Genuine question: Is the issue you take that I criticized astrology, that I gave a throwaway carveout for religion, or both?
the twin facts that astrology gets disproportionate condemnation
Does it though? I don’t know if that’s a fact. It gets more criticism than other pseudoscientific bullshit, but that could be because people encounter it more. It’s a durable fad that’s easier to bring up than, say, crystal healing. I criticize astrology because it is a common ideological malady I run into in leftist organizing spaces. I took the “well it’s not harming anyone so I’ll just politely say ‘I don’t fuck with it, leave me out and I’ll keep my mouth shut about it’” approach for a long time, but the practice of magical thinking turned out to not just be siloed to this one field and that’s a problem.
If the most common ideological malady I ran into in leftist organizing spaces were radlib NATOist brainworms I’d criticize that more. Oh wait, I do, far more than I criticize astrology. If the most common ideological malady in these spaces were encroaching evangelical christianity, I’d be criticizing that more too. There is a whole host of shit I hold myself back on bashing because it’s less common or because people don’t get it up in my face the way they do with astrology so I don’t perceive it as prevalent. There’s a whole host of shit outside the realm of leftist spaces that are problems, but they’re outside my scope. What good is it for me to say “hey those Baptists? Terrible, the lot of them” here where the only Baptists reading this are probably the feds spying on us?" Audience and scope matter. We already know that the christian nationalists are terrible.
and that this is also true for anything else seen as “for women”
It’s skirting dangerously close to sexism to call astrology “for women”, but I think the “seen as” part saves it. I think the meme that astrology is “for women” is problematic though, as well as untrue (I know too many men who are into it too), and it should be pushed back on because there’s something sexist about it. Is the implication that astrology gets criticized because of misogyny? I’m not criticizing astrology because people see it as “feminine” (I don’t). I’m not going around bashing nail lacquer which has a much more established feminine coding than astrology does. If MRA bros are going around criticizing astrology while believing that sigma males are a thing, then sure, I’d buy that they’re being misogynistic because they clearly don’t mind magical thinking and pseudoscience, they just see it as something “for women” (another way they’re being sexist) and that’s why it’s bad. Right answer (astrology is bad), wrong reasons (at least 2 layers of misogyny).
You could say the exact same shit about something like religion, and you dont have the same eagerness to call that silly shit for the terminally stupid.
I’m just going to respond to this and your other comment here:
I had a very hard anti-religion phase years ago, but I’ve since noticed that there’s more depth to religion as a cultural practice. Some of it is still horrible. Some of it looks helpful to people. I find it harder to talk about religion coherently because there are so many wildly different ones.
People marched to do genocide under the sign of the cross, cultures were destroyed in the name of the Lord, God, whatever name he has been called, has been invoked to justify every possible crime, every possible prejudice, every possible irrationality, and you deliberately ignore
Religion is a powerful tool for social control. It is not the material reason for social control. You’re talking about atrocities committed for land, resources, and power that were and are done under the banner of religion. But at the same time, there were peasant uprisings in the name of religion as well that boiled down to “a saint visited me and told me that since class war is violent, we should kill the barons” (before Marx was around. They used the language of Christianity to express class war sentiments). These wars are political and material in nature and root causes even when done under the banner and rationalization of religion. The various wars between Protestants and Catholics after they split were not about religious ideology and blind hatred of those bastards who believe in a different god, they were about politics, land, and money.
I don’t disagree that religion is also immaterial, irrational, the supernatural components are demonstrably false, and the institutionalized parts of it are harmful. Perhaps I should be more critical of it as well. But there’s more to it than that. It becomes an important part of people’s cultures and families, generationally. I don’t know how to cover that competently, because it’s incredibly varied and thereby so much more complicated to address. Superficial-level discussions that I saw from the cesspool of /r/atheism over a decade ago tended toward just finding ways to be racist toward populations of Muslims, and/or taking people’s traumas about evangelical christianity out on Muslims, so I’ve gotten allergic to that level of discussion. To delve into the problem with Religions as a whole immediately requires distinguishing between myriad different sects. The problems with Baptism are not the same as the problems with Catholicism are not the same as the problems with Hinduism are not the same as the problems with mainstream Sunnism are not the same as the problems with mainstream Shiism are not the same as the problems with Salafism are not the same as the problems with Reform Judaism are not the same as the problems with Orthodox Judaism are not the same as the problems with Zoroastrianism are not the same as the problems with Buddhism are not the same as the problems with Yazidism. That is all so far outside my realm of expertise that I dare not even attempt it. I feel I have to leave it at this: I find it hard to say “all religion is bad” when there are whole strains that use the language and framework of their religions to actively push for social, racial, and economic justice (Liberation Theology). I find it hard to say “all religion is bad” when I see how the Palestinian resistance — and by that I mean especially the noncombatants who are being genocided for settler-colonialism and empire — turn to it for strength and solace during the darkest times.
