries to accuse me of because I've been there, done that, dealt with it, and to be human is to have cognitive dissonance.
The counterpoint I want to make in a brief, sketched-out way is that I think that there is an inherent flaw in attributing a stance against "religion" or "God" or whatever as inherent to "the Left." In the above-video, they make an absolutely spot-on point that I actually hadn't heard articulated before that the Left tends to prop up things from within the far-right of Islam in trying to combat the oppression of further-left but sometimes still-conservative Muslims. Like, basically, we try to make hijabs a feminist symbol of liberation and freedom even when their religious and cultural context may not support that at all, particularly when there is presently a regime which enforces modest dress in this manner. But I'll let them explain their points. My point is that for a movement that is all about freedom and following what makes one's human existence meaningful, metaphysically or otherwise (including the denial of metaphysics baby-bathwater-and-all), there is an awfully strong resistance to allowing religious individuals to exist comfortably within the overall "Left" community.
Scrolling through the comments section, I happened upon an individual who was arguing that religious Leftists could exist but that it was the moral obligation of a religious Leftist to be sure that their religious beliefs had no authority to make decisions for a group or community as a whole. On the one hand, I 100% agree with this! I'll get back to that, though. The glaring philosophical flaw I see in this is when atheists within the Leftist community prescribe atheism as the only rational response to the cognitive dissonance that can come from being a Leftist, queer in any sense of the word, etc., and religious is atheism. That is prescribing an appropriate response for an entire community that must be blanket and not debated in the very same way that religion should never be allowed to do for a whole community that is not voluntary-membership-only.
I feel like a response might be that this isn't actually what is wanted by an atheist. However, in my atheist friends I see a spectrum that seems to run between apathy about religion and opposition to its social and systemic impact. I don't really know how to reasonably take up any kind of argument that a religious viewpoint can be sincere from a person who is far-Left without being thrown out for proselytizing. This is one of the reasons that, with a Philosophy Concentration Religious Studies degree, I did not pursue graduate school in that area. By the time I finished my philosophy classes, I was glad to see the end of them. I still loved the environment, the debate, the learning, the confronting my own ideas and revising them on an almost daily basis that was required of em, and so on. However, I was absolutely exhausted from the way in which the kind of academic atheist rational evangelism was co-opting the entire field in terms of rhetoric about it. While my department offered quite a few religious studies courses that were secular and academic in nature, there were swaths of students with the support of some professors who believed that all religious studies and metaphysical philosophy should be relegated to history or anthropology and sociology departments because they were no longer relevant. They would smugly smile and insist about this, even right to the faces of the people in their department to whom it was extremely relevant.
There was an argument I heard toward the end of my career as a Philosophy Major that Philosophy departments were hungry for relevance and had scapegoated theology and metaphysics as the thing that was holding them back from greater funding and following. This actually inspired what I wrote my philosophy thesis about which was, more or less, a refutation of the idea that the scientific method has domain over every type of knowledge and that it has any power to process the whole of reality such to prove that nothing exists beyond its purview. I am ALL FOR SCIENCE. I love it. I just don't think it can touch all that is. And I was having fun, but I got laughed at, a lot by the people who wanted to rebrand the philosophy department as "Ontological Sciences" so that they could get in on the STEM money and cream. If only the stupid religious people would go away.
And that is not even touching this kind of strange fear that I've noticed with a lot of ContraPoints's rhetoric that she talks about that sometimes the Left ends up making the Alt Right's talking points for them. Particularly people who are moderate left-of-center types who wouldn't be considered part of the capitalized-Left end up kind of circling back around into this kind of accidental alliance with the Far Right whom all those groups would despise (if for various reasons). And this was my experience as a religious, sexually confused, mentally unwell Philosophy student. In my department, there were kindred spirits, but mostly I came across people whom it would not surprise me in the slightest had since become part of the Alt Right Pepe-type "Ironic" Naziism racial and social cleansing brigade. I don't know that any of them did, and I don't mean to make false accusations, but my point is that many of the arguments that made my skin crawl the most in our debates in class were those that totally supported a kind of kneejerk, deliberately godless conservatism.
