Identity Politics and So-Called Theocracy
Islamic Terrorism, Dominionism, Intersectional Marxism, Psychology, Evolution of Language, and Mutants Against Identity Politics
I just watched this, and it reminded me of many things even though there are a few parts I disagree with, though, to be fair, those are probably things that have actually changed over seven years. At one point in time I actually wanted to be an Iranist (someone who studies Iran) and do foreign policy kinds of things because I basically just didn’t want to be a nerdy loser like Sheldon Cooper in STEM (that’s not how STEM as a whole is in real life anyway but I’ll agree that that show definitely pushed many people away from STEM because it pushed me away a little and it took a lot to make me want to do what I was learning anyway re: biophysics etc.,) and thought it’d be a lot more in-demand than studying China since everyone wants China, but I know Persian people unlike many Americans so I’d be happy helping the innocent Persians with their terrible government. Now I think the reason that didn’t happen was that that would’ve been a horrible waste of my time, it’s not that difficult to learn languages and cultures even if it takes some effort, it’s effort everyone puts in at one point in their lives and often more than one point anyway.
But during that point I did actually research Islam a lot, though I think I can say I disagree with Styxhexenhammer666 that people who aren’t raised in those cultures can’t understand it even if he also says Iran and even Afghanistan are different from the Arab world which is definitely true. I do think there’s more tribalism in Iran and Afghanistan than he gives it credit for, there’s even tribalistic violence in Iran and Afghanistan off and on, but it’s less than in many parts of Africa, never mind Arab countries, which are far and away the most tribalistic areas in the world.
For example, the whole burka thing and segregating men and boys from women and girls is actually so members of one Arab tribe don’t start getting amorous with another and diluting the bloodline. Of course it’s still sexist to force women and girls to take the brunt of it, but it isn’t driven by a bunch of male chauvinists being insecure in their masculinity and feeling like seeing some ankle would cause them to start raping women in the middle of the marketplace or whatever, it’s driven by the ultra-intense tribalism that really only Arabs have to that level. Saudi Arabia doesn’t ban women from being educated at all (unlike the Taliban) and Bedouin women (the nomads in more rural areas) could always legally drive, because the issue isn’t making women as miserable as possible, the issue is intense paranoia about mixing up bloodlines if the sexes are around each other too much and accidentally make a mixed tribe baby, it just results in women being pretty miserable and men being pretty miserable as well since it’s not like males from other countries are lining up to move to Saudi Arabia and get their hands cut off if they’re accused of stealing and never get to see a lady in a bikini again or wear shorts or whatever.
I think the motivation behind all the radical Islam and probably Islam in general even when it’s nonviolent is generally people looking for some kind of group identity to overcome all these tribal kinds of divisions. Different forms of Islam do this in different ways and this is why the Shi’a form is more popular in Iran and Afghanistan among other things, aside from the whole elevation of Ali who was not Arab deprioritizing the whole having to have Arab blood to descend from Muhammad thing that’s so popular in Sunni countries and helping out Persians and Afghans who are basically the same as Persians, Indo-European people like, well, Indians and Europeans, and not Arab. Afghanistan and Iraq were both the edges of the Persian Empire at one point so remember that whenever you think about the US Middle East wars as well. I told you I did study these things at one point and the fact I barely think about them now is just more evidence for me that those jobs are probably all kind of make-work jobs and it would’ve been a waste of my time to pursue it even if I had the noble yet misguided motivation of not wanting to be a Big Bang Theory character and actually get to do something useful for people I know personally.
