Discover Top Posts Tagged with #religious structures

Increasingly, we are seeing insistences that Social Justice has become a new religion. The purpose of this essay is to explore this topic in some depth. Because this essay is inordinately long—because the topic is inordinately complicated—it is broken into sections, as listed below. The reader is encouraged to engage with it in pieces and to treat it as he or she would a short book on this topic.

Comprehensive examination of Social Justice (the uppercase S, uppercase J Bailey vs the lowercase s, lowercase j Motte), Wokeism and Critical Theory as religious - or religious-like - structures, by Mike Nayna and James Lindsay.

Table of Contents

Social Justice and Religion – What I intend to say and not say about whether Social Justice is best thought of as a religion—mostly housekeeping and a bit dry

Ideologically Motivated Moral Communities – A Durkheimian view of the religion-like sociocultural phenomenon to which both Social Justice and religions belong

Religions Meet Needs – An elaboration on the previous section that explains why human beings organize into ideologically motivated moral communities

Social Justice Institutionalized – A presentation of how Social Justice exhibits institutionalization, which is central to organized religions

The Scholarly Canon – How academic scholarship in “grievance studies” serves as a scriptural canon for Social Justice

Faith in Social Justice – An exposition on faith and its role in the Social Justice ideology

The Mythological Core of Applied Postmodernism – A lengthy discussion of mythology inside and outside of religion and how postmodernism and its currently ascendant derivatives fit into this framework. (If you really want to understand the deepest part of this essay, it’s probably in this section, which can be read first if desired.)

Pocket Epistemologies – A discussion of the means by which an ideological tribe aims to legitimize the “special knowledge” that serves it and how this manifests in Social Justice

A Focus on the Unconscious – A more focused discussion upon the methods of special knowledge production of ideological tribes and the postmodern numinous experience

Ritual, Redemption, and Prayer – A short section about the role these play in ideological tribes and how they manifest in Social Justice

Gender Nuns and the Grand Wizards of the Diversity Board – Addresses the function of the priest caste within ideological tribes, including Social Justice, and how they put their faith into practice

Summary – A short summary of the case made about whether Social Justice constitutes a religion. TL;DR: Yes and no, and mostly yes.

What Can We Do with This? – A brief discussion of secularism, construed much more broadly than usual, and how it applies to dealing with a very religion-like Social Justice

From: “What Can We Do with This?”

Liberal societies have already developed and made one of their cornerstones the answer to dealing with groups that forward special knowledge as though it is knowledge, and in the specific case of forming a bulwark between church and state, it is known as secularism. Secularism, taken as the separation of church and state, can be understood plainly enough as a committed prevention of institutionalizing religious doctrines and practice in liberal governments.

[..] to the degree that we can accept that Social Justice is a faith-based program based upon a kind of locally legitimized special revelation...

[...] ... it immediately gives every person the same degree of permission to guiltlessly reject the moralizing of any moral tribe—including Social Justice—that he (or she) would apply to any (religious or other) faith program of which he were skeptical. Christians, in common with atheists and Hindus, have no problem not seeing themselves as morally deficient for failing to recognize Jewish or Islamic beliefs, for example, and in secular societies there can be no effective compunction put upon them to keep or even to respect alien faiths. Similarly, no one need feel any guilt for rejecting the applied postmodern mythology or tenets of faith which exist at the center of Social Justice. In this sense, viewing Social Justice as a cultural entity very much like a religion is a moral permission slip to question, doubt, and challenge it as such, to demand rigorous evidence for it before it should be implemented, and to treat objections in very much the same way as one would those extended by any religious faith under similar conditions.

Social Justice, because it is an (applied) postmodern mythological system upon which a moral tribe is built, is not technically a religion but is a kind of faith system. This raises serious questions about how we should deal with its attempts to institutionalize itself in various cultural enterprises—especially education—under the guise of being secular in the broad sense merely because it qualifies in the narrow sense. Most importantly, however, it provides all of us with explicit permission to treat its claims and advances in the same way we would any other faith—say, like Scientology—and to proceed accordingly without the guilt it attempts to foist upon us as a conversion mechanism.

#postmodernism #postmodern religion #pseudo religion #woke #wokeism #wokeness as religion #cult of woke #religion #religious structures #Social Justice #applied postmodernism #religion is a mental illness #criticism of ideas #criticism of religion #ideology #religious ideology

Brihadeeswarar Temple in Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu

Gajasurasamhara, a fierce form of the Hindu god Shiva as the slayer of the elephant demon Gajasura. Shiva is shown dancing vigorously, wearing the flayed elephant hide of Gajasura.

The imagery symbolizes the triumph of divine forces over demonic elements. In sculpture, Gajasurasamhara is often pictured with eight or sixteen arms. These multiple arms are uncommon in Shiva's iconography and are exclusively used in his combative forms. In such multiple-armed images, Shiva may carry various attributes like the trishula, a damaru, sword, kapala, pasha, deer, ankusha (goad), vajra (thunderbolt), arrow, gada (mace), khatavanga, tanka (a chisel-like weapon), bow, snake, the elephant's tusk and akshamala. His hands may be held in suchihasta mudra (gesture to draw or point out attention) or vismaya mudra. At least, two arms hold the elephant skin around the body.

Parvati and Kartikaye are seen standing nearby witnessing the event.

#brihadeeswarar temple #hindublr #hinduism #bharat #sanatan dharma #south indian temple #hindu temple #eastern religion #shiva #shivji #fierce form of shivji #shiv parvati #religious architecture #religious sculpture #religious structures #tamil nadu #desiblr #sanskrit #vedic god