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Religious conflict, whether it be in the realm of academic discussion or all out physical conflict, is in essence a practice in futility. Religions are like poorly written research essays, which cite themselves as proof of their own existence; they are mired in circular logic and claim themselves to be 'absolute truth' or the method by which one may attain such a lofty abstraction. Of course, reasoning that a religion is the 'correct' religion based off of that particular religion's scripture, created solely to provide a fact-like mythology for that religion, is fallacious. No religion will acknowledge another religion's scripture as 'factual,' somewhat because they recognize that their own scripture is mostly didactic myth and mostly because all religious arguments boil down to pissing matches between imaginary friends. Arguing religions is no more academic than arguing intrinsic, immutable opinions or politics. The simple reason for this is because there can be no 'absolute truth' available to prove any side right or wrong, because everything in the universe is relative to all other objects in the universe; the complex reason is explained thusly:
Hegel's 'Herrschaft und Knechtschaft,' or 'Master-Slave Dialectic' theory: when two equally sentient beings come in contact with one another, they will struggle for supremacy until one conquers the other. The triumphant being becomes the Herr, Lord, or Master, and the other becomes Knecht, In Bondage, or Slave. In this process, the Master becomes the privileged Primary being, while the Slave becomes the secondary Other being, seen in relation to the Primary.
Althusser theorizes that the Master creates Ideological State Apparatuses to maintain its ideology amongst the proletariat (Other, Slave) because the Power class is much smaller than the proletariat. Without realizing it, all actions taken by the Other propagate the ruling ideology and its ISAs - the proletariat is always-already interpellated by the ISAs.
Foucault theorizes that the Master, much smaller than the proletariat, creates rules for changing the ISAs by forcing individuals to become 'experts' in the field (via more education and therefore more exposure to ISAs). The uneducated proletariat becomes marginalized in the discussion regarding various pieces of the ruling Ideology, such as Law, Sanity, and Education, among others. Any who dissent against the Ideology are marginalized further and completely excluded from the discussion - this includes those who are considered 'criminals' or 'insane.'
de Beauvoir theorizes that an Other (such as woman) remains marginalized because the Primary privileges itself by creating cultural artifacts like language and art which accommodate them and exclude the Other. In the case of Woman/Man, Man creates and controls language, so woman does not have language to explain or understand her situation (the 'female condition' being mythologized and forced to assimilate by men), and thus has no way in which to escape her situation as long as men control the language and culture. However, woman is not born as the Other - there is no essence inherent in 'womanhood' preceding her existence which forces her to be marginalized - but instead forced into it by the society into which she is born. Thus, she defines her essence through her existence and therefore by her relations to others in the world.
Derrida explains that all objects, ideas, beings in existence follow this model, including and especially language. Language is comprised of signs (words) and signifieds (concepts) which are arbitrarily related to one another. The word 'bread' has many iterations in other languages because the concept of 'bread' (as we know it) has no essence of 'breadiness' which forces it to be named 'bread.' Thus, words are not names for things, but pleasing sounds strung together to divide our world into manageable chunks. Different languages chunk things differently.
Religion works on the premise that there is an all-powerful, all-seeing 'God' which transcends these realizations about the material world. This assumption is a Western mistake known as 'logocentrism,' the belief that meaning is self-present within a word. A word with self-presence is known as a transcendental signified. Transcendental signifieds cannot exist because essence cannot precede existence. Thus, a 'God' would be a singular concept, in which the word 'God' would always have to mean the same concept in all languages. There could be no wavering - no language could have another word for 'God' because it would be misnamed. Because the word and the concept fluctuate, it is not self-present - its definition and being is directly correlated to its differance, or its difference between all other things and the constant deferral of meaning to these differences, ad infinitum.
Also, no movie can be labeled 'The Best' because that would be logocentric, but Fargo is pretty sweet.
Now go plug this into your papers without citing it so you can get a B+ in your cultural theory class.
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