The truth is that people’s belief in religion is every bit as Orwellian as the left’s belief in their doctrines.

L Ron Hubbard nods in agreement.

“Ray on March 12, 2019 at 12:18 pm at 12:18 pm said:
Socialism has always been promoted as a religion.
http://www.heavenonearthdocumentary.com/resources/commentary_socialism_vs_religion_07-14-02.pdf“

That was a good link, and it covered the bases nicely. Especially good were the outright admissions quoted from Marxists that their own driving impulses were emotional and eschatological.

You can find some religiously tinged sentiments in Marx’s anti-religion [the proper object of worship for man is man, etc.], and plenty of metaphysical suppositions or claims in his anti-metaphysics, but this kind of puling over brotherhood and a glorious social dawning, with the outright acknowledgement that Marxism is their conscious substitute for a metaphysically [in both the euphemistic and rigorous senses of “metaphysical”] based morality and worldview, is not found so far as I am aware in Marx’s own writings.

Thanks so much for highlighting my earlier post!

The post was an application of ideas I’ve been musing about for a while, not just in relation to Gaiaist Leftism or Leftism-in-general, but human ideologies and worldviews as a whole.

I call it “functional religion.”

About Functional Religions
My thesis begins with the idea that humans intrinsically need a holistic worldview that can “ground” their decisions about what they do, the habits they adopt, and ideas about how they fit into the world.

(That much is obvious, I suppose. But it’s always best to start an argument from premises that everyone accepts.)

Now the only “holistic worldviews” that can match these requirements are those which provide their adherents:
– a metaphysics
– an epistemology
– a cosmology
– an anthropology
– an ethics
– a set of tools for dealing with amoral evils (inside & outside oneself)
– a set of tools for dealing with moral evils (inside & outside oneself)

…and, because humans are culture-forming, discursive, social animals, these things naturally lead to…
– a set of habits (arts and disciplines) for learning, maintaining, and strengthening the above views in oneself
– a set of habits (arts and disciplines) for working in concert with others sharing the same views
– a set of habits (arts and disciplines) governing one’s advocacy of those views to others, especially one’s own children

To the extent that a “holistic worldview” is MISSING some of the above requirements, it is incomplete: If no surrogate appears to fill the unoccupied role, the person will find himself unsettled in his approach to life. That is why it’s an intrinsic need of humans: Both practical and felt.

Now any serious “name brand religion” (Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, Jainism, whatever) is going to provide most or all of these functions in a person.

But, a person who doesn’t follow a “name brand religion” still needs those functions filled.

He needs, in short, a “functional religion.” (He may reject the term “religion,” but whatever he adopts will fulfill all the functions of a good, solid religion in him.)

Building A Functional Religion (for fun and profit!)
Very often, he’ll assemble his own “functional religion,” like a computer hobbyist who goes to a computer-store to assemble a Gaming PC from hand-selected parts, with his own homespun Linux distro as the OS.

The upside of this is: He can pick (what he believes to be) the best of all the parts, install or build-from-scratch his own favorite Linux distro, and wind up with something especially well-suited to his needs.

The downside is: The “functional religion” he thereby creates is “Version 1.0” and might be “buggy”: The parts and OS (i.e., the metaphysics, habits, etc., he adopts) he puts together may have unexpected incompatibilities. These may not reveal themselves at “first boot” (i.e., for the first few years of his adherence). Some very serious flaws may be too subtle, or too slow-building in their negative consequences, to reveal themselves inside of a single human lifetime.

I think everyone winds up with a “functional religion.” (The alternative is just wandering through life unthinkingly, devoid of principles, introspection, and consciously-chosen pursuits.)

I think the “four horsemen of the New Atheism” (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennett) from a few years back had a “functional religion” in common, and thus, unsurprisingly, served as evangelists for it.

And, as I expressed in my earlier post, I think college students are drifting, and to an extent being propagandized, into Leftism as their “functional religion.” Irreligious ones often come to college already believing most of it; but once there, previously-religious students often become “converts” through peer pressure.

Logical Consequences of the “Functional Religion” idea:
1. If this idea — this obvious truth, I’d say — were better-recognized in American law, we’d quickly see that much of what passes for “separation of church and state” and “secular education” in America is actually an establishment-of-religion (albeit a “functional religion”) being foisted on society, with government subsidization.

2. Any “functional religion” which fails to recognize itself as such is insufficiently introspective to quickly find its own internal contradictions. It’s not that its adherents won’t have a metaphysics. They’ll have an unexamined one, and probably a pretty bad one. A lot of modern secularists share a common functional religion; but a lot of them are Positivists, in spite of the fact that positivism was found unworkable, self-contradictory, and fundamentally irrational by serious philosophers decades ago. He who fails to recognize he is doing philosophy will make freshman errors.

3. Any self-described practitioner of a “name-brand religion” is always in danger of replacing one part of his declared religion with a surrogate adopted from the surrounding culture. In Catholicism, for example, a lot of left-leaning American politicians who describe themselves as “Catholic” have clearly adopted consequentialism as their ethics, producing incompatibilities with “Catholicism” as traditionally defined. These politicians still have a “functional religion”; but it isn’t Catholicism any more: It’s a self-assembled hodgepodge of pieces from disparate sources, with the cultural hallmarks of Catholicism left intact.

