As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen

- anthropology

- problem of evil/sin

- redemption

- eschatology

If your system he answers to these, you basically have a religion.

Overall these pitfalls can be avoided by following some principles: reject taboos, seek more information, avoid metaphor, accept that some things you can't know

Open to talking about it, sure, but the crucial element that separates apologetics from real debate is that one side is forbidden from changing their mind. In religion there is a rule overshadowing the exchange of ideas that says, "no matter how convinced you are, or how weak your own case is, you should stick with it, because it's virtuous to stick with this belief no matter what."

Not all secular beliefs are ideologies. I think there are two key common factors between religious beliefs and ideologies that call themselves "secular":

First, people don't acquire the beliefs by considering and weighing evidence; they acquire them by being told them, usually at a young age, by people they trust, and making them part of their identity. That's why people are so resistant to changing such beliefs.

Second, the set of beliefs acquired in this way is not just a few isolated ones, but a whole network of beliefs that cover every aspect of life and are all asserted as justification for each other in what amounts to a logical circle. That's why it's so hard to penetrate such a belief system and get people to doubt it, even if it flies in the face of easily obtainable evidence.

I don't think that's necessarily true though. Religion is synthetic: it's practice, it's discipline and existence is rooted in how easily it can be synthesized in different communities. Man can exist without knowledge of God: that's the very premise that fueled colonialism and, to an extent, feudalism.

That's just a trick religious evangelizers use as bait to unleash their barrel of canned answers.

And boy, you really have a lot of ammunition to use.

But, and this is an important but: In the end, it is all just rhetoric to justify what you already believe and are unwilling to change.

"Free markets" are just turning loose an optimizer that optimizes for - something. Central planning just pushes the problem back to the planning level. Combining the two for political ends tends to produce strange results because economics has very poor predictive power.

This uncertainty tends to drive people to faith-based positions. That doesn't work either, but it satisfies some basic human need.

The sources of those beliefs are decentralized though, and the individual person can pick beliefs which suit their whereabouts, environment, and sub culture best.

Religion however is a centralized source of belief systems, which comes with problems:

- One size fits all solution leads to problems like this: Oh your best friend is gay? Too bad, our 2k year old manifest says they are bad people/subhuman/sick. (This makes me SO angry)

- Central authorities can and will exploit their power if possible: Witch hunts, crusades etc

- Self-actualization is constrained by a fixed set of rules: Tolerable in times where basic needs are often not met and are more urgent, but becomes an issue when 95% live better than a Pharao.

This is a poisonous reversal of reality, to the extent that I wonder if you're just trolling.

Fact is, more religious people, especially the evangelical Christian sect that is most vocal and influential in America, is not about examining implicit beliefs, nor is it open to debate. It's about falling into line, and adopting a strict set of ideological beliefs that are not negotiable. In fact, religion is often explained in terms of faith as an opposition to analysis: after all, if your first principle is that you believe in something, why question further?

In contrast, modern secular culture, although not immune to tribalism and ideological blindness, is much more open to building belief through analysis and understanding, i.e. the scientific method.

If it did that, it wouldn't be able to use it a source of social control. What we have is a society of true believers, that's why they can't see it as a religion, it's just reality to them. I really don't think you can be a true believer and call your religion anything but "reality," especially a "religion."

Anyway, there have been some attempts at documenting American religion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_civil_religion

> If you believe you are not religious, it just means that you don’t have the cognitive tools to recognize the secular ideology that you have adopted.

I think there are still a few people who aren't religious and I don't really think your criterion here is the most useful. It just begs the question.

Or maybe you have a different definition of "religious" than I do? But no, it must be that I lack the right cognitive tools. Sheesh.

Other branches are definitionally critical of various binary systems(all of the LGBTQ things), describing them instead as continuous systems, or even complex planes.

I don't think such definitions are very useful. They're very limiting since the world is full of edge cases, and your ideology is unlikely to handle all of them well, but is also likely to require you to handle some of them poorly

Do you believe that becoming religious made you smarter / more aware, or that it made you more eager to seek reassuring comparisons outside your religion?

> The secular world would benefit from adopting more formal definitions of their belief system.

Benefit whom? The 'secular world' is perhaps not as centrally organised as you may believe or wish for. (We meet at the Fox & Hound every second Wednesday.) Whether this is inconvenient for members of the secular world, members of various fantasy clubs, or both - is hard to say.

