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Comment by Udo | Hacker News Reader

> fundamentalism offers a sense of community and belonging

That's certainly an interesting point. I must admit I struggle a bit with understanding where these people are coming from, because as an atheist I don't personally experience a lack of community and belonging. I would imagine a forced "sense" of community being prescribed at gunpoint to be quite alienating, but I've heard enough people asserting it to take it seriously.

Maybe fundamentalist islam is just a meme whose time has come. Maybe the mindless, cruel herd is fundamentally more appealing to humans than individuality and free thought. In that case, we're not just seeing the pendulum swing here, we're seeing the transition into a new civilization: devoid of science and insight of any kind, yet wielding the tools of technology for maximum devastation.

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One thing that has helped me to understand fundamentalist groups a bit better is to see these tendencies in myself. I consider myself a strong individualist and free-thinker, but I still have places where I take comfort in fitting in to a group.

I tend to pick groups that I view as positive: hacker, scientist, feminist, etc. but they are fundamentally (pun intended) filling the same need as religious beliefs. They give me a framework to understand the world and feel connected to others.

I think as humans we are deeply attracted to belonging, and sometimes the "better" ideals are more dangerous, because we feel justified in judging others. Intelligent people are better at rationalizing their core beliefs, and therefore have trouble seeing beyond them.

Perhaps if we all could recognize the tendencies in ourselves it would provide enough empathy to facilitate change instead of conflict.

I agree to an extent but I still see judgement here "mindless, cruel herd is fundamentally more appealing to humans than individuality and free thought".

Huge numbers of people today have no friends and no community. Read a book called "Bowling Alone" for an America-centric view of the problem but it's actually global.

> but I still see judgement here

That judgement is absolutely intentional. How can I not judge the abject surrender to herd mentality in particular, and fundamentalist belief in general? It's bidirectional, by the way, fundamentalists have no problem judging (and doing worse to) me for refusing to submit.

> Huge numbers of people today have no friends and no community.

To be fair, the rational answer might not be to join the Borg.

It's debatable how much say common people even have in the matter when their whole region converts to religious governance. This leaves us with the people who do choose it for themselves, and they're faced with a non-trivial question: "do I agree with these values or do I just join in order to embed myself into a community, any community?"

For those who agree with the fundamentalist message anyway, community is not the driving factor. The message itself is. Those who merely surrender to the message superficially in order to achieve community will probably become disenfranchised quite soon, because the community they chose is a dangerous place, even from the inside. What use is it to be surrounded by people if you still can't connect with them fully? However, by that point, the damage is done: by the rules you can enter, but you cannot leave ever again even if there's still a "you" left. Apostasy costs your life.

As far as I can see, the religious and other "post-thruth" people live in a portion of the economy where i. The standard of living is low, ii. The feedback loop of improving one's skills to attain a better income level is broken. So they have little self-worth and almost no hope for a better future. Coupled by low-quality education, this drives them to seek solace in easy and comforting answers given by religion about the universe, and by demagogues about their social/economic situation.

There is no easy fix.

Not everyone who is religious is poor or uneducated. There are plenty of people with university degrees (even PhDs) and professional or academic jobs who are devout religious believers.

Even extreme religious views aren't necessarily a product of poverty or lack of education. Creationists like to list how many creationists have PhDs from respectable institutions–almost all of whom have PhDs in fields with no direct relevance to the question of evolution, e.g. engineering or mathematics–but, the very fact that they can engage in this specious argument demonstrates that not every creationist is poor and uneducated.

At a far more extreme end, several of the 9/11 hijackers came out of the Hamburg cell, composed of international students studying at university in Hamburg, Germany. Their religious beliefs were so extreme they were willing to kill themselves and thousands of innocents along with them, yet people who can afford to enrol in university in another country are scarcely people with "almost no hope for a better future".

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