Re: Empire and Its Servile Masses (was Felix Morrow on religion)

[Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 2/24/07, joel blau <jblau@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I didn't say that all religion instilled servility.. What I said was
> that in the U.S., all three of the major religions practice
> patriarchical monothesism, which demands subservience to an imagined
> male deity, and that such subservience closely correlates with the
> servility that market demands and expects.

It seems to me that monotheism has historically inspired more revolts
of workers and peasants than Buddhism, pantheism, or other sorts of
religion.  Shinto as a matter of fact is a pantheism whose supreme
deity is female: Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess.  She is kind of cool,
actually, as she lends herself to a feminist and communist reading,
but I have yet to see any modern revolt inspired by her.  The types of
religion that tend to inspire workers and peasants' revolts and
revolutions tend to be messianic and millenarian, which Shinto isn't.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
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