roachboy

i think the idea that organized religion made people free is loopy. in general, they were a mechanism of private social control, accountable to no-one, answerable to no-one.

even if your scenario made sense and the united states were sliding into some form of state domination, so long as it was vaguely responsive democratically we, whomever the population would be of this imaginary place, would be more "Free" than we would be in a religiously dominated system---and this simply because every so often there'd be elections and in between you can in theory anyway organize people to bring pressure to bear on an apparatus that has **some** reason to respond.

but this whole scenario is imaginary---- it doesn't exist and this is not a matter of "just my opinion, man" but of the empirical world. we can talk about the empirical world you know. there's no reason to vaporize it behind the mist of paranoia. that one cannot **know** the object world does not mean that therefore its all "just my opinion man"---there are any number of systems for ordering and by extension knowing the object world---most are effective within their particular domains---there's just multiple systems because there's multiple domains---the cliche about the contemporary period is that the "master narratives" have collapsed: the stories about other stories that gave the impression that subsystems fit into some larger system and were not simply juxtaposed linked situationally (and in the being-linked addressing problems of scale or synch that are maybe created by reliance on notions of scale themselves)


here's a counter example: stalinism---the idea that the united states is sliding toward something like that is loopy----what you describe as a desired outcome for this strange "war on religion" (o-reilly anyone?) is a restatement of the ambition behind the collectivization of agriculture. do you seriously see anything remotely like that happening in the united states? where?

you don't see it because the entire claim is false empirically: nothing like that is happening and if you knew anything about stalinism, so knew anything about what actual bureaucratic-capitalist domination looked like you'd know that. the idea that the united states is sliding toward something like that is predicated on people not knowing what state domination would mean or look like. so it's an imaginary construct that appeals to some emotional dimension of your being. its not a description of the world; its a description of your attitude with respect to a construct that you label "the world"

personally, i don't really care what happens to the roman catholic church. i grew up catholic too. but i don't care what happens to it. the whole edifice could burn and it wouldn't matter to me. i'm sure the cool commodities would end up in museums and people could visit with them and go ooo and aaah and feel all connected to the 2000 year game of charades that is european history in the way they feel connected to that game of charades now.

but i digress.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite