Seriously. For a community who have actively worked so hard to rid themselves of internalised imperialism, a lot of people around here are doing things like equating religion or theism itself with anthropocentric religion, or assuming that the concept of God is always personal in a theological sense, etc. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and other mainstream ones have become widely synonymous with religion itself as a byproduct of the hegemony achieved through empire, and decolonising your ideas about economics, politics, and culture is undermined by not doing similarly with religion. And for those who think that doing so is a waste of time: Society and its history are profoundly intertwined with religion, religions are still extremely powerful structures, and an overwhelming majority of the global proletariat who we must work with are religious, so this very much is important.

Extended sidenote because I'm a scientist and people often butcher this passion of mine in religious conversation, and for context I am not religious (but I'm sure that some will still decide for themselves that I am and that this is all a cynical shill for Jeezy boi): There is very frequent dogshit-tier use of science by a lot of western Logic Bros™ to refute all religion (and for clarity I explicitly mean all; I am not referring exclusively to anthropocentric religion). Hilariously, although they are not likely to admit it or understand why this is, "Science" has become to many of them a religion itself - albeit fairly theoretically advanced with a significant amount of evidence, but with faith-based extrapolations and anthropocentric rationalisations which actual scientists worth their salt do not make because it is scientifically improper. For completeness and because some iamverysmart Logic Bros™ are almost definitely pouncing on this, this paragraph does not apply to alllll of them, but it typically does to those adapting scientific arguments without a comprehensive understanding of both science and, crucially, nuance in scientific analysis, and I've found that the latter only comes from a fair bit of academic research and critique of published work. This was very much me before developing my understanding by the way, and I am not passing judgement for the reasons I explain below.

A similar decolonisation argument may also be made for science, since its worship is a consequence of the philosophies of anthropocentricism and human 'progress' above nature, which were spread deliberately by the West during the industrial-era and beyond to justify the extraction and destruction of people and natural resources. More generally, blind fetishisation of science within the left undermines our causes and needs to stop. It's often still used to oppress and steal land from religious and indigenous people - citations needed did a really good episode on this.

When people do fetishise science it's most likely because they have a weak understanding of what it actually is on a fundamental level, and it's not simply "jUsT dRaWiNg cOnCLuSiOnS bAsEd oN eViDeNcE" as many of the worst offenders scream. In philosophical discussion, science is far more to do with justifying the type of conclusions which can or can not be made based on the rigorous analysis of the data and the lack of it. Science is not just the headline of the academic paper, and if you're using either the existence or extrapolation of these headlines (i.e. the colloquial understanding of scientific progress) or a lack of scientific evidence for particular faiths to refute your personal understanding of religion in its entirety, then you're doing so from a fundamentally flawed understanding of theism and/or science.

I absolutely don't blame people for misunderstanding scientific analysis which is very practice and expert teaching-dependent and typically has a high financial barrier, but for the love of fuck chapos, decolonise your understanding of religion and the concept of a God. If you've come so far in other areas, why let theism undermine it just because you're not religious? I'll let you off for scientific inaccuracies in this post, but if anyone makes arguments conflating theism itself with anthropocentric religion then you're getting a paddlin'. Much love to you all <3

Edit: To paraphrase an important point made by a comrade below, there is an active and vocal contingent of people on the internet and also this site who use every excuse to do the fedora “magical sky daddy” strawman against every person with even vaguely spiritual beliefs, who advocate for excluding any religious/faithful/spiritual folks from their spaces and make those spaces hostile.

  • kronkfresh [none/use name]
    ·
    edit-2
    4 years ago

    so i mean then what does theism mean to you? because from the discussions ive seen most people here lean towards some flavor of agnosticism. dont most people draw a distinction between religious ideology and the harmful institutions formed in their name? this seems to be more directed at athiest debaters not chapos. or maybe im just missing these posts, which is nice.

    also bagging on god believers is so stupid because it cant be proven or disproven one way or another and everyone "believes" shit even the most stemmy of stemlords. so like what gives you the right

      • kronkfresh [none/use name]
        ·
        4 years ago

        again you're talking about the institutions formed in their names, which deserve all the criticism in the world. like op said, religion is so intertwined with society that for every big horrible thing you can blame on religion you can not only find secular examples but also examples of them being the driving forces for good - charity, education, discovery, art, etc. It's really myopic to look at the entire breadth of human history and point to the belief in a god, or gods as an issue. It has been the binding force for society for almost all of it.

        I mean hell yeah, go after the KKK, the Dalai Lama, and jihadists. Fuck Isreal and their "holy land". But let's be real, without religious charity - however perverted it might be under neoliberalism - the poor would have literally nothing. That in itself is something that needs to change immediately, but you can't dismiss the fact that it's what we have now.

        You talk about the "material world", but a purely material analysis would tell you that religious beliefs cannot by their nature have serious tangible effects on the world, and only actors on behalf of those beliefs can. Going after ideology as inherently bad leads to fascism.

        • BillyMays [he/him]
          ·
          4 years ago

          How this plays out in the real world is leftists groups working directly with churches to provide food and clothing for those who need it. Not denying them simply because “all churches bad”

          • StupendousGirl17 [she/her]
            ·
            4 years ago

            Exactly, and thereby getting better at it through the dialectic between theory and praxis

    • EatTheLibsToo [comrade/them]
      hexagon
      ·
      4 years ago

      Yeah I'd say most people draw that distinction, but the issue I'm highlighting is the assumptions made by people through a number of threads on the concept of a God when no specific religion has been mentioned, e.g. that a god is a personal one in the religious sense of the word.

      Also I'm definitely not bashing people who believe in a God and I'm not sure how you've drew that interpretation of what I said.

      • kronkfresh [none/use name]
        ·
        4 years ago

        oh no that last bit was just me agreeing that going after someone's belief in god was stupid, not that you were doing it. my bad.

        i agree with you 100%, more from a philosophy approach though. its cringe af when people start talking about "logic" on the internet

    • blackmesa [comrade/them,he/him]
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      edit-2
      4 years ago

      because it cant be proven or disproven one way or another

      they have a name for this "condition", it's called pascal's wager. in my opinion this has historically been a problem.

      • kronkfresh [none/use name]
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        edit-2
        4 years ago

        I prefer Sartre's version of pascal's wager. Sorry I could only find it in meme format, but it's from the essay "Existentialism is a Humanism".

        I agree that its problematic though, because thats mostly because it posits the Christian god as the Correct god so it's not a very good proof unless you're an asshole. In Sartre's version you are basically betting against yourself if you flip the coin, so it's better to not play.