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General discussion (archive)A Plea for Tolerance(175 posts)(175 posts)
(175 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted May 19, 2014
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Matewis: oh no he didnt!! hmmm-hmmmm

I'm using that right yes?
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IAmSinistar: Possibly, though it's hard to read intent in this particular case. You could be saying that I am guilty of the very thing I speak out against, or merely that I am going "oh SNAP" in a verbose way. Hopefully the latter. :)
I'm just joking around :) Regardless, the water is being muddied which is all that matters atm for this thread :P
Posted May 19, 2014
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IAmSinistar: Possibly, though it's hard to read intent in this particular case. You could be saying that I am guilty of the very thing I speak out against, or merely that I am going "oh SNAP" in a verbose way. Hopefully the latter. :)
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Matewis: I'm just joking around :) Regardless, the water is being muddied which is all that matters atm for this thread :P
That's not muddy water, that's primordial soup. ;)
Posted May 19, 2014
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Matewis: I'm just joking around :) Regardless, the water is being muddied which is all that matters atm for this thread :P
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IAmSinistar: That's not muddy water, that's primordial soup. ;)
Granted, but that is entirely a matter of perspective - like discussing biochemistry in a cooking class ;)
Posted May 19, 2014
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misteryo: I'm Christian. Some of you may have picked that up. I've been at least open about it.

Plenty of folks here are not Christian. Plenty are not believers of any stripe.

Please, friends, let's not ridicule each other. Or belittle each others' beliefs. Or generalize about all believers, all non-believers, etc.

I'm not asking everybody to agree. I don't agree with many of you, on many different subjects. I don't expect anybody to agree with me all the time. I don't even think I'm right all the time. I just don't know which things exactly I'm wrong about. ;)

I am asking for some tolerance and respect. This would include not blaming all religious for all problems in the world. Or blaming any one religion. Or assuming that you know and understand a person because of the religion they identify as.

Thanks.

Cheers.
What you ask is impossible because people wont accept a one way street. People will have tolerance and respect only for religions that have tolerance and respect towards them. And most religions don't have tolerance and respect towards most people.
Post edited May 19, 2014 by monkeydelarge
Posted May 19, 2014
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IAmSinistar: ...
I second that.

Furthermore, secularism allows us as a society to negotiate the basic rules of living together. We can adapt to new circumstances, insights, even short-lived trends sometimes. We can invent our own sets of morals and see how we fare with them - drop them if they prove harmful or modify them to better suit our needs and the functioning of the community and society. Religions, on the other hand, have sets of unmoveable rules that (sometimes quite literally) are "written in stone" can be thousands of years old. And many of them I personally don't see fit to guide a society in today's times. There just too many different life plans out there that people should be able to pursue.

As long as these rules do not lead to harming/oppressing people I see no problem with folks following those rules in private. (There will be problems like when a devout catholic or muslim finds out they're gay.)

For me the line is crossed when the religious people try to impose their rules and morals on society as a whole. When, like in Germany, churches are priviledged, fostered and subsidize by the state. When the panels that decide what movies/games are suitable for children have a percentage of Christan representatives by law. When in a non-Christian kindergarten some nurse is allowed to the nativity play and telling 4-5 year old children about Jesus and the Christian God. When conservative politicians try to write "Christian values as our foundation" into the European Constitution.
I know it's a lot worse elsewhere and I wouldn't want to live in some radical muslim country or even in the US Bible Belt.
Posted May 19, 2014
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Telika: Secular maggots coopt history and munch on "hero" corpses just the same, making them symbolic figures of this and that, sacralizing them their own way, and planting their flags on them.
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IAmSinistar: While I understand what you are trying to get at, and agree with some of your core reasoning about the commonality of root causation of affect, I think it's also seductive to overapply reductive parallelism between discrete magisteria.

Since systems like religion and secularism both come out humans, naturally there will be manifestations in each that are driven by the same causes. So it is easy to point to both and say "see, here one does X and the other does Y, naming them different but at heart being the same". But this is also facile if one doesn't consider the multifarious layers that go into those manifestations. This is where reductionism leads to oversimplification.

In terms of sociodynamics, I would say that the overarching difference between secularism and religion is that the former strives for universality, whereas the latter strives for segregation. Secularism is about seeing where we overlap and finding what we all want as humans. Religion, conversely, is about binary absolutes - the believer versus the doubter, the obedient versus the heretic, the saved versus the damned.

If you prefer, you can view secularism as striving for the minimal set, the baseline for what we must do as a society to ensure that individual rights and freedoms are honoured. Conversely religion strives for the maximal set, an orthodoxy of what every individual must believe, and must not believe, in order to ensure stricture. Secularism embraces heterogeneity, whereas religion espouses homogeneity.

A thought experiment that I often return to helps delineate this primary contrast: If we all woke up tomorrow as secular humanists, by the end of the day we'd all still be secular humanists. But if we all woke up tomorrow with the same religion, by the end of the day we'd have splintered into dozens of new sects. Because the former is predicated on where we are alike, and the latter on where we differ.
I am not sure of that, but it may be because I do not see secularism as a thing by itself. When I mention the secular hijacking of the dead, I have in mind the various ideological splinters that do not depend on religion : nationalisms, political currents, etc. We do not require religions for wars, bigotry and opposed identities. We have many secular forms of these. At the end of the day, in your thought experiment, we might still be at each other throats, even if our differences won't take a strictly religious form - other mystiques are available, other Great Ideas, abstract ideals, or even Ancestors to honor, who died for us, Founding Fathers whose Words are Golden. Stalinism and Hitlerism were pretty secular, yet (in similar and different ways) vastly mythological.

