Religious fervour is migrating into politics
economist.com
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The trend seems to be that people first decide what's most personally appealing to believe, then label themselves whatever fits with their in-group, with almost no attempt to connect the two. From a philosophical perspective, there is a lot of reinventing the wheel (poorly) going on, and very little recognition that carefully thought out frameworks which considered every possible angle and relentlessly sought internal logical consistency have existed for hundreds of years.
I think we should call the leaders of such Sunday Meetup groups "Priests", or maybe "Ministers".
The ones you mentioned do not meet to talk about ancient philosophy. They meet to talk about an imaginary entity you come to kneel to and pray it does not bring the end of the world.
The managers of these groups also expect the participants to tell them what they did wrong (confession) and when they hear that a guy is going to rape someone because he feels that need, they cowardly cover for him. Mostly because they put their comfort above the life of someone else (secret of confession).
So yeah, that wood be good but for now this is just a meeting of people who learned this from their parents and do not want to think about the whole craziness of the idea.
The charity work is nice, though.
(And I think the answer is no, the Buddha did not say that.)
The social aspect seems to be the biggest motivating factor for what makes people either join or leave a religion.
People often choose to stop a belief because of the failings of their parents, spiritual leader, etc without thought to their direct relationship with their deity and the belief system itself.
- In other words, if you are Catholic and your priest was a criminal does that mean the next logical step is to become an atheist?
- If you’re an atheist and science says that the inherent beauty of laws of the universe means that it is a possibility that our world was engineered by powerful being(s) does that mean you should jump your belief all the way to creationism?
IME and those I've read about on various ex Reddit subs is that many stop believing because the evidence is non-existent. Learning about the hypocrisy of leadership may push people out of certain organizations, but to stop believing is another thing.
For those that become “religious” and see it as their personal mission and spiritual relationship, then the social part has scant importance because the hypocrisy is that of other corruptible individuals.
Nobel-winning physicist, Roger Penrose.
Question: Do the wonders of physics and the beauty of its laws inspire belief in something that is beyond science?
Answer: ‘There is a sense in which I would say I’m an agnostic[...] But that doesn’t mean I’m an atheist. Do I believe in something outside science? Well, it’s a bit hard to know. What is science? Where are its boundaries? Is there something going on in consciousness, which is outside of science? Well, I like not to think that. It is certainly outside the science we have now. But it’s something we can explore scientifically. Whether we will have an understanding of what’s going on, which is deep enough to solve the mystery of what it is to be, I don’t know.’
Source: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/a-singular-mind-roger-pe...
I've stopped believing in Christianity because the things I learned about physics and sociology far better explain the evidence that I've seen. Others appear to have done the same. Whether their is some untest-able higher power is irrelevant to my life. And if it can be tested and falsified then given enough time and effort it will be proven. Yet centuries of human effort have been wasted exploring what may simply be a side effect of overzealous agent detection.
Great way to put it, definitely going to steal this one!
Our brain's pattern recognition circuits are highly developed and we like to anthropomorphize. Tens of thousands of years ago with a lack of scientific knowledge, who else but the gods could we have pointed to in order to explain the world around us?
I find some of these other explanations strange and quite at odds with the experience of me and the rest of my deconverted family.
I wonder how many people who attend church and identify as Christian hold similar views to mine: overall it's a pretty good system but very few stories in the Bible are historically accurate.
From a Texas Monthly article: "Jensen, who joined the church in 2005, did not come to St. Andrew’s in search of protective cover. On the contrary. In an article posted on the church’s Web site, he explained that he came in search of a moral and political community .... He told the congregation that he did not accept the divinity of Jesus, but he did endorse the core principles in Jesus’ teaching and pledged to be a responsible member if they would have him. That was enough for the folk at St. Andrew’s." [0]
(That didn't sit well with traditionalist elements in the larger church and led to ecclesiastical trouble. [1])
[0] https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/st-andrews-presbyteria...
