This is the first intermission of 👯, listed as season 1 episode 7 for filing purposes. In this episode, TracingWoodgrains, MasterThief, The Sultan Of Swing, XantosCell, and Unsaying discuss religious community.
This discussion was originally slated to be released as an episode of the The Bailey podcast, but eventually it was decided that it should be published elsewhere instead, and so it finds its home here, at 👯.
The image used in the video is Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld's Pentecost woodcut for "Die Bibel in Bildern", 1860:
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Schnorr_von_Carolsfeld_Bibel_in_Bildern_1860_226.png
Show notes:
36:00 Unsaying's superintelligence of deity post: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/a54d99/the_compression_problem/
39:47 Despite instructions made in the moment, this tangent was not cut out, as it turned out to be relevant. Normally, any requests to cut something out would be honored, but everyone involved assented to this edit of the episode.
47:03 Xantos's snake-handling video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=2dlnqRDmmds
Extended show notes:
(Discussing unsuitability for marriage and the path of monasticism) https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/hkesjh/comment/fwy8ofv/
https://www.americamagazine.org/content/all-things/watching-spotlight-young-priest
https://babylonbee.com/news/dozens-of-bible-verses-come-forward-to-accuse-joel-osteen-of-abuse
(If people want more BG on heresies, i dunno) https://old.reddit.com/r/Catholicism/comments/4ihgog/extra_history_on_early_christian_schisms_pt_2/
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Notes -
I think this would have benefitted immensely by the inclusion of somebody who has experience with non-Abrahamic or pre-Abrahamic religion: paganism, Shinto, various folk religions, etc. When I was into atheist Tumblr, I often encountered the idea that Western atheists, since their only point of reference for what religion can look like is Christianity - which makes explicit claims to universality and is full of propositional claims which its adherents are expected to accept on a personal epistemic level - they have an arrogant, overly-dismissive, and unjustifiably contemptuous attitude toward religion as a category.
Since I was indeed one of those arrogant Western Christianity-hating atheists, this always struck me as ludicrous - just more woke “white men do atheism like that, while us wise Atheists Of Color do atheism like this”. Now that I’ve started to dig deeper into pre-Christian religion, though, I’m starting to really appreciate what those people meant, and I wish this podcast had included the perspective of somebody who has experienced a type of religious community which does not resemble the Abrahamic religions-of-the-book.
Yeah, "religious" is just the default state of pre-modern-atheist communities - the differences between two of those (aside from technology) is comparable to the differences between one of them and us. And most of the, say, problems with religious communities won't be innate to their religiosity, but be practical decisions that, though related to or justified by the religion, could easily be implemented without said religion, or the religion be used to justify different practices.
You don't (contrary to a lot of modern christian rhetoric) need a person-as-God to have "purpose", "strong morals", or a non-atomized community, the "multiple gods" counterexample is obvious but non god-centered rituals and beliefs could back those up with other sources. And by extension, the reason we don't have the latter is not 'lack of christianity', but other causes leading to both.
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