I struggled a lot with my religious beliefs more at the time when I was around 11 or 12. While I still had similar questions in college at times, I had gone through my long-dark time with it much earlier. In the end, I actually tried to switch religions a couple of times, but in the end I found that my belief was sincere, independent of family social pressure, independent of guilt, and that what I felt on a spiritual level was something I couldn't stamp out or ignore. Furthermore, I didn't want to. If that's self-delusion, then I don't think it's the kind that needs to be cured, anymore than any other thing about an individual person who is not being compelled to behave in harmful ways.
My best friend is an atheist, and while there have been times I have felt insecure or felt a bit like I was butting heads with her on an existential level, for the most part I ave always felt just fine about how she respects my religious beliefs. I respect her non-belief as well. We are able to disagree without it changing our love for each other. However, one time I remember being with her in person and someone talking vocally about proactive atheism which tried to dispel religious people's delusions, and my best friend sort of rescued me from being trapped in a car with this for an hour with something that shows one of the many reasons she is my best friend. Despite being an atheist herself, she told this person that science could not prove a negative and therefore could not disprove the existence of God. I breathed such a sigh of relief and I'm not sure she has ever known how grateful I am that I didn't have to sit there and say nothing out of politeness while listening to that for a prolonged amount of time.
Which brings me to my final thing. While I completely agree with a number of talking points that are rational, researched, measured critiques of organized religion and the way in which traditions with scriptures deal with the fact that many of us end up not believing what we are told exactly to the literal letter, I have another fundamental problem with how atheism is treated in Leftist communities as the only understandable option. What this results in is a kind of allowance for atheistic evangelism which is not called that because it is liberation from religion. However, I sense that the idea that a Leftist religious person shares and advocates for their beliefs on an individual, one-on-one level is what horrifies many Leftists out of allowing religious people to exist in their communities without a severe gag order. And I think it is a reversal on their very principles, not because "BUT ACTUALLY THE BIBLE VERSE MEANT..." arguments (which can be made by people with much more linguistic knowledge than I am but which are not necessarily encouraging) but because it equates one individual with the whole group with a specific except to the need to take intersection into consideration. Religious LGBTQIA+ are going to exist. They just are. And I can let smarter sociological and anthropological minds parse that out. But I just think that insisting that a person who holds a sincere religious belief must, in fact, keep his or her mouth shut about it within the Left community is the same kind of silencing that certain Far-Right groups do to try and token-accept gay people and trans people. "You can be it as long as you don't talk about it and go with the flow and don't corrupt our young."
I haven't been to church in months and months and months and that in itself is a struggle for me, spiritually. But choosing to go to a church, given my current options, would also be a risk mentally, spiritually, emotionally, you name it. I hold sincere beliefs and they aren't going anywhere. I think that if someone is curious and feels an inclination toward religious meaning and affiliation that I should be "allowed" to say something to them about what I believe and to let them decide and question all they'd like. However, I can say that ever since college in the Philosophy Department, I would hazard a guess that any religious Leftist feels completely disallowed from doing that.
Please remember if you read this that it is a personal post on a journal. I welcome thoughtful reply, but I don't guarantee that I endorse what I just wrote as without flaw. It's the middle of the night and I'm sleepy. But I just have been thinking about this for what feels like years, and it was something I wanted to put down in words.
I'm putting it under a cut since we usually try to be polite and filter these topics.
So there is a transgender YouTuber whose content I absolutely adore lately. However, she is completely unsubtle (and it occasionally comes up) about how against religion she is, ideologically. Now, I majored in Philosophy in college in the Bible Belt, so believe it or not I spent my days among a lot of individuals who basically went into my department to major in Learning How to Rail Against the Religious Background They Were Coerced into Participating In. And, like, I get that. I am completely acknowledging that being forced to participate in a religious tradition against your will is a kind of unfair coercion, but as someone who did not drop the sincere beliefs at the door, it was difficult to constantly correct people in that, no, my religious beliefs were not somehow purely a thought exercise I didn't actually believe because I was too smart and couldn't possibly.
