Who Cares bout Religion?
I don't know why anyone still talks about religion as if it has an impact. The mainstream hardly follows the tenants of any religion. Its affect on behavior, especially at Wash U, is negligible.
The creationism vs. evolution debate is really an emancipatory question - if no one believes in creationism, no one can believe in Genesis, and the whole storyline falls apart in the Bible. The rulers of Christain faith already know there is no God, and this is where their power comes from. They must keep up the illusion that this God exists.
The whole debate is merely a power struggle. Either side can come up with reasons for implementation. As Kuhn showed, implementation of radically different world views relies on the culture of the groups responsible for implementation. It's bullshit.It's like a school of fish who have never been out of water, fighting over who gets to sleep in the giant shell. All they know is the water and all they care about is the shell. There are bigger questions.
At its core, the problem is capitalism's effects on the self. Identity battles are everywhere in our culture. We have this weird conception of the self as being a sort of having. You can't even admit someone else is right otherwise you lose a part of yourself, less it be a figure with greater power(recognizable power, like an established philosopher, someone designated as powerful and right) than you, in which case you may even feel it is ok to change your mind since you are being dominated by someone "superior." If the self didn't require this having, didn't require being so closed off, we may have a true dialectic(on ethics especially), and a real sense of community. If your sense of self didn't depend on maintaing viewpoints, or keeping commodities, you could honestly have a natural discussion and actually a conclusion about the greater good! A community! But for some reason someone thought otherwise. Probably the oligarchs. I am so pissed.
posted by Anonymous at 5:21 PM
2 Comments:
Fishstix-
While I can appreciate that you call to attention the fact that "religious" debates rarely have anything to do with actual doctrinal dogma itself, I would take issue with your assertions that religion is negligible and that the mainstream hardly follows true religious tenets.
First, a large majority of Americans are, in fact, religious fundamentalists and therefore hold fastidiously to extremely literalist readings of the Bible. There is an obvious hypocrisy at work when they focus on passages against homosexuality but then neglect other, seemingly more important, laws against food preparation, social structure, and other Old Testament Judaic norms, but one cannot dismiss their relgious conviction as neglible.
Second, the debate about creationism is not a "final stand" in any sense for a Genesis-based interpretation of the origins of the universe. Some of the earliest rabbinical exegeses (not to mention later Catholic interpretations) take the creation story to be allegorical. The Catholic church today has no problem accomodating both an origin by a Creator and the latest evolutionary science.
Third, religious forces constitute a major player in many of the most important social policy debates. Reactionism against gay marriage, the secular state, abortion, and multicultural pluralism, to name an obvious few, cannot be summarily explained by a conspiratorial, political power-based struggle on the part of oligarchs, but receives its power through the sustained, widespread ideology of inherited religious beliefs, beliefs in many important ways incontingent upon any sort of bourgeois capitalist regime.
My greater point is that the liberationist rhetoric of overthrowing the existing capitalist order is a pipe dream, in so many words. You are right when you observe that religion plays practically no part on Wash U's campus. That statement, however, may bely a certain infamiliarity with the many American citizens who "genuinely" (however you may wish to interpret that) believe and implement their religious faith, even on a daily basis.
As a secular humanist (how banal!), I think that religion is mistaken and a greater hindrance than help on humanity. However, the solution is not bound up in a radical economic and social revolution, or a gradually dismantling of the "self" from the commodities of the current social order. Rather, I believe (and this is also, I think, in line with Kuhn), that social change is not about liberation or enlightenment but about the gradually ascending status of secular beliefs, spread throughout varied avenues. This project has been underway since the 17th century or earlier and will hopefully continue. We'll never change enough people's beliefs about their beliefs, but we can gradually replace one discourse with another. I don't necessarily view that as bullshit, but perhaps the only way we can hope to implement change. Now let's drink some keg beer!
Actually, I renounce what I just said. Ben Fisher just proved me wrong at Austin's birthday party. How could I be so naive, so indoctrinated, such a cog? I sit here weeping and reevaluating.
Though, I would know who I was if my primary processes weren't annihilated by capital.
Heil Fisher.
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