/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

How many bait threads are you going to post
>>29656

>>1768688
>It has become increasingly difficult to disagree with a religious person without receiving a condescending "you dropped your fedora" remark
literally never heard someone say that in real life

Seriously though, all Abrahamic religions need to be eradicated.

>>1768688
Please direct your autism to a relevant forum for this.

>>1768688
why does the magic animals guy have such a thick ass

I'll never stop saying this every time this gets brought up: New Atheism was unironically the worst thing to happen to atheism. Couldn't think of anybody worse to represent it than a bunch of pro-war British neocons.

Just show people they can get what they want out of spiritual practice without getting dieties involved, and religion will lose it's monopoly. Same way you have to build socialism before you can build communism, capitalism can't skip socialism directly to communism, and a religous population can't skip witchcraft directly to atheism, it has to turn to witchcraft to cure itself of religiousity first.

My problem with religion isn't that the stories aren't true, but that the underlying concept behind most of them is that some entity is secretly in control of everything. My problem is with the belief that the universe has some inherent justice to it, and that some entity ensures wrongs will be punished and rights will be rewarded.

I understand the emotional benefit of holding on to this, especially if you're someone who has suffered many wrongs. But at the end of the day, its just Cope. And it breeds complacency

>>1769566
I had a conversation with a woman about God a few months ago and the impression I got was that it was a cope for having lived an awful life. She was also an anti-vaxxer and believed in a cabal of Satanic elites and things like that, big Trump supporter. It's like only the next life is important, and this life is not important. But if your life was pretty terrible then the alternative of there being no God would be almost unbearable.

–

I think another lens to look at religion is actually through Pride parades. I've been to them several times and have concluded it's integrally a religious experience. People feel suffering, and they gather together in a big group and affirm each other with an essentially Christian message that is encoded throughout: that everything is okay and that they're loved. "Be yourself." And people can get really emotional at them. It's the "heart of a heartless world" and both an expression of suffering and a protest against suffering. And this emerged decades ago from a pretty marginalized substrata of the population within Western societies which then gradually became a generalized religion / ideology of a significant number of people – many of whom are not even LGBT. Even if this is mostly secularized, the real heart in them is in the people – not the corporations which have colonized them – and the presence of a number of progressive churches their on their own initiative is worth noting. And then everybody feels better and then they go home. Like church.

But for this reason, the critics who are like "don't you realize this is a distraction from the class struggle" can sound a little bit like the New Atheists. Suffice to say I don't think repressing these people is going to work – it might only make it grow stronger. Which is exactly what the right does not understand.

There are also conservatives on the right who have noted that what they call woke-ism is like a religion. They got that part right. But I don't know how far they have taken that critique instead of just wanting to double down on their own sauce.

As I was saying about the religious experience.

>>1769566
>>1769588
I have a less cynical view on it, I think people are pre-desposed to faith naturally, the idea of a god is inhernetly comforting to human beings, I mean even Stalin understood that religions gives people hope and power that give people something higher to belive in full faith, here's an example, when he'd give speeches, he'd use terms that were from orthfoox chuch that russian peasnetw were familar with?
>He presented the Marxist and Leninist formulae in the accent, the intonation, and sometimes even the idiom of Greek Orthodoxy, which made those formulae sound less alien to the 'backward' Russian masses. Indeed, he made Bolshevism appear as something like a new emanation of the old and indefinable spirit of the Church, long before he rehabilitated the Church itself for reasons of expediency.
>It is enough, for instance, to read Stalin's famous oath of fealty to Lenin, that strange litany which he intoned after Lenin's death and in which he began every invocation with the refrain 'We swear to Thee, Comrade Lenin', to feel with almost physical immediacy the ex-pupil of the monks, trained in the delivery of sermons and funeral orations, emerging in the disciple of Lenin and overtopping the Marxist.

>>1769606
I hope I didn't sound cynical about it. But another example is Martin Luther King. He didn't just say "I'm against racism and people should be nice to each other." People had been saying that for 100 years and had no effect. He was effective because he synchronized his message of the struggling subaltern classes with pre-existing "organic ideology" (to borrow a term from Gramsci I think) which was both encoded with Christian beliefs and also even a bit "patriotic" in a way with his "dream" speech (synchronizing with the American Dream, but reconfiguring it to be about something else, or what it ought to have been, or could be). And I think American socialists can use him. Right after his assassination, Angela Davis and George Jackson were writing letters to each other while Jackson was in prison saying a little bit opportunistically that "well… we had our disagreements but we can use him… we can just say he was a Maoist."

It's so complicated though. This is from Chantal Mouffe's "Gramsci and Marxist Theory."