Personally I don't feel that a codification of my understanding of the universe (I struggle to think of it as a belief system, as that has connotations of faith and rigidity in the absence of evidence) is necessary. I do undeniably like the idea that my understanding of the universe (roughly) aligns, AFAICT, with that of other intelligent people I know, or whose works I see or read - but I'm not sure that's the same thing.

> If you believe you are not religious, it just means that you don’t have the cognitive tools to recognize the secular ideology that you have adopted.

Do you accept that perhaps intentionally non-religious people may not be as dumb as that assertion demands?

Essentially groups and ideas survived better when there was an organization and social rules built up around this human tendency. Left unchecked reckless nonsense ideologies spring up too easily, an organized religion gives this human trait an outlet (and often becomes an unchecked wreckless ideology itself, but... less often).

Or in another sense, the big organized religions are the winners in a centuries long evolutionary race of ideas. The nonsense ones destroy themselves eventually, the less nonsense ones survive and spread (seriously, judaism is thousands of years old and has a health code, much of which in context is decent advice).

Religion has one fundamental cognitive device - faith. It’s not a tool, it’s malware.

When you start to see the level of obsession people have over certain topics, it’s hard to call it anything else.

One of the main points of Zizek regarding ideology, relevant to what you said, is that as religious ideology has waned in importance, other ideologies have taken their place, yet because they do not come from religions we do not recognize them as ideologies, though they are. But ideology has always existed in this form, in the background. It is just without religion taking a forefront in life that the importance of other ideologies has grown.

Anyway, I bring it up because I do not think it is possible for us to explicitly address all ideology. Ideology is part of the human condition, not in a metaphysical sense, but because we have only limited abilities to perceive and understand the world - finite lifetimes, limited senses, limited cognitive abilities. We must make assumptions and generalizations, take things for granted, and trust people and ideas so that we can spend our time thinking about other things.

Why? Because it's exhausting to explicitly address all ideology. I'll give you some examples: Country, Culture, Government, Justice, Love, Fairness, Ownership, Work. In discourse we take on only limited slices of what these concepts mean, yet we take their existence and high level concepts for granted (though one person's concept of fairness may not match another's). These are heavy, complicated topics in themselves.

> If you believe you are not religious, it just means that you don’t have the cognitive tools to recognize the secular ideology that you have adopted.

Depends on how you define religion. In my opinion what separates religion from philosophy or just ideology, is claims regarding the supernatural and divine. You can absolutely appreciate religions for their wonderful philosophy and theology while rejecting what I would consider very core parts of what makes one a believer in a religion, like belief in supernatural events or divine beings.

How would that statement apply to your god? And would they be religious?

They have arguments that they make to nonbelievers. That's not the same as being genuinely open to debate.

I don’t think it’s purely a semantic argument though, religion is predicated on the supernatural whereas ideology isn’t.

Hubris is a sin. I'm sure someone with your sharp cognitive tools can recognize that.

Just want to point out that Jewish apologetics is not the same as Christian apologetics. Christian apologists are working in furtherance of the Christian goal of converting everyone to Christianity. Jewish apologists are working only to prevent other Jews from being swayed by the arguments made by other religions (primarily those from Christian missionaries, who often target Jews specifically).

That aside, what makes you think apologetics represents an openness to debate? I cannot speak for Christians, but Jewish apologetics only exists because other groups are trying to lead Jews to conversion to another faith, and apologetics holds little value within the framework of Judaism itself. What non-Jews think of Judaism is irrelevant because proselytizing is not a requirement (it is not forbidden, but it is also not encouraged and conversion is a deliberately difficult process). Judaism certainly has an openness to debate, but the debate is within Judaism itself -- what is the right way to practice the Jewish religion? What is the right way to interpret and understand Jewish holy books? Judaism is not open to debates about the need for Jews to practice Judaism; the covenant between Jews and God is an axiom.

You had something interesting to say, why'd you have to go and close it out with flamebait?

And that's where so called 'atheism is just a religion' got it wrong. No, it's not about getting a result. Scientific method is a way of processing information. It's about the process, not the result. It's not about believe the god exist or not(the result). It's about find out a way to prove (process). And it's perfectly fine if u can't produce a solid proof(provability). 'I don't know' is perfectly fine. You don't even have to believe, use the scientific method to analyze, do you best to deduce, and move on to the next topic. 'Religion' is just a topic to study. If people can't really grasp how scientific method and critical thinking works, they would never move past 'to believe' or 'not to believe'.