However, none of that is even unique to Islam in my opinion, and this is part of why I think it’s not so difficult to understand that. In certain sects of Christianity there’s this idea called Dominionism, which I wish people would use the name of instead of calling it “Christian Nationalism” since “Christian Nationalism” implies that Jesus wanted a nationalist religiously-based government or something which is really obviously not true when you look at “render unto Caesar…” and “my kingdom is not of this world” and all that, plus, it’s not even a “No True Scotsman” move, Dominionism is literally the term made by the people who came up with the idea, they weren’t calling it “Christian Nationalism,” they were calling it Dominionism so let’s do the same. Dominionism is much more popular in America than most other countries, but it exists in all the states that were part of the British Empire or had a large British population at one point or another (e.g., South Africa, Australia,) because it originated in Great Britain. For all the nice things Great Britain gave us that I kind of really appreciate, I guess there’s also that which is probably even more toxic for your mind and soul than black pudding is for your body, though that’s not the fault of the same people at least.
When you look at the rise of these Dominionist ideologies, one thing you see that I think is a correlation is this whole intersectional Marxist idea that I have often referred to as identitarianism despite having learned a long while back that that specific term originated with white nationalists and isn’t supposed to just refer to “identity politics” in general. I do revel in using it still though, because it’s funny to call the people who self-identify as really woke a word that originated as a self-descriptor by racists to point out that they’re basically interchangeable.
I think that, as intersectional Marxism becomes more of an official ideology, it is directly causing the rise in Dominionism, radical Islamism, and all these other kinds of so-called theocratic movements (though I don’t love that term since theocracy means a rule by a god, not a rule by a bunch of people who want to enforce their religion on everyone, if an actual god ruled a country directly or indirectly it might not want to enforce a religion on the populace at all) because I think we are genuinely seeing a resurgence of tribal psychology in America, Canada, and all these other Western countries that I like to call the displaced countries. I don’t think it’s such a big thing in Europe, Great Britain itself, or anywhere that isn’t somewhere I’d consider one of the displaced countries. I also think that’s a lot of what’s behind the increasing popularity of Islam for Gen Z and part of what’s behind all the support for Palestine to the extent that it isn’t always Antisemitism. However, Antisemitism itself is certainly a direct outgrowth of this kind of rise of identitarian thinking for very straightforward reasons. This doesn’t mean all the identitarians all over the political spectrum are Antisemitic or that Gen Z converts to Islam are all remotely violent or anything. People can be psychologically challenged by these notions of identity politics that historically haven’t mattered very much in the displaced countries past the rather huge event of killing the natives and banishing the remaining ones to reservations and not just become violent as a result even if I don’t think identitarianism is a good thing at all.
If your choices are to identify as white, black, straight, gay, female, male, disabled, able-bodied, etc. or to identify with a religion, of course you’re generally going to want to identify with a religion. In tribalistic societies like Saudi Arabia they’ll happily identify with a tribe because their tribe is on top and it makes them wealthy and powerful, but the poor people will identify more with Islam because their tribe makes them poor and weak, and this is actually a way that the status quo can be maintained in those societies. However, in America we have never had this kind of tribalism and most of our leaders have also been sincere believers in God to boot, so none of this makes any sense. So of course a lot of the Gen Z people are going to identify with (mostly heavily Westernized) Islam when they just get told Christianity is for white people and lots of white people agree with that and they want a sort of cross-ethnic identification that doesn’t care about that, and Muslims are over here telling them that Islam is for all the races despite all of the cultural differences compared to Christianity coming off as sort of exotic and interesting to these Gen Z people, so what do you think people who don’t want to be shoved into an identity politics box are going to choose.
However, more significantly, people who are already in mostly certain fundamentalist sects of Protestantism are going to double down on that and want the government to be officially run by their religion, even though that idea is nowhere in the Bible. It does say in the Old Testament that blessed is the nation whose god is the Lord, but it still seems like quite a jump from saying that people worshipping what the Bible considers the correct deity instead of sacrificing their children to Baal and Moloch makes everyone happier means that there needs to be official government establishment and tests of religion. If you think there needs to be, don’t only take it up with Jesus in the New Testament directly contradicting that, also take it up with the US Founding Fathers who really explicitly were against such a thing for what are obvious good reasons of not wanting some hypocritical state acting in the name of religion but not actually following any of its principles.
