“Christians can’t be egalitarians.”
It’s helpful that they come right out and say it.
Narrated by Amy Gunn [wife of Colin, one of the brothers Gunn], Monstrous Regiment argues that “Christians can’t be egalitarians. We believe in hierarchy and inherent authority.”
Oh. Right. Thanks for spelling it out. That’s why we hate and fear you. We think that belief is evil.
And yet they complain about being oppressed.
One of the Gunn brothers, I note, still lives in Hamilton, Scotland (South Lanarkshire). Don’t let that put you off, however; it boasts a particularly fine Town Hall.
http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/hamilton/hamilton/
In my not-notably-humble opinion, you can distinguish pathological, dangerous, poisonous religions from the comparatively non-toxic variety by using the key quote here as a formula and seeing which substitutions fit and which don’t. We could start with Christian denominations:
Pretty much the paradigm for hierarchy and authority.
Yes, they certainly do. Perhaps that’s a bit strange for a denomination that started out rebelling against authority, but long-term consistency (or any consistency whatsoever on any scale) has never been a virtue of faith.
This kinda-sorta fits, but not very snugly. Episcopalian authority tends to have a very bottom-up rather than top-down operation, and the commitment of individual believers (and even individual priests) to doctrine is amusingly loose — which is why so many American Episcopalians I know mockingly call themselves “Episcopagans.”
But I could play that game all day with just Christian denominations, and eventually it would devolve into some variation on Emo Philips’ famous bridge joke. So instead, let’s expand the field a bit:
The sentence works perfectly as a demonstrably true claim about the world. Muslims for whom this sentence isn’t accurate — perhaps there are a handful of anti-authoritarian Sufi mystics floating around out there, for example — have so far removed themselves from what the rest of the faithful consider the Umma that they are marked for death when they say what they believe too clearly and loudly. (Then again, being mystics, they isn’t in much danger of Sufis expressing their beliefs too clearly.)
Pretty much. Some ultra-Reformed communities are pretty lax about hierarchy and inherent authority, but by and large the shoe fits all too well.
Caste system; ’nuff said. Many gods existing in their own internal hierarchy and insisting on the same for mortals is no better than one authoritarian god.
Uhm… not so much. Buddhists clearly make better neighbors. Except for the more magical-thinking-inclined Buddhists who make up nonsense about reborn leaders that the historical Gautama probably would have LOLed at. (Yes, “LOLed.”The Gautama Buddha, forward-thinking visionary that he was, loved text-speak and icanhazcheezburger memes. I read it internet somewhere, so it has to be true.)
Obviously doesn’t fit, to a comical degree.
Ditto, but more so. Unitarians believe that someone should make the coffee, but a subcommittee has yet to achieve consensus on who should make the coffee (although all are in agreement that the coffee should be made from shade-grown, fair trade, ecologically sustainable beans).
Play at home, everybody!
wut. Buddhists believe that a woman needs to first be reborn as a man before she can try to achieve Nirvana. How is that non-hierarchical and egalitarian?
and actually, Sunni Muslims are about as egalitarian as Buddhists: they both have sexist beliefs, and they both put believers above non-believers (in the case of Buddhists, that would be the monks)but otherwise their religious communities are leader-less or have almost anarchic methods of picking temporary leaders. It’s the Shiites who are basically the Muslim version of the RCC.
“Catholics can’t be egalitarians. We believe in hierarchy and inherent authority.”
“Pretty much the paradigm for hierarchy and authority.”
I know this sounds like I’m beating a dead horse, but most of the Catholics that I know don’t give a rats ass about hierarchy and authority, or the pope or bishops, etc. I know that might seem weird, but it’s a view more common among Catholics than many people realize. This does not encompass all Catholics, of course, but I don’t think plugging denominations into your quote, G Felis, really works well.
Thanks for the education, Jadehawk. I tend to think playing “which is the least worst religion” game ain’t so great. All faiths are predicated on the same wrong assumption (faith is a legitimate way of knowing and metric for a good life), and so have fallen into the same traps. Given enough time, they produce the same corruption. Mennonite rape mobs? Are you kidding? Sadly, no.
G Felis,
I think your system works well for individual people, but no so well for denominations for the simple reason that even within denominations there are often wide variations of opinion.
I would also caution against conflating social oppression with religious oppression, as in the case of the Hindu caste system which is (i) not really justified by Hindu texts, (ii) has a long history of attempted reforms within Hinduism itself (many of the Hindu saints opposed the caste system, going back centuries), (iii) there are many examples in early Hinduism of people being into one caste moving into another, and (iv) many non-Hindu groups in India follow caste rules as well, such as Muslims and Christians. It appears from historical and genetic analyses that the caste system probably developed thousands of years ago when groups migrating into India were accepted into Indian society with lower status.
You can say that a religious pretext is sometimes found for the caste system in that it is sometimes said that the castes were created by Krishna, but that’s about is close as it gets.
Correction to above: some more recent genetic work suggests that the caste system evolved within the native groups rather than as a response to migration.
I’ll accept that the caste system isn’t necessarily Hindu in origin (which I already knew, incidentally). But since Hinduism has been used to enforce the caste system for centuries, I fail to see how it’s a distinction that makes a sliver of difference with respect to authoritarianism.
