Tag:Tribes

Tribalism in the modern era.

It seems that in order to exist in the modern world, you need to belong to one or more tribes. The tribes of old have diminished and died off, there are very few people in the world that would identify as being a member of the Celts, Gauls, Rhaetians and Swabians, Vistula Veneti, Lugii and Balts tribes.

Had you asked me what I would consider tribal a few years ago, I would have said that football or baseball suppport would follow the tribal model quite well, the fans follow the same team, wear the same colours, fight the opposing tribes and to some extent embrace the same ideals

With the rise of the internet, and the spreading of information ad miss-information, prominent current tribes seem to be ‘Anti-vax’, or Anti-Mask, or Pro/Anti-Trump.

Membership of one tribe almost always seems to lead to membership of others too, so for once in the world we have tribes that are segregated in a way that looks a lot like a Venn diagram.

My Religious Opposition

I was raised in an not especially religious household, we went to Church on an infrequent basis and I was sent to Sunday school for a while, but in general there was no great emphasis on religion that I remember. I was encouraged to pray, but mostly religion was not a subject that was discussed a great deal

I went to Sunday school because my parents wanted me to go, while there we were told stories from the bible and while interesting, I quickly identified them as fiction. There was no basis in reality that I could see, simple, cute, whimsical stories that often had a moral to them. In near every example the story proved that being good to others would generally lead to a good outcome, while being bad would generally be your downfall. I got good at this, I could identify the bad actors within a couple of minutes. I paid all of this education lip-service, because my parents wanted this.

I distinctly remember some of my peers taking this seriously, they took the stories to be actual records of things that had happened, rather than my interpretation of them as being moral-based stories that promoted better behaviour.

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