They are not well debated in a sense that it would be called reasonable in a normal and educated world. Thats why we call it believe. Its much easier to say 'whats written in a book from some people from some 2000 years ago is true' and start to philosoph around it than actually not stoping questioning until there is a real truth to it. My discussion with a very religios person stoped after i realizied they are convinced that stuff in that book is relevant and true and moving the debate of it to 'our old people studied it and gave those learnings to future people'.

Interesting to read that for you, becoming more religiuos made you aware of other religious tendencies. For me it actually started in school with discovering group dynamic and then after that, questioning religion which lead me to being non religious and i'm very very aware of how other cognitive biases and media and co are forming us.

The biggest problem you might not understand in your world of codified: 'the other believe system' is universal and doesn't need to be codified its just that you might need to discover it for yourself or accept the truth yourself.

Ah it sounds much more spirital than i wanted it to be. Effectively my family/friends are normal good people. We don't identify us through religion and we don't hurt each other. We basically are all on the same planet, we know who birthed us but we don't know why. Single wall of truth: the big bang. Single simplest rule: Don't harm others / don't do things you don't want others to do to you.

And actually, certain states have very well defined law books which answers a ton of questions. Even slightly weirder ones that if someone had an accident with a car, to a degree both parties can be in fault. Its basically us wo build our believe system through living together.

Al lot of what you call "religious tendencies" are just cognitive and organizational tools. Religions use and codify (some of) them in their own ways, and other aspects and approaches to human life use and / or codify in their own ways too.

Whatever leads you to wish for more structure and codification in your life and the world that surrounds, and you find them in religion, that's fine. Other people find them in military life, others in self-discipline, others in ascetism, others in their professional career, etc. But trying to impregnate your religious beliefs and choices onto everyone else is, I think, just trying to justify and shut down your own doubts. If you don't see this then, if I may put it this way, you may lack certain cognitive tools to recognize it.

Namely; "we may be in the midst of the discovery that the only thing worse than religion is it's absence"

Are you saying science method is a secular ideology then? Nothing else is required to analyse, understand and explain the world around us. Nothing.

Ideologies are a set of ethical/moral assumptions about what is right and just, i.e. they are about human practice, about what humans ought to do.

Religions are ideologies, but they are also a set of beliefs about the world itself, about the physical and metaphysical reality - which are thought as true a priori. This part is almost universally wrong, as we could learn by a competing concept: science.

Ideologies can only be falsified insofar as they base their arguments on statements about human nature - these can be questioned empirically.

All while claiming other people don't have the cognitive tools you do. I'm amazed this comment didn't get downvoted.

That is Marxist false consciousness and should not be brought up in a debate.

As for the difference between the two, for me a religious belief is one that is without evidence, a non religious belief is one that has some evidence for it, even if it is still wrong (e.g if you believe in the misama theory and so avoid stinking food you are less likely to catch a food born illness).

I do agree without you that it would be better if we adopted some better understanding of the secular beliefs, but that would also cause a lot of infighting because not everybody who hates the current system wants to replace it with the same and they may hate each other more than they hate the current system.

As an example: Malcom X and MLK. They didn't want to be under the boot of Jim Crow. They disagreed about what they wanted and how to get there.

There is no mechanism by which the ABSENCE of a belief in your parent's invisible sky wizards becomes just evidence of an alternative belief system.

Not believing in the tooth fairy does not make my understanding and endorsement of say, the periodic table, an equivalent, dogmatic, religious, ineherited-from-parents belief.

The two are not the same. One is better.

That sounds like twaddle. It could just be that the person recognises their secular ideology - and knows that it doesn't constitute a religion.

An alternative view, and one that, IMHO, is favored by Occam's razor (to name just one cognitive tool), is that both religious and secular ideologies are consequences of a more general human nature.

The label "not religious" doesn't mean anything. People use it to refer to atheists, in which case you are alleging that atheists by definition don't have the tools to understand their own position - which is absurd. Others use the term to refer to minimally-practicing members of a faith who basically only show up to places of worship when there is an official event, in which case you argue that these people don't understand the reasons why they avoid their own religion until they become active practitioners.

> The secular world would benefit from adopting more formal definitions of their belief system.

First of all, a secular world doesn't preclude the population from being religious. Having a secular world that is explicitly separate from religion only means that society itself is not regulated by religion.

If by secular world you mean the percentage of the population who is atheist or agnostic, then you're not talking about a specific belief system. You're talking about a diverse group who have chosen to not believe in deities, and that often extends to not believing in the supernatural altogether. The allegation that this absence of belief happens without reflection is simply untrue. On the contrary, being an atheist is still a thorny path to take, even today. It doesn't happen passively.