>"Gramsci immediately places himself on entirely different ground from those viewing ideology as false consciousness or as a system of ideas, and he rebels against all epiphenomenalist conceptions which reduce it to mere appearances with no efficacy. The claim, presented as an essential postulate of historical materialism, that every fluctuation of politics and ideology can be presented and expounded as an immediate expression of the structure, must be contested in theory as primitive infantilism, and combated in practice with the authentic testimony of Marx, the author of concrete political and historical works. According to Gramsci, the starting point of all research on ideology must be Marx's assertion that 'men gain consciousness of their tasks on the ideological terrain of the superstructures.' So that the latter, he declares, must be considered 'operating realities which possess efficacy and if Marx sometimes terms them illusions it is only in a polemical sense in order to clearly specify their historical and transitory nature. Gramsci was to formulate his own definition of ideology as the terrain 'on which men move, acquire consciousness of their position, struggle.'"

There's this book that somewhat deals with this. An apocalypse happens in the 1940s-50s, and the protagonist is a geologist. In this apocalypse, he finds what he believes to be the last woman, who is black woman (which is significant to the story). Eventually, they find other survivors and establish a safe place to live. They start having children, who have an easier time existing in their own parents' world, even though their parents yearn for the comforts of the previous world. The protagonist specifically wants to return to America. He tries teaching the kids history and science, but they are only interested in basic survival knowledge and religion, with the Bible being the only text that is thoroughly read in that society. Time passes, and a new guy arrives and asks to live with them. However, he attempts to rape an underage girl, and the protagonist stops him by beating him with a hammer. From then on, the kids semi-worship the protagonist but don't listen to what he says. The guy survives until his 90s, when all the other adults have died, and he realizes that his "tribe" has fully realized, they have a common phenotype and their faith in has his wife as a holy mother figure and him as a warrior father. As he's about to die, he reflects on how men will create myths that become religions, and there is little that can be done to stop it.

>>1769588
wokeness isn't real, you are a news addict

Isn't this a left-trumpist board now? We have to like religion bros!! It is so utterly not kino to be atheist pilled!!!!?!?!

>>1769628
you can dislike religion without making it cringe, like you can hate America without making it cringe.

I think the widely acclaimed speaker, writer, journalist, and political analyst Caleb Maupine is starting a new church later this year.

Speaking as a Catholic, I'll try to explain where I think the issue around Reddit Atheism's image comes from.

For one, I've joked with a friend before that a lot of these reddit atheists "killed god" so they could replace Him with funkopops and marvel movies. This isn't to say mindless consumerism is "an atheist problem" or that those who'd consider themselves religious aren't also mindless consumers, but rather the death of God should, in theory, prompt a meticulous bit of introspection on oneself, reality, and meaning. I think it's entirely possible to have "Faith" in some abstract sense without necessarily worshipping God or a god, however it seems like many of these Reddit Atheists are content to merely "kill God" again and again without doing the constructive work that comes after. It's basically this desire to "go with the flow" that ends up just reinforcing liberal capitalism because, in place of God, a lot of these people just choose mindless obedience to the closest thing we have to "God" on earth, usually Capitalism or the State. Both have proven themselves capable of moving mountains if the inclination strikes them.

I remember reading this story of a guy who was an Atheist, but the more laidback or casual kind. His kid ended up making friends with some evangelical family, then started going to church with them, then got baptized and became a youth minister, and the next thing you know this little teenager is screaming at his dad because the guy admitted he had a gay experience in college once. One comment stuck out to me: if you raise your kid without any values he's eventually going to drift towards the first set of values he encounters, for good or for ill. Of course this isn't anything on the parent, I'm certain he was trying to raise his kid to be a good person and didn't want to deprive him of religion if that's what he wanted, but I think it highlights how in the mainstream "Atheism" doesn't offer much beyond just "going with the flow" or agreeing with the values of bourgeois society uncritically.

This doesn't necessarily have to be the case. For example the Commissars of the USSR were true believers in Communism. Many of them were wholly willing to charge into gunfire in service to their ideals. However we aren't living in a time of high-minded ideals people are willing to die for. We're living in some decayed neoliberal era, where the worst thing you could have is Faith of any kind. There's only one Sin, and it's rocking the boat. I think this is where the emphasis on "peaceful protests" or "passive resistance" comes in. Meanwhile you've got Hamas guys heroically planting explosives on Israeli tanks, running barefoot over shrapnel, just to fight for their homeland.

Taxi Driver was written because the guy behind the idea wanted to write a European existentialist work in an American context. Travis is distinctly American in that he isn't looking for any kind of "authenticity", and instead just wants to be "famous" in some bizarre sense. He doesn't want his existence justified to himself by himself, but rather he wants to be met with cheering crowds saying "Hey, there's Travis Bickle!"

I think Faith is a really important thing to have today. And while you'll get some "enlightened centrist" bullshit insisting "every human believes in a God" and showing some guy praying to a bust of Marx, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Faith, absolute Faith, can allow a man to die as much as to kill. If a man is earnestly convinced of the dangers of climate change, such that he guns down an oil executive in broad daylight with the assumption it'd do something to prevent disaster, I don't think it can be argued he has any less Faith than the man who gets crushed by a Bulldozer protesting a new development. And that's something neoliberal society hopes to beat out of people. Israel wants young Arabs to stop caring about Palestine because, hey, it isn't happening to them. Oil companies want young people to stop caring about the planet because, hey, we aren't all dying yet.

