So just a few comments on thinking through my writing on Chick-Fil-A in the previous post:
A few people have commented that the post is anti-Christian.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
I’m anti-domination-as-oppression.
Why an un-thought, un-named Christian historical presence of mainstream American thinking –and alongside the Paganism that Christian institutions of the past destroyed, are working in tandem as dominant over other ways of thinking, doing, and structuring lives, peoples, norms, is the point and target of my critique and questions concerning how to live with differences in our world.
My writing is not anti-Christian. It is the assumption that historical Christian-based thinking about nature, persons, values, and the categories that are formed to give life to American culture, is something that goes as dominant and undisturbed and maintained and defended above other ways of thinking and structuring our values and societies—this is the issue.
How these un-examined values may then, be named as ‘democracy’ or ‘civility’ and ‘freedom’ and the use of the term ‘God’ in order to establish legitimacy, are an underlying problematic raised by this general critique that is almost unnamed in my previous post, but is there.
There are many valuable and useful things that Christianity, as in all religions, have brought through into lives and identities and institutional and legal norms. But without examining its domination-practices, our so-called ‘goodness’ or ‘spirituality’ or ‘glory’ or ‘freedom’ or other such terms, are nothing but cover-ups and disguises for abuse, corruption, denial, arrogance, simple-mindedness, violence and delusion.
These things are not necessary but continue to exist and operate through us because we may refuse–yes REFUSE, to think differently in relation to our own practices of domination–most of which is unconscious (because we deny history, culture and politics in our worldviews in the present).
AI NO KO 