anyway people who claim all ✌️ organized religion ✌️ is inherently evil and oppressive need to read up on liberation theology and stfu
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L.J. is reading the Daodejing (ljwrites@rage.love)'s status on Wednesday, 24-May-2023 19:20:06 JST L.J. is reading the Daodejing
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L.J. is reading the Daodejing (ljwrites@rage.love)'s status on Wednesday, 24-May-2023 19:20:02 JST L.J. is reading the Daodejing
This rant brought to you by hearing an account of how Korean churches, especially the Catholic Church in Korea, were active participants in the Gwangju Uprising of May 1980 (and in the subsequent democracy movement). They were up-to-date on the situation in Gwangju in real time and were responsible for spreading the information out past the military barricades. They also took in people who had escaped the carnage to hide them away from the military and police, putting people up in cathedrals and sequestering women students in convents.
I do not ask anyone to have warm fuzzy feelings for Catholicism, or to deny the Catholic Church's crimes or put away their trauma because of this. All I'm saying is that life is complex and many different things can be true at once, and theorizing about the nature of religion or whatever does very little to illuminate what people actually live through all over the world.
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L.J. is reading the Daodejing (ljwrites@rage.love)'s status on Wednesday, 24-May-2023 19:20:03 JST L.J. is reading the Daodejing
Honestly there's nothing definitive or special about ~religion~ in the abstract. It's just people organizing, and like anything to do with people it's a bunch of things all at once. What's interesting is not "is this religious?" or "does Theory say it's bad/good?" but actual lived realities.
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L.J. is reading the Daodejing (ljwrites@rage.love)'s status on Wednesday, 24-May-2023 19:20:04 JST L.J. is reading the Daodejing
Yes, people have religious trauma and face immediate threats from religious organizations and people. These are realities people deal with, and there are other realities as well. A white Christian Evangelical Christian in the U.S. is not the same as an Egyptian Marronite or Peruvian Catholic, or for that matter Indonesian Muslim or Burmese Buddhist. Any big take divorced from on-the-ground realities and contexts risks overwriting multifaceted realities with a brush colored by dominance.
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L.J. is reading the Daodejing (ljwrites@rage.love)'s status on Wednesday, 24-May-2023 19:21:58 JST L.J. is reading the Daodejing
And yes, I know Korean democratization is ~insufficiently revolutionary~ and the neoliberal violence continues unabated. I know the reality we live in, and don't have to be reminded that we're not in some Promised Land of decolonial perfection.
But by God I'm not going to apologize for being relieved that arbitrary detention and torture are less likely than in the 1980s, and that my autistic son is unlikely to be beaten in school by teachers or picked up by the police and put in a labor camp as a "vagrant." Yes I still live in a shitty client state of the U.S. and an ableist capitalist hellscape, but there are differences of degree even in hell and these changes are more than cosmetic.
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