Regarding the displaced countries, I have identified six countries that share a trait that are constantly in the news: USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Israel. What they share is that many people came from long distances to settle. I don’t think Israel is a colonialist state or whatever slur, I think Jews definitely have the right to live in Israel, but the Jews in Israel now were definitely a diaspora for hundreds and in some cases thousands of years before settling in the modern state. I’m sure plenty of people acknowledge that this is unprecedented in world history, but there’s a more important angle which few people look at it from which is that this is unprecedented in natural history. Historically, hominins (which is a more specific term than hominids since great apes have been moved into hominids) have only migrated to adjacent areas, and this continued from hundreds of millions of years of prehistory ago throughout most of recorded history up until the period which was the Little Ice Age in Europe. People like to identify the displaced countries with the Five Eyes but England doesn’t have quite so much drama and they’re prominenly missing South Africa, birthplace of J. R. R. Tolkien and Elon Musk, both of whom are South Africans of British (not Dutch Afrikaaner) descent and they can’t fit Israel into a pattern at all, but realizing it’s the Displaced Countries and not the Five Eyes and what you’re seeing is natural history as much as, if not more, than it is world history should make a lot of things make sense to you.
The fact is I think a lot of the evolution of Homo sapiens was actually directed by staying relatively stationary. If it didn’t, something or -things rather different would’ve evolved if hominins had this level of mobility like seagulls or butterflies for all those hundreds of millions of years rather than some people in Europe making good boats so they could leave freezing Europe a few centuries ago and then people from mostly Africa and then China getting shuffled around too. For example, the faculty of language. Back to that time I wanted to be an Iranist, even though everyone except a few feral children learn language, it’s really not feasible to learn all of the vastly-different languages in the world. This is also very much one thing some people want AI to do. Acquiring a modern human language was only ever reasonable because people would only interact with the people right next to them, and not people half the world away.
However, for the most part, language developed for thinking, not communication. The structures of language evolved for thinking and the use of the sensory-motor complex in addition to the structures of universal grammar allow people to communicate. It’s still clear though that all these feral children don’t learn to think very complex things either, so there is some degree of linguistic determinism aka Sapir-Whorf, it’s just weak determinism, where the language you speak just sort of influences how you think rather than strong determinism where if you speak English you just think stereotypically British things and if you speak Chinese you think stereotypically Chinese things and you can’t do otherwise. But if you’re feral you seem to not get exposed to any ideas or ways of thinking about things other than just immediate sense perception like a non-rational animal at all.
Why did language evolve? – Philosophy of Linguistics (wordpress.com)
If language mostly developed for thinking but it was still heavily influenced by its use in communication, then evolving in a way so that people would use a different type of language that would be more reasonably learned by people in completely different areas of the world, for example, maybe people who weren’t deaf or mute would learn sign languages since those evolved to be almost all mutually intelligible worldwide, or maybe some other kinds of organs would’ve developed for processing and creating entirely different kinds of signals to what exist in modern hominins, then it follows cognition itself would have been vastly different as well. Something other than Homo sapiens would’ve been overwhelmingly likely to evolve if hominin migration followed modern patterns for the last few million years.
This is why if someone asks for your race on a form you write Homo superior, and you tell them that you used to believe there was only one race, the human race, but now you highly doubt that, though to be fair aliens might’ve gotten there first with all the UFO news that’s coming out. I’m joking, that might be a good way to engage in Ralph Waldo Emerson-style civil disobedience against the identitarian regime and end up in jail for three days, but I don’t think it would serve any constructive purpose in the current sociopolitical context. However, I do largely self-identify as a mutant on Substack and identify you, my subscribers, as mutants because screw identity politics. I don’t identify with a race or whatever, I identify as a mutant, and I’m sure I actually do have a bunch of mutations even if I need to find a way to figure out what they are if I want to get away with writing that my race is “mutant” or whatever or forms, and so do you.
The commandments and precepts one learns as a child can be remembered by rote, but they mean little until there is example—and, even then, the example needs to be recognized.