The willingness to believe in something, anything, to the point you'll see your own life as an instrument for change is a dangerous thing to the status quo. It may explain why we lionize heroes who are wholly unwilling to kill people or do anything other than act as enforcers for the status quo. "Superheroes" are nihilists.

>>1768688
God I hate Redditors so fucking much

>>1769628
Continue seething, bidenite

>>1769735
>One comment stuck out to me: if you raise your kid without any values he's eventually going to drift towards the first set of values he encounters, for good or for ill … but I think it highlights how in the mainstream "Atheism" doesn't offer much beyond just "going with the flow" or agreeing with the values of bourgeois society uncritically.
That's probably true. A lot of them get into secular humanism, which is a form of liberalism. But that can sometimes develop into socialism as well. A lot of them can also be Star Trek fans, which has varied a lot as a franchise, but it does essentially depict a utopian socialist federation where the evils of sexism and racism don't exist, and intelligent beings from different plants live in a condition of mutual benefit. One of the villains are greedy capitalists called the Ferengi who also have replicators but they're privatized as opposed to the Federation's socialized ones. Roddenberry apparently identified as a communist and one of the themes of the show is the debate between idealism and pragmatism (as represented by Mr. Spock) which has a long tradition in American philosophy.

>>1769735
I figure I should clarify “faith” a little bit. What I mean by it is a total confidence in your convictions that transcends your physical form and the morality of your surroundings in some cases. Traditionally this included some belief in a heavenly reward, but that ain’t necessary to act with Faith. I’d also say Faith, as I interpret it, is a fairly rare thing, including among the religious. The many doctrinal evolutions of Protestantism have turned Faith from something you do into something you have. Too many have taken the passive approach to Faith and I think the end result is that they’ve turned “God” into an extension of their own ego that exists solely to tell them everything they do is correct and if they’re feeling down then something good will “just happen” to make them feel better. Rather than transcending the physical, their faith is intensely physical and selfish. It places them as God of a kind; they won’t go to Church, but they’ll be intensely offended by the “godlessness” of modernity. They’ll despise gays while gambling, stealing, and cheating on their spouse. They want the right to kill without the consequences of murder.

>>1769802
Funny enough I’ve been watching a lot of Star Trek (classic and TNG) with a friend lately.

Okay this is gonna be really cringe, but if we’re talking media and values, I’ve got to say one of the best depictions of existentialist themes I’ve seen in media recently is in the latest expansion for FFXIV. The entire plot of the expansion is about suffering and nihilism and how you confront it, and it’s a one dimension villain of all things that serves as the rebuttal to this question of “why are we born if we’re just going to suffer and die?” And funny enough he probably becomes the best fictional example of Nietzsche’s Ubermensch that I can think of.

His entire motivation, his reason for being, is just to have the ultimate fight of his life. He even admits it and mocks a character for thinking all the people he killed and suffering he unleashed would matter if he had some “better” reason. He doesn’t try to mask his intentions or justify himself, and as a result he’s completely unphased by things like the threat of death or despair. He genuinely doesn’t care because he decided on his own that the purpose he gave himself matters more than any of that. He’s willing to end the world just so he can get his fight. Death is meaningless to him because his meaning is a literal fight to the death.

And yes, it’s fiction. However it goes back to what I was saying about having a kind of transcendental faith in something. I recall a story about some Philosopher in India that tried teaching a Raj about solipsism; he goes on and on about how reality is an illusion, nothing in life matters, and death is meaningless. Well the Raj gets tired of all this solipsism so one day when the philosopher is out in the courtyard, he orders an elephant released and it starts to rampage around the court. The philosopher sees this elephant charging at him, and he screams and climbs up a tree to escape it. For all the guy’s high minded ideals about the meaninglessness of life and how all that we see is an illusion, the sight of a rampaging animal made him fear for his illusory, meaningless life and try to preserve it.

For a more modern example, you’ve got the nihilists in the Big Lebowski constantly tauting “Vee believe in nussing, Lebowski” but they throw a temper tantrum and whine that it isn’t fair when their extortion scheme doesn’t work out.
>”Not fair? Who’s the fucking nihilists here?!”

Values are important. And I think people can look at the Reddit atheist all “enlightened by his own intelligence” and recognize a pathetic quality that some of the pseudo religious can disguise with reverence to their ancient texts or aesthetic rituals. Yes they’ve “killed God” but that makes the collection of banal consumerist products all the more pathetic. It’s also why the liberal hysteria as Trump being some apprentice of Hitler seem so ridiculous. Hitler at least believed in something and one can imagine a world where he lived long enough to shape Germany into this dark monument to nationalism. I can guarantee that Trump, in a world of his own making, has such a fundamental lack of belief in anything that the best he’d pull off would be the “Bad Timeline” from back to the future: we’d get the Trump Presidential Library and Casino, with a gift shop on the first floor where you can buy The Art of The Deal with an introduction written by Tim Tebow and slot machines coated in 24k Gold. At the end of the day, Trump is just an ego driven yuppie. He’s American, and he’s as pathetic as the rest of us.

