Re: An insult

On Aug 29, 12:06 pm, Lance <LanceG...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Peter H.M.Brooks wrote:
Lance wrote:
Peter H.M.Brooks wrote:
Lance wrote:
I doubt whether many science lecturers can stir the emotions like a
Billy Graham.
What about Hitler? Was his ability to stir emotions related to
religion?

I'd have thought that the answer to that was 'yes'. 'Kinder, Küche,
Kirche' seems a pretty religious slogan. The organisation of people into
groups with collective rituals and pretty uniforms seems to be one of
the markings of a religious cult.
What about fear? Do you think many priests could make people as afraid
as Stalin did? Was the source of Stalin's power religion?

As with Hitler, I'd have thought the answer to be 'yes'. Marxism with
its simplistic set of 'answers' to the human condition based on a belief
in the unquestionable rightness of the state (aks 'the people' or 'the
workers') along with plenty of ritual, symbols and iconography (as well
as saints like the blessed pickled Lenin) passes most of the tests for
religion that I can think of.
There are many sources of emotion that have zilch to do with religion.
And sometimes the good guys can bring about social change without
being emotional. I think that is why Socrates was given hemlock to
drink...

Socrates may not have been emotional, but you don't have to read much
Plato to see him make good use of the emotions.

So Socrates was no Billy Graham.

marxism etc explicitly denied religion - even if you think they were
religious.

We have the old duck question, don't we.

Hitler and Stalin claimed to be democratic representatives of the will
of the people - I'm not sure that those claims make the matter true, though.

As I see it (see the title of this thread that you started) you tend
to assimilate all theories of society and morality and economics
(especially if they are totalitarian and wrong) to religion -
something of which you don't approve.

I can see that view. I think that I see much of religion in these
things, particularly in totalitarianism because it does prescribe how
people should live and proscribe many things that are in the private
sphere - activities shared by religions.

But it is equally possible to see religion as a manifestation of a
human impulse to find order and sense in the world - to offer
explanations for things. If we adopt the second view then Marxism
wasn't religious because it made no non-materialist claims and made no
claims about an afterlife, etc. But it is a theory of how society
works and is based on a utilitarian ethical philosophy. So it is wrong
- but that doesn't make it a religion. It is just a wrong account of
how society works that was forced upon whole countries much to their
detriment.

There is a distinction, I think, between marxism as a theory and
marxism as practiced in the Soviet Union, China and the other places.
In these places you have cults of the personality ritualistic worship
of the state and so forth that are manifestations of religion. Marx
himself might well have been shocked about them, and I agree that a
book on marxism doesn't make a big thing about gigantic posters of the
Blessed leader in heroc poses being what it is all about. It's the
real manifestation rather than the theory that I'm talking about when
I say that it is a religion.

Similarly, your account of society as best functioning if without
government is a theory, no a religion. Perhaps it is right or perhaps
it is wrong. The fact that you believe it doesn't make you any more
religious than Einstein in believing that Quantuim theory must be
wrong.

That's true.

.

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