[1] https://killingthebuddha.com/mag/confession/the-inquisition/
The history of the Jewish and Christian scriptures and the subsequent history of the many faith communities who read them, shows how much time and effort people have spent trying to understand themselves and the world.
Being raised in the church and briefly having taught kids there, please don't do this. Even in progressive churches the lessons they risk being exposed to will teach lazy thinking: trust in authority, testimony above hard evidence, etc. At worst they may be taught to hate or despise themselves, others, or natural desires.
I really think the article's author is on to a good line of thinking.
You get the holidays and culture, nice set of shared stories and a shared common sense. Thinking any of it is factually accurate or that god is a thing or being that actually exists is almost considered weird.
In Slovenia (where I’m from), for example, about 70% of the population identifies as Catholic, but only 25% say there might be a god. Another 30% say there’s probably some sort of greater spirit, but not necessarily god.
The American version always seemed odd to me. Believing that stuff in the Bible is factually true, not just fables with lessons ... that’s weird.
At least that’s what they told the peasants. In reality it’s all about power politics and money. Same as now.
You gotta remember that for 2000 years the church was politics. Sure there were kings but who crowns the king? The church does.
Because Occam's razor is clear. I successfully grow flowers on my balcony and my verification and peer review of temperature is not alarming. It's hard to make a living as a scientist, and journals need sensationalism, so of course people in their 30s+ would show me numbers that fit the agenda. From logical thinking the deduction is there is no global warming, but I do believe there is in some parts of the world, and we'd best do something about it.
Same thing goes for what ancient civilisations believed within the concept of their lifestyles.
Much of the bible is a mix of history inspired folk tales, political propaganda, morality tales, and self-help advice from various eras. It’s a great resource in that respect, but I wouldn’t use it to explain any particular “how”
https://www.meetup.com/Bible-Study-for-Skeptics-Agnostics-an...
I'm also a regular on the creationist debate circuit. In fact, I'm doing one this afternoon:
At first glance, it appears that agnosticism is more rooted in science and evidence than atheism.
What is atheism’s general view of BioLogos and evolutionary creation as supported by the former head of the Human Gene Project and NIH, Francis Collins?
My personal view is more nuanced than that, but it's much too long a story for an HN comment. The TL;DR is that the divergence between science and religion happens very, very early in one's thought process. Humans seek to explain their experiences, but there are two very different kinds of explanation you can choose to seek. You can pursue mechanism, i.e. what are the laws that describe the phenomena we observe, or you can pursue teleology, i.e. what is the purpose of the phenomena that we observe? If you choose the former, you end up with science, and if you pursue the latter, you end up with religion.
Neither approach subsumes the other. Science fails to identify purpose, and teleology fails to identify a mechanism. But humans want both, so we struggle to put together some kind of synthesis. BioLoogos is a valiant attempt at a synthesis, but it's not really supportable by anything other than our desire to construct a unified theory of our existence, i.e. to tell a story that makes us feel warm and fuzzy. IMHO it's problematic from the perspective of both theology and science. But, like I said, it's a long story.
Personally I liken the typical materialist denial of telos to only trusting quantitative data, which is something they also do. You don't even get half the picture because the two halves form a greater whole.
To be honest, it was a catastrophe when the dualism of the Abrahamic religions was split down the middle and the spiritual half was abandoned. Its no surprise that modernism is so unfulfilling when the default philosophies that are compatible with pure materialism are hedonism and nihilism.
Right, I didn't mean to imply that it was. It's just an explanation (a hypothesis at this point) for how otherwise reasonable people end up with radically different worldviews.
My experience in Canada is that there are a lot of people who would most closely align with Liberal Christianity[0] but then spend their time in churches which are more "traditional". I think there is a bit of disconnect and tension in the current state of the churches here, though I think as this subgroup of Christians grows it will have to be addressed.
