But there’s nothing absolute about dictionary definitions, and they’re subject to change in response to social pressures (like recent changes in the definition of the word “marriage” or “racism”). Although the framers probably conceived of religion in a theistic manner, it is not at all clear that they intended the religion clauses to apply only to theistic religions. We have prepared it for occupation by the shape of things to come.
These two goals are served by defining religion in terms of the religious function in an individual’s life—addressing the fundamental questions of human existence and providing a guide for how to conduct one’s life.
The obvious alternative that Lindsay does not mention is community–a community of shared values, shared experiences, shared traditions, and shared moral outlooks. ), then black feminism, by such luminaries of the 1990s as Judith Butler, bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, and Kimberlé Crenshaw.
existents) and that words are symbols (or collections of sound) that stand for those things. Taking these two ideas together, religion can be defined as a comprehensive belief system that addresses the fundamental questions of human existence, such as the meaning of life and death, man’s role in the universe, and the nature of good and evil, and that gives rise to duties of conscience.
Wind In The Willows Musical Soundtrack, Not on my watch.”.
Do they not know of the staggering death tolls of wars in China over those thousands of pre-Enlightenment years? Who would be there to experience it? Little else short of genuine conspiracy could explain half-baked critical tweets receiving hundreds of thousands of direct interactions than an underlying belief that somehow such tweets have petitioned the new gods in the right ways. This is because, to put it as simply as possible, ideas have consequences. A definition explains what the word means in terms of those referents in reality. Because of the values of free expression, the theory goes, if any litigation is to be had, it must occur after publication, not before. This description is not only virtually synonymous with the Woke approach to adopting a critical consciousness (as a member of any group that has dominant positionality), it is effectively a description of Robin DiAngelo’s best-selling book White Fragility, which might best be understood as a puritanical spiritual guide in the same kind of spirit as Arthur Dent’s The Plain Man’s Path to Heaven (1601). These, too, are Critical Social Justice duties of conscience. Fraternal orders, political parties, and many other manner of non-religious phenomena may also in ways and at times present with the outward forms of religion without being religious in any meaningful way. Life in the community gains meaning in the (almost cosmic) battle for “liberation” against systemic oppression, and individual meaning (and agency) are defined almost entirely in terms of this struggle.
In all cases, especially those in which secular ethics haven’t been put in place as a check on the sociopolitical power of a system of faith, the theology itself has to be examined as it is and taken literally at its own word because those ideas have consequences, one of which is their overimplementation and successful imposition upon people whose personal consciences view life differently. Where does CRT fall on this spectrum.
Consider several excerpts from DiAngelo. 5. People are given no options but to adopt a critical consciousness and do the work of the Critical Social Justice faith or find themselves complicit in the evil of systemic oppression.
And, since the sewing done remotely, a numinous NHS-mediated-bond between the stitchers. As discussed above, it is also clear that, in quasi-postmodern fashion, Wokeness has a clear set of liturgical forms across its varied churches (Antifa, social media activists, and anti-racist bureaucrats certainly call to worship differently), which is to say that it behaves in ways that are clearly religious in structure and practice.
The only difference here is that the Christian looks up to God and His perfection and Glory (a matter of faith in Christianity), and the Wokester looks down at systemic oppression and how imperfect and terrible it has made the ordinary, not aberrational, state of the world (a matter of faith in Critical Social Justice).
In centuries past, governments wielded harsh restraints against the press. We often hear the premises that slavery is America’s “original sin” and, following the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project (a critically revisionist historigraphy), its fundamental organizational principle—one that has removed it from any possibility of salvation by works and that requires a fundamental, if not millenarian, remaking of the nation.
.