I think a lot of you have a hard time understanding why religions do harm, and are a bit too prideful about knowing that they do often cause harm.
It isn't a "gimmick," and it is also deeply settler-colonial to suggest whatever form of knowledge production you subscribe to happens to be the "right," one. Many cultures that didnt invent the bigotry we hate also practiced scripture, and devaluing that as a "gimmick" is not only racist, but irresponsible. If being "rational" was insulated from the context that "rationality" existed in, the white men would have fixed themselves in their salons when they thought they were too good for it all. Big surprise:
Yes, exactly, it is arguable, which why I'm saying that you can't say there's actually "good" or "bad" cherries.
Check out "postructuralism" and scholars like Derrida or Foucault. The role that language plays in our constructions and effects on things forces us to interrogate the reality of how we understand this thing to be "good" or "bad," as it is itself subject to the systems of power we are subject to. So, it's very hard not to reproduce the values we're trying to challenge when we don't address how those values are constructed.
Yes, we all know white supremacy is bad, but if it is only bad because it hurts people, then many people think that it only exists at the level of individual actions, like calling someone a slur, and not at a systemic level like how laws and knowledge are oriented around fundamentally devaluing certain groups of people; or why it is those groups of people in the first place besides "hating what's different." White supremacy does hurt people, and that is bad, but our understanding of how it does that changes how we understand what is needed to end it.
Wow, the ego on this guy. I was trying to be gracious with the first comment and really tried to read it with good intent, but I'm not going take this one seriously.
For this who come across this and are confused as to why this person is incorrect (both in their point and how they're arguing it) feel free to ask, as there are common distortions found here.
But that's also like, the point. The practice of scripture is about having a shared tool to make sense of things as it is the faith that that tool is indeed the right one to do so. Everyone uses it for their own ends.
I'm going to have to see a big ol'source for that one. You're saying that's a Christian thing exclusively, and not found in any of the cultural or religious influences on Christianity? How could you even begin to draw that line? Even more, you're saying that, despite roughly fifteen hundred years of change, that was a core value that existed in the exact same way from the beginning of Christianity to European colonialism? Not even translations effected something so fundamental? Why would Christian patriarchy do this, but not Greek or Roman or Iranian? Why was it absent in Judaism but present here?
Even beyond that, you just subscribed to a normative construction of humanity and morality by asserting that capitalism emerged through this religion, and not that specific property relations and systems of power influenced how both are understood within our culture over time. For example, domination and objectification of the living world are certainly elements in this, but it's difficult to argue Christianity is why that's so and not that that was so, and Christianity exists as it does as a result of that.
Edit: I'm also just going to add that, though I'm sure this wasn't intentional, this also ends up carrying deeply colonial and white supremacist notions of superiority by attributing that much gravity to the one religion that EuroAmerican imperialists happened to subscribe to. They got to have the religion that was so foundational, so world-changing that it marked a break in the entirety of human self-perception? I get were saying capitalism is bad, but exceptionalizing it in this way reproduces narratives that white supremacists find favourable.
I'm not sure if you meant to use "salient" here (as in you're using the word incorrectly), but I definitely wasn't trying make my writing that.
I'm also not sure about what else is said here either. Plenty of people behave immorally despite having role models; and I'd hardly say good people are in short supply despite how doomers insist the world is right now. I'd also caution against resorting to individualist explanations for this as well, and I was trying to discourage that by emphasizing the relationality between individuals and systems.
This is also by no means nothing even remotely new, but the specific form of normativity that people engage with this from did indeed emerge from modern European colonialism, and therefore Christianized notions of moral purity. But by, "nowadays" I reckon you're not positioning this as a centuries-long development.
And then, "holding us back," itself casts a normative construction of how things ought to be, which is exactly what I've cautioned against. I'd hardly imagine your understanding of a collective addresses decolonialism in a way that doesn't subordinate groups or values that are "holding us back," from some idealized, "proper" state that thing should be in by now.
I mean, sure, but what I'm cautioning against is prescribing any normative definition or configuration of Christianity, as it then implies an idealized version is real, and therefore that the problem is that people aren't following the religion the "right" way, not that there is something systemic that influences how the religion functions in society.
There were baptists in central Europe that allowed women to serve as pastors as early as the early modern period, which is markedly different than what Baptism is like in the US today. During the Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century, there were Christian denominations that practiced polyamory and collective property ownership. These were developments that coincided with Christianity as an institution of settler-colonialism and EuroAmerican imperialism, and they were certainly not accepted by larger or more formal denominations at the time; still wouldn't be today. It should also go without saying that they wouldn't reflect the churches in the period you're referring to even if just because they emerged in relation to what came afterward.