Thus, I was able to sit patiently and watch the hurt foot being washed, cold-poulticed, and bound up, and perceive no connexion between it and the affirmation which I had heard almost every Sunday of my life.
'And God created man in His own image. And God decreed that man should have one body, one head, two arms and two legs: that each arm should be jointed in two places and end in one hand: that each hand should have four fingers and one thumb: that each finger should bear a flat finger-nail. . .'
And so on until:
'Then God created woman, also, and in the same image, but with these differences, according to her nature: her voice should be of higher pitch than man's: she should grow no beard: she should have two breasts ...'
And so on again.
I knew it all, word for word—and yet the sight of Sophie's six toes stirred nothing in my memory. I saw the foot resting in her mother's lap. Watched her mother pause to look down at it for a still moment, lift it, bend to kiss it gently, and then look up with tears in her eyes. I felt sorry for her distress, and for Sophie, and for the hurt foot—but nothing more.
While the bandaging was finished I looked round the room curiously. The house was a great deal smaller than my home, a cottage, in fact, but I liked it better. It felt friendly. And although Sophie's mother was anxious and worried she did not give me the feeling that I was the one regrettable and unreliable factor in an otherwise orderly life, the way most people did at home. And the room itself seemed to me the better, too, for not having groups of words hanging on the wall for people to point to in disapproval. Instead, this room had several drawings of horses, which I thought very fine.
One of the really interesting things about this particular book is the fact it is very much describing a Dominionist state. The author John Wyndham is Canadian and most of the book is set in Labrador (the cold place we don’t want to turn Europe into,) but Dominionism came to Canada too from England so the post-apocalyptic country of Labrador can reasonably become a Dominionist state without even starting to stretch suspension of disbelief (the reader complaints don’t come in until all the telepathic stuff is introduced, and that’s very much a your mileage may vary thing, if people like the book psst that’s usually exactly what they like.) This book is also where the whole “HERESY! ABHOR THOU THE MUTANT!” thing from Warhammer 40k is from since everyone knows Warhammer 40k takes its ideas from lots of other sources, though people don’t seem to know that it took even the motto of “HERESY!” and the way of talking about all the kinds of creatures and people you’re going to kill for being heretics from an old book that’s the one out of all its various sources people rarely read or even really know about, probably because the telepathy thing is still mostly considered outmoded in science fiction though even that’s been changing a lot recently. Everyone knows Dune, A Canticle for Leibowitz, etc. and quite a few people even know the Elric Saga and the other Michael Moorcock Eternal Champion stories, but The Chrysalids and John Wyndham rarely even get mentioned, so people probably think the “HERESY!” thing is super original and a reference to the Inquisition or something, rather than the least original thing in the entire 40k universe and a reference to a science fictional depiction of Dominionism (which is a Protestant extremist movement comparable to radical Islamism and in no way affiliated with Roman Catholicism or the Middle Ages) in a fictional post-apocalyptic Canadian state that’s being taken over by telepathic mutants. Speaking of this, since as
said, too much chaos leads to stagnation, and I’ve been gladly earning a lot more control of my time recently, I will have so many actually finished Thousand Sons models to take pictures of soon.It’s still criminal that people don’t want to take science fiction books seriously, especially ones that don’t deal so much with topics like technology but are “softer” that way but still very much written seriously, though it’s also obvious why. If you wanted a fictional book about Dominionism I’m sure what you’d mostly get is Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which she infamously argues is definitely not science fiction despite people she knew personally like Ursula K. Le Guin disagreeing. Apparently Margaret Atwood just got the endorsement of Northop Frye and this was basically her whole career. I think I should probably read The Handmaid’s Tale despite the fact I doubt it’ll be very good, after all, people read lots of culturally-important books that aren’t very good that they personally disagree with like Mein Kampf and whatever, though I’m sure it’s not as bad as Mein Kampf and this is probably the first time those two books have been mentioned in the same sentence seeing the politics of their authors and the entirely different genres of the books.