Outside of a particular brand of Protestantism which happens to be quite popular in the US, Christians doctrine doesn't hold that the Bible is a literally factual narrative.
But beyond that, which obviously doesn't quite cover the degree of divergence you seem to be suggesting, there are probably Churches you'd fit into without hypocrisy, though som e might argue they they are only partially or historically Christian, e.g., some Unitarian Universalist churches.
Otherwise you're soon running into creationism, or purity culture, or speaking in tongues and the evil of backsliders, or why women can't hold jobs, why dolls violate the 2nd commandment, or, imo, one of the worst, Calvinism and it's TULIP doctrine[1]. I'm not sure what's worst, L, wherein God only saves some, and sends the rest to hell as an example of his grace to those going to heaven, or P, where if you express reservations or concerns about the church, you're obviously not actually saved and are going to hell.
When our kids were very little, my Episcopalian wife said we needed to raise them in a religious tradition "so they'd have something to reject when they grow up." So we did; both were baptized (as infants) and confirmed (as teens) at her parish. Fast forward three decades: One now-grown and -married kid is on the vestry (board of directors) of the parish, while the other hasn't darkened the door of any church since he was a teenager, apart from his sister's wedding.
(Later I ended up joining as well; see https://www.questioningchristian.com/2005/05/why_i_call_myse...)
This is a very American kind of statement.
In this world, most people don't 'join' religions - they are born into them, and they are usually a part of the social fabric.
In the New World we have this notion that Religions are a bunch of competing ideas, that you can join or unjoin this or that.
Joining/unjoining kinds of religions are so fundamentally different things that they probably need different words.
Catholicism is so different from Evangelicalism that they probably should not be put in the same boat.
Catholicism in many ways is more similar to Judaism than Evangelicalism.
Anglicans (Church of England), Catholics (Church of Latin world), Presbyterians (Church of Scotland), Methodists (Church of Some Germans) and Judaism ('Church' of Jews) - should almost be thought of in cultural or ethnic terms as much as religious.
The Church has always been a cultural and community centre as much as any place of mere belief.
The notion that we treat it almost in terms of 'belief' is a constant fallacy which causes us to often miss the point.
Finally - religious fervour moved out of the Church in the last century into left/right wing politics. It's just taking a different form now.
Most of what I'm bemoaning here boils down to frustration with the apparent increase in anti-intellectualism, and how it pervades everything. If you don't understand enough of what's been discussed before, you can't even have a coherent conversation. There are all too many incoherent conversations going on.
> Their view of social justice has no place for forgiveness or grace—as Alexi McCammond recently learned, when the 27-year-old’s editorship of Teen Vogue was cancelled because of some bigoted Tweets she sent as a teenager
This is an incredible story. If you’re not familiar with it:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/business/media/teen-vogue...
Your immature, 16 year old teen self can affect your career trajectory with just a tweet.
She also dressed as a Native American at a Halloween party as a teenager.
They are just reactionary fools and don't have as much political clout as original fools.
https://mynewbandis.substack.com/p/my-new-band-is-teenage-mi...
I feel conflicted. On one hand, kids do dumb things. On the other hand... those tweets were pretty terrible, and may hint at some deep seated prejudice. And this isn't a 50yo, those tweets were only a decade ago.
Ultimately I fail to be outraged either by her hiring or her firing. They could have kept her and I'd shrug; they fire her and I also shrug. The whole situation is sad. It's hard to imagine my child saying things like that, but who knows, maybe her parents said the same thing.
For reference, here are the tweets referenced in the story:
Outdone by Asian #whatsnew
now googling how not to wake up with swollen, asian eyes...
give me a 2/10 on my chem problem, cross out all of my work and don't explain what I did wrong..thanks a lot stupid asian T.A. you're great
Children do horrible, cruel things all the time. It's part of growing up and learning boundaries.
