Better for atmospherics than plot, but she’s a lovely writer.
(Just the idea of non-religious meetings and, in this context, this passage jumped to mind).
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Cool. I’ll check her out.
Ah, got it. Some people enjoy the structure or community of a church service, even if they’re no longer religiously inclined. Others got out of religious precisely because of those trappings, though. As such, that wouldn’t appeal to those folks.
For me, both are legit views. Communal activities aren’t for everybody, but for many people, communal activities are a great way to feel connected and grounded to the rest of humanity.
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You’re confusing faith and religion.
One is personal belief and should be treated as ‘your own business’. The other is a scheme that’s been in use for millennia (at least) to extract wealth from those around - either directly as some kind of offering, or indirectly in order to justify someone having power over you because reasons.
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A lot of Unitarian Universalist communities seem to work that way. A religion where God is optional.
Felix Adler also tried to set such a thing up, over a century ago. It’s still kind of stumbling along. (Back when I was in prep school, Fieldston Academy was one of our regular opponents in athletic competitions.)
I’ve heard an exchange: “How can you sit in a church and listen to all this claptrap? It’s all stories!”
“Yes, they’re stories. They might not be factual. But they’re the stories of my people.”
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That’s a facile and inaccurate definition of “religion”, that only makes sense if you implicitly assume that all human religion is basically modern Protestantian Christianity.
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I guess you must not be aware of all the ‘kings anointed by god(s)/kings as gods on Earth’ (and all the variations upon this idea) that have ruled way before Protestantism.
Say, for instance, the pharaoh in ancient Egypt who were one of way too many examples (and although the most obvious one, that is far from being the only type of scheme that’s been in use for as far as we can go back in recorded History).
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Yeah, my wife and I went to various UU services a few times (it’s just hard getting up early on Sunday 
One of my roommates in college was in seminary school and is now a UU minister. His parish is about an hour away so we don’t go there often. He even officiated our wedding.
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I think it’s easy to make too much of the god-on-earth or anointed-by-god aspect of a lot of monarchies. Stalin and Mao didn’t express the reason for their rule in a religious way but that didn’t detract from their power.
You’ve got to wonder if the primary benefit of religion is teaching the self-discipline to get out of bed on Sunday.
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I don’t have too much difficulty getting out of bed on Sunday, but it’s usually followed by the Church of the Holy Pancakes with my daughters officiating
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Communists distain for religion plus the Cold War is one of the reasons evangelicals have such a strong hold in American politics. It was easy to attack the communists as godless heathens.
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And conservatives love Russia now that it is a God-fearing (and homophobic) Christian nation.
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And (in their blinkered view) very very white.
The examples of far-right Americans praising the Kremlin are as myriad as they are obvious. For Richard Spencer, the coiner of the term “Alt-Right” and a leader of the emerging white nationalist faction it represents, Russia is both the “sole” and “most powerful white power in the world.” Matthew Heimbach, head of the white nationalist Traditionalist Worker Party—and someone who, like Spencer, desires the creation of a whites-only nation-state within the U.S.—believes Russian President Vladimir Putin is the “leader of the free world,” one who has helped morph Russia into an “axis for nationalists.” Harold Covington, the white supremacist head of the secessionist Northwest Front, recently described Russia as the “last great White empire.” And former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard David Duke has said he believes Russia holds the “key to white survival.”
Of course, the idea of Russia as some sort of “white empire” is, to an extent, merely a fantasy held by American and European white supremacists. Not only does Russia routinely jail and sideline the most outspoken members of its domestic white supremacist movements, but Putin routinely offers support to Russia’s ethnic and religious minority communities when it suits his political aims.
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They aren’t wrong in feeling that way. Human beings love the world to make sense to them, as we love meaning and patterns, I think. People can even understand something isn’t factually true and still get meaning and value out of it, because it tells some “greater” truth or because it connects them to a larger community where they feel a sense of belonging.
It certainly helped! The counterculture and the push for greater rights from marginalized communities that challenged their stranglehold over social norms helped, too.
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I’m rather surprised to hear we’re in agreement on this. Some of our previous exchanges gave me to believe that you were willing to discard those benefits in pursuit of a scorched-earth policy against intolerance and theocracy. I’m glad to hear your position is more nuanced.
FWIW, one of my personal beliefs is that the commandment about not taking the Lord’s name in vain has very little to do with cussing. The real prohibition is on bringing God into disrepute by doing evil in His name. And He surely knows that His alleged followers have been very prone to that!
As a historian, I’m well aware that people who are religious can be discriminated against, too and have been here and in other places.
That doesn’t mean that the Christian right isn’t a real and very dangerous problem here in the US. But the religious right tends to be protestant and would very much create a theocratic system that would disenfranchise millions of Americans, including those of other faiths. As a person with no religious beliefs, that would suck for my own rights. A secular government protects ALL of us, by allowing people to follow their own ethical paths while not infringing on the rights of others. There are plenty of people here who would glad undo that good and replace it with oppression.
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Whoever said that religion was the only way for someone to exert absolute power?
Although in Stalin’s case, the ‘little father of the people’ image made him something of a semi-religious figure.
On CD, the Neeme Jarvi/Scottish National Orchestra version is (to me) the best; I highly recommend it. The full chorus screams. (Weird, though, how Prokofiev was allowed to use text in Latin.)
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