Spuriosity

I see two general categories of spurious claims to universality. I could call them the exclusive and the inclusive, or the conservative and the liberal, but today I will call them the catholoid and the unitarioid.

The catholoid spurious claims to universality are those analogous to the claim of catholicity of the Roman Catholic Church. You might think that after the Great (East-West) Schism the claim of catholicity would have been adjusted. Perhaps they could have continued to speak of one holy and apostolic church of which heres your Roman Half. Officially the Roman Semi-Catholic Church. [Shown to the right: a representative of part of the other half.]

Catholoid spurious claims to universality are recognized in the extreme as leading to such things as inquisitions and crusades, holocausts and pogroms, physical genocides and mass conversions. Think armies of missionaries, concentration camps, McCarthyism, and the Red Guard. The point is that if yours is the universal church or universal ideology or universal property and economic arrangement, then any non-subscriber does not fit in your world at all. First they must be converted. Then, when that doesn't "take," they have to be removed, so as to make real in the remainder a universality that was previously a lie.

As I've implied, catholoid behavior is most often a failure of conservatives (I include communists among conservatives. They are only "liberal" until the Tsar is out of the way.) Liberals don't make the catholoid mistake of excluding those who disagree with them. Liberals who make spurious claims to universality do it in unitarioid style.

By unitarioid spurious claims to universality I mean unfounded claims of factual existing universality. Consider the following sentence. "We all know there's something out there, some mystery, that gives meaning to life, even atheists know that. You can call it God or you can call it something else, but in your heart you know it's there." Actual real people say things like that.

Actual real stupid people, who call themselves liberal thinkers, go around and claim to know what beliefs other people carry around deep in the hearts, without ever bothering to ask first.

[Shown: Assorted mystery shit that never did me any good.]

I, for one, don't believe any mystery can give my life meaning. And I'm not even an atheist. I believe in more gods than most self-proclaimed theists do. I just think if it's a mystery, then it's a mystery how it does me any good. In fact it's freaking moronic to think that a mystery gives you anything. And it pisses me off to have freaking morons tell me I believe their moronic ideas in my heart, knowing that I don't.

This is why, whenever three or more liberals come together, someone takes offense at someone else, and organizes an action.

Unitarioid behavior doesn't lend itself to the kind of overt dramatic oppressions that the catholoid ones do. But I believe that in the long run the harm done by papering over real differences of thinking and beliefs among us is just as great. By denying real differences we prevent real understandings based on a solid foundation of truly knowing one another that could lead to a kind of social progress we've never had, but need desperately.

Of course, as soon as I announce my contrary beliefs publicly for the edification of the unitarioids next door, the catholoids who live on the other side of me haul their rack out of storage. So we never get anywhere. Hence I am peeved.