I’ll concede that there’s a struggle to be had about religion, but it is a different struggle, or maybe a bunch of different struggles. I think that struggle is better had within the religious communities. I’m willing to discuss problems with Islam with Muslims and ex-Muslims; I don’t feel like discussing it with people who haven’t been part of the religious umbrella. If I saw some strain of evangelical christianity evangelizing and spreading within leftist circles like I see happening with astrology then I would be much more passionate about arguing against it as well. None of that detracts from my criticisms of astrology. Perhaps I just shouldn’t have mentioned religion at all.
Genuine question: Is the issue you take that I criticized astrology, that I gave a throwaway carveout for religion, or both?
Both.
Does it though?
Yes, you are literally doing it right now.
It’s skirting dangerously close to sexism to call astrology “for women”, but I think the “seen as” part saves it.
It is absolutely not sexist to point out that things associated with women get more scrutiny and more criticism than things associated with men. Look inwards on this one.
Astrology is a soft target for easy rationalism points and is criticised frequently by men as such.
Religion is a powerful tool for social control. It is not the material reason for social control. You’re talking about atrocities committed for land, resources, and power that were and are done under the banner of religion.
In which religion bears blame. Yes. You cannot pretend that the religious and their institutions did not participate in these crimes, and that they did not justify what they did using religion.
But at the same time, there were peasant uprisings in the name of religion as well that boiled down to “a saint visited me and told me that since class war is violent, we should kill the barons” (before Marx was around. They used the language of Christianity to express class war sentiments).
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of jacqueries. They were not class warfare in the traditional marxist sense. As Marx noted about a more literate and more aware peasantry closer to his own time, peasatry as it existed could not form a mass movement aware of its nature as a class, by coming together they do not form a unit distinct from the individual but become simply more of the individual thing, just as you cannot put enough potatoes in a sack to change their nature into anything but a sack of potatoes.
Even during the Bundschuh movement and the subsequent peasant wars, the peasants did not at any point call for the overthrow or murder of the aristocracy, or in any way oppose them as a class. But sought a direct readressment of specific grievances, which included the Catholic church refusing to provide local priests to read the bible to the peasantry and leaving smaller churches empty to focus on the wealthy cities. They begged for proper aristocrats and a return to existing aristocratic feudal law, and a withdrawal of the excesses of the aristocrats to that of a mere generation ago. Because they had a belief, codified and passed down for centuries by the catholic church, that their subservient role was a part of the natural order that could not be changed and trying to was tantamount to blasphemy.
This was in part because the Catholic church existed and continues to exist to perform one function and that function is to maintain an existing social hierarchy for the benefit of the ruling class. Religion has a specific societal function too separate from that of the specific institution, to justify the unjustifiable, to give meaning to the meaningless and to soothe the pains of the souls that cannot otherwise be soothed. It is the opium of the people.
And you look at organisations that have murdered millions, kidnapped thousands from their parents and tried to systematically erase their culture, and ask people to believe that humans can speak to the dead, walk on water, and possibly that you can turn wine into literal blood by waving your hand over it and saying the magic words, and a group of people making star charts and say “Well only one of these things is worth condemning for its moral transgressions and irrationality and it ain’t the murderers”
I appreciate your points about religion; thank you for those even though we are arguing. It’s going to take some time to digest those so I don’t have anything productive to add, but I see your point and think there’s something of value to be gleaned there. However, I suspect that the most you’ll get out of me is not that I give pseudoscience a pass (I have far too much negative personal history with such charlatanism; astrology is close to the least of those bugbears, it’s just the one that comes up most often because it is the least niche), it’d be that I don’t give some religions a pass. As I understand your answer to the first question I asked, that will still upset you.
