this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2025
259 points (95.8% liked)
Casual Conversation
3209 readers
199 users here now
Share a story, ask a question, or start a conversation about (almost) anything you desire. Maybe you'll make some friends in the process.
RULES (updated 01/22/25)
- Be respectful: no harassment, hate speech, bigotry, and/or trolling. To be concise, disrespect is defined by escalation.
- Encourage conversation in your OP. This means including heavily implicative subject matter when you can and also engaging in your thread when possible. You won't be punished for trying.
- Avoid controversial topics (politics or societal debates come to mind, though we are not saying not to talk about anything that resembles these). There's a guide in the protocol book offered as a mod model that can be used for that; it's vague until you realize it was made for things like the rule in question. At least four purple answers must apply to a "controversial" message for it to be allowed.
- Keep it clean and SFW: No illegal content or anything gross and inappropriate. A rule of thumb is if a recording of a conversation put on another platform would get someone a COPPA violation response, that exact exchange should be avoided when possible.
- No solicitation such as ads, promotional content, spam, surveys etc. The chart redirected to above applies to spam material as well, which is one of the reasons its wording is vague, as it applies to a few things. Again, a "spammy" message must be applicable to four purple answers before it's allowed.
- Respect privacy as well as truth: Don’t ask for or share any personal information or slander anyone. A rule of thumb is if something is enough info to go by that it "would be a copyright violation if the info was art" as another group put it, or that it alone can be used to narrow someone down to 150 physical humans (Dunbar's Number) or less, it's considered an excess breach of privacy. Slander is defined by intentional utilitarian misguidance at the expense (positive or negative) of a sentient entity. This often links back to or mixes with rule one, which implies, for example, that even something that is true can still amount to what slander is trying to achieve, and that will be looked down upon.
Casual conversation communities:
Related discussion-focused communities
- !actual_discussion@lemmy.ca
- !askmenover30@lemm.ee
- !dads@feddit.uk
- !letstalkaboutgames@feddit.uk
- !movies@lemm.ee
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Calling Buddhism or Confucianism not a religion is a political claim which the speakers usually have zero knowledge of and I’m sick of it. The history of what is religion in China from the republic onwards with the very Protestant understanding of what is a world religion is very important to understand this question. But most people either claim this for their hippy means or to be derogatory
I mean, it really comes down to how you define religion. A lot of people's conception of religion is grounded in the Abrahamic traditions (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam), and other traditions don't fit neatly into that framework. It's useful to identify the Christian/Abrahamic lens through which various traditions have been historically seen and to reexamine whether the actual reality is in line with the picture we have of them. Whether such traditions are ultimately classified as religions or not is semantic, but it's worthwhile to examine them as they are and to question assumptions about them.
You’re 100% right. Religious studies went through exactly what you described. Thinking of religion as Abrahamic, opening up to world religions through the former lens, opening up to more that would have been considered cults or bad, then now I think quite open to most religions. Defining religion is a boring but important part of the field that many monographs feel it’s their duty to do.