Richard Baker wrote: > >> Questionable. Communist might be considered a kind of religion, as >> some of its dogmas are based on faith. > >It explicitly rejects supernatural explanations though. > Some religions also deny supernatural explanations, like those that believe in psychic powers.
> Dialectical materialism might be wrong, but it is materialism. > Also, for example, "We take these truths to be self-evident..." > towards the beginning of the Declaration of Independence > might be argued to make American > democracy a kind of religion using similar reasoning. > And I think it is also a kind of religion. > If we're going to > use a definition of religion that broad then... I'm not sure what I > have to say on the matter. > The real problem is that we **don't** have a decent definition of religion, as things that are considered religions by most people differ substantially. For example, compare religions that believe in a distant God that eventually interfers but will judge people after death to those mystic ufologists that believe that UFOs contact people using telepathy and nothing is supernatural, just supertech. >> WW2, in both European and Asian scenarios, were religious wars. Nazism >> has its roots in mysticism and the denial of science. All that Aryan >> stuff is esoteric, and can be traced back to a rebirth of paganism in >> the 20s. And Japanese expansion was based on the Divinity of the >> Emperor. > >Okay, I think you might have a point that those movements were tapping >into the same kinds of thoughts as religions (as Burleigh argues in his >excellent new history of the Third Reich, in which he calls Nazism a >"political religion"). > Nazism was more than just a political religion. There was a strong mystical component that was essential to the nazi doctrine. > I don't yet know enough about Japan in the 1930s > and 1940s to know whether religiosity was a major factor in their > choice to go to war, but I don't think it can have been important > enough to have been a central reason, because the descent of the > imperial family from the sun goddess Amaterasu was an idea > a millennium or more old. > So? You can't have Kamikazes without a religious component, because they were not dying to save Japan, they were dying for their honour. Alberto Monteiro _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