4. Recently-minted Leftist “functional religions” (from SJW-ism to Maoism) are prone to violence (when they get big enough) in a way that Christianity (for example) isn’t. This may seem an over-bold assertion, given the behavior of the Spanish Inquisition! But 3 things are required for a “functional religion” to exercise restraint on the human instinct to tyrannically oppress “the other”:
– the religion’s ethics has to oppose that kind of thing (not all do);
– the religion has to have been on the receiving end of that kind of treatment before, but not so recently that it’s a stinging memory craving revenge;
– the religion has to have at least one past instance where it was guilty of being tyrannical, has repented of that, and retains the memory of its own earlier hypocrisy as a cautionary tale.

Now Christianity has all that, and for all its many sins in this area, there are more instances of comparable restraint. (The Roman Inquisition, for example, unlike the Spanish, produced the fairest courts in Europe for centuries. People accused by their rustic neighbors would intentionally say something heretical or blasphemous in court in the hopes of getting a change-of-venue to an ecclesiastical court: They reasoned they had better odds of not being railroaded or lynched by a hostile neighbor who was the judge’s second cousin. And once the church-court was in session, they could always say, “Oh, sorry about that, I don’t know what I was thinking, saying the Holy Spirit isn’t fully-divine like that. These theological notions confuse me, but I didn’t mean any harm.”)

Now leftist “religions” often want to kill all the unbelievers…but that ethic isn’t spelled-out up-front, so recent converts aren’t aware of it. They also don’t recognize Maoism, Stalinism, etc., as the same kind of thing…so they don’t have the benefit of the “cautionary tale.” And they’re recent-enough that, if they have big-enough numbers to persecute, they probably also have recent, stinging bitterness at being out of power.

They are among the most intrinsically dangerous of the “functional religions.”

RE: A few Trump supporters are unwilling to acknowledge Trump’s flaws … ”
A few!?

RE: “Then Trump supporters will happily acknowledge his flaws and weaknesses.”
It is certainly not my experience. The attitude by many of President Trump’s supporters is that we live in dangerous times and that any criticism undermines the man who is going to save us. This is silly. First because any successful organization or venture must have the ability to objectively look at themselves, see what can be improved, and do it. Secondly, I’ve never seen an idea that is so dangerous it can’t be talked about. For example, if you think socialism and racism are bad ideas, I agree with you. They are easily disproved, and they should be. And finally, your idea appears to be: “If you’re seen as a never Trumper, many will refuse to listen to what you say”. That basically makes my point for me. It’s an example of tribalism. Assigning labels to people as “leftists” and “never-Trumpers” is a way of discrediting and dehumanizing others as members of an out-group, even if they are independent people acting freely.

RE: “So, it’s NOT US. It’s them because they don’t want to work to improve an imperfect system, they want to destroy it while calling it “fundamental transformation”.”
A stunning example of tribalism, with us against them in full view. I also don’t agree with your summary of many leftists methods and motives. For one thing, the reference is made to the Obama administration. They, like many leftists, were not seeking to improve the existing system, nor were they trying to destroy it. I believe that they were results oriented. They had specific problems that they wanted to address; they didn’t have the power or the skill to affect change; and they did an end-run around it.

——–

My point is based on solid science: human beings are designed by evolution to form groups, and those groups frequently form to oppose other groups. And the cure for this is to: (1) realize this, and (2) step outside your tribe and re-evaluate your own pre-conceived notions, data, and conclusions. That’s very hard to do if you think that you’re always right and your fellow countrymen are evil.

“If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between “for” and “against” is the mind’s worst disease.” — Sent-ts’an

Does that mean that nothing is worth fighting for? Of course not. Our Republic, Western values, and human rights are definitely worth fighting for. But it is a good thing to have open discussion without dehumanizing people. And nothing is more toxic to the debate than simply dismissing alternative views because that opinion doesn’t support the tribe or is at odds with the tribe’s thinking.

Humanity can be in a sense seen as a degraded, not evolved, format, in which higher level entities descended to this plane of existence to do something, got stuck in physical avatars that corrupted their souls, and couldn’t get back out of it. Permanently logged in. If you try to log out, your avatar dies, and then your actual user behind the computer dies as a result.

The soul is logged into the physical avatar. Not something scientists know how to figure out or test.

I also find it ironic that people want to talk about this topic now of all times. Whenever I raised the Leftist alliance being a religion not a political faction, people just went strangely silent before 2012. They only started piping up, I realized, after 2013.

One of the little side effects of incarnation, whether it is reincarnation or degraded resurrection, is memory loss. Remember the Greek legend about drinking the water of a river and then dying and forgetting? Well that already happened due to Adam’s eating of the fruit juices. Every soul comes to Earth and then promptly forgets everything of the past.

Even China has the same legend about Moupa whatever soup. Drink it, die, and forget.

Quoting Leszek Kolakowski — “. . . Almost all the prophecies of Marx and his followers have already proved to be false, but this does not disturb the spiritual certainty of the faithful, any more than it did in the case of chiliastic sects: for it is a certainty not based on any empirical premises or supposed ‘historical laws,’ but simply on the psychological need for certainty. In this sense, Marxism performs the function of a religion, and its efficacy is of a religious character.”

It’s not clear that factual authority, and seeking it, is much different than moral authority, which is closely related to moral superiority. And it’s no surprise that Dems are constantly trying to achieve “factual superiority” — which is why the Fake News jab against them is so strong.