> In the secular world these aspects exist but they are implicit, making them difficult to debate and attack.

When you say that these aspects are well codified in religion, what you really mean is that specific religions have behavioral codices that members must adhere to. The consequences of non-adherence depend on the religion and the society. But when you look at different religions, these codices are all quite different.

As soon as a population contains more than one religion, what you are touting as a benefit quickly becomes just as impossible as if you were dealing with an atheistic society.

What you find difficult to debate and attack is non-uniformity in general. I consider that a plus.

You are of course completely correct that a diverse society can appear more nebulous, and in some ways individuals can have a much harder time finding a path in life if they, well, have to actually go and find a path. This is a consequence of the freedom to choose. Systems that don't give you those freedoms are assigning a path to you from on high, or at least they heavily constrain your choices. No doubt some people would prefer that.

But the benefit of living in an open society is that you have the option of choosing to be religious, and you are free to choose any religion and any flavor. A secular society doesn't take that away in any form, it just means that your religion doesn't get to make the rules for people living outside of it.

Even so I am far less dogmatic in my worldview and conclusions than I ever was a religious person. To imply that my lack of religion is somehow a religion itself just hilariously misses the point.

I'll admit that in the absence of religion, some people pick up ideological causes and treat them as a religion. However, I'm interested in knowing what "rituals, origin stories, deities, saints, priesthood, blasphemy, vice & virtue" you think I have.

It's called (analytic) philosophy.

Such an ego!

"I alone know the truth about the universe! The rest of you are lacking in cognitive tools, i.e, stupid."

Is it generally seen as an arm open to debate? I have a very religious friend who has gotten into apologetics in the last 6mo or so, and he explicitly describes it as "defending the faith." That seems much less drawing conclusions from evidence and much more drawing evidence from conclusions.

Maybe he's an exception to apologetics, though, as I know he has some admittedly extreme views in some ways.

I saw a few comments interpreting the last line as snarky or condescending. I just meant that my experience helped equip me with tools to understand the world better, like learning a new language or programming language does. There are other paths e.g. through philosophy that many seculars pursue as well.

In a liberal bubble in an atheist society? I remember the South Park episodes on the prophet, and I remember my countrymen executed for "insulting" the said prophet. At least the "cancel culture" chills some racism.

> If you believe you are not religious, it just means that you don’t have the cognitive tools to recognize the secular ideology that you have adopted.

You can understand the simple fact that all us humans being shitty doesn't imply that some aren't even shittier? When we say someone is "selfish," it means they are more selfish than a majority of people.

People may be called un-American as a political weapon, but that's about all it is. People in politics use all sorts of childish phrases as weapons. In reality I've never been called un-American or seen another person called un-American, unless it was for humor.

Unbritishness definitely gets thrown around, especially these days.

The leader of the other party stood up and tore him to shreds, saying that the magic of Australia is that it's a country of immigrants and that by very definition, everyone there is Australian. It's perfectly fine to disagree about stuff and have discussions, but we're all still Australian. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to tear the country apart and should never be given a microphone again.

The other guy has never tried that childish divisive tactic again.

TLDW: we don't know if Peterson is religious or not but he thinks that Christianity must stay. Harris (obviously) is an atheist and thinks religions must go. Now, Douglas is interesting. He's an atheist but thinks that Christianity must stay because much-much worse ideologies would take its place. Peterson and Douglas like to prove their point by pointing to existing ideologies that are already very dangerous.

Personally, I don't have any argument to offer. Since seeing this debate, I thought about this topic a lot but I still didn't come to a conclusion.

If the assumption is "yes" then the challenge becomes whether the narrative is actually epistemologically solid enough to bear scrutiny from all angles - something I don't actually believe exists.

I think in the US the narrative since the Colonies formed, has been something like "Land of Opportunity" which a healthy proportion of the US and world doesn't believe in, and realistically only some segment of the world population did believe in for a short period after WWII.

https://www.amazon.com/Great-Emergence-How-Christianity-Chan...

This post explains it well:

https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/are-we-in-a-500-year-reli...

I doubt we'll see Beyond Good and Evil become a NYT bestseller unfortunately.

One instance where Jesus says love your neighbour, then the listeners ask him who should be considered a neighbour. He responds with a story about a Samaritan who goes out of his way to help a Jew robbed and left for dead, as an example of a good neighbour.

