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I’m not sure I agree completely. I think most religion fits into that box but you have things like Gnosticism or some types of Buddhism or Jainism that I don’t find oppressive. Shit, Jesus was executed because he pissed off conservative Hebrews with his more left-wing teachings. His fan club just regularly ignores what they don’t want to hear.
Buddhism sure as hell has oppressed others. The Tibetan caste system where Lamas were on the top and everyone else was basically a slave, for example. And then there's the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, which was encouraged by the monks.
As for Jainism, it teaches that men are a superior species to women and women cannot attain salvation without being reborn as a man first.
Gnosticism I don't know much about. Did they preach against slavery? Did they preach about equality between men and women? Did they say that children should be protected from harm? I doubt that they did all three (or other modern progressive ideas), but feel free to disabuse me of that notion.
Part of the problem is that it's pretty difficult to invent new things for your religion to be for or against when new concepts or technologies arise. Buddhists (despite what I said above) are supposed to refrain from killing. Would Siddhartha Gautama think that AI is alive? If so, is it immoral to ever turn one off? That is a moral question that has a great potential to arise in the very near future and I don't think any religion is prepared for it.
Women did have power in Gnostic Christian history before the conservative wing of Christianity crushed them. From what I can tell they still had to deal with entrenched Roman sexism but it was still progressive for the time. I’m honestly not sure how they fall on slavery but as they believe that all humans have a piece of god in them I would hope they’d be against it. Part of the trouble is most gnostic writings were destroyed for “heresy”. You’re right that plenty of Buddhists have been horrible, Myanmar right now is a good example. Didn’t know that about Jainism so ty.
I think they might be coloring with a bit of a broad brush, but religion - broadly speaking - is conservative. Some religions may promote values that we agree with and traditionally associate with progressivism (pacifism, egalitarianism, altruism). It’s because they’re based primarily on old or even ancient writings.
I was raised a traditionalist Catholic. I went to catholic school until high school until I went to high school where I became an atheist (which I didn’t even know was an option) and was invited by the school to investigate other educational opportunities.
I also studied Theravada Buddhism for many years. Theravada Buddhism isn’t conservative in the MAGA sense of the word, of course. Especially in the tradition I studied, it concentrates on personal investigation rather than treating the texts and teachings as literally true. A common way of presenting teachings is to say something along the lines of “If it helps, let it help. If not, ignore it.” Still, monks are not permitted (generally speaking) to interact much with women, monks and nuns live separately, and I honestly have no idea how a trans person would fare in that environment.
There’s always a problem when you found the basis of your philosophy in a historical text rather than a constantly evolving understanding. One of Chomsky’s chief complaints about Marxism is that it’s founded on and bound by Marx. He points out correctly that people don’t call evolutionary biology “Darwinism”. I mean, creationists do, and biologists might if they’re referring to a very specific concept, but for 99% of the time we just call it “biology.”
So, building your worldview around a fixed text is by definition conservative. Being flexible about its interpretation can make it less conservative. By and large, though, they’re trying to conserve something.
I can’t speak for all Theravada Buddhist nations, but I found Thailand to be pretty accepting of trans people. Not sure how much of that can be attributed to the religion rather than other factors though.
I feel like the real issue is fundamentalism vs a moderate or reform minded way of thinking. I know plenty of Catholics that are quite liberal and are very loud about their disagreements with church dogma, which I’ve found encouraging.
At the end of the day, I consider religion a tool that can be used positively or negatively as a part of a person’s identity. Doesn’t even need to be religion per se, I’ve seen people use a part of their identify positively where another uses the same identity negatively. For example, I might use my love for video games to bond with friends or raise money for charity while others take that same passion and make death threats to devs they are upset with or swat a streamer. A bit of a tortured analogy but I hope it’s at least somewhat coherent.
Thank you for your thoughtful response.
I was thinking of Thailand in particular since that was where my studies were grounded and my understanding is that the general conceptualization of gender is not identical to western approaches. I do tend to try to steer away from terms like “trans” when talking about other cultures because I’m not sure how well the western idea of a trans person translates into cultures with different ideas of genders. I know enough to know that I don’t know enough, but I do know that what we in the US consider LGBT has absolutely no relation to Ancient Greece or modern Thailand.
But I do know that there’s gender-based separation in most of the Thai monasteries that I’m familiar with, and that monks are conscious of sexually based attractions as distractions to be avoided. I strongly suspect that a person we consider trans would be accepted as a nun - at least, in a non-western, traditional order. But that’s based on my overall readings - it’s really weird to realize that I’ve never even thought to ask that question.