- Joined
- Dec 6, 2020
I don't go to Mass for the "fellowship" of standing around in the car park of my church after Mass and asking Joe if his son's going to come again next week, or listening to Sister Petunia tell a joke she saw on Facebook. I go there to worship God. If I wanted to go somewhere for "fellowship", I'd go to my local youth club and play ping pong with my friends.
The purpose of religion is to worship God. If you don't have God, all religion becomes is an altar, a few candles, a pack of wheat crackers, some wine, an oddly shaped building and a bloke in robes. All of those are worthless without God, and an attempt to offer a "Mass" in the name of Iron Man is just going to be a blasphemous and stupid larp.
I also find it funny how Bob thinks moral codes can and should change. If you want to argue that morality is determined by society, then why does all the evidence show that the same natural law applies across societies? No matter whether you look at American Indians, or Yorubas, or medieval Frenchmen, they have the same moral foundations; honour your father and mother, don't murder, don't commit adultery, don't steal, don't bear false witness, don't covet others' possessions - which are incidentally seven of the Ten Commandments.
Will someone please show me some evidence for the existence of a "feminine priestly class"? The majority of prehistoric societies were patriarchal societies (because men are stronger than women) and worshipped two gods; a sky father and an earth mother. You can see examples of these gods in a lot of pagan religion - Gaia and Pachamama are both earth mothers, Jupiter and Ukko are both sky fathers - and to the best of my knowledge whatever priestesses existed only worshipped female goddesses.
If Bob's trotting out the "Jehovah was actually just the head of the Hebew pantheon" myth, then why can nobody point to any Hebrew scriptures that mention any other gods? If the Pentateuch is a collection of Hebrew mythology, then surely there would be variants somewhere of the Pentateuch that mention other gods?
Degrowth is a sensible idea if it is coupled with localism and a move away from globalised capitalism. In other words, it makes sense for individuals to reduce their carbon footprint by, for instance, not flying if, and only if, that's coupled with a more general transition towards people eating locally-grown food, buying locally-grown products, and away from just getting the latest iCrap off Amazon every year. Moviebob's belief that degrowth and the system that allows him to drink PBR and pretend he's working are somehow compatible is not a sensible idea.
As I've mentioned before I hold some quite hardline views when it comes to the climate. This doesn't mean that I can't call out Moviebob's "environmentalist" views (which are really just him parroting what he believes the Green New Deal says) for the consumerist nonsense they are.
And what are you going to do with all the people you just laid off? Automation will kill off white-collar jobs just as quickly as it kills off working-class jobs, and you'll end up with a large proportion of your population on the dole.
Yes, yes, I know, you think UBI will fix it. In the UK, a livable wage (and bear in mind this is "what you can survive on", not "what you can live comfortably on" is something like £12k to £15k a year. If you automate all those jobs you'll need to pay that to about 50% of the UK population - so you'll need to pay £408 billion a year in UBI, at the very least. I have no idea where Moviebob thinks that money will come from but if he seriously wants to automate those jobs he'd better think of some way of getting it or find himself on the wrong end of a revolution.
> anarchism is compatible with the capitalist mode of production
Not when your local Antifags put a brick through your shop window it isn't.