Jews and Samaritans at the time despised each other.

Tribalism is a fundamental component in starting on the road to a modern civilisation, without it there is not capacity to innovate as all individuals are occupied with gathering food and finding shelter. Only when humans settled down in groups did we have the ability for some individuals to be freed from the toil of daily life to invent things.

In any case, if you assume this tribalism is crucial for civilisations to get started, then all alien civilisations would have had the same component. However, while tribalism is crucial in the earliest life of a civilisation I think it’s detrimental later. In particular, it makes tackling global challenges like climate change difficult and in the presence of word ending weapons it makes total destruction likely.

We’ve already seen examples of this e.g. inaction on climate change because China won’t do their part and with the mutually assured destruction of nuclear weapons.

So in essence I agree with you and because tribalism is an evolutionary trait I expect it will also be our undoing long term.

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter

I think one needs to go a bit deeper. Tribalism is ~~the~~ an underlying cause, but I believe an even deeper cause lies at the root (or a deeper root at least), one that enables tribalism and all other things higher in the stack: the nature of human consciousness. Consciousness presents us with an illusion (estimation, simulation, perspective, opinion, etc) of reality, and we mistake this for reality itself. What's even stranger about the situation is that we already know this. And yet despite this, we continue on living our lives (our real time behavior) as if this is not actually true.

Worse, I believe that this illusion has been encoded/embedded within portions of the ~fabric of reality. As just one example, look at our language (very simplistic compared to the reality we use it to describe), but more so how we use it (on a real time, day to day basis). Take the word "is", which means "to be". "1 + 1 is 2" is (almost certainly) an objectively and comprehensively true statement. But then take "Tribalism is the underlying cause of most of humanity's bad behavior"...is this almost certainly an objectively and comprehensively true statement? I suspect not. And yet, we use the very same word. And this is an extremely simple, fairly innocuous statement compared to many other examples (say, journalism) where we use this word in a way that implies (is perceived as) being of the "1+1=2" variety, but is actually of the estimation/opinion type (in turn, increasing the magnitude of illusion further, creating an even more powerful coordinated/synchronized illusion).

Now, I'm quite confident that you were speaking casually and can understand the complex nuance in play if you put your mind to it...but what of third parties who ingest information in threads like this, adding portions of it to their model of reality, perhaps even repeating the "truths" they have learned to others? While it's true that many people are able to switch their mind into extreme pedantry mode (for short periods of time with some degree of skill) and pick nits along with me, what is actually happening (in the real world as it is) when they are not in this mode, and are interacting in a complex system with billions of other people who are also not in this mode the vast majority of the time, if ever?

Imagine you have a giant computing cluster with 7 billion nodes, and the software running on every single node is utterly riddled with bugs, a complete mess of continuous errors in computation - might the output of this cluster be suboptimal relative to one that has less bugs?

I went to church as a kid too, but the only positive thing I remember about it has a secular alternatives (youth choir).

Otherwise I just remember: Wearing uncomfortable clothes and trying to sit still while bored out of mind for an hour, trying to intentionally make us late so we wouldn't have to go, my dad getting angry at me for intentionally making us late, spending forever sitting in traffic and finding a parking spot.

My only rule is when they ask me what I believe I will not lie to them. But they can be religious if they want.

I realize most people stick to the “everyone is bad” part and forget that they too are an everyone and gloss over the whole forgiveness and acceptance part.

The interesting argument IMO is that current secular ideology seems to trend toward “ignore all religious holidays” or “remove all religious symbolism from society” when a perfectly rational and arguably more populist alternative would be to include and celebrate them all.

It's unknown if such a technology will be possible one day, but I don't find transhumanism or that idea dogmatic. The human mind is of course part of the human body, but there's nothing that prescribes any particular mind must be part of a biological body. This is known as "substrate independence". If substrate independence is true, it would suggest creation of conscious machines and simulation of conscious beings is feasible.

There are additional difficulties when it comes to the possibility of actually "uploading" one's mind, but it seems incorrect to say "atheists who trust science believe the mind and body are inseparable, yet here they act like they can be separated". The atheist/physicalist/scientific claim is that the mind emerges from the brain, and that the brain is made of ordinary matter - not that they're "inseparable" in the sense that there can't be such a thing as a mind without a fleshy body.