When I do I don’t want to give Margaret Atwood a cent of my money though so I’ll just borrow it or find it for free used, probably as a PDF online, because we all remember the SANctimonious Wars of 2023 and if you weren’t there you mutants and norms have probably heard of it at least a couple of times. Margaret Atwood was like “Well, obviously Substack shouldn’t platform Nazis because Nazis means you want to kill all Jews and that’s clearly against the violence incitement rules, so I agree with SAN!” I actually personally replied saying “Yes, that’s what Nazis mean to normal people, but to SAN, Nazis mean TERFs, J. K. Rowling (who’s not actually a TERF because TERFs are radfems and Rowling is a posh liberal,) and ironically Zionists including Zionist Jews who are literally Jewish. They’re not actually trying to stop Nazis from inciting violence, which would be fair since Substack doesn’t actually permit all 1st amendment speech, they’re just trying to call people they don’t like Nazis to try to shame them into silence and get the site leaders and news outlets on board.” Of course Substack doesn’t allow inciting violence even in cases it’d actually be legal in the US under the Brandenburg test, but they also actually ended up specifically allowing some Nazi accounts to stay if they weren’t inciting violence and ended up banning a total of five Nazis who were actively inciting violence. After the five Nazis who were inciting violence were banned from the site, luckily the SANctimonious Wars were quickly mostly entirely forgotten.
Though I haven’t read The Handmaid’s Tale yet, the premise is quite obvious (which leads me to think the book is most likely rather shallow overall, though it’ll likely be quite easy and fast to actually read because of that at least,) in that women in some kind of Protestant fundamentalist so-called theocracy, aka a Dominionist state, are completely controlled for the purposes of reproduction. Hmm, I wonder why this could be, it totally couldn’t have anything to do with why the Saudis and most other Arabs control women in their states so much which is because of the whole tribalist thing and not wanting to mix the bloodlines, and that this is really the fundamental reason for these kind of so-called theocratic states (I should come up with a better word for rule by religious wackos that isn’t the rather secular-humanist-antitheist “rule by a god,” gods ruling things might be chill compared to this if it happened, at least with Dominionism you don’t have to call it Christian nationalism because that’s not its name and there’s no reason to pretend that’s its name when Dominionism is clearly the historical term for it.) I’m sure that’s not going to be in Margaret Atwood’s take at all except probably tangentially with something like “look how racist these religious bigots are, hurr durr!” which shall also be very telling when I come across it and I will take careful note of the context. Meanwhile, it’s May, which means it’s time for Halloween in May, I would rather read Dracula and comic books and you mutants and norms should too.
On the other hand in The Chrysalids, the book literally ends with, spoiler alert, Petra, who is the strongest telepath and probably the first of a new race from the other ones since she’s the only one who can actually do things like mind control people and read thoughts that aren’t projected to her, “talking” telepathically to the “Sealand lady” (who lives in New Zealand, notice that all these science fiction stories keep using the displaced countries instinctively among all the other places in real life you see them pop up on the news,) who is coming to rescue them from the religious wingnuts in Labrador who want to kill all the telepaths because they can’t tell what’s going on when the people are communicating to each other with pictures in their heads and are paranoid, even though lots of regions actually wouldn’t be so hard on things like the six toes mutation because that’s not really threatening anything.
Do the two telepathic ladies sending images to each other in their heads pass the Bechdel test? It really doesn’t matter, because science fiction is light-years beyond these tests that were made for modern concerns. But it’s still literally two women who are the opposite of oppressed fighting the Dominionist state. Hmm. The biggest threat to these kinds of so-called theocratic orders is definitely women because women are the ones who potentially would cause the tribal bloodlines so-called theocracies exist to try to preserve to not be preserved, and in The Chrysalids they’re actually the ones who take the Dominionist state down, even though it’s very subtle about it and not at all a grrrrrl power kind of moment. Plus, it was, you know, written in the 1950s, which makes the fact that that’s what happens pretty remarkable, and it’s a good thing they don’t make a scene out of it being two women who dubiously pass the Bechdel test because they communicate telepathically instead of talking despite that actually being important because guess what, not everything is shallow identity politics, especially when you’re a mutant. Write race: mutant or race: Homo superior on forms. They can’t get us all. Or race: werewolf or gender: shapeshifting daemon bird or whatever and if you get what all these are really referencing, which you certainly won’t if you just wildly guess because they’re pretty much all inside jokes from Substack and not references to anything widely-known, you can be my friend.