>>1769929
That's right about Trump but I think the Nazis were also philistines. I think you'd find this interesting:

>In ‘Socialism and Culture’ (reprinted in The Gramsci Reader, Selected Writings 1916-1935, David Forgacs ed., New York University Press, 2000) Antonio Gramsci writes:

<We need to free ourselves from the habit of seeing culture as encyclopaedic knowledge, and men as mere receptacles to be stuffed full of empirical data and a mass of unconnected raw facts, which have to be filed in the brain as in the columns of a dictionary, enabling their owner to respond to the various stimuli from the outside world. This form of culture really is harmful….It serves only to create maladjusted people, people who believe they are superior to the rest of humanity because they have memorized a certain number of facts and dates and who rattle them off at every opportunity….It serves to create the kind of weak and colourless intellectualism…which has given birth to a mass of pretentious babblers….The young student who knows a little Latin and history, the young lawyer who has been successful in wringing a scrap of paper called a degree out of the laziness and lackadaisical attitude of his professors, they end up seeing themselves as different from and superior to even the best skilled workman…But this is not culture, but pedantry, not intelligence, but intellect, and it is absolutely right to react against it.

>Gramsci’s critique here resonates with the kind that Nietzsche offered of the ‘educated philistine,’ the superficially educated man who runs about collecting ideas and consuming the cultural products that are considered the ‘trophies’ of his ‘culture,’ but who never learns their value, nor masters their relationships and interconnections so as to raise himself to a higher state of being (where a ‘unity of style’ may be manifest.) This pedant remains hopelessly confined to accepted and dominant modes of thinking and acting, unable to summon up a genuine critical, reflective viewpoint on his place in this world. As such, he is all too susceptible to becoming a reactionary, a defender of the established status quo, a hopeless decadent. These attitudes would be benign if they were not also affected with a fatal arrogance that breeds a dangerous politics.

>Gramsci goes on to claim that:

<Culture is something quite different. It is organization, discipline of one’s inner self, a coming to terms with one’s own personality; it is the attainment of a higher awareness, with the aid of which one succeeds in understanding one’s own historical value, one’s own function in life, one’s own rights and obligations.

>The invocation of ‘organization’ and ‘a coming to terms of one’s own personality’ also strikes a Nietzschean note here. The truly cultured person, one possessing a ‘unity of style,’ has brought together his disparate drives and energies and inclinations into a unified whole, an act requiring a ‘discipline of one’s inner self.’ He has also, as Nietzsche suggested, recognized his own self for what it is, and ‘joyfully’ accepted it.

>The concentration camp commandants who read Goethe and listened to Beethoven at night in their offices were philistines in this view; they were mere consumers of ‘culture’; they lacked ‘discipline’ and remained susceptible to their atavistic urges. Their ‘pedantry,’ their philistinism, and the lack of intelligence it implies were an integral component of their moral failures.
https://samirchopra.com/2016/03/10/gramsci-and-nietzsche-as-philosophers-of-culture/

>>1769802
It's dune vs star trek debate, what do you think is more likely, humanity progresses beyond all it's societal and material issues with secular humanism or humanity devolves into superstitious feudal religious fantastic

>>1769929
Endwalker was the first expansion that I actually paid attention to the story. Loved it.

>>1769735
> if you raise your kid without any values he's eventually going to drift towards the first set of values he encounters, for good or for ill.
That describes most zoomers in the West, but they were raised by parents who meant well, but didn't offer them any higher ideals. Even the Christian ones were nominally only Christian in a more secular way. That's why we ended up radical as we all did when offered any sort of higher ideas.

>>1769615
sounds neat, quick search seem to indicate its "Earth Abides" by George R. Stewart

>>1769958
>Endwalker was the first expansion that I actually paid attention to the story. Loved it.

Honestly it shows that even a "shallow" character like Zenos can be compelling under the right circumstances. Him mocking the Garlean survivors asking him why he did it was just icing on the cake. A lot of modern media (Marvel especially) have this problem with trying to create "sympathetic" villains then realizing at the last minute they made them too sympathetic and so they have them murder an infant or something. Like how in the new Bioshock the lady leading a populist revolt against the racist theocratic Columbia tries to murder an innocent child.

Zenos off-handedly insults that style of writing with one simple question: "Would you be happier if I had a 'good reason'?"

