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.

  • StupendousGirl17 [she/her]
    ·
    4 years ago

    That's a separate issue, and needs to be hashed out with a panel of expert, caring psychiatrists, therapists, general pracs and solid support systems. You have trauma, but leftist nu atheists are some of the most smarmy shitlord people