there’s a reason i coalition build best with religious anarchists while myself being an agnostic.

Very hard to be an anarchist and then recoil at a neighbor with superficial differences in belief. If you need homogeneity of thought for anarchism to function, but you reject a hierarchy of institution to enforce canonical doctrine, how is that even supposed to work?

there’s actually a ton of radical political thought in theology if you can get away from a hierarchically programmed preacher long enough to study it yourself

Sort of the secret sauce of the modern major religious movements. They are all, at their core, populist messages intended to appeal to wide audiences of working class people. The insular cults and sectarian country clubs do a great job of raising tons of money from a few gullible rubes. But they can't stand the test of time without reforming back into popular theology.

I would say that any serious student of religion or history really needs a teacher (ideally more than one). "Just do your own research" is fine on its face, but inevitably you run into contradictions and conundrums that the texts alone don't illuminate. A great deal of the Old Testament is written as part of a rabbinical dialogue, with different books and chapters and even verses intentionally challenging one another in order to spur meditation and debate. And plenty of Leftist texts follow a similar trajectory.

You don't have to read Marx and Engels as somehow oppositional to Kropotkin, Bakunin, and Stirner. You don't have to read Descartes as oppositional to Kant. All these philosophers can operate in dialogue with one another. Perhaps even in some kind of dialectic with one another.

But it does help to hold a certain set of common beliefs.

there’s a song i love titled Owed to a Hypocrite about how the politician and the preacher walk down the road hand in hand oppressing all us regular people

My favorite line from Game of Thrones is the Sellsword Riddle. The answer you give to the riddle says a great deal about what you think of political power and who ultimately wields it. And the deeper you muse on it, the harder it is to unravel.

I feel I may have been invited indirectly a couple of times when we spoke.