I think all too often in media, mass death is kind of used as a tool and not focused on all that much. If a supervillain nukes a city, it's a statistic to show how "bad" he is (compared to killing one of the Hero's friends, where you'll likely get sad music and weeping). Y'know "Infinity War" ends with half of all life getting removed from existence, but about the only characters we really focus on are the dudes in spandex. FFXIV is great because it shows, to some extent, the consequences of "world ending threats" on the people. Y'know WoW has had about a million different little apocalypses but they're cleaned up in the course of an expansion because status quo is God.

So here you get to see all the consequences of the villain's actions. Mass death. Starvation. People ripping each other apart like animals. And then he poses a question: do you think any motive I had would've justified what I've done here? Like, if it was part of some insane scheme to "bring glory to my nation" would it make the fact he murdered countless people and consigned the rest to immiseration "good" somehow? He rips apart all the bullshit and just tells it like it is: he did it for his own reasons and no other.

And while it's ultimately sociopathic and selfish, it's still his own choice and there's a certain respect that can be had for his honesty.

>>1769983
>That describes most zoomers in the West, but they were raised by parents who meant well, but didn't offer them any higher ideals. Even the Christian ones were nominally only Christian in a more secular way. That's why we ended up radical as we all did when offered any sort of higher ideas.

And I think that's ultimately why "liberal Christianity" isn't necessarily a path forward either. There's an old joke about some unitarian church wanting to be "fair" and so before the pastor gives his sermon, the Devil is going to give one first. Liberalism in its modern incarnation prioritizes nothing but "dialogue" without conclusion. It's like riding a stationary bike and claiming you've got freedom to travel because of it. And I think the right recognizes that base hypocrisy on some level; which is that, if you really believe in this fundamentalist interpretation of Islam or Christianity, it isn't enough to be satisfied with passively saying "this is what I believe", you want to live your beliefs and practice them. If you genuinely think "gays should be stoned to death" then you aren't going to be satisfied with this compromise that "you can say you believe gays should be stoned to death, but you can't actually stone gays to death". And once you encounter that, you realize that for all its vaunted tolerance, Liberalism disguises a set of values that it'll enforce when push comes to shove.

On a less reactionary note, you see the same when it comes to discussing Socialism. Liberals will tut-tut about how you're free to discuss Socialism in Capitalist countries but not vice versa, but the fact is if you're a committed Socialist, you don't want to discuss Socialism, you want to live it. Liberalism wants you to be satisfied with the fact you can just say "I want Socialism" while never getting it, like some parent entertaining their kids' requests for McDonald's when they already know what's for dinner.

"Liberalizing Christianity", basically keeping Christianity and removing all the "bad" parts isn't good enough. Because while people will be satisfied for a time with the notion that "hey, the local church doesn't hate gays" it's a purely passive change, rather than the creation of new values or giving people a tangible project to work on. I think the popularity of "TradCaths" on the Zoomer Right emerges from this desire to have an active set of values they can live through rituals to engage in, programs to push, fuck even a new language to speak. Liberal Christianity merely promises you can keep doing what you're doing, or wearing a cross without feeling embarrassed in front of your gay friends.

I suppose it's partially why I've got a begrudging respect for some variants of "classic" Fascism. To paraphrase the Big Lebowski again:
>Say what you will of the tenants of classical Fascism, but at least it's an ethos.

>>1768688
People REALLY exaggerate how bad "internet atheism" is. Extremely rare in real life, and much much much less prevalent than IRL religious proselytizing.
I also think it's stupid to obsess over petty drama and not the actual merits of religion.
<I'm an atheist, but some guy on the internet was vaguely annoying, so I'm going to ignore religion's mass child rape/abuse, obstruction to science/progress, oppression of minorities/women, fascism enabling, genocide enabling, slavery enabling, social hierarchies, general irrationality, etc etc
It's this kind of brazenly hypocritical "I hate people who are terminally online therefore I am going to take the most terminally online stance possible" shit. Just say what you mean and mean what you say, take stances based on substance, shut the fuck up about everything else, stop going on Twitter.

>>1770110
True, if someone goes 'muh fedora' then tell them to go fuck themselves, some meme doesn't make their god real

That enlightened by my own intelligence post was made by a 13 year old. But atheism’s fatal fault, which it can do nothing about, is that if as a teenager you realize Jesus didn’t actually come back from the dead, and what actually happened was his lunatic cultists robbed his grave and stole his body and lied about seeing him walk around a go up to heaven, you really are justified in believing you are smarter than every adult *in this specific instance.*

>>1770155
You don't even have to believe that, the only testimony of the resurrection is in the Bible and most of it isn't even contemporaneous, it's most likely just completely made up

>>1770162
I actually do believe that everything did happen, there was some popular Galenian preacher who was executed by the state, his followers believed that he didn't die, that he rose from the read and they spread their teaching to the regions of this empire, whether it evolved and mutate with different interoperations.

>>1769606
was that by the though, or just the fact he received his education in a church school, so those were the terms he was familiar with.