It is important to deny ownership of moral values by the institutions that configure and disseminate them for this exact same reason. Even though they serve a purpose within the system they exist in, they meet a need of the people who subscribe to them, and normativity is what stifles their ability to wrestle that utility away from these institutions.
I do find it interesting how many arguments I'll see online that rely on an idealized version of Christianity to make a point of Christianity, as though Christianity would be pure if people followed the "actual" morals. But like, this is what it is, they're talking about a Christian church in the United States of America and the argument is that if MAGAts followed that Christianity, they'd be following "real" Christianity. Christianity was an engine of colonialism and all of the genocidal violence within it; institutions are what they do, not what they say they want to do.
I think a lot of people don't realize that they're making conservative, revisionist narratives when they want to privilege hypocrisy in their arguments rather than morality.
That was a lot of words for, "yes, I forgot." Guy's own fucking words, you chud. He meant it to be a parallel, grow the fuck up. Not everything is about comforting you, FFS.
This isn't even a controversial association, you people have to fucking grow up.
"Druckmann has openly stated that the themes of revenge and cyclical violence in The Last of Us Part II stem from his reaction to the 2000 Ramallah lynching of two Israeli soldiers, where footage of the event filled him with "intense hatred" and a desire to "kill all these people that committed this horrible act" and "make them feel the same pain." He later reflected on feeling "gross and guilty" for these impulses, but used them as the foundation for the game's narrative. Druckmann also draws parallels to Israeli politics, citing the 2011 exchange of over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, noting how his father viewed the deal as harmful to Israel overall but would release every prisoner to save his own son. These inspirations manifest in The Last of Us Part II's portrayal of warring factions: the secular, militarized Washington Liberation Front (WLF), equipped with advanced weaponry and resources, mirrors the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) as a "brutal but well-intended" military, while the Seraphites, a religious cult engaging in ritual disembowelment and fanaticism, dehumanizes Palestinians as an extremist threat akin to Hamas."
Right so, this is definitely related to what "purity politics" means, but not what I was referencing. I'm talking about the (liberal) tendency on this site for people to supposedly challenge purity-based political systems and ideologies like fascism, white supremacy, and settler-colonialism one minute, and then accept "piece of technology corrupts the human soul," as an explanation for something better explained through systemic analysis or cultural critique.
The idea that "people's brains don't work because of AI," is deepy puritanical in nature, and attributes the harmful quality to the technology itself and not the socioeconomic conditions where what that AI produces is made subject to liberal capitalist imperatives and logics. Conveniently, it then takes those values for granted in favour of a narrative that is also markedly ableist in its message. Oh, do people who are disabled and require AI use to access ableist education institutions or information on the increasingly oblique and inaccessible internet "wreck their brains?" I wonder if a fascist would even disagree with that narrative.
Okay, this person is completely incorrect in their claim about sharecropping. But yes, the US federal government did not think slavery was an issue worth going to war to end. The Confederacy explicitly existed to continue slavery even though it was not threatened whatsoever in the South and more by freesoilers out west, including Lincoln and most "antislavery" activists. The US invaded the Confederacy because the Confederacy picked a fight and decided to shoot first, it was not about any moral ground. The decision to implement antislavery policy as a tactic during the war is more accurately attributed to the growing food and resource crisis the Confederacy suffered relative to the huge advantage that guaranteeing freedom to the overwhelming enslaved population there created.
So, yes, it was good that slavery was abolished as a consequence of this War, but it would be distortive to suggest the Union fought to do that specifically. Solidarity among property-owning classes was a much more influential element in whether war broke out, and was indeed a huge reason why the war did not start until southerners started it despite the many good moral reasons to shut it down.
I asked for any source and you linked some (inadequate) secondary sources below that simply discuss that sharecropping was discriminatory. Slavery wasn't bad just because it was racist, and you clearly thought that was the case. I'd be happy to provide a reading list when I have a minute.
Also, you not only said that, but you said it multiple times explicitly throughout this thread. Bud, you gotta stop pretending to know about shit you clearly don't know well enough about.
Okay, Im not 100% certain of what you think you're saying, but this and the comment below aren't coherent.
You said sharecropping was worse than slavery, and that is not elevating the systemic racism experienced by African Americans in a post-Civil War era to the present, it actually diminishes it by denying the severity of slavery. I don't think you realize what you've said, because it is immensely racist.
