I posit that there are very few genuinely religious people left in the United States, and by extension, The West. I am most familiar with Christian theology and dogma, so I am most comfortable critiquing it over say Buddhism or Islam. Taken at face value, the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth as portrayed in the Bible is full of very explicit messages about the proper, or godly relationship between the reader/supplicant, God, and the rest of humanity. If you want to be a theologically correct Christian, you will live a life of poverty, relative to your peers. After all, Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God And that is not subject to 'interpretation.' In context of the story it says that a rich rich dude asked how he could become a disciple of Jesus and the man said it was simple. Give all you have to the poor save the clothes on your back and a few crusts of bread and then you can follow me and we'll get to the real work. But first you must GIVE. Rejection of the value of poverty, or in fact, 'Prosperity Theology' runs counter to a direct command from the flesh incarnation of the One True Living God. Now tell me, how many 'Christians' believe that? How many of them use poverty as a guiding principle of their lives and spiritual identity? By the definition of their own deity anybody with a few pennies to rub together cannot claim the title of 'Christian.' The point of all of that is to express that America, and by some extension 'The West' takes the bits it likes from whatever religion is least offensive at the time, washes them clean of whatever parts don't fit into our existing model of our place in the world, and wears them proudly like a cheap rhinestone necklace at a jewelers convention. In statistically significant numbers, we don't distinguish genuine spirituality from it's inexpensive feel good knock offs.
Exactly my point. Materialism has shown itself to be a good force in the west, not a negative one. The desire for wealth, luxury, is a thing that can be managed properly and used to forge a great life. Like all things, it can be taken to extremes, but in moderate doses, it is a great thing. Buddhism, eastern philosophies, and so on, when introduced to the west are not going to retain that anti-materialist sentiment, at least not as strongly as they could in their native populations. Their general ideals, however, being content, happy to live where you are, and so on, are very powerful messages that moderate consumerism, and lead people to a more healthy, more content lifestyle while they continue to keep their eyes on a goal-oriented western-type motivation of doing great things, having a big home, and so on and so forth. Cultural capitalism, as you see in companies selling all the Buddhist/eastern cultural crap, is a sure sign that the west's religion, philosophies, and so on, are heavily motivated and driven by consumer culture. Nothing wrong with that. The human mind is a complex and great machine, where you see contradictions that person clearly sees something cohesive and decent, and you most likely do not have the experience or the knowledge to state otherwise. We follow words based not on their original intent, but based on the way we perceive them. Jesus is no longer the icon from the bible, not in the west. Jesus has become the model of a great, humble, person who helps their community and gives to others when called upon to do so. He is no longer a poor hippie hating on the rich, because the west are the rich, and we have no mind to go about hating ourselves. It allows our society to function, allows people to live better lives, to have mentors to follow. The message of Jesus is false, it is stupid, it doesn't work. So we modify it to suit our needs. That's not hypocritical, that's practical. However, these critiques of materialism are not just being incorporated into our own culture, they are also being branded by some companies as exotic and are being marketed to sell goods.
It's not about appropriation, it's about contradiction.
