How is religion hierarchical if you're not forced to participate?
I get that parents can force their kids to participate in religion but as adults if you stop showing up the religion police are not going to show up and lock you in jail. Is it the threat of virtual eternal jail (aka hell) that makes christian religions hierarchical? I get that religious ideas contaminate politics and work their way into state laws but that don't seem like a primary argument or a clear and direct source to me. Can someone explain the basic argument as to what's wrong with religions. From where I'm looking at it right now it seems mostly voluntary with no consequences for opting out.
Posted Jan 19, 2016, 7:59 PM UTC
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Many people are not so lucky. There are many people that face real consequences if they abandon their faith. Mormons, Jehova's Witnesses, and 7th Day Adventists, and the WBC all have abandonment practices in their doctrine. This means you must cease all contact with individuals that leave the faith, including family members. This divides people into classes, believers and non-believers, and puts believers above the non-believer class.
There are tenets of most religions that establish social hierarchies and perpetuate the adherence of these hierarchies. For example, in the text for Christianity women are to be submissive to the needs of her man and slaves are to obedient to their masters. The sects of these religions also tend to establish a hierarchy (the clergy) that sits above the congregation. Also religions tend to have supernatural beings, gods, that are above and superior to humans. Most also have notions that servants of the gods (e.g. priests) have authority over other humans because they are speaking on behalf of the god(s).
Ex-mormon here: I'm still pressured and controlled to some degree by my religious family for matters of faith/their supposed morals. I have it easy. A lot of mormon families end up split up when spouses/parents choose loyalty to their church over loyalty to their family. In fact, mormons as a religious group have one of the highest rates of child homelessness, because they so frequently disown children who fall under the queer umbrella, and they also produce higher adolescent suicide rates than other religious demographics. Not all religions are damaging to the same degree, but it is irrefutable that highly moralistic and conservative religions with strong central leadership tend to produce negative effects for their members and people who interact with them, and those negative effects come from the authority paradigm inherent to those religions, ie: it's dangerous to be a mormon/jehova's witness/whichever because your friends and family will betray you in order to obey the authority of their local leaders, who obey their regional leaders, who obey the people who claim they have the supreme authority of a deity backing them up. Religion is hierarchical because to a believer, you cannot violate the will of their deities without being somehow wrong or evil, and being in violation of their unquestionable paternalistic authority in "heaven" means that the believer is now superior to you and has a right or a need to either oppress you or control you to ensure that the will of their church or their god(s) are done.
Ex-JW here. Yep, if you're born into the religion, be prepared to lose your whole family, and any childhood friends for choosing to think for yourself. It's pretty coercive, especially for anybody born into the religion. For those not born into it, the whole doctrine of being destroyed at armageddon is pretty coercive.
I found being destroyed in armageddon less coercive than most other religious punishments, which finally helped me leave actually. The worst that can happen is you cease to exist, not so bad. But, the not being able to talk to some of my closest friends and family is definitely coercive.
Is breaking contact with a coercive family member really a negative consequence? This sounds more like an incentive system. If you play ball you keep your support system. I see that as different from play ball or you're going to jail. Don't most people have the ability to opt out of religion? Can't you say "those are just words" and walk away? I'm generalizing but isn't this a real option is large parts of the world?
You should ask the thousands of homeless children in the U.S. if their family breaking contact with them, either because of religious differences or (also related to religion) their sexual orientation, was a positive in their life. A coercive family is often the only support system young people have. So while it is not a particularly good environment for them, they at least tend to have the basics provided for them (shelter, food, water, etc.).
In that sense isn't all of work under capitalism the same. You always have the ability to opt out, technically speaking. It is not really a choice available for young people to realistically make if your options are basically keep your support system that allows you to keep living, or abandon it all for homelessness.
I get that kids are stuck with their parents while they are kids. I don't think the work under capitalism argument holds up. As far as I can tell the dependence on religion is far less. As an adult stuck living within capitalism as far as I can tell I'm able to opt out of religion with zero consequences. Sure kids have an infinity of hierarchy thrust upon them but that's a separate issue from religion in my opinion.
Venture over to the ex-Mormon, ex-Muslim, and ex-Black Christian subs to see this silly notion done away with.
You can even look at the religious LGBT community. They're the bottom rung of the religious hierarchy.
That's really privileged and lucky of you. There are individuals that are punished by the state for leaving their birth religion. Every couple of years there is a news story about some blogger, writer, broadcaster, etc. that leaves the Islamic faith and is handed punishments from their community and also the state.
Another instance of the absurdity of your claim is with non-profit organizations. Non-religious non-profits must go through many more steps and are subject to many more regulations than their religious counterparts. From personal experience I can tell you it is so much easier to set up a non-profit if you claim it is a church/religious in nature than to set up some kind of non-religious non-profit. The advantages given to religious organizations over non-religious organizations is absurd.
Of course there is a one word refutation of your idea that being able to opt out of the faith makes it not a legitimate hierarchy. Israel. They are a capitalist society that has their hierarchical structure based entirely from their religious texts, and even opting out doesn't exclude one from the state and community imposing that hierarchy upon all of the residents.