#comparative religion
Advaita Vedanta and Buddhism: Andrew Holecek in conversation with Swami Sarvapriyananda
A fantastic exploration of the finer points of non-dual philosophy.
My hot take is that it’s cartoonishly evil how one of the core pillars of christianity is that their goal is to convert the entire world & they explicitly state this very frequently & everybody’s just like yeah that’s normal
Fantasy story where The Empire is very polite about their intentions when they’re not actively literally mass-murdering people if they refuse to join them so nobody questions it
The book gets criticized for being unrealistic while the united states of america exists
Isn’t that every religions goal? Correct me if I’m wrong but doesn’t every religion think to some extent that everyone should be a part of their religion?
No. Most religions don’t. It’s just that the ones people are most likely to be familiar with, namely xtianity and Islam, are “universal” religions, meaning they proselytise. It makes sense that these would become the biggest and most well-known religions, because of this very thing – religion was used as an excuse/justification for imperialism – and so people often assume that’s just what religion is, but it’s not true for really most of the religions of the world.
Historically, polytheistic cultures, upon encountering other polytheistic cultures, would just assume that those gods are those people’s local gods and so on. It wasn’t a threat to them. But even among monotheistic religions, it’s really mostly just xtianity and Islam. Judaism does not care about making non-Jews Jewish; there are some basic moral principles Judaism expects non-Jews to adhere to, like not murdering, but in orthodox Judaism it is still customary to turn away potential converts three times before even considering them. The Druze religion is even more tightly closed. In order to be considered Druze, both of your parents must be Druze, and conversion and proselytism have been expressly forbidden for almost a thousand years. I’m not sure what the Bahá’í view on proselytism is, but they generally believe that the other world religions have the same core truths.
Many, probably most by number, world religions are ethnoreligions, not universal religions. That means that religion and culture are tied together. Judaism and the Druze religion are examples of ethnoreligions. That is why a person can be, say, an atheist Jew. Most indigenous/folk religions don’t care about what other groups believe and have no interest in making other people outside their culture conform to their beliefs. By number of religions, the idea that you hold an absolute truth that you must make other people believe (and the idea that you must do this because if you don’t they will not be “saved” and will suffer punishment) is very uncommon. It’s just that this belief has enabled a small handful of religions to dominate through colonialism and war and so those are the ones people think of when they think about “what religion is.”
I encourage you to read about indigenous/folk religions to understand this more. Here is a list of ethnic religions, to see the sheer number (and this is not necessarily complete, because there is some argument about terms like folk religion vs ethnoreligion vs indigenous religion and so on). I appreciate the politeness of the question, because there are a LOT of ex-evangelical atheists (or people who grew up in what we call “cultural xtianity”: you may not be religious yourself, but you grew up in a society that was heavily xtian, had xtian holidays as the mainstream, and absorbed xtian values/philosophies as part of cultural norms, and because this all seems normal to you, you have a blind spot, because it’s hard to see our own culture from inside, especially when it’s the majority) who are very keen to disparage all religions as being identical to the brand of fundamentalist xtianity they are familiar with, and it’s a racist and harmful position that they are VERY reluctant to give up. Because a lot of these religions are ethnoreligions and inseparable from culture, wanting to eradicate all religious practice/belief is the same as cultural genocide. It’s important to understand that A. you have this blind spot, and B. that most religions are not like xtianity, and religion is not synonymous with right-wing politics, homophobia, sexism, violence, controlling rules etc.
Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism are the only missionary religions that became powerful enough to exert significant political control, and once a religion can do that it tends to get more aggressive about proselytization and conversion, but Buddhism allows for syncretization in a way that Christianity and Islam don’t and generally functions very differently from both (although persecution of non-Buddhists by Buddhists is a thing). Basically you generally don’t get the goal “convert the entire world” until it looks like you might be able to (or at least your corner of it).
There’s plenty of missionary religions out there and I’d imagine most of them have the potential to start wanting to take over the world even if they don’t now.
In Ras Michael Brown’s African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry Brown wants to talk about the history of the cultural and spiritual practices of African descendants in the American south. To do this, he traces discusses the transport of central, western, and west-central African captives to South Carolina in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,finally, lightly touching on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Brown explores how these African peoples brought, maintained, and transmitted their understandings of spiritual relationships between the physical land of the living and the spiritual land of the dead, and from there how the notions of the African simbi spirits translated through a particular region of South Carolina.
