Comment on Literally nobody
Postmortal_Pop@lemmy.world 2 days ago
You gotta remember, despite everything we say, everything we’ve written, the laws in place, the rapidly growing atheism, the US is a theocracy first and foremost. The religion is just as important as the economy, employment rate, or the opinions of the ruling class.
So weird for one of the world’s youngest nations to hijack one of the world’s youngest religions from a place they so frequently fear, hate, and bomb.
They really are just the plebeians of an empirical nation that never quite got to empirical level, unless your factor corporatisation of the society.
And they accuse the English of not speaking English…
I think they took their religion from europe. As a starting point.
A theocracy that only believes in Supply Side Jesus and ignores the real teachings of Jesus. The GOP would look a lot different if their religion wasn’t just a tool to manipulate their Christian base.
That’s what religion is
Yeah. I am Chicano but identify more with my indigenous side and am friends with plenty of Native Americans. I’ve always personally blamed Judeo-Christian thinking. The whole manifest destiny mindset is insane.
I mean read just a piece of how different things were before those religions came to this land.
A second, related factor was the absence of large domestic animals in North America, which meant that instead of the ‘intensive’, ploughing-and-manuring agriculture practised in Europe, Native American farmers used ‘extensive’ techniques, cultivating an area for a few years and then moving on to let the soil recover. Most groups - hunters and plant-gatherers as well as agriculturists - viewed land as a common resource rather than a commodity that could be owned. Tribes and families had the right to hunt, fish or grow crops in defined places, but the concept of a fenced-off parcel of land being the exclusive property of an individual would have been utterly alien to most, if not all, Native Americans. The Indian attitude towards land was part of a broader, more fundamental understanding of reality which underpinned the whole of native life. Although, again, there were enormous local variations in mythology and ritual, some of the essentials of this world-view were shared by many, if not most, cultures. Perhaps the most basic element was the belief in sacred power: the idea that everything in the universe was interconnected and possessed a spiritual force or energy that could affect the lives of ‘the people’ and of all other living things. Gaining power and the aid of powerful beings was absolutely vital: for success in hunting, plentiful crops, good health, thriving children and victory in battle. But power was also dangerous.
Source: Chapter 2 of The Earth Shall Weep by James Wilson.
I have a pet theory, I’m not a sociologist or anthropologist or historian so I don’t know enough to claim it valid. I feel that Europe did to the world what Dark Souls did to gaming.
Here’s this tiny section of the world, the weather is awful most of the year, the ground is barely fit for food and the only reliably edible plants are just variations of mustard. The wildlife is awful, wolves can drag off grown men, boars take whole parties to hunt, rats will eat and poison an entire grainhouse over night. Every few years a new power rolls in to wreck the place, if it’s not people it’s diseases, if it’s not diseases it’s climate shifts. Everyone lives in shit hovels relying on next to no nutrients, without enough to feed everyone, crammed in together with farm animals and listening to every other member of their family fucking as they’re trying to sleep. And they persist like that for longer than recorded time.
That’s life on the hardest possible difficult for generations. So when they finally scrape together enough to get out of there they find out that every single other civilization was living in literal verdant utopias. They respond the same exact way a diehard Dark souls fan does, everyone else needs to git gud and get learned up because how the fuck are these Stardew players surviving without an 800 page manual on stats? Europeans literally couldn’t comprehend the idea of a forest that gives you unlimited food because all of their forests eat your fucking chicken just to laugh at your suffering. Living without defined boundaries? How do you stop your neighbor from taking all your grain and leaving you to starve to death in the winter? Picking up your whole community to follow buffalo? Are you insane?! There’s probably a group of bandits right over the hill waiting to gut you for everything you own! Put your big hairy cows in a paddock so they aren’t stolen too! Europe had to make use of every square inch of land to survive, they couldnt fathom the idea of so much land that you’ll never need to see another human again without choosing to. And the hording, lifetimes of eating the same dozen plants and never having enough for everyone to be full, winters that kill you if you don’t spend every second farming to survive it. Land so scarce you have to kill for it.
All of this ignores the social aspects of this mindset becoming a political system. Now several hundred years later, we still have to deal with it because generically we’re the equivalent of dogs scarfint down anything they see because they get used to not being fed regularly. Of course they’re going to be vastly over powered and over equipped compared to a world of people playing on a sane and reasonable difficulty level.
HAL_9_TRILLION@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
The only thing that has really kept religion in check in this country is, ironically, their enmity toward each other due, ostensibly, to differences in eschatology. That has melted away as they have come to the realization that they are in danger of becoming irrelevant. Fortunately, the laity is extremely stupid and easy to manipulate (religion will do that to you) and have no idea what they really believe or what the differences are, so they are being led as if they are more monolithic by focusing their worship on what they all agree they love: money. They are also too stupid to realize that this is ironic.