The first one is just the "model minority" trope, the second one is a reference to the actual physical characteristic that Americans use to define "Asian" (since we tend to leave South Asians out, and everybody in the West tends to leave Central Asians out), and the third is a case of over-specification that maybe indicates hidden racist attitudes, but could also be a way to distinguish between a number of TAs whose names you don't know.
I don't care about Teen Vogue, and I don't care which elites get jobs in the culture industry dictating the range of acceptable opinion, but tweets like these are minor racial crimes as compared to the systemic actions of people who would never talk like this.
The difference between age 16 and age 27 isn't a decade, it's 45 years, give or take.
As someone who grew up in Germany, this made me chuckle, as probably 50% of children did this at least once in their life where I lived for "Fasching". The other half were cowboys.
Barry Goldwater, 1994
In my shoestring travels around the U.S., I'd say most of the help I received was from people who identified as Christian.
I also observed that most charity work like feeding people regularly is done by Christians and other religious/spiritual groups.
You would expect the majority of pretty much anything to be Christian.
Distance between what's written in the comments and the reality I personally observe, is the dimension I was thinking of.
The internet, and Reddit especially, are a self selected group that don’t represent the majority of the 330M people living here at all.
A 2017 Pew Research survey found that 18% of Americans consider themselves "neither religious nor spiritual" and that a further 27% consider themselves "spiritual but not religious" [1]. In total, roughly 45% of Americans consider themselves "not religious". Given the historical trends in the U.S., I suspect these numbers are even higher now.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/06/more-americ...
Most people in the U.S. identify as Christian.
(In this case, this would be an example of areligious fervour migrating into politics!)
There was also Richard Dawkins etc. advocating 'the Brights' and Alain de Botton proposing atheist churches, amongst a lot of other cringeworthy ideas.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/30/new-atheism-the-godles...
Roughly halfway down: "I think it seamlessly merged into the modern social justice movement."
Saying "both sides can't answer this one question" as though that implies that both sides are equally invested in magical thinking is a bit unfair.
Anyway, if we start inventorying our personal beliefs and the rational, empirical basis for each of them, I think we all probably practice magical thinking to some extent.
I imagine some perfectly rational, omniscient alien interrogator questioning my most deeply held beliefs about, say, free will, or my individuality, or why the world is the way it is, and placing me somewhere on a continuum that includes witch-burners and cavemen, rather than in a completely separate category.
OP said secular humanism and religion were indistinguishable - my point is they are distinguished by their fundamental attitude to evidence.
It started with Objectivist Michael Shermer, when he started debunking the existence of poverty, racism and sexism rather than quacks and ghosts, was exacerbated after 9/11 when that group (and notably Hitchens) found that they would rather direct invective at brown people overseas than their own parents (it certainly paid more), and the elevator incident simply finalized the Incel tripod, leading into Gamergate.
Perhaps organized religion was serving to keep people's need to be part of something more productively contained. However I can tell you it isn't universally a neurological need. There are those of us who get by just fine without any religiosity, or church. I don't know if that is because we are different or if anyone can do it.
I'm in a very secular country. Non-religious people are... non-religious. I don't believe there is anything that "replaces" religion in most people's lives. If you're not religious, you don't necessarily have metaphysical needs, and I think most people here don't.
Regarding religious people: they meet with eachother in church and other constellations as usual. Nothing is keeping people from practicing their religion, but they can't assume most people will empathize with their views, which is true for many different standpoints in life, not just religion.
(I did not read the article as I was paywalled, I might have missed the context of your comment)
There is ritual around death and marriage. The scene of a temples will be typically older people eliciting prayers for health, relieving ailments.
But little else that I have observed.
It is perhaps the rest of the rigidity of their society that gives them a sense of belonging to, serving the whole, a notion of laws, rules, guidelines....
So faith is, religion is not.
I think this introduces one of the largest spiritual problems of our generation. I have talked to an astounding number of young Christians [the group for which I identify] who have been turned away because of the Church's failure to answer their questions on a sophisticated enough level. And I don't fault them for that. But as most of our churches become more extreme and socially conservative, I think there is a huge community of people who yearn to belong to something more progressive (and, ironically, more aligned to the gospel).
