re: #128 Anymouse 🌹🏡😷

Even non-hierarchical religions (for example, Wicca) place faith in what others have told them, even if they don’t have a central scriptural text. Whether they got that knowledge from writings by Wiccan authors such as Scott Cunningham’s “Wicca for the Solitary Practitioner” or from a “formal” coven with a high priestess, the witch takes her or his direction from what they’ve read or been told by authority figures and turns it into belief. They then incorporate the belief such that “what they believe is who they are.”

I can no more convince a Wiccan that their religious faith is likely untrue than I can convince a Christian or Muslim. As a minority religion they have no power to persecute others, though they have been persecuted.

From the outside as an atheist looking in, the structures of religion look the same regardless of the window-dressing, which is why I consider conservatism a religion. By design it does not change (like any other religion) if at all, seeks control of those lower on the pyramid, insists in the face of all evidence against its tenets that it must be true, and is persecuted by “others” (ohmygod the cancel culture bullshyte is really getting old).