I am not opposed to spirituality. I think organized religion subverts people from their own quest.
It's possible that others did that too, and I missed them. People are welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com in such cases, especially when a flamewar starts to spread.
In any way there is always some emotional manipulation, and people who depend on that are also vulnerable to rational manipulation. Sometimes it's helpful, sometimes it's dangerous. How you respond to that depends on you. You saying words like "shocked, disgusted, suspicion, subverts" concerning faith and church reveals more about you than it says about your opinion.
This is far from a quick assumption and my response here is what I am doing about steering people away from dangerous delusions. Religion is superstition, not at all unlike believing you can get rid of AIDS by raping someone.
There is no society without religion. That is, every society needs tenets that all members share.
Now we should ask ourselves what religion is adequate for today's world.
In the end I think our main disagreement here is how broadly we define religion. To me, if you take take the narrow view of religion, you're leaving huge human catastrophies to be explained outside religion. What do you think of the Stalinists' belief system, for example? Their terror wasn't justified by a god but still by rules they demanded blind acceptance of. And they had ceremonies and rituals.
To me, it is easier to understand the Stars and Stripes behind every politician's head in the U.S. as a religious symbol than to invent a whole new category over it. But I see how people could be irritated by that.
I think what you're trying to say is that we've got better tools than religion now. My approach here is to broaden the meaning of religion. As I said before every society needs common beliefs to function. I refer to those beliefs as religion. But I can accept if this is too broad for some people.
Redefining religion to encompass any kind of shared values is a cheap trick to legitimize the destructive nature of dogma and of teaching people that accepting nonsense as fact is a virtue by pretending that a secular state is a religion--which is just absurd.
All secular states have a flag used for ceremonial purposes for example. It's supposed to create a feeling of unity. Just like religious symbols do. Sure we can talk about matters of degree. Not all societies have an all-seeing god, for example.
First of all, you are confusing two very distinct concepts here under the label "belief", just as religions usually do. One is "stuff you think you know about how the world works", the other is "how you think certain things should be done".
Your "beliefs" as to how certain things should be done are arbitrary to a degree.
If your "beliefs" about how the world works are arbitrary, then your epistemology is heavily broken, in particular it is probably lacking falsifiability. Things you let go close to the surface of the earth either fall down or they don't. If you believe the latter, you are just wrong. This is the concept of "belief" that I was talking about above: Religions make unsubstantiated claims about how the world works and indoctrinate people into accepting that nonsense as factual knowledge about the world, claiming that doing so (what they then call "faith", another such misleading equivocation) is a virtue.
Now, you need common beliefs about how the world works for the simple reason that if two people have contradicting beliefs about how the world works, at least one of them is wrong, and being wrong about how the world works is not conducive to controlling your environment. In that sense, it is much less confusing to simply say that a society needs accurate beliefs about how the world works--which necessarily will be common.
As for common beliefs about how certain things should be done: Well, yes, you need that, too, and while those can be arbitrary to a degree, it isn't all that much of a degree, because most of how things should be done is a consequence of how the world works, and if it isn't, you are, again, wrong.
> All secular states have a flag used for ceremonial purposes for example. It's supposed to create a feeling of unity. Just like religious symbols do.
So? Are there any unsubstantiated claims in the existence of a national flag? Why do you mention this?!
Religions do lots of stuff that non-religions do, which is exactly why those things are not defining characteristics of religions.
> Not all societies have an all-seeing god, for example.
Which is indeed an example of an unsubstantiated claim that religions sell as factual. And a claim that secular states do very well without. Which is precisely why it is absurd to pretend that secular states are religions.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Does that sentence define how the world works? Or does it define how we want to live? Or does it kinda both? The point I'm trying to make here is that religion should be understood as a system of government. And that we would do well to understand even secular governments under the same terms. Not as a guide, but for clarity.
I don't pretend secular governments to be religions. I simply define them as such and then see what fits and what doesn't. It's very illuminating to me. The superstitions are not very interesting in that regard. I think they get too much credit.
Insisting that religions are defined by their superstitions misses a large part of what they are and why they exist.
> Does that sentence define how the world works? Or does it define how we want to live? Or does it kinda both?
Well, the part about being created by a creator is an unsubstantiated claim about how the world works--and also completely unnecessary. That is, unless you want to appeal to people who have already been indoctrinated into thinking bad of you if you don't accept such unsubstantiated claims.
The function of that sentence otherwise is simply to declare how the signatories think their state(s) should be governed.
> The point I'm trying to make here is that religion should be understood as a system of government.
Well, but if you understand religion as a system of government, that doesn't make all systems of government religions, does it? Otherwise, you are just using "religion" as a synonym for "system of government", which is at best pointless (because we already have the term "system of government") and at worst extremely confusing (because most people will understand "religion" to mean something very different than "system of government").
> And that we would do well to understand even secular governments under the same terms. Not as a guide, but for clarity.
Aren't you just saying that it is insightful to compare religions to other systems of government? Well, yeah, sure. But in order to make an insightful comparison between trains and planes you don't have to define trains to be a "kind of plane, just without flight".
> I don't pretend secular governments to be religions. I simply define them as such and then see what fits and what doesn't.
But that is how you do pretend they are religions. While you are free to define terms however you want, if you just implicitly use definitions that deviate from common understanding, you are misleading your audience.
> The superstitions are not very interesting in that regard. I think they get too much credit.
Are you saying that superstitions (and the epistemology that supports them) have no significant influence on how religious people behave as compared to non-religous people?
> Insisting that religions are defined by their superstitions misses a large part of what they are and why they exist.
So, what would be an example of what religions are and why they exist that is not superstition and also doesn't apply to non-religions (because, if it applies to non-religions, it's not a defining characteristic specific to religions)?