In Kelly Oliver’s The Colonization of Psychic Space, she constructs and argues for a new theory of subjectivity and individuation—one predicated on a radical forgiveness born of interrelationality and reconciliation between self and culture. Oliver argues that we have neglected to fully explore exactly how sublimation functions in the creation of the self,saying that oppression leads to a unique form of alienation which never fully allows the oppressed to learn to sublimate—to translate their bodily impulses into articulated modes of communication—and so they cannot become a full individual, only ever struggling against their place in society, never fully reconciling with it.
These works are very different, so obviously, to achieve their goals, Brown and Oliver lean on distinct tools,methodologies, and sources. Brown focuses on the techniques of religious studies as he examines a religious history: historiography, anthropology, sociology, and linguistic and narrative analysis. He explores the written records and first person accounts of enslaved peoples and their captors, as well as the contextualizing historical documents of Black liberation theorists who were contemporary to the time frame he discusses. Oliver’s project is one of social psychology, and she explores it through the lenses of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis,social construction theory, Hegelian dialectic, and the works of Franz Fanon. She is looking to build psycho-social analysis that takes both the social and the individual into account, fundamentally asking the question “How do we belong to the social as singular?”Read the rest of Selfhood, Coloniality, African-Atlantic Religion, and Interrelational CutlureatTechnoccult
Scott Midson’s Cyborg Theology and Kathleen Richardson’s An Anthropology of Robots and AI both trace histories of technology and human-machine interactions, and both make use of fictional narratives as well as other theoretical techniques. The goal of Midson’s book is to put forward a new understanding of what it means to be human, an understanding to supplant the myth of a perfect “Edenic” state and the various disciplines’ dichotomous oppositions of “human” and “other.” This new understanding, Midson says, exists at the intersection of technological, theological, and ecological contexts,and he argues that an understanding of the conceptual category of the cyborg can allow us to understand this assemblage in a new way.
That is, all of the categories of “human,” “animal,” “technological,” “natural,” and more are far more porous than people tend to admit and their boundaries should be challenged; this understanding of the cyborg gives us the tools to do so. Richardson, on the other hand, seeks to argue that what it means to be human has been devalued by the drive to render human capacities and likenesses into machines, and that this drive arises from the male-dominated and otherwise socialized spaces in which these systems are created. The more we elide the distinction between the human and the machine, the more we will harm human beings and human relationships.
Midson’s training is in theology and religious studies, and so it’s no real surprise that he primarily uses theological exegesis (and specifically an exegesis of Genesis creation stories), but he also deploys the tools of cyborg anthropology (specifically Donna Haraway’s 1991 work on cyborgs), sociology, anthropology, and comparative religious studies. He engages in interdisciplinary narrative analysis and comparison,exploring the themes from several pieces of speculative fiction media and the writings of multiple theorists from several disciplines.Read the rest of Cyborg Theology and An Anthropology of Robots and AIatTechnoccult
Elizabeth A Wilson’s Affect and Artificial Intelligence traces the history and development of the field of artificial intelligence (AI) in the West, from the 1950’s to the 1990’s and early 2000’s to argue that the key thing missing from all attempts to develop machine minds is a recognition of the role that affect plays in social and individual development. She directly engages many of the creators of the field of AI within their own lived historical context and uses Bruno Latour, Freudian Psychoanalysis, Alan Turning’s AI and computational theory, gender studies,cybernetics, Silvan Tomkins’ affect theory, and tools from STS to make her point. Using historical examples of embodied robots and programs, as well as some key instances in which social interactions caused rifts in the field,Wilson argues that crucial among all missing affects is shame, which functions from the social to the individual, and vice versa.
J.Lorand Matory’s The Fetish Revisited looks at a particular section of the history of European-Atlantic and Afro-Atlantic conceptual engagement, namely the place where Afro-Atlantic religious and spiritual practices were taken up and repackaged by white German men. Matory demonstrates that Marx and Freud took the notion of the Fetish and repurposed its meaning and intent, further arguing that this is a product of the both of the positionality of both of these men in their historical and social contexts. Both Marx and Freud, Matory says, Jewish men of potentially-indeterminate ethnicity who could have been read as “mulatto,” and whose work was designed to place them in the good graces of the white supremacist, or at least dominantly hierarchical power structure in which they lived.
