Over at the Australian Claire Lehman's Quillette they are having a set to about whether secularism is a religion. John Staddon says they sorta do.
Oh sure, the secularists don't have a "god" but they certainly have sacred objects. Principally, the sacred object is the Victim. The point about the sacred is that it is beyond criticism, and analysis, at least not by you, chum. Now, you tell me that, for the Communists, the "worker" was not a sacred object. Or that the suffering woman is not a sacred object for the feminists, or the African slave for the blacks. Etc. In addition, the prophets of secularism have attained almost to the status of saints, as a first step towards identification with the immortal. Think Lenin's tomb. Or Mary Wollstonecraft. Or Martin Luther King, Jr.
It is not stretching things too far to suggest that the secularists worship The Victim.
And as for "mythical/historical!" The whole point of the secular left is to construct likely Three Stage stories about the Victims. Back in the day humans were innocent and equal. They lived, you might say, in a veritable Garden of Eden. But then came the Fall. Once innocent humans fell upon each other, stripped of their innocence, and became divided into Exploiters and Victims. Or Patriarchs and sex objects. Or Lords and Serfs. Or Masters and Slaves. Or Capitalists and Proletarians. But now, with the blessings of activism and the holy sacrament of peaceful protest there is dawning a new age that will save us from oppression and exploitation and we will enter into a new Eden of Heaven on Earth.
I am not making this up.
Of course, I come to this from an appreciation of chaps like Jung and Joseph Campbell and Jordan Peterson. They are saying that myth is universal, and just because we moderns say we have "grown" beyond religion doesn't mean that we aren't lying to ourselves. Jung, of course, was consciously trying to found a new religion, and for that got criticized by chaps like Richard Noll in The Jung Cult.
I believe that it is essential to establish that modern secular beliefs are religion in everything but name. There is a very good practical reason for this, that if modern secularism is a religion then the dicta of the Bill of Rights apply, that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." If secular cults are religions then they should not be privileged as science and should not have the power to deplatform people that disagree with their expressions of faith and their orthodoxies.
We can expect that our lefty friends will insist, to the last faggot on the auto-da-fé, that their systems and their ethics and their programs are not religious, no sir, not nohow.
Because under the current regime lefties hold a huge tactical advantage. Their ideas and proposals are noble "issues" and "settled science" rather than the crazed doctrines of a whacky religious cult.
My argument is simple: religions have three characteristics: spiritual, mythical/historical, and moral. Secular humanism lacks the first two and is often quite critical of these aspects of religion.See, I think that the secularists do too have the spiritual and the mythical/historical.
Oh sure, the secularists don't have a "god" but they certainly have sacred objects. Principally, the sacred object is the Victim. The point about the sacred is that it is beyond criticism, and analysis, at least not by you, chum. Now, you tell me that, for the Communists, the "worker" was not a sacred object. Or that the suffering woman is not a sacred object for the feminists, or the African slave for the blacks. Etc. In addition, the prophets of secularism have attained almost to the status of saints, as a first step towards identification with the immortal. Think Lenin's tomb. Or Mary Wollstonecraft. Or Martin Luther King, Jr.
It is not stretching things too far to suggest that the secularists worship The Victim.
And as for "mythical/historical!" The whole point of the secular left is to construct likely Three Stage stories about the Victims. Back in the day humans were innocent and equal. They lived, you might say, in a veritable Garden of Eden. But then came the Fall. Once innocent humans fell upon each other, stripped of their innocence, and became divided into Exploiters and Victims. Or Patriarchs and sex objects. Or Lords and Serfs. Or Masters and Slaves. Or Capitalists and Proletarians. But now, with the blessings of activism and the holy sacrament of peaceful protest there is dawning a new age that will save us from oppression and exploitation and we will enter into a new Eden of Heaven on Earth.
I am not making this up.
Of course, I come to this from an appreciation of chaps like Jung and Joseph Campbell and Jordan Peterson. They are saying that myth is universal, and just because we moderns say we have "grown" beyond religion doesn't mean that we aren't lying to ourselves. Jung, of course, was consciously trying to found a new religion, and for that got criticized by chaps like Richard Noll in The Jung Cult.
I believe that it is essential to establish that modern secular beliefs are religion in everything but name. There is a very good practical reason for this, that if modern secularism is a religion then the dicta of the Bill of Rights apply, that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." If secular cults are religions then they should not be privileged as science and should not have the power to deplatform people that disagree with their expressions of faith and their orthodoxies.
We can expect that our lefty friends will insist, to the last faggot on the auto-da-fé, that their systems and their ethics and their programs are not religious, no sir, not nohow.
Because under the current regime lefties hold a huge tactical advantage. Their ideas and proposals are noble "issues" and "settled science" rather than the crazed doctrines of a whacky religious cult.
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