I am a New Atheist. In the late 90s and early 00s I fought in the BBS, in the online forums, and in the mailing lists. I IRC'd and engaged on the burgeoning web, and IRL. I listened to The Infidel Guy and The Non-Prophets, and I went to see Dawkins in person.
I think you've been misled into believing that "religion" is a meaningful word. It's sometimes better to think of it as a purely ideological word, one used to suggest the way we should view various belief systems. Why is Christianity a religion, but Platonism a philosophy? Only to disguise the fact that they're basically the same thing. Why are Buddhism and Hinduism religions instead of philosophies? To encourage us to think they aren't on the same intellectual plane as Platonism.
We should at least distinguish between religions of mythology and Axial Age religions. Possibly we should instead be speaking of ethics based on mythology, tradition, rules, rational logic, or empirical observation. There must be many ways of categorizing ideologies that are more productive, objective, and parsimonious than "religion" vs. "philosophy" vs. "science".
Wokeism repeats Christianity because they're both descended from Platonism. Platonism is the worm at the heart of the West, the thing that makes the West the worst and the best. It also gave us Hegel, Unitarian Universalism, Marxism, and Nazism. Platonism itself descends from geometry, Pythagoreanism, and the government of Sparta.
I don't think the kind of need for totalitarian authority you find in the West is innate to humanity. Many ancient societies had nothing like Western religion. The Sumerian, Greek, and Roman religions had nothing to do with morality, finding purpose in life, or giving people a direction or marching orders. I doubt that the Norse or Aztec religions did either. They were pragmatic religions aimed at negotiating with the gods (or, in the case of the Aztecs, saving them). The closest thing I know to Western religion in antiquity was that of the Egyptians, who are pretty clearly the earliest identifiable ancestors of Western civ IMHO.
Platonism been the silent, unconscious bedrock of Western society for the past 2000 years. It is arguably what defines "the West", using a broader definition which includes Eastern Europe and Russia because they have the same addiction to analysis and dialectic as Western Europe. I don't think it's possible to come to terms with it. I still believe that the more technologically advanced we become, the more-important it becomes to eliminate Platonism (in its most-general sense), because it nearly always leads to totalitarianism and massacre. (I say "nearly" only because of Unitarians and 19th-century progressives.) The one thing Platonists can be relied on to do is to get the answers to philosophical questions radically wrong, and then to try to force those wrong answers on everyone, at any cost. That will destroy us all once everyone has the technological capacity to kill everyone else.
I think you've been misled into believing that "religion" is a meaningful word. It's sometimes better to think of it as a purely ideological word, one used to suggest the way we should view various belief systems. Why is Christianity a religion, but Platonism a philosophy? Only to disguise the fact that they're basically the same thing. Why are Buddhism and Hinduism religions instead of philosophies? To encourage us to think they aren't on the same intellectual plane as Platonism.
We should at least distinguish between religions of mythology and Axial Age religions. Possibly we should instead be speaking of ethics based on mythology, tradition, rules, rational logic, or empirical observation. There must be many ways of categorizing ideologies that are more productive, objective, and parsimonious than "religion" vs. "philosophy" vs. "science".
Wokeism repeats Christianity because they're both descended from Platonism. Platonism is the worm at the heart of the West, the thing that makes the West the worst and the best. It also gave us Hegel, Unitarian Universalism, Marxism, and Nazism. Platonism itself descends from geometry, Pythagoreanism, and the government of Sparta.
I don't think the kind of need for totalitarian authority you find in the West is innate to humanity. Many ancient societies had nothing like Western religion. The Sumerian, Greek, and Roman religions had nothing to do with morality, finding purpose in life, or giving people a direction or marching orders. I doubt that the Norse or Aztec religions did either. They were pragmatic religions aimed at negotiating with the gods (or, in the case of the Aztecs, saving them). The closest thing I know to Western religion in antiquity was that of the Egyptians, who are pretty clearly the earliest identifiable ancestors of Western civ IMHO.
Platonism been the silent, unconscious bedrock of Western society for the past 2000 years. It is arguably what defines "the West", using a broader definition which includes Eastern Europe and Russia because they have the same addiction to analysis and dialectic as Western Europe. I don't think it's possible to come to terms with it. I still believe that the more technologically advanced we become, the more-important it becomes to eliminate Platonism (in its most-general sense), because it nearly always leads to totalitarianism and massacre. (I say "nearly" only because of Unitarians and 19th-century progressives.) The one thing Platonists can be relied on to do is to get the answers to philosophical questions radically wrong, and then to try to force those wrong answers on everyone, at any cost. That will destroy us all once everyone has the technological capacity to kill everyone else.