If you've ever read the Bible dispassionately and neutrally, you've probably wondered about the questionable morals described throughout. Perhaps you've also wondered about the stilted writing style. Sam Harris makes this observation:
I saw this announcement from Indigo Books on a Twitter feed. Indigo is a big book store in Canada. Here's a recent store announcement:
Indigo is a private company and they can do whatever they want, of course.
I have long been concerned about religions, though, and the Land of the Woke appears to be the birthplace of a new religion, at the same time as many traditional religions are losing members.
Here is the big clue that we are dealing with a religious cult: the phrase "without question or judgement." I don't accept anything without question or judgement. It's not like I understand everything, of course. There are many things about which I am an ignoramus and where my questioning and judgment hit dead ends. But I would never make an announcement that I am willing to accept anything, especially anything complex and potential harmful to young people, without at least trying to question it. Whenever an organization tells me that I cannot question something, that's the smell of religion.
What planet am I on? I need to re-ask that each day. Today, I'm on a planet where only the "white" employees of Seattle were invited to a meeting set up by the City of Seattle, apparently for the purpose of disrupting their employees' sanity. Here's an excerpt from a City Journal article titled: "Cult Programming in Seattle."
Last month, the City of Seattle’s Office of Civil Rights sent an email inviting “white City employees” to attend a training session on “Interrupting Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness,” a program designed to help white workers examine their “complicity in the system of white supremacy” and “interrupt racism in ways that are accountable to Black, Indigenous and People of Color.” . . .At the beginning of the session, the trainers explain that white people have internalized a sense of racial superiority, which has made them unable to access their “humanity” and caused “harm and violence” to people of color. The trainers claim that “individualism,” “perfectionism,” “intellectualization,” and “objectivity” are all vestiges of this internalized racial oppression and must be abandoned in favor of social-justice principles. In conceptual terms, the city frames the discussion around the idea that black Americans are reducible to the essential quality of “blackness” and white Americans are reducible to the essential quality of “whiteness”—that is, the new metaphysics of good and evil.Once the diversity trainers have established this basic conceptual framework, they encourage white employees to “practice self-talk that affirms [their] complicity in racism” and work on “undoing [their] own whiteness.”
Seattle seems to be a City on the cutting edge of . . . something I'm still struggling to understand, but it seems to fit within the framework of a cult. There is a lot of troublesome information to digest in this article, including the reference to the new race-sensitive math curriculum being considered by the Seattle school district.
I'm wondering how much the Diversity Trainer was paid for the Seattle meeting and whether that Trainer's name was Syvester McMonkey McBean (from Dr. Suess' The Sneetches). Maybe that sarcasm is apt, given that Suess' book was written for little children. After all, even young children can easily understand that it is morally wrong to treat groups of people differently based on how they look.
Interesting stats on Religiosity from Pew, published in October, 2019.
In my view, there are also many other forms of groupishness that I see as religious or quasi religious that are not considered by these surveys. I also suspect that as traditional religions melt away, other groups that don't look like traditional religions at first glance, but which have similar functions, take their place.
I've closely followed the writings of Jonathan Haidt. His conclusions are closely tied to scientific findings. He crosscuts the current American political divide. He is hopeful that we will find our way as a country.
In this recent article at The Atlantic, "Jonathan Haidt Is Trying to Heal America’s Divisions: The psychologist shares his thoughts on the pandemic, polarization, and politics," Haidt explains what has gone wrong with many of those who consider themselves to be liberals and conservatives. What they have in common is authoritarianism populism:
Haidt laments the state of contemporary American politics, believing that on both the right and the left we’re seeing populism that responds to real problems but in illiberal ways. “On the right,” he said, “the populism there is really explicitly xenophobic and often explicitly racist … I think we see strands of populism on the right that are authoritarian, that I would say are incompatible with a tolerant, pluralistic, open democracy.”
Looking in the other direction, Haidt says, “we’ve messed up the word liberal and we’ve used it to just mean ‘left.’ I’ve always thought of myself as a liberal, in the John Stuart Mill sense. I believe in a society that is structured to give individuals the maximum freedom to construct lives that they want to live. We use a minimum of constraint, we value openness, creativity, individual rights. We try hard to maximize religious liberty, economic liberty, liberty of conscience, freedom of speech. That’s my ideal of a society, and that’s why I call myself a liberal.”
But on the left, Haidt said, “there’s been a movement that has made something else sacred, that has not focused on liberty, but that is focused instead on oppression and victimhood and victimization. And once you get into a framework of seeing your fellow citizens as good versus evil based on their group, it’s kind of a mirror image of the authoritarian populism on the right. Any movement that is assigning moral value to people just by looking at them is a movement I want no part of.”
Haidt went on: “I think this is a very important point for us to all keep in mind, that left and right in this country are not necessarily liberal and conservative anymore. On the left, it’s really clear that there are elements that many of us consider to be very illiberal; and on the right, it’s hard to see how Trump and many of his supporters are conservatives who have any link whatsoever to Edmund Burke. It’s very hard for me to see that. You know, I would love to live in a country with true liberals and true conservatives that engage with each other. That, I think, is a very productive disagreement. But it’s the illiberalism on each side that is making our politics so ugly, I believe.”
The key quote from the passage above: "Any movement that is assigning moral value to people just by looking at them is a movement I want no part of.” This is a modern version of MLK's classic advice that is scorned by many modern day "liberals": "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Why has this beautiful sentiment become so difficult today?