I really hope to see a solution because the current trend of complete rejection of the church is unfortunate and much wisdom will be lost. But you see that the younger postmodern generations really are afraid of institutions and power as a whole, which is why their protests are led in a decentralized manner (BLM, women's march). I would guess a portion of this mindset is due to a bit of a "perfectionist complex", i.e. many live in fear of being criticized by the mob and thus will refrain to committing themselves to an institution short of perfect. Unfortunately, this makes them far less effective movements than they could be. They have something to learn from the church in this regard.
I have been in different churches for most of my life outside of about 6 years where I decided I knew better. I’ve never heard anything close to what angry Reddit culture seems to think is preached.
The issue is more that the Republican Party tries to paint itself as Christian to appeal to voters. Somehow this has created a lot of Democratic policy and talking points among their base which seem to take aim at hurting churches or labeling churches as a threat somehow...which naturally causes people to become more defensive.
The issue is that so many policies being pushed by Democrats over the last decade exist around the idea of controlling what people are allowed to do or say, going to far as to target all things Christian as something that should be disallowed.
It’s scary not just from a religious perspective but from the idea that people support such controlling policies at all.
The mindset it takes to believe that you know what’s best for other people is terrifying.
What The Economist is missing is they have never understood evangelicals as anything other than caricatures. Most of the popular understanding of them comes from Jack Chick comics and the farcically corrupt televangelists of the 80s, coupled with music samples of fire and brimstone sermons in industrial music. That chapel who protested gay peoples funerals was an appalling example, but it has occupied the role of straw man ever since.
The Economist's view essentially reduces to, "let them eat stimulus checks," and along with the rest of the progressive establishment, they have profoundly misunderstood what a religious revival means. The reason all these people are getting right with their maker is because they are preparing for war.
Our scientific revolution, which largely usurped religion, may have thrown the baby out with the bath water and has left many people with a deep unconscious void in their lives which has largely been filled by pious political ideology which echoes many of the same concepts and dynamics of human mythologies.
I was a missionary (no longer religious) for two years and saw first hand the terrible fire that ignites in some when confronted with disagreement about fundamental tribal beliefs. It does seem this fervor is hard-wired, and now with religiosity waning it gets applied to everything.
Then again, reading the comments for a couple of days will do the same :)
E.g.: the Earth revolving around the Sun, the existence of Black Holes, the Earth being 5 billion years old and so on. I have daily evidence against the first, and no evidence for the others, all of which are accepted by everyone "because scientists / professors / everyone else says so" and any attempts to argue against it are ridiculed.
Let's not even go into Global Scamming, which has reached religious levels of hysteria. I mean, "the world is ending, give us money" is basically copied from the Catholic Church.
If you doubt the sun is at the center of the celestial system there are some experiments you can do yourself to test that conclusion. Proving or disproving black holes may take significantly more effort.
What distinguishes religion is blind appeals to authority and claims about ancient, sacred truths which cannot be falsified.
But I see on this very page people saying that we are somehow the elites here? Excuse me?
There is a vast difference between the socialist left and the neoliberal center.
“Comforts that were rare among our forefathers are now multiplied in factories and handed out wholesale; and indeed, nobody nowadays, so long as he is content to go without air, space, quiet, decency and good manners, need be without anything whatever that he wants; or at least a reasonably cheap imitation of it.”
And what scenario do you imagine when you imagine confronting dogma? You probably imagine painstaking effort being put into conveying reason to the afflicted. It’s always the same pensive expression on the face of that person. And that effort is always met by bulging veins up the neck and forehead. For all of history it has been pensive wincing at bulging veins and slamming fists. And the epiphany that I have had is that it is completely a fools errand to engage in that exchange. No matter how perfectly you do it, they won’t understand.
