There’s an interesting below the line discussion over at Harry ‘s Place about Boris Johnson and all the various types of individuals who want him gone. The discussion, as they often do at Harry’s Place has gone a bit off topic and drifted into the areas of faith and culture. One commentator, Jurek Molnar, speaking about the growth of identity politics and how it has replaced religion somewhat said:
If traditional religions are in retreat the void is filled with another drug-related habit. Religions are not drugs, but their absence create addictions, which are otherwise not there. Religions are a solution to a human problem, that pops up again, when religion is abandoned. An American commentator remarked that Trump created New Jersey housewives excited to be in the French Resistance. That’s a drug related habit.
The addictions that are absent without traditional religions all circle around the ambivalence of identity. Since there is no stable identity in identity politics, everything is radical present, which changes and does not know history. Every human being in a woke society is struggling with identity and so becomes addicted to community based self-confidence. There is no stable identity, only an infinite shelf of identity performance kits to chose from. No God, no centre, no balance. The world is out of joint, permanently. Trotski and Mao fused into Robyn De Angelo and Ibrahim Kendi, declaring Shakespeare a white supremacist.
Since identity in the sense it originally means is not possible, the only way to regulate the imbalance is to politicise institutions and organising enemies within. They are Stalinists, not fascists. (At least not yet. But we shall see.) The solution they have for their programs to succeed is simply to create even more tension. It is simply tyrannical and evil.
Jurek has a good point. Whilst religion as a basis for a society, at least in the West, had and has its faults, what replaces it might be worse. Although I dislike religious extremism of all types as I can quite understand how piety can devolve into extremism, secular cults like identity politics that have taken the place of religion are just as dangerous as religious extremism.
I have read this sentence through several times and still have no clue what it means.
Having been an atheist since my teens, I have become pretty bored with atheists and atheism being blamed for the world’s ills, usually without evidence and often in the face of contrary evidence. We have to try and work our problems out and I don’t think that it is helpful to have as a starting point beliefs that are demonstrably untrue.
Yeap, linking in with my comment on your next post as Chesterton (may not) have put it:
‘When men stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything.
Environmentalism, Socialism, Feminism and Social Justice/Identity politics are all attempts by their adherents to fill the god-shaped hole and give meaning to their lives This gives the left (who mainly believe in this stuff) over the right who, absent traditional religions, have nothing to offer (free markets, Individual liberty, etc are all good and well but don’t fill the god-shaped hole, IMO)
For millennia humans have had a religious impulse and when the outlets for that are taken away or discredited then people will fill that god shaped hole with something else. I agree with you about environmentalism etc but I would also add extreme and exclusive nationalism to that as well.
I have just noticed that my attempt to copy and paste a sentence from the OP failed so that the first part of my post makes no sense either.
“An American commentator remarked that Trump created New Jersey housewives excited to be in the French Resistance. That’s a drug related habit.”
I have read this sentence through several times and still have no clue what it means. There, fixed.
I believe that what the OP was trying to say is that Trump gave NJ housewives the feeling that they were in some sort of resistance movement and that addiction to that feeling of being on an ‘in group’ is addictive like a drug.
My take is that humans are convinced that they know how to think in the same way that chickens are convinced that they can fly. I keep chickens and so I do know that they can fly. Technically they can, just not well enough to actually get anywhere. We invented the scientific method and certain types of philosophical thinking, to get around the fact that we don’t actually think that well. So when it comes to idiotic beliefs, not very bright people are going to provide plenty of fertile ground for them to grow. Is a pre packaged idiotic belief like a religion any less harmful than whatever non religious nonsense idiots latch onto instead?
I think that replacing basic religious morality which I sum up as love the Eternal One, love your neighbour and try not to be a twat, with political ideology is dangerous. It is possible to be enlightened and religious.