I think we can read these books now because, incidentally, secular humanism is dead. I think the death of secular humanism was the death of modernism. Modernism gave us the idea of litfic which means English professors contemplating adultery and failed English students contemplating cocaine, and everything else was not allowed. I suspect most of this comes not from some abstracted notion of taste so much as the psychology of fear. Stephen King books are, well, scary, and a horror story about what’d happen if his books were real and Stephen King was this mastermind making it all happen is called Sutter Cane.
In high modernism, like in secular humanism, all these paranormal, mystical, and science fictional things can’t exist because demons are scary, time travel is scary, telepathy and telekinesis are scary, undead are scary, aliens are scary, on and on. You can only write about what’s real in the view of secular humanism, and everything else can maybe be TVTropes-style on-the-nose allegorism, which is very much relegated to a second class, but God forbid you want to just write a literal story about the paranormal or future technology or anything mystical that might incidentally have figurative meaning, even though this is exactly what Tolkien did and what I think put him miles above all the awful generic epic fantasy like Dragonlance, Belgariad, Sword of Shannara, etc. (epic fantasy other than Tolkien can be good, but not the kind like what I mentioned, that’s invariably awful and the reason lots of libraries and bookstores have a science fiction/fantasy section instead of a separate fantasy section, to hide the awful fantasy that makes derivative books like Eragon look like the best thing ever in comparison.)
Since we now have people like Sam Harris who are basically just hippies with all sorts of paranormal and mystical beliefs who don’t like organized religion dominating the atheist conversation, the expectation that books must conform to the secular humanist notion of reality or else you’re just describing the viewpoint of an uneducated person and that’s uninteresting because we have “omniscient” narrators in the Henry James style and not “telepathic” ones in the Stephen King one (or Franz Kafka if you at least want to be socially acceptable to poststructuralists, but Kafka never used that word even if he described the same idea,) which in turn is the same kind of idea as Comte’s positivism and the opposite of Romantic science, prioritizing the “hard” over the “soft,” is also dead with it. The ice has thawed and life springs from the ground.
Lots of people have always believed in these things in real life, but not the demographic of high modernism which I think has always tried to hide that it’s the same as secular humanism. I think there’s one grand exception however which is the key that people were overlooking, and that’s Sylvia Plath. I kind of can’t stand Sylvia Plath and I think she was whiny, gave all her power away, extremely nutso (obviously,) miserable (ditto,) and I don’t like her writing style at all which stinks as much as all the metaphors of bell jars and eating air and sticking heads in the ovens (OK, that was how she actually died) that she wrote about, but when you look at Sylvia Plath she didn’t believe secular humanism, she worshipped demons under the direction of Ted Hughes. She hated Ted Hughes, and people say he murdered her because lots of people died around him, but Sylvia Plath is the one who chose to literally practice black magic and the same is true for all the other women who killed themselves around Ted Hughes, that was their choice, it just wasn’t a very good one. It’s controversial to say Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes as well as most of the other people around Ted Hughes were doing these things even if it’s incredibly well-documented and no less by the Guardian, the paragon of generally-inoffensive British news sources. Thinking it’s important that they believed it doesn’t mean you believe it, it just means, well, prioritizing psychology and other “soft” things over the “hard” and being a huge traitor to high modernism and secular humanism.