As for Jadehawk’s… uhm… contributions: If I dismissed the reincarnation of lamas as “magical thinking,” I’d think it might be pretty easy to infer that I would consider all of the other claims about reincarnation — authoritarian and otherwise — to be equally magical. That said, the core of Buddhist religion/philosophy has been subject to a huge number and variety of magical accretions, many of which are authoritarian, so whether any given Buddhist sect makes better neighbors is certainly contingent on those accretions. So I can accept that correction with some good grace. But I can’t cut you any slack for not actually READING what I wrote, Jadehawk: I wrote Sufi mystics, not Sunni. There are miles and miles of difference between Sufis and Sunnis.
And why is anyone taking this sooooo seriously to begin with? I attributed a fancy for text-speak to Gautama for cryin’ out loud! Usually it’s theocrats who are humorless, not B&W readers. Sheesh! Forgive me for attempting to lighten the mood (while also pointing out that all religious beliefs and believers aren’t as downright fucking scary as the loony theocrats OB has been writing about lately).
Actually, a lot of the scariest authoritarian churches aren’t all that hierarchical, if we compare them to the Catholics. Muslims are, as far as I know, about as non-hierarchical as Baptists. The Shiites apparently defer to religious learning, so some imams are considered more authoritative than others, but there’s nothing comparable to the chain of command of priest, bishop, cardinal and pope.
It’s often said that Islam has yet to undergo a reformation, but it arguably did so very early, and the fundamentalists prevailed among the Sunnis.
The Baptists have the ostensibly liberal idea that every man is his own priest and can interpret the Bible for himself, paradoxically coupled with the doctrine of the Bible’s inerrancy: it’s entirely up to you, but you’re required to come to the same conclusion as everyone else. Fred Clark at Slacktivist has said some funny things on that score.
Fuck you, too
Not relevant, since the question was about which religions are, due to their religious doctrines (you know, that “magical thinking” stuff), egalitarian and which aren’t. None of it is real. The pope is not magical either, but it’s that doctrine that makes the RCC what it is.
It’s evident that it is you who hasn’t read properly. Where do I imply that you were talking about Sunni Muslims? <i>I</i> was talking about them, to make a point entirely unrelated to that you’ve made about Sufi Mystics: namely, that (some forms of) Buddhism are no more egalitarian than (some forms of) Islam, a distinction you didn’t bother with (while at the same time going into detail with Christian denominations)
not news, and also irrelevant, which you’d know if you followed your own advice and read what people write.
“it was just a joke” has never been an effective excuse for saying incorrect things <i>unless</i> the incorrectness of them is the joke. That’s ok though, I’m used to being called “humorless” by people who can’t admit they’re wrong.
*sigh* i keep forgetting not to use HTML on here
U mad?
bad Jim @ 11 –
Is it possible to be authoritarian without being hierarchical? Even an authoritarian religion with no human hierarchy (if there is such a thing) still puts its book and its god (always male) at the top.
Not that you don’t know that; it’s the point of your last paragraph.
My apologies, Jadehawk. I did misread your point in bringing up Sunnis — although frankly I find the point somewhat less than sharp even when read correctly. Men on top and women on bottom is still a hierarchy, even without a priest-bishop-cardinal-pope-type hierarchy — and partriarchal hierarchy is no less evident among Sunnis than Shi’ites. Sexism is certainly present in some Buddhist traditions, but not all of them by a long shot — and sexism isn’t intrinsic to all Buddhist thought and traditions and writings, not in the way it’s written into the Q’ran and hadiths.
My assessment that you were (and remain) humorless (and unnecessarily hostile) stands. And note that there is no connection between my willingness to admit when I’m wrong and your complete lack of humor, which you only provided more evidence for in your responses.
Then why do most of the catholics that I know keep giving the papal pederasts money and support ?
They may say that they don’t give a rats ass about hierarchy and authority but at the same time they are complicit in propping up the whole rotten edifice.
Ditto for any other religion, if you have the decoder ring, receive the weekly secret message, collect the box tops and send in money in a self-addressed stamped envelope then you are part of the problem.
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Charles Sullivan @#6
If so, why do they call themselves Catholics? I’ll bet that they go to church, baptize their children and put money in the collection plate to support a hierarchy and authority they say they don’t give a rat’s ass about.
It’s time these Catholics you know start to give a rat’s ass about something and stop supporting the RCC.
Charles Sullivan @#6
If so, why do they call themselves Catholics? I’ll bet that they go to church, baptize their children and put money in the collection plate to support a hierarchy and authority they say they don’t give a rat’s ass about.
It’s time these Catholics you know start to give a rat’s ass about something and stop supporting the RCC.
G Felis, if you think I meant to imply that Islam isn’t hierarchical, then you still haven’t grasped what the fuck I was saying. And I dare you to have a look at places like Laos and tell me Buddhism isn’t sexist. Western Buddhism sometimes might not be, but then, neither is Western Islam or Western Christianity in many cases.
Some fun similarities between the theravada and the mahayana; the catholics and the protestants; the shia and the sunni.