I was watching part of this video earlier, at last, though not all of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihl5QxfeqDk
It is on the topic of Islam, Anti-Muslim Bigotry, and LGBT+. The YouTuber whom I enjoy a lot, ContraPoints, was having a discussion with another person who does a podcast and I'll let the description box explain it to you if you're interest. But in being concise, I want to express my own counterpoint and thoughts about something that has bothered me since college which gets dredged up again when I hear ContraPoints reference opposition to religion on some kind of movement-level (which, to be fair, she seems to have indicating a hedging away from in the above-linked video, though I don't know what her conclusions are).
I will fully admit that growing up in a socially conservative religious region of the country does have a major impact on the way I processed growing up and coming to terms with myself. I am bisexual and a Christian, and I absolutely will not give up one of those to favor the other. I honestly do not care what kind of cognitive dissonance someone tries to accuse me of because I've been there, done that, dealt with it, and to be human is to have cognitive dissonance.
The counterpoint I want to make in a brief, sketched-out way is that I think that there is an inherent flaw in attributing a stance against "religion" or "God" or whatever as inherent to "the Left." In the above-video, they make an absolutely spot-on point that I actually hadn't heard articulated before that the Left tends to prop up things from within the far-right of Islam in trying to combat the oppression of further-left but sometimes still-conservative Muslims. Like, basically, we try to make hijabs a feminist symbol of liberation and freedom even when their religious and cultural context may not support that at all, particularly when there is presently a regime which enforces modest dress in this manner. But I'll let them explain their points. My point is that for a movement that is all about freedom and following what makes one's human existence meaningful, metaphysically or otherwise (including the denial of metaphysics baby-bathwater-and-all), there is an awfully strong resistance to allowing religious individuals to exist comfortably within the overall "Left" community.
Scrolling through the comments section, I happened upon an individual who was arguing that religious Leftists could exist but that it was the moral obligation of a religious Leftist to be sure that their religious beliefs had no authority to make decisions for a group or community as a whole. On the one hand, I 100% agree with this! I'll get back to that, though. The glaring philosophical flaw I see in this is when atheists within the Leftist community prescribe atheism as the only rational response to the cognitive dissonance that can come from being a Leftist, queer in any sense of the word, etc., and religious is atheism. That is prescribing an appropriate response for an entire community that must be blanket and not debated in the very same way that religion should never be allowed to do for a whole community that is not voluntary-membership-only.
I feel like a response might be that this isn't actually what is wanted by an atheist. However, in my atheist friends I see a spectrum that seems to run between apathy about religion and opposition to its social and systemic impact. I don't really know how to reasonably take up any kind of argument that a religious viewpoint can be sincere from a person who is far-Left without being thrown out for proselytizing. This is one of the reasons that, with a Philosophy Concentration Religious Studies degree, I did not pursue graduate school in that area. By the time I finished my philosophy classes, I was glad to see the end of them. I still loved the environment, the debate, the learning, the confronting my own ideas and revising them on an almost daily basis that was required of em, and so on. However, I was absolutely exhausted from the way in which the kind of academic atheist rational evangelism was co-opting the entire field in terms of rhetoric about it. While my department offered quite a few religious studies courses that were secular and academic in nature, there were swaths of students with the support of some professors who believed that all religious studies and metaphysical philosophy should be relegated to history or anthropology and sociology departments because they were no longer relevant. They would smugly smile and insist about this, even right to the faces of the people in their department to whom it was extremely relevant.
There was an argument I heard toward the end of my career as a Philosophy Major that Philosophy departments were hungry for relevance and had scapegoated theology and metaphysics as the thing that was holding them back from greater funding and following. This actually inspired what I wrote my philosophy thesis about which was, more or less, a refutation of the idea that the scientific method has domain over every type of knowledge and that it has any power to process the whole of reality such to prove that nothing exists beyond its purview. I am ALL FOR SCIENCE. I love it. I just don't think it can touch all that is. And I was having fun, but I got laughed at, a lot by the people who wanted to rebrand the philosophy department as "Ontological Sciences" so that they could get in on the STEM money and cream. If only the stupid religious people would go away.