How black magic killed Sylvia Plath | Sylvia Plath | The Guardian
Yes, I do personally think Styxhexenhammer666 should reconsider the whole worshipping Stolas thing, though I don’t think he’s really harming anyone besides himself unlike Ted Hughes. Ted Hughes went around promoting a much more brutal kind of black magic to other people, not just saying “hey I want to worship the pagan owl god who will give me the knowledge of the plants and the rocks” to himself. I think worshipping the plants and rocks and whatever sounds really unfulfilling personally and wouldn’t lead to happiness over an infinite amount of time (“eternal bliss,”) but I see no reason to be rude to someone who at worst is hurting himself while mostly providing a lot of value to other people. I’m sure a lot of other people want to worship Stolas and whatever because of him and I think that’s a bad idea so I’m saying that, and I disagree with him on lots of other things regardless, but I don’t have a bad opinion of him overall just because I disagree with him on really important things in addition to the more minor things like what inspired this article.
Know what, off and on I do think one particular thing regarding him and I’m going to write that: I think he was also somewhat of a casualty of the idea that smart people want to study string theory and cosmology and studying plants and rocks is for less-smart people, like what you see on The Big Bang Theory where the male nerds mostly study all the string theory and cosmology kinds of things while the female nerds that are brought in later mostly study biology and the show doesn’t take it so seriously. I think biology, psychology, neurology, and even geology are way more important than string theory and cosmology kinds of things (especially the parts of geology relating to crystal formation and morphology that should shed light on animal and plant morphogenesis, that part fascinates me) and I do that without worshipping an owl demon. So that’s just one thing to consider, and that’s just my personal opinions. I don’t think all the things that are called magic are evil at all, since e.g. Isaac Newton practiced alchemy and got the law of gravity from “as above, so below” because he had an apple hit his head and realized that was the same force keeping planets in their orbits (they fall in circles in their orbits) among other inspirations, and I highly doubt that’s evil, so that’s very fine with me even though I don’t really do that kind of thing with alchemy and what’s called natural magic myself, I called my blog subscribers the mutants and not the mages because that’s where my mind is.
I do think people probably need to have some kind of religious identity in order to not get pulled into these kinds of identitarian politics, but the religious identity certainly doesn’t have to run the government, and it’s probably horrible if it does because that leads to hypocrisy and calling everything “HERESY!” (Then, I’m clearly continuing to spread lots of heresy here like usual.) There can be pluralism in society like the founders of America and many other countries agreed upon even if some religions are probably much better than others. If some religions are just uniformly horrible in every way, the people who follow those will act crazy and make bad decisions, and you won’t see them in office, so we don’t need a religious test, in fact life can show us which religions are better instead. However, overcoming tribalism that hominins have literally evolved to engage in for hundreds of millions of years will be immensely difficult, though I think I’ve done it and so can you.
Don’t end up as one of those people who pathetically blames Jews for everything, which seems like the end result of seeing the world in identitarian terms. Once upon a time I wanted to be Jewish because I wanted to join what seemed like an über-cool group, now I’ve grown and see things differently so not so much. Hating Jews and being afraid of them just seems like the flip side to that, thinking that Jews are indeed the best, but that’s because they traded their souls or something and you couldn’t be a Jew if you wanted or whatever. I don’t personally believe the Jewish religion is correct, and lots of ethnic Jews have pretty much the same complaints about it as outsiders do regarding many forms of it very much degrading non-Jews (even if the most popular ones do allow converts if they really want to, you still have to really believe in Judaism to convert in the first place.) Oh, Hitler also thought Jews were mutants if he didn’t use the word, so go figure. Everyone Hitler didn’t like was basically genetically inferior and therefore a mutant to him, but actually the mutants are genetically superior so joke’s on Hitler. Not that he had a sense of humor despite his Charlie Chaplin moustache.
Adolf Hitler Issues Comment on the "Jewish Question" | Holocaust Encyclopedia (ushmm.org)
Was Hitler religious? The Nazi leader hated Christianity as well as Judaism. - The Washington Post
Wow.
That was...
Five articles in one?
A whole thanksgiving meal with pie!