Ask A Genius 457 – The Future of Cultures (10)
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/28
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Based on the interviews, the issue is a religion per se. It is fundamentalist forms of it. The liberal forms are fine. The fundamentalist forms of non-religion can, sometimes, be more dramatic than that.
My concern is freedom of religion and freedom of belief, and freedom of conscience. Someone who is being mistreated in a fundamentalist religion should have the right to leave and have the free choice to do so.
If someone is experiencing this in some non-religious group, they should have the right to leave it too. My concern is people able to freely live and guide their own lives as they see fit, especially as this is more of a problem for women – which is why women’s rights are more of a concern for women.
It is deeply simple “religion…”
Rick Rosner: What we see in America over the past couple of decades with religion, it has been politicized. It has been politicized in a way in which bad guys are in charge. At various points in the past, even now, religion politicized in such a way to be more tolerant and to help people.
But the forms that the politicization of religion in America has taken are mostly toxic, lately.
Jacobsen: In terms of the narratives of religion, they can be more functionally true in terms of guiding life compared to some of the ones on offer in the secular community.
Rosner: Yes, you can have traditions stretching back hundreds of years. That is concerned with or synonymous with being a good person.
Jacobsen: Maybe, it is less about functional truths about the larger cosmos and more about the functional truths of everyday life.
Rosner: Of being a good person in society, as you noted about the larger metaphysical beliefs about existence, they are less about the general ideas of existence and more about the specific precepts about how to live among people.
If you take the rules of living as a decent person, you can strip away the mysticism and still have the beliefs of what is good and effective ethically, long-established. Some are outmoded like not eating pork or what to do about sleeping on the sheets of someone menstruating.
It may have been practical 2,000 years ago, but not so much now.
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