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It's interesting that Vance can see the parallels between pride parades and civil religion, but I wonder if he can see how christianity and wokeness fit in. Pride parades are positive rites - they celebrate the existence of LGBTs without demonizing straight people. Then wokeness came along, and its core thesis was original sin: you are born racist, sexist, and homophobic, and only through listening to marginalized voices, unpacking your racism, and de-toxifying your masculinity can you ever hope to be saved.
The comparison to the Christian concept of original sin falls apart immediately.
In Christian theology, everyone is born with original sin and everyone has the opportunity to atone for it through faith and receiving Grace. It's universal and - wait for it - egalitarian.
Wokeness has explicit power hierarchy from birth wherein some groups are sinless throughout life and others are without redemption. Furthermore, Christian original sin is about the origin point of man - we are all fallen. Wokeness is about different historical scorecards for inherited wrongness. Some groups (white males) have inherited such substantial debts that we can actually condemn them as a class (isn't that like, bad?). The Canadians are now finding ways to help people of all types find ways to not be the wrong types.
It's conceptually eugenic - if you're born "wrong" maybe we won't kill you (although if your self-sterilize that would be nice), but you will be confined to a life of non-personhood full of self-flagellation. But if I can "choose" to be something that is biologically impossible, it begs the question - why can't we all just choose to be one of the non-bad character classes?
Sometimes I do believe the double-weirdos when they say that middle aged divorced men transition just so they have some relevance to society today.
I don't know about that. Unless you're a gay black trans disabled palestinian poor nonbinary woman, there's still something for you to feel guilty about. Within every group there are people being made to feel guilty about the more oppressed members of that group. Pride parades themselves have been relentlessly attacked for not including POCs, being too corporate, being sexist, etc. For every article about black men being sexist, there's an article about white women calling the cops and demanding to speak to the manager.
I agree that the woke version of original sin isn't as egalitarian, though I think it still takes advantage of the same psychological mechanisms that Christianity does. Christianity and wokeness are both puritanical religions, in which the goal of being free of sin/privilege is always slightly out of reach. This is good for perpetuating the religion, because it turns people into either evangelists who relentlessly attempt to convert others, or villains who lash out at the religion and provide an example of what not do do. A simple civil religion that says "Thor is great, be like Thor" or "love is love" isn't going to divide people as effectively.
I'd say some sects of Christianity are puritanical ... like the Puritans.
Roman Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity generally teach that being free of sin while on Earth is impossible, but you do your best nonetheless and confess your sins when they do occur. There's humility in this - while I strive to avoid sin, it's an impossible task, so I can't cast the first stone at others.
I think Wokeness is better compared to fundamentalists across Abrahamic religions, wherein the outward performance of piety goes a long way, as opposed to a more restrained daily personal adhere. Like all other fundamentalist organizations, this is a death spiral. People simply try to continually out do one another in demonstrating how "down for the cause" they are until it turns into a circular firing squad.
A common critique of most online Radical Tradtionalist Catholics is that they're trying to be more Catholic than the Pope. This is a way of saying, "you're being too performative and dramatic in how pious you are and, in so doing, are being vainglorious and conceited." It would do the Wokes well if they could have a similar intragroup discussion.
Both Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox doctrine holds the Virgin Mary to be personally sinless(the EOC dispute over the immaculate conception doesn’t contest this- original sin isn’t personal sin) and it’s not a tiny minority of theologians who think John the Baptist never committed a personal sin either.
Fair and true. And an oversight on my part.
A better phrasing for my original:
"Roman Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity generally teach that being free of sin while on Earth is impossible ... for currently alive and practicing humans"
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Does prepending "virtually" before "impossible" change anything significant about his point?
Considering the Virgin Mary is explicitly the role model(among others) for becoming a saint, to which all are called, yes. Spiritual masters(and I know Catholic spiritual masters) explicitly and literally believe that it is possible to attain a level of holiness in which one just stops sinning, albeit after many years’ progress in the spiritual life.
Did sainthood become something a typical person has a decent chance to attain, when I wasn't looking? If not, I don't see how that changes his point.
By the definition of ‘go to heaven’, yes, per Catholic doctrine everyone on earth has the technical ability to do this and the responsibility to try their damndest.
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Ah, so they've speedrun Calvinism.
I knew I could count on a banger from @hydroacetylene.
In a word, yes. Wokeness has all of the hallmarks of fundamentalist revival movement. There's no coherent worldview or deeper investigated theology, it all ends at the level of "what we're fighting for is right because we're fighting so hard for it."
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I would argue that the shift from the Pride flag to the Progress Pride flag more explicitly aligns it with the hard left and makes it a more exclusionary movement. It is now a flag that excludes only one group (straight white people). And that's the flag that you see flown from government buildings and put up in school classrooms.
The Pride flag says "we're gay!". The Progress Pride flag says "We represent everybody but straight whites!". So it is kind of a short hand for the left coalition.
Specifically, it excludes white fertility. Wokeness is more like catharism than Christianity, but the whole ‘the world is evil’ thing is aimed mostly at white people.
‘Queer’ white people have lots of heterosexual sex, but they don’t have babies very often. Cathars were also really into weird sex stuff for the same reasons- the world is evil and so bringing more of it forwards is bad. Likewise if whiteness is evil continuing it is bad.
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