>>1769939
>Nazis were also philistines
I mean, the Nazis were a lot more brutish than people realize. The early Nazi party, especially, was closer to a street gang of thugs with basically an identical excuse for their violence. People forget that Hitler was actually a homeless bum who got radicalized by street pamphlets and other early Nazi party members like Christian Wirth(also homeless for a while) and Adolf Eichmann(used radio salesman) were just disgruntled soldiers.
That said Stalin and his cronies were also rather similar and came from similar roots.

>>1768886
OP is spending too much time on 4chan.

>>1770130
Your fedora is loose, OP.

>>1770492
no twitter.

>although it should still be preserved
what the fuck do you mean by this?

>a type of atheism that is so off-putting that it makes you hesitant to even identify as an atheist
Don't identify as things, you emo.

>Many on the political left
Not a real thing. This is not a cohesive entity, stop pretending it is if you want to make any sense of the world.

>It has become increasingly difficult to disagree with a religious person without receiving a condescending "you dropped your fedora" remark and having others rally behind them.
How the fuck are you going to be a socialist then?

>>1770507
as bad, if not worse.
get a life.

>>1770570
>although it should still be preserved
it's records, theological texts, it's architecture and art all should be preserved

The problem is that a non-empirical positions on epistemology are equated to, and carry the burden of, being identified as "religion", with all the baggage that entails.

I think it's possible to have non-empiric beliefs that are also not religious, and those should be fine to have.

>>1769606
>, the idea of a god is inhernetly comforting to human beings
>inherently
>a god
you're just exposing your bias for monotheism

>>1769735
i was gonna read your post but your dogshit chick tract tier propaganda made me realize it wasn't worth reading.

>>1770476
I have read Stalin in russian and listened to some of his recording and i can say, that poster cliaming about "presenting bolshevism as emanating spirint of church" is complete and utter bull.

>>1770714
really, so what is it like then?

>>1770720
Like a person who speaks russian with georgian accent. Kind of a stupid question tbh. How am i suppose to answer this, do you think?

>>1769939
My thoughts on the matter are complicated. If you look at Hitler’s chosen artistic medium (painting) it’s easy to see his frankly philistine tastes. I’m not gonna take the tired approach of saying his art was “bad”, but rather Hitler never elevated his art beyond the skill of a hobbyist. I believe the people who rejected his art school application said he should pursue architecture as a career not to discourage him, but because the crux of his art was mostly realistic paintings of landscapes or dogs and the like. It isn’t bad but it’s lacking depth. It’s the kind of paintings you’d expect to find in your grandmas house, not hung up in a gallery. Hitler wasn’t necessarily a bad painter, but he’d have been better off pursuing a more tangible career and keeping painting as his hobby. That said, he’s a little less of a philistine than Trump, or perhaps it’s just that Trump is an ultra philistine. Trump is like every stereotype of the Nouveau Rich embodied in a single man. He’s purely bourgeois and nothing else.

I think Trump’s bourgeois character is a source of a lot of liberal consternation, even if they don’t want to admit it. Yknow Chapo made the claim that to a lot of liberals, Trump’s only crime is that he wouldn’t fit on the West Wing, and while that’s true I think the reason they like the West Wing so much is because it gives us this illusion of American culture being “elevated” or “higher” than it really is. There’s a kind of envy in settler colonies towards Europe for being already established nations with this air of dignity or nobility about them, and shit like the West Wing allows us to think there’s some of that same nobility in America, with the President being some stoic patrician type that wouldn’t be out of place with Roman senators of old.

Trump is wholly shallow. He’s like some stereotype of a capitalist in some European novel decrying the death of the aristocracy—you’d get these noblemen waxing philosophically on the nature of love or death, and in comes this short sighted, chubby merchant, contrasting with the lords and ladies. They’ll dance in some opulent palace with frescos and gilded domes, and while they’re talking about the sheer age of the palace, all the capitalist can think of is “wow! Look at how expensive this all is!”

Again, like the stereotypical burgher in some European novel, Trump is draping himself in expensive clothes and buying all the totems he associates with the rich, but completely deprived of context and meaning. He thinks the aristocrats are looking at some fresco of an Angel and appreciating it since it looks pretty, so he orders his own—nevermind that the palace fresco is 100 years old and is appreciated for that abstract quality.

It’s really amazing. I think they genuinely don’t make people like Trump anymore. Hell his fancy suits don’t even fit him! They’re baggy and basically conceal all his fat, flabby skin. If he were a character in a movie, we’d complain that he’s too much of an obvious metaphor.

Hitler at least had those little human passions, and it could be said that his true art was his rallies, Trump just… has nothing there.

>>1771008
the thing is aristocracy it's self prides on it's self on an image, we have these old literal feudals in my nation, mantling traditions that died decades ago, they are allowed to exist cause of the massive state issues and lack of development of my nation

>but muh fools need religion
Fine, have a damn religion
https://fanlore.org/wiki/Gaykoslavie

imo religious people are becoming a minority compared to what it was during Marx's time, at least in the west. I'd say product consumerism has replaced religion, how many people do you actually know that go to church?