And on that note, gonna be real, the fact it bothers you that I criticized astrology specifically, your missing of the points about proportionality and scope, and your continued insistence that it is misogynistic of me to criticize astrology make me disinterested in trying to have a productive argument with you. I’m going to stop responding to you in this thread on this matter because if I wanted the thrill of a flamewar I’d just go to and spar with sshitlibss instead of comrades. I don’t fully understand how the disengage rule works, but since I’ve said a couple things in this comment, if you want to respond or rebut, I support you responding to this comment with any final jabs you want to get in. I can’t promise that I’ll read them and I def won’t respond since I’m already riled up, but onlookers can, and I do not think it would be fair for me to get in the last word while also calling for disengagement and stopping you from getting to say your piece.
Even though I am ending this exchange in a pretty brash manner I don’t mean it with a ton of fire or vitriol toward you specifically. Peace
Genuine question: Is the issue you take that I criticized astrology, that I gave a throwaway carveout for religion, or both?
Does it though? I don’t know if that’s a fact. It gets more criticism than other pseudoscientific bullshit, but that could be because people encounter it more. It’s a durable fad that’s easier to bring up than, say, crystal healing. I criticize astrology because it is a common ideological malady I run into in leftist organizing spaces. I took the “well it’s not harming anyone so I’ll just politely say ‘I don’t fuck with it, leave me out and I’ll keep my mouth shut about it’” approach for a long time, but the practice of magical thinking turned out to not just be siloed to this one field and that’s a problem.
If the most common ideological malady I ran into in leftist organizing spaces were radlib NATOist brainworms I’d criticize that more. Oh wait, I do, far more than I criticize astrology. If the most common ideological malady in these spaces were encroaching evangelical christianity, I’d be criticizing that more too. There is a whole host of shit I hold myself back on bashing because it’s less common or because people don’t get it up in my face the way they do with astrology so I don’t perceive it as prevalent. There’s a whole host of shit outside the realm of leftist spaces that are problems, but they’re outside my scope. What good is it for me to say “hey those Baptists? Terrible, the lot of them” here where the only Baptists reading this are probably the feds spying on us?" Audience and scope matter. We already know that the christian nationalists are terrible.
It’s skirting dangerously close to sexism to call astrology “for women”, but I think the “seen as” part saves it. I think the meme that astrology is “for women” is problematic though, as well as untrue (I know too many men who are into it too), and it should be pushed back on because there’s something sexist about it. Is the implication that astrology gets criticized because of misogyny? I’m not criticizing astrology because people see it as “feminine” (I don’t). I’m not going around bashing nail lacquer which has a much more established feminine coding than astrology does. If MRA bros are going around criticizing astrology while believing that sigma males are a thing, then sure, I’d buy that they’re being misogynistic because they clearly don’t mind magical thinking and pseudoscience, they just see it as something “for women” (another way they’re being sexist) and that’s why it’s bad. Right answer (astrology is bad), wrong reasons (at least 2 layers of misogyny).
I’m just going to respond to this and your other comment here: I had a very hard anti-religion phase years ago, but I’ve since noticed that there’s more depth to religion as a cultural practice. Some of it is still horrible. Some of it looks helpful to people. I find it harder to talk about religion coherently because there are so many wildly different ones.
Religion is a powerful tool for social control. It is not the material reason for social control. You’re talking about atrocities committed for land, resources, and power that were and are done under the banner of religion. But at the same time, there were peasant uprisings in the name of religion as well that boiled down to “a saint visited me and told me that since class war is violent, we should kill the barons” (before Marx was around. They used the language of Christianity to express class war sentiments). These wars are political and material in nature and root causes even when done under the banner and rationalization of religion. The various wars between Protestants and Catholics after they split were not about religious ideology and blind hatred of those bastards who believe in a different god, they were about politics, land, and money.
I don’t disagree that religion is also immaterial, irrational, the supernatural components are demonstrably false, and the institutionalized parts of it are harmful. Perhaps I should be more critical of it as well. But there’s more to it than that. It becomes an important part of people’s cultures and families, generationally. I don’t know how to cover that competently, because it’s incredibly varied and thereby so much more complicated to address. Superficial-level discussions that I saw from the cesspool of /r/atheism over a decade ago tended toward just finding ways to be racist toward populations of Muslims, and/or taking people’s traumas about evangelical christianity out on Muslims, so I’ve gotten allergic to that level of discussion. To delve into the problem with Religions as a whole immediately requires distinguishing between myriad different sects. The problems with Baptism are not the same as the problems with Catholicism are not the same as the problems with Hinduism are not the same as the problems with mainstream Sunnism are not the same as the problems with mainstream Shiism are not the same as the problems with Salafism are not the same as the problems with Reform Judaism are not the same as the problems with Orthodox Judaism are not the same as the problems with Zoroastrianism are not the same as the problems with Buddhism are not the same as the problems with Yazidism. That is all so far outside my realm of expertise that I dare not even attempt it. I feel I have to leave it at this: I find it hard to say “all religion is bad” when there are whole strains that use the language and framework of their religions to actively push for social, racial, and economic justice (Liberation Theology). I find it hard to say “all religion is bad” when I see how the Palestinian resistance — and by that I mean especially the noncombatants who are being genocided for settler-colonialism and empire — turn to it for strength and solace during the darkest times.