Black women's bodies were objectified for their reproductive capacity throughout the history of slavery in the US, but especially so in the early decades of the 19th century after the importation of enslaved peoples was banned and the only source of growth for that population was through their bodies. This meant they were raped to produce more slaves dude, sexual violence is inherent to slavery, but think for a minute about just how brutal that single element of the institution is. This is of course not even the only form of sexual violence that occurred within African American enslavement in the US; white slave owners regularly raped women they claimed ownership over, engaged in sexual humiliation as a form of punishment, in Louisiana, wealthy owners would even participate in balls or galas where they'd display their "mistresses," which were enslaved women.
This isn't even getting into the myriad of other vectors of violence, the brutal punishments that were inflicted on them, the degree of forced labour, forced malnutrition (yes, worse than simply being a poor farmer), the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 even allowed the abduction and forced enslavement of relatively any African American in slave or free states should they find themselves in an unfortunate position.
The reason why slavery was bad is the same reason there are constant attempts by racists in the US to claim that racism is over because the "actual" bad elements of it are abolished and the only reason there is discrimination afterward is due to some innate flaw in black people or individuals' character. They did it after slavery was abolished, after black men were elected to political positions, after the great migration, after the Civil Rights Act, after Obama got elected. Erasing the brutality of slavery to elevate some other form of oppression neglects the reality that those two forms of oppression are relational, both in their historical developments and in the ways each are facilitated within a racist system.
Please, do not spread misinformation irresponsibly, even if you're trying to do something good.
Bud, I'm gonna have to see some sources on the sharecropping claim. Either you haven't read enough slave narratives, or there is some insanely obscured events related to sharecropping.
Edit: Okay, so we've confirmed this dude is just racist.
Hey, read the sources I provided.
I think a lot of you have a hard time understanding why religions do harm, and are a bit too prideful about knowing that they do often cause harm.
It isn't a "gimmick," and it is also deeply settler-colonial to suggest whatever form of knowledge production you subscribe to happens to be the "right," one. Many cultures that didnt invent the bigotry we hate also practiced scripture, and devaluing that as a "gimmick" is not only racist, but irresponsible. If being "rational" was insulated from the context that "rationality" existed in, the white men would have fixed themselves in their salons when they thought they were too good for it all. Big surprise:
Yes, exactly, it is arguable, which why I'm saying that you can't say there's actually "good" or "bad" cherries.
Check out "postructuralism" and scholars like Derrida or Foucault. The role that language plays in our constructions and effects on things forces us to interrogate the reality of how we understand this thing to be "good" or "bad," as it is itself subject to the systems of power we are subject to. So, it's very hard not to reproduce the values we're trying to challenge when we don't address how those values are constructed.
Yes, we all know white supremacy is bad, but if it is only bad because it hurts people, then many people think that it only exists at the level of individual actions, like calling someone a slur, and not at a systemic level like how laws and knowledge are oriented around fundamentally devaluing certain groups of people; or why it is those groups of people in the first place besides "hating what's different." White supremacy does hurt people, and that is bad, but our understanding of how it does that changes how we understand what is needed to end it.
Wow, the ego on this guy. I was trying to be gracious with the first comment and really tried to read it with good intent, but I'm not going take this one seriously.
For this who come across this and are confused as to why this person is incorrect (both in their point and how they're arguing it) feel free to ask, as there are common distortions found here.
Yes, I'm saying "cherry-picking" suggests there are bad and good cherries, when it's just cherries.
But that's also like, the point. The practice of scripture is about having a shared tool to make sense of things as it is the faith that that tool is indeed the right one to do so. Everyone uses it for their own ends.
I'm going to have to see a big ol'source for that one. You're saying that's a Christian thing exclusively, and not found in any of the cultural or religious influences on Christianity? How could you even begin to draw that line? Even more, you're saying that, despite roughly fifteen hundred years of change, that was a core value that existed in the exact same way from the beginning of Christianity to European colonialism? Not even translations effected something so fundamental? Why would Christian patriarchy do this, but not Greek or Roman or Iranian? Why was it absent in Judaism but present here?
Even beyond that, you just subscribed to a normative construction of humanity and morality by asserting that capitalism emerged through this religion, and not that specific property relations and systems of power influenced how both are understood within our culture over time. For example, domination and objectification of the living world are certainly elements in this, but it's difficult to argue Christianity is why that's so and not that that was so, and Christianity exists as it does as a result of that.