The main source of our disagreement seems to be the assumption that the things people say they believe, the actions they take on a conscious level, indicate the way they believe, that what a person believes is controlled by the person in some way. I realize this is a somewhat unfalsifiable position, but I believe that the majority of people aren't really aware of how they feel, of who they are. Look at the actions in the west, you pointed it out, it's hypocrites all the way down. Jesus, the savior of the world, the patron of sacrifice and humility is used in massive churches with great luxury. Broadcasted on TV to people in large homes while some sit starving in nations where mud is the most water they can find. Eastern values of suffering through desire are twisted into consumerism, made out to be sold and packaged into nice little booklets for a person to buy for a few dollars. They are used to create a culture of desire, to have a new statue of Budda, to buy into tapes, videos, and so on. However, I think that if you look with any dept at these cultures, they represent that disconnect between who we are, and who we think we are. We want to believe, and are taught to believe, that we are nice, humble, caring, considerate. We want to believe that we are in a group that supports us, that we are important, special, part of something larger, something greater. Sometimes we want to be different, we want to dismiss societies values and challenge our ideals, we want to learn, to expand our mind. That's what these "hypocritical" religions are doing, They do not give people what they say they do, and the people who go to the churches do not go there for the reasons they think they do. They satisfy our desires, ironically enough, even if they are claiming to be attempting to get rid of them at the same time. I really do believe that if these people were hypocrites, they would change. Not only would they change, they would do so in such a fast way that you wouldn't believe it. In reality, they aren't hypocrites, they just haven't taken the time to know themselves as they should. If they did, they probably would be guilt ridden, as they have told themselves for their entire lives that "this is what I want". So they don't. Look at how people act around meat for a shining example of this. We are cruel, heartless bastards when it comes to treating animals well, but we don't like to be those things, as we are taught that they are inherently bad traits. So we cover it up. We buy "free range" eggs, we try to convince ourselves as much as possible that the animal's aren't actually suffering, or we try to say we made up for the fact we just killed a living being for a nice treat by giving it a nice walk before we do kill it. Our actions indicate that we do not believe animals are moral. Our words, our conscious idea of who we are say we do. This does not mean we are hypocrites, just that we are ignorant of our nature. Not even that, we are terrified of it. Consider when we abandoned slavery, or when the west did. Not when we learned of freedom and liberalism, but after the industrial revolution where we became a society of workers who needed freedom, who needed to be able to work in a factory, and to be trusted in doing so. But the story isn't one of slaves being made obsolete by technology, it is of humanity suddenly realizing that we did for thousands and thousands of years is one of the most horrible acts possible. In reality, slavery just went out of date. It wasn't driven out of existence by argument, but by an assembly plant. The south fighting the north was like a war between muskets vs bow and arrows. Just as the war between the US and the Soviets was one between liberty and order. The old vs the new, slavery vs industrialization. Industrialization won. Morality did not. If slavery was still more efficient, we would convince ourselves it is an OK act, as we do so today with sweatshops, and meat factories. This is the reality that we fear. This is why you see so many hypocrites. If your goal is for people to live happy, content, emotionally fulfilling lives, than I agree that modern consumerism, capitalism, and so on, are not the best or greatest ways of running society. However, society is not something that exists for people to merely be happy in. People are not driven by a desire to merely be happy, to be content. We are driven to tinker, to control, to destroy, to abuse, to create, and so on. Society, the foundations upon which it was built, do not rely on everyone within it being happy, but instead rely on the societies ability to grow, to accomplish more, to provide benefit to those who live within it. A content life of philosophical study in the woods is great, but it does not build circuits, unlock the potential to feed thousands on land that could previously feed hundreds. It does not build missiles that can annihilate cities in an instant, it does not give us the inspiration and greed required to look to the stars and say "mine". We are a weed, a parasite, an invasive species. We cannot go through life without killing other creatures, be it by stepping on a bug, or eating hundreds of other things with feelings much like our own. Our very bodies are built on the sacrifice of thousands of individual cells, destroying themselves prematurely for the greater good. What is cancer but a free-spirited cell that takes life into it's own hands, freeing itself from the oppressive restraints of the body? We take, we consume, and we twist the world around us until it suits us more than it did before, and we will continue doing so until it is impossible to do more. We are not nice, we are not peaceful, we are not happy. Mankind is not suited to a life of peace, nor one of war. I do not believe we are evil by nature, as we can care for one another, we cry, we nurture, we farm, we domesticate, we build great and peaceful cities, we form peace where only war existed. We have empathy, we protect species all over the world from death, we catalogue and preserve things which are in danger by our own destruction. We do all we can to look away from the reality of how horrible this world really can be, and from what we have to do, and endure, because of that fact. We are complex, our lives are complex, our nature is complex. To consign mankind into a restrictive box as most religions do, to say we must be content, happy, at peace, is to restrict who we are. This is the source of the hypocrisy you see. In order to build something, you must destroy something else. Mankind is an expert at both, and society is the greater sum of all our actions.consumerism does not produce happiness and that it is, in it's current form, fueling the destruction of our society in both environmental and political ways.