• Church youth leader sentenced to 13 years in prison for sexual abuse of young girls
(archived link)
• Catholic nun among 25 arrested in mob bust in northern Italy
(archived link)
• Member of secretive Christian sect sentenced to 120 years in prison; part of widespread child sexual abuse and subsequent coverup
(archived link)
• Oklahoma deputies arrest former pastor accused of lewd or indecent acts to a child
(archived link)
• Oklahoma pastor sentenced to 25 years in prison for lewd acts, rape of underage girls (not the same Oklahoma pastor as previous headline)
(archived link)
• Retired New Orleans priest pleads guilty to kidnapping and raping boy in 1970s
• Texas pastor accused of secretly recording visitors, downloading child porn
(archived link)
Drag doesn’t believe in religion. Which is to say, drag thinks there’s no such thing. It’s not coherently defined. If religion is about belief in gods, what about Buddhism? If religion is about belief in the supernatural, then there are no religions, because everyone thinks their beliefs are part of the world, ie nature. If religion is about organised belief, then schools and universities are religion. That’s not an attack on the beliefs schools teach; schools teach very important things like maths and spelling, and they organise belief on those subjects.
Religious studies were my major at university. I know far less about what religion is now than before I studied it… there’s as much definitions of religion as there are scholars of religion.
When boiled down, religions are essentially just a way of coping with the unknowable. The exact specifics of our origin, what happens to the thing we call “ourselves” after death, and usually an idea of how to be a better person. These themes are pretty consistent across everything we’d colloquial agree is a “religion”.
The issues only really arise when someone insists that these unknowable, unquantifiable things that they believe in MUST be the only way, and anyone who doesn’t believe the same way is somehow a threat. I believe that ones beliefs with regard to these unknowable things are deeply personal. They’re arrived at by understanding one’s self, and a LOT of introspection. It’d be weird if any two people managed to arrive at an agreement on everything, and that’s okay because the beliefs are built on internal factors rather than external.
Organized religion, then, is bullshit, yeah. Anyone pushing answers for questions unanswerable is pushing an agenda. I doubt anything approaching the level of group think that is modern abrahamic religions could ever exist without some kind of power struggle.
A story about something you never saw, received tenth-hand via a morass of scholars and politicians. Yes, let’s analyze it. Ugh.
What about Trumpism? That’s a religion, and it doesn’t deal in any of those three questions.
That’s really more a cult than a religion. As much as “hahah all religions are cults LoL”, there is a distinct difference between them.
Drag isn’t a sociologist, but drag is pretty sure the set of cults is contained within the set of religions.
Right. All cults are, ostensibly, religions. That doesn’t mean that it works in the other way. Not all religions are cults.
Right, so if Trumpism is a cult, it must be a religion. And it’s a religion that isn’t concerned with the creation of the universe, the afterlife, or how to live well. So your definition of religion based on it answering unknowns can’t be right.
There’s a reason I said “ostensibly”. Cults co-opt the religious umbrella in order to manipulate. They rely on the same kinds of psychology that religions do, often touch on the same kinds of topics. Trumpism is more a cult of personality than a proper religious cult.
Either way, to equate any kind of spiritually and religion with one of the most obvious examples of someone heading a cult is at BEST disingenuous. I’m not here to talk about cults. Cults suck, they’re the opposite of what I described earlier. Intensely external, entirely about control.
Trumpism definitely has the worship and belief in the supernatural, insofar as most religions do. Drag thinks it’s a religion.