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I thought I would raise for discussion the question of the cultural protections afforded to religions and ideologies, and the differences between them. I think this is very important for a clear understanding of exactly what we are dealing with when we speak of a given religion or ideology and how much protection we should give it.
Though the dualist view of reality has been pretty much discarded by professional philosophers, it continues to live on in creatively perverse ways in the popular culture.
Under this view, any idea which pertains to "this" world, the immediately apparent and manifest world, and which makes normative judgements about the same, can be said to be an ideology.
All that relates to "spiritual" experiences, however, and which deals with the relationship at a subjective level of an individual with this world and his fellow denizens of it is supposed to fall into the realm of religion.
Now I know that these definitions are far from exact, but they're a start. In general, we have some sort of cultural propensity to afford sympathy and protection from criticism to that which we class as "religious". Ideologies which speak of the ordering of the material world, however, are not given the same protection.
In general, we're more wary of criticising someone's supernatural belief system than their political affiliation. You can generally call someone deluded for being a Democrat/Republican, and do so in good fun, but you'll be considered a bad sport if you joke about someone's religion.
To move to the meat of the matter: what happens when there happens to be a set of ideas which is a religion and an ideology all rolled into one?
Should the ideology parts of it be free from criticism because the idea-set also contains a religion?
Or is it that the minute an idea-set makes an ideological claim, it opens itself up to all the criticisms ideologies are open to?
Though the dualist view of reality has been pretty much discarded by professional philosophers, it continues to live on in creatively perverse ways in the popular culture.
Under this view, any idea which pertains to "this" world, the immediately apparent and manifest world, and which makes normative judgements about the same, can be said to be an ideology.
All that relates to "spiritual" experiences, however, and which deals with the relationship at a subjective level of an individual with this world and his fellow denizens of it is supposed to fall into the realm of religion.
Now I know that these definitions are far from exact, but they're a start. In general, we have some sort of cultural propensity to afford sympathy and protection from criticism to that which we class as "religious". Ideologies which speak of the ordering of the material world, however, are not given the same protection.
In general, we're more wary of criticising someone's supernatural belief system than their political affiliation. You can generally call someone deluded for being a Democrat/Republican, and do so in good fun, but you'll be considered a bad sport if you joke about someone's religion.
To move to the meat of the matter: what happens when there happens to be a set of ideas which is a religion and an ideology all rolled into one?
Should the ideology parts of it be free from criticism because the idea-set also contains a religion?
Or is it that the minute an idea-set makes an ideological claim, it opens itself up to all the criticisms ideologies are open to?
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