Against religion as we know it, especially in America

"Spirituality" is an empty concept. The concept is useless and should be discarded.

"Spirituality" is an empty concept whose real meaning is that "consciousness" is not a means for thinking but for believing religious dogmas, which are instituted to make people obey. Poets and mathematicians are spiritual; church-goers are merely ideological and reactionary.

The concept of "spirituality" is useless and should be discarded. It is used, for ideological purposes, to appear to mean something that many people will find attractive, in order to direct them to something else. Without such window-dressing, what these people do would begin to lose most of its attractiveness.

There is no reason why there cannot be even a Nazi spirituality just as much as a "good" one; the concept is used to partly mean "ethics" and yet it could very well be a bad ethics.

One could find meaning in religious texts without ascribing to them "spirituality." And for that matter, without ascribing to them any obligatory character.

Is the God of the Old Testament (or the New) one of "being spiritual"? Nothing could be less obvious. A follower of Moses and the Patriarchs might be just as much "materialist" as "spiritual" (and, after all, these are, classically, opposites). With Christianity it is a bit more complicated because it rejects the Jewish idea of perfecting society in favor of a salvation that is individual and may be just a matter of mental attitude, rather than what you do. And that idea is all over Christianity.

Religious texts are literary works, not a manual for living. There is no manual for living. There is no book that you can turn to that will simply tell you what you ought to do. The idea that there is is the great swindle.

What is wrong with treating canonical texts that are part of our religions as literary texts? That certainly does not exclude their having ‘religious’ themes and ideas, and it does not exclude taking seriously enough to ‘follow’ any of their apparent or inferable ethical ideas and moral injunctions. There is nothing in the concept of the literary that excludes the idea of ethical and moral ‘commandments’, although the genre of discourse that elaborates their character as such is, as is generally understood, that of a philosophical ethics rather than a literature proper, as the latter has ambiguities that the former must dispel. What is Ecclesiastes or the Song of Songs if not a literary text? That such a text’s canonicity can be stated as an understanding that it either is ‘about’ the reader’s relationship to God or in some sense derives from that deity, this doesn’t make it any less of a literary text. These texts have the same status in that regard as the writings of Kafka.

The United States would be a far more liberal country were it not for its religious nuts and the noise they make. Their claims have no foundation. Those of us who are committed to modern and liberal values must seek to silence their voices entirely in schools and as much as possible in the public sphere. They can have no place in government.

This religious stupidity and madness probably would not exist in America in anything like the intensity with which it does, had it not been for slavery. The reason is it is designed to tell people suspected of deviance, subversion, or the will to be independent, to: obey. It is an extreme authoritarianism, and that is its principle purpose. This is obvious if you listen to these people for even a moment. The real purpose of most talk about religion in America is to tell workers to obey.

This has even creeped into Reform Judaism; I have seen it preached from "liberal" synagogue pulpits. They are not liberal.

This is, incidentally, the reason why abortion and hatred of homosexuality are the religious right's signature issues. They want to punish those who are abnormal and make people, including women, obey. The roots of this are in an almost uniquely right-wing capitalism, and the roots of that are largely in slavery. We're still living with the consequences.