I always give the hypothetical of Jesus coming to Earth in secret and running for President in a Republican primary. What would happen? The answer is that he would be laughed off the stage, if we are being honest about it.
This is even before we get to the whole thing of relentless commercialization and never-ending extension of the Christmas season, and the fact that most "evangelicals" never cracked open the New Testament to actually READ it. All we get are some snippets they found online or on TV - of the Old Testament, to show us how lost and vain the rest of us immoral degenerates are.
What about "family values"? Haven't heard THAT one in a while, primarily because the last Defender of Evangelism used to shtoop and pay off porn stars.
My primary voting issues in 2020+ are: winding down and stopping our endless wars in the Middle East, restoring domestic manufacturing, protecting constitutional rights, in particular free speech, and curtailing the US intelligence apparatus, which I view as abusive and political.
You got a bit of the first, and none of the rest. If Trump runs again in 2024, you should pick someone else.
I generally liked the primary scene of 2020, especially Gabbard. The ossified party control needs to be broken up.
Jesus beat the merchants in the temple, called the Jews who refused him and later had him killed the “synagogue of Satan”, said that they who have a sword but keep it sheathed would inherit the world, so it’s not crazy to interpret him as a leader of freedom-lovers with guns who in order to please the spirit that created them must out of free will help their fellow brothers and sisters
Christianity is based on the concept that every individual can choose to follow Christ, or not to follow Christ. If you choose not to follow Christ, you take responsibility for your actions, even the ones that lead to hell. If you choose to follow Christ, Christ takes responsibility for your actions (via the cross), even the ones that lead to hell, and enables you to learn how to act righteously.
Leftism, as far as I can see, is mainly about putting all decisions in the hands of the "elite", that makes individuals not responsible for their actions. If there is no individual responsibility, then there is no such thing as sin, and then there is no point to Christianity.
Conservatism, as I know it, is very much about the individual's freedom to make their own choices.
I see no room for Christ in Leftism. Where Conservatism does have room for Him.
So, ideologically, I see Conservatism as more in line with what Jesus taught, than Leftism. Conservatism allows for freedom, especially of thought, Leftism does not.
Politically, Christians have more freedom under Republican's than they do under Democrats. Hence why we vote Republican. It's not that we fully support everything Republican, it's that we want the freedom to practice our beliefs without government interference.
To be clear, I'm not a fan of any of the political parties. I'm registered as independent. But I'll vote for freedom over tyranny any day. Even when the party I'm voting for has warts.
Oh, and for Christians, traditional moral values are still very very important. Many votes for Trump were made due to the outsized effect the US Supreme Court has on those values. The Left does it's best to shove their ideology down our throats via Judicial fiat, rather than working through the process set forth in the US Constitution, so we have to keep the Supreme Court in a state where it won't join in with those overreaches of power. Hence why we often vote for very imperfect men.
One final thought, there is a difference between Leftism and Liberalism. I haven't solidified my thoughts on that enough to say, but right now the Democrat party is not liberal. It is leftist. I've even heard on former leftist call modern conservatism more liberal than what the left stands for now.
Who shows that they love their neighbors? Does building the wall show that?
Which of them love their enemies? Which doesn't judge others? Who has repented for their sins?
Where do I "only have to look" to find these people? What non "celebrity pop culture news networks" should I be watching?
Similarly we have a lot of religious/cult-like "scientism" overruling actual empirical science and scientific method processes. See COVID.
If you complain about government spending and the obvious fiscal cliff ahead, you get responses bemoaning racism and classism. If you complain about foreign wars and constant interventionism, your patriotism is questioned. If you complain about the suppression of speech, you get lectures on “hate speech”.
It’s exhausting and the polemics responsible are loathsome.
This is false equivalence. The common use of the word worship does not describe how everyone acts towards things that interest them. And people devote their lives to a greater variety of things besides the government, themselves, and non-falsifiable entities.