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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Thursday, February 26, 2004
The BBC has commissioned an interesting survey on levels of religious affiliation in differing countries. Many of the results are interesting, but to my mind the most surprising was that only 29% of the UK population said they thought the world would be a more peaceful place without religion. In fairness, the issue is not clearcut; as this article suggests there is usually a continuum of causes, wherein religion simply serves as another marker of otherness:"Alice Lakwena, the leader of the Holy Spirit Movement, claimed that God had commanded her to seize the Ugandan capital and I and other journalists found and interviewed her in a banana grove about 100 kilometres (60 miles) short of Kampala. Superstition played a large part in the progress her ragtag band of followers had made. They smeared themselves with a potion they were told would protect them against the army's bullets. But this bizarre campaign has also fed on northern political grievances in Uganda."
That said, there are much more unambiguous instances from history where persecution was conducted with only religious difference being the cause and without ethnic difference or forms of economic or social grievance. In this sense, religion does serve as a prototype for a form of absolute ideology that must be imposed in a way that has rarely been true for other ideologies (interesting to note that most religions tend to meet most of Eco's characteristics of ur-fascism). An obvious exception is communism, but in many respects it can be argued that religion served as the prototype here. As an acquaintance of mine once wrote in comparing christianity and communism:"Neither has much use for the criticisms of philosophy, which they both distrust because they cannot control it... One joins them only by publicly endorsing their doctrines, and advances by being perceived by one’s superiors as passionately conforming to them. The laity of each lack the power to dictate the course of church-state actions; power issues from the apex - the crowned head of the controlling minority of the ideological elite.
Dissent is either treasonous (contra people) or blasphemous (contra God); one punishes it directly in this life, one indirectly through disposition of a believed-in next. To join either is to forfeit it your rights. One is world negating the other is other-than-world negating. Each asserts that the only way to be truly human is to embrace its faith... Both have a person to worship and a book to read, and both have trained experts to communicate the orthodox meaning of each to the mass herds, and to denounce forbidden concepts and conceivers. The masses of each are constrained to take their words at face value, the words of ideologues commissioned to propagate the Faith."
In both cases, a certain set of concepts is promulgated which are essentially incompatible with the liberal ideas of the nation state that developed in opposition to them. Neither can claim exclusive preserve over such concepts but neither are easily separated from them.Labels: Religion
posted by Richard 9:37 pm