It's orthogonal to "bodiness" or an idea of anything like a soul. If substrate independence is true, then a mind is a thing which must exist on some physical substrate composed of matter. It's fine if you believe substrate independence isn't true, but I don't see any dogma. Perhaps a dogma would be "substrate independence is true" without demonstrating any evidence of it, but I haven't seen that claim. This'll probably only ever be known for sure if some group actually manages to instantiate a seemingly-conscious mind on a non-biological substrate, and if it seems to pass every possible test for consciousness we can devise.

Better examples might be what you can find in certain strands of rationalism: the simulation argument, that God (friendly AI) doesn't exist but ought to be created, that if the AI isn't summoned (programmed) in a very particular way it will be maximally dangerous, the Judgment day when the AI is brought online, and even intangible possible Hells through TDT and basilisk arguments.

I can't help getting the impression there's a weirdly distorted version of Christianity in there somewhere, and the reason it can survive is because its adherents don't recognize that that's what it is.

I think also that we as humans have “religions” that are also intellectual cop-outs in other areas. Left vs Right, Capitalism vs <<other>>, Nationalism/Patriotism vs Globalism.

I find a lot of people don’t have nuance to their thinking they just blindly believe what ever they’ve settled in on, which leads to those funny “curb your capitalism/communism” YouTube videos, where people can’t defend closely held convictions.

Not only has American theological ignorance increased (people like Richard Dawkins for example, popular in atheist cultures, has just downright comically terrible theology and understanding of the Bible), but as well as ignorance of the human psyche.

I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

[1] https://www.pewforum.org/2018/05/29/being-christian-in-weste... [2] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/12/06/10-facts-ab...

America has been into that since the very beginning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apotheosis_of_Washington

As with anything, I think the real answer is much more nuanced.

1) This article is making the case that this behavior is universal, when there is no evidence of that. As always has been, there are subsects of any ideology that are ravenous in their dogma. They are always the loudest and get the most attention, because their actions are so extreme. It's selection bias by the media, who (wouldn't you know it) are the same folks making the assertion that political religiosity has supplanted deified religiosity.

2) If there's something resembling a "trend" happening around peoples' emotional investment in politics, it's likely around the fact that politics is increasingly prodding itself into peoples' lives. At the very least, if I travel abroad, and we have a president like Trump, I look like a fucking idiot. That sucks. At the worst, I'm a woman or minority whose livelihood is negatively affected constantly by political footballing.

This has nothing to do with an absence of god, but everything to do with a real, quantifiable affect on peoples' lives. How can you expect people, secular or not, to put up with the state of social and political conversation as it exists today? If they're staunch conservatives, how can they put up with a clear wind blowing in the direction of socialism? If they're democrats, how can they put up with a clearly obstructionist and crooked counter party?

Reducing all of that to computer parlance and the most basic biologies undermines the real problems that people are dealing with.

Take a look at this article for example https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/aug/27/religion-why-is...

Determining if religion is declining or rising is more complex than just making a poll.

ideo = images / ideas

I think religious devotion is a subset of ideological intensity.

In terms of the "traditional" churches in the US, yes, mainline Protestantism is dying because it is a spent force (it has more or less fully acquiesced to the culture, become a consumer and servant of that culture, which means it no longer has any purpose). Muslims who move her tend to become moderates and likely shed Islam entirely eventually. You do see some growth among Evangelicals, but in any case, globally (Africa, Asia), you do see Catholicism and Islam growing. The West is in this sense a decadent freak.

Of course, it's about the same thing as the religious and non-religious cult-dynamics are somewhat similar.

Of course, it's a product of any "local community" fading away - the moderating influence of random people living near one is fading.

If you only meant the west then that is accurate, but due to the various birth rates it could very easily change with immigration.

I think the "news" here, such as there actually is any, is that modern secular progressivism has adopted (transplanted?) many religious notions from e.g. Catholicism, and the comparison bothers people because the left prides itself on being anti-religious. American Nationalism has pretty much always been tied to Christianity given the history of the country, so yeah it's not surprising at all to point that out.

Neither is this news to people nor is it a good claim. But it is a believable claim so that's why we're talking about it.

agreed and the world would be more navigable if they adopted distinct names, garb & beliefs the way the other religions did.

If you think about it, every thanksgiving debate was really a religious debate among people who didn’t clarify their membership.

The Gods can be identified by answering these questions: “why am I here?”, “who am i?”, “what should I do?”, “what is true?”, “why should I suffer & die?”, “what will happen tomorrow?”, “who matters more: myself or others?”.