Matory combines historiography,anthropology, ethnography, oral history, critical engagement Marxist and Freudian theory and, religious studies, and personal memoir to show that the Fetish is mutually a constituting category, one rendered out of the intersection of individuals, groups, places, needs, and objects. Further, he argues, by trying to use the fetish to mark out a category of “primitive savagery,” both Freud and Marx actually succeeded in making fetishes of their own theoretical frameworks, both in the original sense, and their own pejorative senses.
Read the rest of Affect and Artificial Intelligence and The Fetish RevisitedatTechnoccult
In Ras Michael Brown’s African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry Brown wants to talk about the history of the cultural and spiritual practices of African descendants in the American south. To do this, he traces discusses the transport of central, western, and west-central African captives to South Carolina in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,finally, lightly touching on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Brown explores how these African peoples brought, maintained, and transmitted their understandings of spiritual relationships between the physical land of the living and the spiritual land of the dead, and from there how the notions of the African simbi spirits translated through a particular region of South Carolina.
In Kelly Oliver’s The Colonization of Psychic Space, she constructs and argues for a new theory of subjectivity and individuation—one predicated on a radical forgiveness born of interrelationality and reconciliation between self and culture. Oliver argues that we have neglected to fully explore exactly how sublimation functions in the creation of the self,saying that oppression leads to a unique form of alienation which never fully allows the oppressed to learn to sublimate—to translate their bodily impulses into articulated modes of communication—and so they cannot become a full individual, only ever struggling against their place in society, never fully reconciling with it.
These works are very different, so obviously, to achieve their goals, Brown and Oliver lean on distinct tools,methodologies, and sources. Brown focuses on the techniques of religious studies as he examines a religious history: historiography, anthropology, sociology, and linguistic and narrative analysis. He explores the written records and first person accounts of enslaved peoples and their captors, as well as the contextualizing historical documents of Black liberation theorists who were contemporary to the time frame he discusses. Oliver’s project is one of social psychology, and she explores it through the lenses of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis,social construction theory, Hegelian dialectic, and the works of Franz Fanon. She is looking to build psycho-social analysis that takes both the social and the individual into account, fundamentally asking the question “How do we belong to the social as singular?”
Read the rest of Selfhood, Coloniality, African-Atlantic Religion, and Interrelational CutlureatTechnoccult
Scott Midson’s Cyborg Theology and Kathleen Richardson’s An Anthropology of Robots and AI both trace histories of technology and human-machine interactions, and both make use of fictional narratives as well as other theoretical techniques. The goal of Midson’s book is to put forward a new understanding of what it means to be human, an understanding to supplant the myth of a perfect “Edenic” state and the various disciplines’ dichotomous oppositions of “human” and “other.” This new understanding, Midson says, exists at the intersection of technological, theological, and ecological contexts,and he argues that an understanding of the conceptual category of the cyborg can allow us to understand this assemblage in a new way.
That is, all of the categories of “human,” “animal,” “technological,” “natural,” and more are far more porous than people tend to admit and their boundaries should be challenged; this understanding of the cyborg gives us the tools to do so. Richardson, on the other hand, seeks to argue that what it means to be human has been devalued by the drive to render human capacities and likenesses into machines, and that this drive arises from the male-dominated and otherwise socialized spaces in which these systems are created. The more we elide the distinction between the human and the machine, the more we will harm human beings and human relationships.
Midson’s training is in theology and religious studies, and so it’s no real surprise that he primarily uses theological exegesis (and specifically an exegesis of Genesis creation stories), but he also deploys the tools of cyborg anthropology (specifically Donna Haraway’s 1991 work on cyborgs), sociology, anthropology, and comparative religious studies. He engages in interdisciplinary narrative analysis and comparison,exploring the themes from several pieces of speculative fiction media and the writings of multiple theorists from several disciplines.
Read the rest of Cyborg Theology and An Anthropology of Robots and AIatTechnoccult
Shirley: Uh, Annie, I didn’t know you weren’t, uh, Christian.
Annie: Yep. One might even say I’m Jewish.
Shirley: Oh, that’s good for you. Tha-that’s wonderful. I respect all religions of the world.
Abed: I’m Muslim.
Troy: Jehovah’s Witness.
Britta: Atheist.
Shirley: The Lord is testing me.
Community. “Comparative Religion”.