I’ll concede that there’s a struggle to be had about religion, but it is a different struggle, or maybe a bunch of different struggles. I think that struggle is better had within the religious communities. I’m willing to discuss problems with Islam with Muslims and ex-Muslims; I don’t feel like discussing it with people who haven’t been part of the religious umbrella. If I saw some strain of evangelical christianity evangelizing and spreading within leftist circles like I see happening with astrology then I would be much more passionate about arguing against it as well. None of that detracts from my criticisms of astrology. Perhaps I just shouldn’t have mentioned religion at all.
Both.
Yes, you are literally doing it right now.
It is absolutely not sexist to point out that things associated with women get more scrutiny and more criticism than things associated with men. Look inwards on this one. Astrology is a soft target for easy rationalism points and is criticised frequently by men as such.
In which religion bears blame. Yes. You cannot pretend that the religious and their institutions did not participate in these crimes, and that they did not justify what they did using religion.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of jacqueries. They were not class warfare in the traditional marxist sense. As Marx noted about a more literate and more aware peasantry closer to his own time, peasatry as it existed could not form a mass movement aware of its nature as a class, by coming together they do not form a unit distinct from the individual but become simply more of the individual thing, just as you cannot put enough potatoes in a sack to change their nature into anything but a sack of potatoes. Even during the Bundschuh movement and the subsequent peasant wars, the peasants did not at any point call for the overthrow or murder of the aristocracy, or in any way oppose them as a class. But sought a direct readressment of specific grievances, which included the Catholic church refusing to provide local priests to read the bible to the peasantry and leaving smaller churches empty to focus on the wealthy cities. They begged for proper aristocrats and a return to existing aristocratic feudal law, and a withdrawal of the excesses of the aristocrats to that of a mere generation ago. Because they had a belief, codified and passed down for centuries by the catholic church, that their subservient role was a part of the natural order that could not be changed and trying to was tantamount to blasphemy.
This was in part because the Catholic church existed and continues to exist to perform one function and that function is to maintain an existing social hierarchy for the benefit of the ruling class. Religion has a specific societal function too separate from that of the specific institution, to justify the unjustifiable, to give meaning to the meaningless and to soothe the pains of the souls that cannot otherwise be soothed. It is the opium of the people.
And you look at organisations that have murdered millions, kidnapped thousands from their parents and tried to systematically erase their culture, and ask people to believe that humans can speak to the dead, walk on water, and possibly that you can turn wine into literal blood by waving your hand over it and saying the magic words, and a group of people making star charts and say “Well only one of these things is worth condemning for its moral transgressions and irrationality and it ain’t the murderers”
I appreciate your points about religion; thank you for those even though we are arguing. It’s going to take some time to digest those so I don’t have anything productive to add, but I see your point and think there’s something of value to be gleaned there. However, I suspect that the most you’ll get out of me is not that I give pseudoscience a pass (I have far too much negative personal history with such charlatanism; astrology is close to the least of those bugbears, it’s just the one that comes up most often because it is the least niche), it’d be that I don’t give some religions a pass. As I understand your answer to the first question I asked, that will still upset you.
And on that note, gonna be real, the fact it bothers you that I criticized astrology specifically, your missing of the points about proportionality and scope, and your continued insistence that it is misogynistic of me to criticize astrology make me disinterested in trying to have a productive argument with you. I’m going to stop responding to you in this thread on this matter because if I wanted the thrill of a flamewar I’d just go to
and spar with sshitlibss instead of comrades. I don’t fully understand how the disengage rule works, but since I’ve said a couple things in this comment, if you want to respond or rebut, I support you responding to this comment with any final jabs you want to get in. I can’t promise that I’ll read them and I def won’t respond since I’m already riled up, but onlookers can, and I do not think it would be fair for me to get in the last word while also calling for disengagement and stopping you from getting to say your piece.
Even though I am ending this exchange in a pretty brash manner I don’t mean it with a ton of fire or vitriol toward you specifically. Peace