The deities of the secular religion would be “the self”, your parents, “the government/state and its figureheads“ , money (and the institutions controlling it), the earth / ecology/ the environment , “science”

These are deities because they are the object of irrational fear, worship, rituals & sacrifice.

To be clear, these gods are also worshiped by formally religious people (christians, muslims etc).

Not OP, but I think this is a pretty narrow reading of their statement. Personally, I read it to be more about value and community dynamics.

Institutionalized religions often are very explicit about their (supposed) terminal values and arrange social situations to explicitly work toward or reinforce those values. I believe OP is pointing out that secular groups (at least those within view of OP's demographics) mostly fail to have explicitly defined value systems.

There is a difference between why we perform and action and the reasons we give for performing the same action [citation needed]. I think OP suggests that religions have structures useful for cognating about the former more sharply than secularism does.

Christian thinkers have spilled a lot of ink attempting to clarify the boundary between reason and revelation whereas, in the secular world, many people do not seem to understand that many of their beliefs (particularly the foundational ones) are revealed.

I have always wondered how many of the high priests or whatever their titles might be in any religion over the millenia (this includes Aztecs and Vikings etc) really just saw religion as another way of holding power (vs. kings or what have you). I.e. "just pretending" to believe and in reality just using it to to wield power and influence over people.

Please don't mistake this for saying there aren't very pious people in that group. I do not doubt there are. I just wonder. Just like there are politicians that truly try and improve things and help their constituents and then there are also the ones that really just enjoy having the power and that really couldn't care less until election time rolls around.

This would be agnostic (militant agnostic?), wouldn't it? I think a true atheist would say "I know that there is not a god."

The US has evolved into a modern dystopia under the first-past-the-post system and cloture in the senate. I think the election of Donald Trump was the signal to the rest of the world that America's democracy may not even be a democracy. Republicans are currently digging themselves in to remove as much democracy from the American political system as possible. [2] I'm not sure where the country will end up.

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/shane-patrick-boyle-died-a...

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2021/06/the-...

I know lots of non-US folk who love the values and opportunities they experience in America. But I also know lots of others who don't.

I see my own country adopting more and more aspects from America: individualism over community, the excessive consumerism, the Starbuck-ification of every facet of our lives, that I think are more harmful than beneficial.

In any case, the expat/immigrant situation is familiar to many Europeans as well. The real difference is that most European countries are nation states, while the US is a land of immigrants and their descendants. "American" is an adopted identity. You become American if you have lived in the US long enough and consider yourself American. In contrast, "German" is an assigned identity. You are German if other Germans generally see you as German. You cannot become fully integrated into a nation state as long as other people pay attention to your origins.

It feels like the 'shining city on the hill' was extremely effective propaganda, for the domestic population.

I don't think that's true of Australia. American Australians tend to assimilate pretty well, and after a while people tend to mostly forget they were Americans originally, even if they still have a bit of an accent. The Australian politician Kristina Keneally is an example. She was born in Nevada, grew up in Ohio, didn't move to Australia until her 20s. But I don't think anyone really thinks of her as "an American". She's an Australian politician. You might like her politics or you might dislike them, but nobody really cares about where she was born and grew up. She's one of us now.

The Australian media has even taken to (at times) calling Virginia Roberts Giuffre (the most notable public victim of Jeffrey Epstein) "an Australian", without qualification. (She married an Australian man, had kids with him, now they live here.) Whereas the American media just calls her an American.

The Australian media always wanted to view Mel Gibson as an Australian, even when he said that he himself identified as an American rather than as an Australian. (I think they are less keen on that now that he has made himself a bit of a persona non grata through his behaviour. America, you can have him.)

The same person asked me into great detail why vaccinations should be a good idea, and expected me to provide all the answers.

We both remained at our positions - she‘s now contemplating homeschooling her kid because of mask requirements, and I still don’t believe in a religion that says my gay friends need to become straight.

Which beliefs do you take on faith? Which would have you outcast if you didn’t believe them? Which lead you to a personal sacrifice? Which beliefs cause great anxiety or pleasure with no tangible evidence?

Not comprehensive but those are categories of beliefs elevated to religious in nature.

For example, believing that the Lakers are the best basketball team probably is not religious, but believing that your life got substantially better or worse following an election would be a religious belief.

You use this as a criticism of religion but I find it's true of secular people as well who have baseless beliefs that are just as deeply ingrained.

Telling someone on hackernews you are religious you will probably get a ton of criticism and downvotes. You know what will get the same reaction? Telling someone you are a moral nihilist.

