underrated internal tension on the right: 1. Leftism is a religion 2. Christianity decayed because of religious rationalism
agreed. But do you think it's enough to say "Oh it's two different senses?" Because if Christian, then that also answers the "which" question (and excludes various alternatives).
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part of what you run into is meta-level vs object-level stuff. like, "leftism is a religion" gets hard to make sense of if you want to compare 2018 lefty doctrinal content with 1918's. But there's certainly continuity there
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say more, what do you think is the essence of the 1918/2018 comparison
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the organizing principle of leftism is power, and doctrine shifts to accommodate whatever is needed to achieve it. I might even go so far as to say "leftism is a religion" only in the sense that every political formula is religious, a justification of right to rule
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That is a good point. So we probably need an operational distinction between "TCY secular humanism," which informs a certain way of life, and leftism-as-powerlust
End of conversation
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Machen's "Christianity and Liberalism" was a fairly clear-eyed view from that period of the object-level leftist religion prevalent in the US, in the time period when it was devouring the mainstream Protestant churches
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I see; you mean you can't understand the Social Gospel without understanding the ways in which it was a capital-R theistic Religion?
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I guess the two senses I think of for "religion" are "public source of/justification of law/rule" and "piety", as in "true religion consists of visiting widows and orphans in their affliction"
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ah, okay. I see those two as inextricable because the public-philosophy bit always devolves in marginal cases into to the ad-hominem bit (which is why ministers telling their parishioners the sovereign authorities are evil leads to angry mobs)
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i don't think they can be disconnected either, but there's a lot of political mileage to be gotten out of pretending you can
End of conversation
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