The Religious Right Stealing Subjugating Strategies since at least 250 BC

[Igel]

12. If the religious and those on the right steal,

who, exactly, are they stealing *from*?

I also disagree that divinities are the ideal tool. There are others, and they all serve the same purpose equally well. Divinities are a bit easier, but it's hard to argue that as religion, the divider in US culture and morality, has decreased division and polarization necessarily decreased. It rather makes precisely the wrong predictions, for all the historically observable reasons.

One of the nice features of a divinity is that it's divisive and breeds self-righteousness, but people hardly need a god to be self-righteous. The Catholic Church at the height of its paranoia and division-seeking had absolutely nothing over on USSR and China, both secular. Many of the most secular students I know put the unwieldily pious "Xians" in my classes to shame in both self-righteousness, animosity to their Other, the need to mock others and to proselytize from a position of arrogance.

Meanwhile, I know absolute atheists and devout Xians and Muslims who, given just a few changes to their levels of self-righteousness and fear, get along really well with each other. Many of them are very political, but you don't know it until you actually ask--and you find that the kid whose friends with the guy who's looking forward to voting for the first time next year (and for Trump) is actually a supporter of international socialism and that Wobblies-motif hoodie he wears isn't just a historical design. (And he was really stunned when his science teacher saw the design and said, "You like the Wobblies?" First response, "How do you *know* that?!&quot

If you put a million actually good people in the middle of a laissez-faire economy or a profoundly authoritarian socialist economy, you'll get the same result, a secular society or a deeply religious society. The structure is one thing; what matters is what's in the structure. Put enough bad people in a laissez-faire society, you get "greed is good" (something that was decried as bad decades earlier) and heightened inequality and oppression ; put enough bad people in a top-down socialist society, and you get the inequality of re-education camps and equality-centered fine-tuned rules over every aspect of life, coupled with special privileges for the 'pure' and nitpicking attention paid to the impure, every bit as much in a highly religion-centered society.