The legitimacy of simplifications depend on what aspect (or function) you wish to consider, and, yes, you can turn your attention to the differences if they pertain to the aspect that interest you, or if they play a role that was too dismissed in another. But do secular political ideologies function differently from religions when it comes to opposing people around essentialized identities, providing mythified role models, justifying the sacrifice of the self (and the other) for an abstract future often beyond one's lifetime, imposing an ethnocentered set of norms/values outside of which is only obscurantism, structuring time around intensification rituals, and socially stigmatising blasphemy ?

Are the differences between religiosity and secularism really relevant, there ? Or are religions a handy way for secularisms to present themselves as humanistic and rationnal ? Alternately, don't certain religious beliefs, just like certain secular systems, present more enlightened, progressive and "oecumenic" projects than some (both secular and religious) others ?
Post edited May 19, 2014 by Telika
Posted May 19, 2014
IMO (which is worth less than what you're paying for the internet access to view this post, even if it's free wifi :P ) "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

If tolerance is merely permitting others to believe what they like, then it's a lovely ideal. Trouble is, that's not how many (if not most) people actually understand the concept. The general grasp of "tolerance" seems to be "you agree with me or else you keep your mouth shut ." Deviations from the party line, whatever that may be, are not permitted (dare I say tolerated?) and are punishable by mob (think torch and pitchfork, not pixellated cow. )

I used to think people really wanted to understand other people- speaking in generalities here- and be understood by them in turn, but these days I'm more inclined to think that everybody just wants to conform everybody else to their own opinion, whatever that may be, or else cry "intolerance" (code for: round up the villagers).

Anyway, to me, in a practical message forum context, "tolerance" is being able to tell the difference between debate and personal sharing and respect the line between the two, and not cram one's opinion/disagreement down the other person's throat without an invitation. If you don't know for sure it's welcome, assume it's not- a safe principle for many things. If you want to argue a certain point, start your own thread to argue it without dragging the personal life of other people into it, if it does not violate TOS to do so. (I'm really kind of impressed that a forum for gamers has such a wide sprawl of accepted topics, to be honest :) )
Posted May 19, 2014
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Matewis: Another Jay and Silent Bob film would me awesome, or another Mallrats!!
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tinyE: Meh, Clerks 2 wasn't that great.
Would have thought you would have liked it for the donkey alone. :P
Posted May 19, 2014
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tinyE: Meh, Clerks 2 wasn't that great.
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pimpmonkey2382: Would have thought you would have liked it for the donkey alone. :P
I said it wasn't that great, I never said it didn't have it's moments. :D

The donkey and the line "...even the trees walked in that movie!" made it passable. XD
Posted May 19, 2014
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pimpmonkey2382: Would have thought you would have liked it for the donkey alone. :P
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tinyE: I said it wasn't that great, I never said it didn't have it's moments. :D

The donkey and the line "...even the trees walked in that movie!" made it passable. XD
Three movies of people walking to a fucking volcano.
Posted May 19, 2014
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Telika: But do secular political ideologies function differently from religions when it comes to opposing people around essentialized identities, providing mythified role models, justifying the sacrifice of the self (and the other) for an abstract future often beyond one's lifetime, imposing an ethnocentered set of norms/values outside of which is only obscurantism, structuring time around intensification rituals, and socially stigmatising blasphemy ?
Politics is whole 'nother ball of wax (made from rendered humans). Politics is easily as divisive and stricture-imposing as religion, and arguably the two are, in their large-scale manifestations, the same thing - a system of control whereby a small group ensures the cohesion and obeisance of the larger one. I don't conflate secularism with politics, but I believe that religion (on the social scale) is inextricably bound to the political. Secularism, like science, doesn't need adherents, it is always there waiting to be (re)discovered. Religion, conversely, like a political system of belief, must maintain followers, else it becomes extinct.

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Telika: Are the differences between religiosity and secularism really relevant, there ? Or are religions a handy way for secularisms to present themselves as humanistic and rationnal ? Alternately, don't certain religious beliefs, just like certain secular systems, present more enlightened, progressive and "oecumenic" projects than some (both secular and religious) others ?
I don't deny that religions, and religious people, do a lot of good works and provide many excellent lessons on how to be a better human being. Nor that religion may simply be the vocabulary that an individual chooses through which to express the innate goodness they possess. My desire in delineating the difference between secularism and religion is that the latter always involves a component that the former does not - something transhuman. And it is in the defining of that transhuman component that religion becomes divisive and prejudicial, in a way that secularism is never obliged to.
Posted May 19, 2014
Someday everybody will get along, someday, when the aliens attack...
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Posted May 19, 2014
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Matewis: Someday everybody will get along, someday, when the aliens attack...
The aliens already are attacking us. Who do you think is responsible for climate change, cancer and Deus Ex?
Posted May 19, 2014
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Matewis: Someday everybody will get along, someday, when the aliens attack...
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grimgroove: The aliens already are attacking us. Who do you think is responsible for climate change, cancer and Deus Ex?
And Robocop is taking our jerbs.
Posted May 19, 2014
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Matewis: Someday everybody will get along, someday, when the aliens attack...
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grimgroove: The aliens already are attacking us. Who do you think is responsible for climate change, cancer and Deus Ex?
You're watching way too much X-files, but that's ok : I do too :)

but lol, why Deus Ex? I would've thought EA or something and the mobile dungeon keeper
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This is my favourite topic
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General discussion (archive)A Plea for Tolerance(175 posts)(175 posts)
(175 posts)