>>1771100
>making broad generalizations about social trends on an international imageboard
shiggy

>>1771008
>Trump is draping himself in expensive clothes and buying all the totems he associates with the rich, but completely deprived of context and meaning … Hitler at least had those little human passions, and it could be said that his true art was his rallies, Trump just… has nothing there.
Counterpoint: Hermann Goering. The Nazis were really degenerate barbarians collecting "trophies" of their culture and acting like this made them sophisticated.

>>1771328
are you suggesting the great khan is a barbarian.

>>1769606
> I think people are pre-desposed to faith naturally, the idea of a god is inhernetly comforting to human beings,

We're saying the same thing anon. People are pre-disposed to faith *because* it's Cope. Humans have a sense of 'justice', i.e. an instinct/expectation that if you do someone a favor, they owe you one, and vice versa. Humans are also aware of their mortality, and like all other products of natural selection, instinctively aversive of it. This often creates anxiety.

These features of human psychology mean that religious beliefs can resolve the tension/anxiety. Therefore, when people stumble into emotionally helpful religious beliefs, they won't want to let go of them. I argue that this is where the 'pre-disposition to faith' comes from: optimism, death consciousness, and a sense of justice/fairness.

>>1768688
This is not a new problem. Marxist atheism is different from bourgeois atheism. The same for feminism, environmentalism, and so on. Bourgeois activists are just cringe, period. Even pre-Marxist socialism sounds cringe.
>socialism is the future because it just is ok sweaty???
Socialists had to work through this and much worse their entire history.

>>1768913
New atheism was dub if your a religious person

>>1769628
no but there is def a contingent of no-lifers that want to make it that way

>>1769832
>Too many have taken the passive approach to Faith and I think the end result is that they’ve turned “God” into an extension of their own ego that exists solely to tell them everything they do is correct and if they’re feeling down then something good will “just happen” to make them feel better. Rather than transcending the physical, their faith is intensely physical and selfish. It places them as God of a kind; they won’t go to Church, but they’ll be intensely offended by the “godlessness” of modernity. They’ll despise gays while gambling, stealing, and cheating on their spouse. They want the right to kill without the consequences of murder.

this perfectly describes many if not most of the religous reactionaries ik, to them God exist to tell them how much of special person they are and forgive them for sin and that abt it.

>Funny enough I’ve been watching a lot of Star Trek (classic and TNG) with a friend lately.

just wait till you get to DS9 shit fire


>>1770110
/thread

>>1770130
I stg half these bait posts are just ppl who don't know how to jus talk shit. Like if someone called be a fedora tipper for being atheist imma prolly just ask if they're wearing mixed fabrics but these mfers are like "guess I have to be nice to religious freaks cuz someone might call me reddit" grow the fuck up and surpass the based cringe dialectic.

>>1771883
>this perfectly describes many if not most of the religous reactionaries ik, to them God exist to tell them how much of special person they are and forgive them for sin and that abt it.

There was a term used by theologians to describe this phenomena, I forget exactly what it was, but it basically reduced God to a Genie that you sometimes pray to in order to get a miracle that makes you “happy” again. This is in contrast to more apostolic strands of Christianity, specifically the Catholic Church, which can view suffering as a virtue because it brings you closer to what Jesus experienced.

Yknow being Catholic myself, I can look back at some of the stories I was taught in Catholic School and recognize that they were pretty terrifying, but that’s how you know the guys had real faith. One particular tale was of a pair of Jesuits who were imprisoned by the Mohawks I believe, and tortured relentlessly. At the end of it all they forgave their captors and were so stoic in the face of being tortured that the Mohawks later asked to convert to Catholicism—so they could one day be as stoic in the face of death.

Like I don’t think a single one of these reactionaries would keep the faith the moment you start breaking their fingers. It’s all been sublimated into their ego.

>>1768688
>it should be prohibited
Liberalism is a religion and you're strong adherent of it.

A good example would be how many women reject organized religion due to its historical oppression of women, but then embrace pagan faiths (which were equally patriarchal and more essentialist) or eastern mysticism. Many women take astrology seriously, whereas a few generations ago, these same women might have been fervent fanatics. It all stems from the same source.

>>1770704
Pretty much every people group exposed to Abrahamic faiths end up incorporating elements from them. They are so successful that everyone, from pagan Nazis to alleged POC revival faiths, essentially adopts basic elements of either Christianity or Islam and change some names on top.

>>1775586
I had the same problem with the ending of the killers of the flower moon. It opens with a Native American elder talking about his people's culture is dying and their children growing up as white men. It ends with actual footage of modern day Osage people performing a ceremonial chant, aiming to show that they persisted despite the genocide, but in reality culturally they are dead. It's just an elaborate LARP. There are more natives who are Christian than Indians who believe in any of the previous culture. Most aspects of modern native culture developed in the reservations, everything else is just archaeology.