Edit: I'm also just going to add that, though I'm sure this wasn't intentional, this also ends up carrying deeply colonial and white supremacist notions of superiority by attributing that much gravity to the one religion that EuroAmerican imperialists happened to subscribe to. They got to have the religion that was so foundational, so world-changing that it marked a break in the entirety of human self-perception? I get were saying capitalism is bad, but exceptionalizing it in this way reproduces narratives that white supremacists find favourable.
I'm not sure if you meant to use "salient" here (as in you're using the word incorrectly), but I definitely wasn't trying make my writing that.
I'm also not sure about what else is said here either. Plenty of people behave immorally despite having role models; and I'd hardly say good people are in short supply despite how doomers insist the world is right now. I'd also caution against resorting to individualist explanations for this as well, and I was trying to discourage that by emphasizing the relationality between individuals and systems.
This is also by no means nothing even remotely new, but the specific form of normativity that people engage with this from did indeed emerge from modern European colonialism, and therefore Christianized notions of moral purity. But by, "nowadays" I reckon you're not positioning this as a centuries-long development.
And then, "holding us back," itself casts a normative construction of how things ought to be, which is exactly what I've cautioned against. I'd hardly imagine your understanding of a collective addresses decolonialism in a way that doesn't subordinate groups or values that are "holding us back," from some idealized, "proper" state that thing should be in by now.
I mean, sure, but what I'm cautioning against is prescribing any normative definition or configuration of Christianity, as it then implies an idealized version is real, and therefore that the problem is that people aren't following the religion the "right" way, not that there is something systemic that influences how the religion functions in society.
There were baptists in central Europe that allowed women to serve as pastors as early as the early modern period, which is markedly different than what Baptism is like in the US today. During the Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century, there were Christian denominations that practiced polyamory and collective property ownership. These were developments that coincided with Christianity as an institution of settler-colonialism and EuroAmerican imperialism, and they were certainly not accepted by larger or more formal denominations at the time; still wouldn't be today. It should also go without saying that they wouldn't reflect the churches in the period you're referring to even if just because they emerged in relation to what came afterward.
It is important to deny ownership of moral values by the institutions that configure and disseminate them for this exact same reason. Even though they serve a purpose within the system they exist in, they meet a need of the people who subscribe to them, and normativity is what stifles their ability to wrestle that utility away from these institutions.
I do find it interesting how many arguments I'll see online that rely on an idealized version of Christianity to make a point of Christianity, as though Christianity would be pure if people followed the "actual" morals. But like, this is what it is, they're talking about a Christian church in the United States of America and the argument is that if MAGAts followed that Christianity, they'd be following "real" Christianity. Christianity was an engine of colonialism and all of the genocidal violence within it; institutions are what they do, not what they say they want to do.
I think a lot of people don't realize that they're making conservative, revisionist narratives when they want to privilege hypocrisy in their arguments rather than morality.
That was a lot of words for, "yes, I forgot." Guy's own fucking words, you chud. He meant it to be a parallel, grow the fuck up. Not everything is about comforting you, FFS.
lol, lmao even. Literally the most famous video game instance of it:
https://www.reversecanarymission.org/person/neil-druckmann
https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-not-so-hidden-israeli-politics-of-the-last-of-us-part-ii/
https://time.com/7275781/the-last-of-us-controversy-israel-gaza/
Maybe read a bit eh. Did you like, forget this was a famous story not three years ago?
I guess Zionism is a bold innovation in video game storytelling now.
Edit: putting this here because I know you goddamn morons arent gonna read two comments down:
https://www.reversecanarymission.org/person/neil-druckmann
https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-not-so-hidden-israeli-politics-of-the-last-of-us-part-ii/
https://time.com/7275781/the-last-of-us-controversy-israel-gaza/
This isn't even a controversial association, you people have to fucking grow up.
"Druckmann has openly stated that the themes of revenge and cyclical violence in The Last of Us Part II stem from his reaction to the 2000 Ramallah lynching of two Israeli soldiers, where footage of the event filled him with "intense hatred" and a desire to "kill all these people that committed this horrible act" and "make them feel the same pain." He later reflected on feeling "gross and guilty" for these impulses, but used them as the foundation for the game's narrative. Druckmann also draws parallels to Israeli politics, citing the 2011 exchange of over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, noting how his father viewed the deal as harmful to Israel overall but would release every prisoner to save his own son. These inspirations manifest in The Last of Us Part II's portrayal of warring factions: the secular, militarized Washington Liberation Front (WLF), equipped with advanced weaponry and resources, mirrors the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) as a "brutal but well-intended" military, while the Seraphites, a religious cult engaging in ritual disembowelment and fanaticism, dehumanizes Palestinians as an extremist threat akin to Hamas."
