Here's a data point for you regarding Christianity (coming from someone who is not particularly spiritual at all full disclosure)
For a while before the first crusade, the church gained a huge amount of popular support and devotion when it managed to enact the Truce of God which basically forbade the constantly feuding warrior elite class, the knights, from pillaging on a few days of the week. It was mostly done as a way to give the peasantry a chance to actually do some agriculture amidst all the pummeling, but the peasantry understandably saw the church as an institution that acted in their interest. Fast forward to the first crusade, and there was almost a mass hysteria event as people, whose only chances at comfort for their whole lives had pretty much been downstream of the church, believed Pope Urban's propaganda about the Turks wholeheartedly.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that while I don't subscribe to the idea that religions are some kind of evil anti-intellectual force to be eradicated, their becoming the providers of people's material needs represents a failure of some kind. The hierarchical structure of the average major religion just lends itself too easily to exploitation imo.
How great is xiaohongshu? I tossed out a few replies to posts for the novelty of it and within a day I was having delightful conversations about the Chinese perspective on The Grapes of Wrath (apparently it's read a lot in schools there) and making fun of Elon Musk with people across the damn world
Someone even asked to see a little of my book and said he couldn't wait to get home and read it with his cat
, the posting atmosphere is so disarmingly wholesome.
I have very few resources to offer anyone in need, as it's really only by my basic unfair privileges as a cis white man that I even have a place to sleep, but I'm just trying to make it clear to the people I know that I have the space to house them/feed them if they are in crisis. Without much else to support them with it feels like the best I can do.
I get apprehensive around wasps too but it's very funny to me how much hatred and distrust these animals are met with because they are able to force you to treat them with a little respect
It's usually justified to make fun of STEMlords but scientists with highly specific skills are still a vital part of our societal whole (I choose to believe this for my own sake)
I remember a conversation I had with a friend who'd been getting really into Hardcore History and wanted to talk some cool ass history with me, the history minor
We got on the topic of how the aztecs had instituted a sort of doctrinal loophole saying that women who died in childbirth also got to go to the Valhalla-equivalent that was normally for men who died in combat. I laughed and said "well yeah, I can imagine plenty of women didn't want to risk their fucking lives by having kids back then, makes sense that there would be a lot of reluctance towards childbirth that they'd try to address with a little media campaign."
This friend got really upset with me and claimed that I was projecting modern attitudes (woke wasn't really a big term yet) onto the past. I wanted to smoke his weed so I didn't start an argument but the patriarchy detector was beeping like crazy
I talked with a researcher who bluntly called whiptails "a bunch of lesbos" and he wasn't even being funny, they still sorta kinda have sex to stimulate egg production.
The entire album Symbol by Susumu Yokota might hit the right nerve, though it's heavier on the dreamlike side and doesn't have lyrics. I use it for driving, writing, anything that needs a kind of hypnotized but functional state of mind.
Unto Others has a great section about this. In a bunch of studied tribes who live generally pre-industrial lifestyles, the anthropologists were interested in how they "organize" big projects like building a house, and when they watched them, wondered what made them so willing to just do it.
Long story short, they saw how the kids watched them and subsequently "played" at doing things like building houses, carrying things together, etc. They essentially concluded that the "work" they did was understood more like play--that without any coercion to labor beyond meeting their needs, they were surprisingly eager to do that boring stuff because they made it into the day's activity rather than grinding "work."
Look this is true but AT LEAST it's how politics is supposed to work, it's not about choosing the most ethically and morally consistent person, it's about having a person in the seat who will vote the way their constituents want, no more
Here's a data point for you regarding Christianity (coming from someone who is not particularly spiritual at all full disclosure)
For a while before the first crusade, the church gained a huge amount of popular support and devotion when it managed to enact the Truce of God which basically forbade the constantly feuding warrior elite class, the knights, from pillaging on a few days of the week. It was mostly done as a way to give the peasantry a chance to actually do some agriculture amidst all the pummeling, but the peasantry understandably saw the church as an institution that acted in their interest. Fast forward to the first crusade, and there was almost a mass hysteria event as people, whose only chances at comfort for their whole lives had pretty much been downstream of the church, believed Pope Urban's propaganda about the Turks wholeheartedly.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that while I don't subscribe to the idea that religions are some kind of evil anti-intellectual force to be eradicated, their becoming the providers of people's material needs represents a failure of some kind. The hierarchical structure of the average major religion just lends itself too easily to exploitation imo.