Why is murder evil? Why is stealing evil? Why is anything evil or good for that matter? At least religious people have answers to these questions. (Although I don't think they are necessarily good answers, why is something good because some omnipotent being said so? what if that omnipotent being was evil?)

I feel like I'm screaming at windmills but everything people get hysterical over in our modern world is baseless. All values do not stand up to scrutiny and can be argued against using the one word question "why?"

edit: I was predictably downvoted, please don't take this as me complaining and trying to claim victimhood because it truly doesn't affect me. I just find it funny how uncomfortable my comment makes people that are supposedly open minded and critical of their beliefs but surprisingly share the same beliefs as their entire social group.

What? Christian apologetics meets atheists, Satanists, Darwinists, whoever. I don't even know how restricting apologetics to a very narrow permissible debate would work, unless like the MSM one can control which opponent gets on the mic.

Christians enforce a narrow range of theological divergence acceptable as orthodox, but that is not apologetics.

> You're basically defining all belief as religious belief

No he isn't. He's defining humans as religious, and observing that the absence of affiliation with a major organized religion doesn't change this.

I live in a Communist country in which the Party sometimes explicitly substitutes for a church. In the USA, congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, which means that naturally a state church will evolve that denies being a state church -- both the "state" and "church" parts. Humans being both religious and hierarchical, it's often tricky to determine whether state is running church or vice versa. The ball is always under the other cup.

If you dare, I'm sure you can think of a few recently-invented blasphemies which if violated would result in censure of a progressively more official nature. Whoever can hunt witches, holds the pulpit, even if it comes with a press badge rather than a funny hat.

Remember to recycle.

The purpose of apologetics is to defend the faith debates with people of other religions or atheists. If there are rules about not allowing certain things to be debated that's not going to work at all.

You can throw those into the religious categories e.g. virtue, vice, deities, origin story etc.

I should also mention “original sin” – you can guess examples of those – in america that would be “racism”.

I’m not taking good / bad position just applying religious lens to secular lifestyle.

Instead of original sin, they believe that society hates women, and this is the root of all society's problems.

Instead of regular repentance, they advise regularly checking your privilege / fighting your internalized misogyny.

Anyone who questions their beliefs must be a heretic who hates women and must be cancelled. Etc.

It comes down to what you believe is axiomatic about the world.

For example, asserting that life is soulless and meaningless is to take a stand on something that you cannot know. It's a religious position.

All secular beliefs stem from similarly foundationless religious positions.

Or maybe not foundationless, but without acknowledgement of the religious roots (that is, positions that require faith), which is probably worse than acknowledging that the beliefs you hold cannot be proven.

It's worse because it leads people to believe they have a leg up on those religious clods with their backwards ways. When you don't recognize the things you assume about the world require faith, there is no corrective mechanism capable of opening your mind to other possibilities. Secular people and secular beliefs are ironically very close minded.

Take all the things that you believe to be true and work backwards to first principles. What are the assumptions that those principles require to be true?

When you hear about a corporation espousing "values," they're practicing corporate Nietzscheism. Most of the time, they're not doing it because they knowingly follow Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy, but rather that they parrot the philosophy from other corporate examples... as predicted by Nietzsche.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transvaluation_of_values

[2]: https://philosophynow.org/issues/29/Nietzsche_and_Values

> Christianity has had 2000 years and reformations to knock off the rough, anti-social edges. Religious doctrine has been tempered with social controls and moral codes that largely (though not completely) prevent demonizing your enemies.

Funny that you then effortlessly go on to demonize your "enemies":

> Far left ideologies have a century of murdering tens of millions of people that didn’t agree with them or in some cases just didn’t cheer loudly enough.

Ah yes, because climate activists, reproductive rights activists, and hell, let's throw in feminists as well, are all authoritarian Stalinists, right?

> When it comes to not murdering me or putting me in re-education camps, I trust devout Christians way more than I trust climate activists or gun control advocates or (insert advocate for secular left position here).

This is incomprehensibly insane. I don't even know how to formulate a response to this.

The fact that you take issue with abortion rights activists and not the right-wing protestors who have murdered doctors, shows your true, bigoted colors. Shameful.

There was a big debate in 2019 of communism vs capitalism among two famous professors. When one of them mentioned the communist revolution being a call for "bloody violent revolution" the audience cheered with approval. It was chilling.

https://youtu.be/qsHJ3LvUWTs?t=1295

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html