Right so, this is definitely related to what "purity politics" means, but not what I was referencing. I'm talking about the (liberal) tendency on this site for people to supposedly challenge purity-based political systems and ideologies like fascism, white supremacy, and settler-colonialism one minute, and then accept "piece of technology corrupts the human soul," as an explanation for something better explained through systemic analysis or cultural critique.
The idea that "people's brains don't work because of AI," is deepy puritanical in nature, and attributes the harmful quality to the technology itself and not the socioeconomic conditions where what that AI produces is made subject to liberal capitalist imperatives and logics. Conveniently, it then takes those values for granted in favour of a narrative that is also markedly ableist in its message. Oh, do people who are disabled and require AI use to access ableist education institutions or information on the increasingly oblique and inaccessible internet "wreck their brains?" I wonder if a fascist would even disagree with that narrative.
This is why I can't talk to most men for more than a minute.
You seriously have to start reading your own comments before you post them. Reread the thread ✌️
Okay, this person is completely incorrect in their claim about sharecropping. But yes, the US federal government did not think slavery was an issue worth going to war to end. The Confederacy explicitly existed to continue slavery even though it was not threatened whatsoever in the South and more by freesoilers out west, including Lincoln and most "antislavery" activists. The US invaded the Confederacy because the Confederacy picked a fight and decided to shoot first, it was not about any moral ground. The decision to implement antislavery policy as a tactic during the war is more accurately attributed to the growing food and resource crisis the Confederacy suffered relative to the huge advantage that guaranteeing freedom to the overwhelming enslaved population there created.
So, yes, it was good that slavery was abolished as a consequence of this War, but it would be distortive to suggest the Union fought to do that specifically. Solidarity among property-owning classes was a much more influential element in whether war broke out, and was indeed a huge reason why the war did not start until southerners started it despite the many good moral reasons to shut it down.
I asked for any source and you linked some (inadequate) secondary sources below that simply discuss that sharecropping was discriminatory. Slavery wasn't bad just because it was racist, and you clearly thought that was the case. I'd be happy to provide a reading list when I have a minute.
Also, you not only said that, but you said it multiple times explicitly throughout this thread. Bud, you gotta stop pretending to know about shit you clearly don't know well enough about.
Okay, Im not 100% certain of what you think you're saying, but this and the comment below aren't coherent.
You said sharecropping was worse than slavery, and that is not elevating the systemic racism experienced by African Americans in a post-Civil War era to the present, it actually diminishes it by denying the severity of slavery. I don't think you realize what you've said, because it is immensely racist.
Black women's bodies were objectified for their reproductive capacity throughout the history of slavery in the US, but especially so in the early decades of the 19th century after the importation of enslaved peoples was banned and the only source of growth for that population was through their bodies. This meant they were raped to produce more slaves dude, sexual violence is inherent to slavery, but think for a minute about just how brutal that single element of the institution is. This is of course not even the only form of sexual violence that occurred within African American enslavement in the US; white slave owners regularly raped women they claimed ownership over, engaged in sexual humiliation as a form of punishment, in Louisiana, wealthy owners would even participate in balls or galas where they'd display their "mistresses," which were enslaved women.
This isn't even getting into the myriad of other vectors of violence, the brutal punishments that were inflicted on them, the degree of forced labour, forced malnutrition (yes, worse than simply being a poor farmer), the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 even allowed the abduction and forced enslavement of relatively any African American in slave or free states should they find themselves in an unfortunate position.
The reason why slavery was bad is the same reason there are constant attempts by racists in the US to claim that racism is over because the "actual" bad elements of it are abolished and the only reason there is discrimination afterward is due to some innate flaw in black people or individuals' character. They did it after slavery was abolished, after black men were elected to political positions, after the great migration, after the Civil Rights Act, after Obama got elected. Erasing the brutality of slavery to elevate some other form of oppression neglects the reality that those two forms of oppression are relational, both in their historical developments and in the ways each are facilitated within a racist system.
Please, do not spread misinformation irresponsibly, even if you're trying to do something good.
Bud, I'm gonna have to see some sources on the sharecropping claim. Either you haven't read enough slave narratives, or there is some insanely obscured events related to sharecropping.
Edit: Okay, so we've confirmed this dude is just racist.