And that is not even touching this kind of strange fear that I've noticed with a lot of ContraPoints's rhetoric that she talks about that sometimes the Left ends up making the Alt Right's talking points for them. Particularly people who are moderate left-of-center types who wouldn't be considered part of the capitalized-Left end up kind of circling back around into this kind of accidental alliance with the Far Right whom all those groups would despise (if for various reasons). And this was my experience as a religious, sexually confused, mentally unwell Philosophy student. In my department, there were kindred spirits, but mostly I came across people whom it would not surprise me in the slightest had since become part of the Alt Right Pepe-type "Ironic" Naziism racial and social cleansing brigade. I don't know that any of them did, and I don't mean to make false accusations, but my point is that many of the arguments that made my skin crawl the most in our debates in class were those that totally supported a kind of kneejerk, deliberately godless conservatism.
I struggled a lot with my religious beliefs more at the time when I was around 11 or 12. While I still had similar questions in college at times, I had gone through my long-dark time with it much earlier. In the end, I actually tried to switch religions a couple of times, but in the end I found that my belief was sincere, independent of family social pressure, independent of guilt, and that what I felt on a spiritual level was something I couldn't stamp out or ignore. Furthermore, I didn't want to. If that's self-delusion, then I don't think it's the kind that needs to be cured, anymore than any other thing about an individual person who is not being compelled to behave in harmful ways.
My best friend is an atheist, and while there have been times I have felt insecure or felt a bit like I was butting heads with her on an existential level, for the most part I ave always felt just fine about how she respects my religious beliefs. I respect her non-belief as well. We are able to disagree without it changing our love for each other. However, one time I remember being with her in person and someone talking vocally about proactive atheism which tried to dispel religious people's delusions, and my best friend sort of rescued me from being trapped in a car with this for an hour with something that shows one of the many reasons she is my best friend. Despite being an atheist herself, she told this person that science could not prove a negative and therefore could not disprove the existence of God. I breathed such a sigh of relief and I'm not sure she has ever known how grateful I am that I didn't have to sit there and say nothing out of politeness while listening to that for a prolonged amount of time.
Which brings me to my final thing. While I completely agree with a number of talking points that are rational, researched, measured critiques of organized religion and the way in which traditions with scriptures deal with the fact that many of us end up not believing what we are told exactly to the literal letter, I have another fundamental problem with how atheism is treated in Leftist communities as the only understandable option. What this results in is a kind of allowance for atheistic evangelism which is not called that because it is liberation from religion. However, I sense that the idea that a Leftist religious person shares and advocates for their beliefs on an individual, one-on-one level is what horrifies many Leftists out of allowing religious people to exist in their communities without a severe gag order. And I think it is a reversal on their very principles, not because "BUT ACTUALLY THE BIBLE VERSE MEANT..." arguments (which can be made by people with much more linguistic knowledge than I am but which are not necessarily encouraging) but because it equates one individual with the whole group with a specific except to the need to take intersection into consideration. Religious LGBTQIA+ are going to exist. They just are. And I can let smarter sociological and anthropological minds parse that out. But I just think that insisting that a person who holds a sincere religious belief must, in fact, keep his or her mouth shut about it within the Left community is the same kind of silencing that certain Far-Right groups do to try and token-accept gay people and trans people. "You can be it as long as you don't talk about it and go with the flow and don't corrupt our young."
I haven't been to church in months and months and months and that in itself is a struggle for me, spiritually. But choosing to go to a church, given my current options, would also be a risk mentally, spiritually, emotionally, you name it. I hold sincere beliefs and they aren't going anywhere. I think that if someone is curious and feels an inclination toward religious meaning and affiliation that I should be "allowed" to say something to them about what I believe and to let them decide and question all they'd like. However, I can say that ever since college in the Philosophy Department, I would hazard a guess that any religious Leftist feels completely disallowed from doing that.
Please remember if you read this that it is a personal post on a journal. I welcome thoughtful reply, but I don't guarantee that I endorse what I just wrote as without flaw. It's the middle of the night and I'm sleepy. But I just have been thinking about this for what feels like years, and it was something I wanted to put down in words.