>>1772489
I feel like theres an algorithm way to be pagan, and an RSS feeds way to be pagan. Obviously the former is what you end up seeing, and that shit is usually rooted in eugenics or snakeoil pyramid schemes. If you take time to surf neocities and personal blogs of surprisingly predomenently furry witches, however, and the vibes are completely different.

>>1778697
It seems to be genuine, like manifesting is an actual women do.

>>1769735
>Speaking as a Catholic
stopped reading
catholicism is the original atheism (in a bad way)

Why do you think Iran is ran by religious extremists? It is because it was previously under the rule of the last Shaw who oppressed Muslims. Not to say that organized religion isnt shit but you cant force it to go away cultural imperialist tankfag. Spiritual beleifs without religion already replacing it at a rappid rate which is a good thing since it doesnt have the power structure that controls people. It really shouldn't be any of your business what someone beleives as long as they arent going for your head or your already limited freedom.

>>1768688
>Even Stalin recognized the significance of faith and religion, and what it meant for the people
That's called pragmatism, and while I disagree with Stalin i see the point.
You don't want to antagonize backwards elements in the proletariat during the transitional period towards socialism.

>>1771008
>Hitler at least believed in something and one can imagine a world where he lived long enough to shape Germany into this dark monument to nationalism. I can guarantee that Trump, in a world of his own making, has such a fundamental lack of belief in anything that the best he’d pull off would be the “Bad Timeline” from back to the future: we’d get the Trump Presidential Library and Casino, with a gift shop on the first floor where you can buy The Art of The Deal with an introduction written by Tim Tebow and slot machines coated in 24k Gold. At the end of the day, Trump is just an ego driven yuppie. He’s American, and he’s as pathetic as the rest of us.

Does trumps vision seem any less ridiculous and evil than hitlers Germany? Because underneath the thin veener of hollow consumerism is a grinding imperialist death machine that drives the American empire. One could easily imagine hitlers Germany being the same thing but just German themed. If the results are the same, who cares if they one had some mystical justification for their shitty actions over just a pure cynical one?

>>1778740
Oh yeah I don't doubt the former to also be genuine, just, well, that video lays out most of what I have to say about it. People simultaniously not thinking about logistics but taking it way too seriously, as opposed to people that generally understand it to be vibes-bending and scrapping together an alter using a cool looking bone they found on the highway, one of those gas station candles with the Mother Mary peeled off, and a framed picture of an anime furry they vibe with.

>>1768886
>>1768688
basing your beliefs on cringe/based internet vibes is stupid

>>1768688
I would say you’re no different

I mean I'm an ashiest, but hearing this song made me almost curl up into ball, I would consider this peak reddit atheism.

>>1768688
Well for one, the main internet demographic of millennials noticed how much it's overt influence had waned even within their lifetime, let alone of what older people told them about how it was prior to them being born. Once Dubya was out and the moral majority shit faded away in the late aughts, what were you rebelling against?
Also the atheists got a little big for their boots and touched the third rail of criticising non-Christianity religions - which gave the progs, the next generation of dismantlers that came about in the early 2010s, easy ammo to exile them into problematic uncoolness.

reddit atheism is just political anti-christianity.
its leaders are autists and anglos which give it the awkward pro-enlightenment feeling about muh reason and science.
it is in some way a first-principles movement too (as per its anglo architecture) and completely rethinks the whole western tradition by a lack of historical education. like how richard dawkins wanted to rebrand atheists as "brights" to indicate that only atheists can have high intelligence and so on. i'm sure if he ever read plato he would just call him a superstitious nut or whatever.
this is the insidious entwinement of political anti-christianity with pop science though and its strangely anti-intellectual position, relying more on english sentiments like "common sense" over stuffy academics. i remember an appaling attitude of contemporaneousness from lawrence krauss who once said that because we know the trivium of dinosaurs existing we are smarter than all of the idiots who came before us. its the sort of arrogance that comes along with sophistical juvenility, which is why reddit atheism is attractive to youths but then it becomes quickly unpopular with maturity (where some wrongly imagine that only religion can make up the difference).
right now the "new atheist" movement has formalised as it has fell away (as per its dialectic) and shown itself to be a movement promoting a moral feeling that the bible is evil and so on, and that secular liberalism should take the place of all religious discourse. its just enlightenment wankery ofc, but aggressive, and antiquated. the talks about muh reason and science boils down to a facile humanism tinged with zionism.

>>1804722
>philosophy = religion
xd

>>1769954
Neither, Mad Max

>>1804722
Not reading this because its retarded pseud drivel, but the image is funny
>Comparing statements made by towering intellectual giants of their field with TV entertainers

every right wing tradcath and pagan are just delusional atheists who cling onto religion because they either want to feel like their a part of something and/or think wh*Toids need religion to survive

I cannot be convinced otherwise

oh and uh atheism is "cringe" these days too so I guess that adds to it