Witchcraft as a metaphor for religion

[Bill Haywood]

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Bill Haywood is most assuredly wrong about my motive/intention for stating so?

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You also asked:

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is such respect deserved? To me it's the epitome of irony that a Christian can laugh at an astrologist with a straight face.

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Are you saying that you do not see religion as primitive and backward and a subject for derision? And are drawing merely a technical connection between Methodists and witchcraft? If so, I stand corrected.

vhawk wrote:

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Surely Stalinism and Nazism and these other 'atheist' groups are FAR more similar to a religion

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I hear this a lot, and I consider it a definitions game. When materialists do good works, it is defined as rational and super. When materialists do bad works, it is redefined as actually being religious.

Well, when you define the terms that way, you can't lose the argument. It's like religionists saying that if priests molest children, it is not the fault of the church culture, its the influence of the devil. It's a cop out. This approach makes one group (materialists) superior by definition, rather than by what they do. I could just as easily say that when materialists use science for bad, they are following materialism, but when they do good, they've subconsciously listened to an angel.

When you look at materialism and religion as social discourses, produced by living communities, the separation falls apart. 60 years ago, mainstream scientists, following standards of the day, were certain of the superiority of the white race and used all kinds of flawed evidence to prove it. This field of scientific racism was quite important in enabling the Holocaust. Sure, you can say that when Nazi scientists did this, they were acting as religionists, not materialists. But that lets them off the hook for what they did. As a community participating in a discourse, materialists have done all sorts of rotten things. As a community, I do not see them as more moral and less prone to nationalist excess than theistic communities.

My fundamental point is that materialists are so easily prone to mob mentalities and atrocities (the Neocons come to mind) that any alleged social superiority over theists is obviated.

And to the person who said Mother Teresa was really a biitch, I agree -- she was a hasty example. How about Florence Nightingale?