RE: Religion is poison to democracy
April 24, 2023 at 11:01 am
(This post was last modified: April 24, 2023 at 11:17 am by The Grand Nudger.)
A person has to be pretty committed to a routine not to see both why and what kinds of religions are a risk for and to democratic governments.
There are fundamentally antidemocratic religions who believe that their gods are the literal kings of creation, complete with binding commandments for all of humanity at all times in any situation. That their values are the only permissible expression of everyday civic relationships and responsibility. This incompatibility with anyone else's mere existence has always lead to discriminatory and eliminationist policy for societies infiltrated by these religions, in past and today.
Contemporary paganism, otoh, is very commonly an acknowledgement and rejection of that. Exactly that. Specifically that. Whatever other weird shit a neo pagan gets into, they're actually bound into a moral community by that rejection as a movement just as the dominionists are bound to their own antithetical and antidemocratic one. It seems silly to even have to ask what we or democracy are supposed to be worried about by a (real or hypothetically)fanatical pluralist.
End of the day, it's unreasonable to expect that a person would not be compelled by whatever religious beliefs they hold, or that, even if such a principled distance from their own most genuine beliefs could be achieved, that it would/could be maintained by many, all at once, uniformly, or very often. So the content and quality of a religions beliefs do matter with respect to democratic governance. Probably not a good idea for a death cult deferring to their ghost king to be in charge......eh?
There are fundamentally antidemocratic religions who believe that their gods are the literal kings of creation, complete with binding commandments for all of humanity at all times in any situation. That their values are the only permissible expression of everyday civic relationships and responsibility. This incompatibility with anyone else's mere existence has always lead to discriminatory and eliminationist policy for societies infiltrated by these religions, in past and today.
Contemporary paganism, otoh, is very commonly an acknowledgement and rejection of that. Exactly that. Specifically that. Whatever other weird shit a neo pagan gets into, they're actually bound into a moral community by that rejection as a movement just as the dominionists are bound to their own antithetical and antidemocratic one. It seems silly to even have to ask what we or democracy are supposed to be worried about by a (real or hypothetically)fanatical pluralist.
End of the day, it's unreasonable to expect that a person would not be compelled by whatever religious beliefs they hold, or that, even if such a principled distance from their own most genuine beliefs could be achieved, that it would/could be maintained by many, all at once, uniformly, or very often. So the content and quality of a religions beliefs do matter with respect to democratic governance. Probably not a good idea for a death cult deferring to their ghost king to be in charge......eh?
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