My 2 pennies:
Living in a secular society where religion plays a reduced part on the individual, compared with 50 years ago.
People now fill the gaps with other banners to fly and differentiate themselves with.
Living in a secular society where religion plays a reduced part on the individual, compared with 50 years ago.
People now fill the gaps with other banners to fly and differentiate themselves with.
Note that in areas where there is still a reasonable chance of getting rich - coastal California, for example, or NYC - people are still willing to put aside their differences to get rich. At least among the people who are actually getting rich. Chinatown or the Sunset in SF have all sorts of AAPI hate crimes, while 50 miles south in Cupertino, Chinese, Indians, and white people work side-by-side in cube farms while enjoying their Apple stock.
OK, in side by side video windows for now...
Where are these opportunities? Do people actually think they can get rich and then achieve it in any meaningful numbers?
If the stats on where most immigrants from foreign countries wind up residing are any indication, not in coastal California or NYC.
The people who move to SV or NYC to get rich on tech or finance are generally Americans born to parents who are college educated or credentialed professionals, and you can see this in the demographics of the companies where these people are working and getting rich.
The largest groups within SV tech are actually green-card holders or naturalized citizens. H-1Bs are only about 8%, U.S. citizens about 20-50% depending on company.
[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/01/17/h-1b-foreign-citizens...
https://www.businessinsider.com/income-inequality-upward-mob...
>one event in Crown Heights, both 30 years ago
I thought (I just googled it to check) that was West Indians and Lubavitch Hasidim. Which are you calling Asians?
As it happens calling Jews Asians is an established form of race based animosity.
Meanwhile, in real life, everything is complex, few things are clearly good or bad, everything has advantages and disadvantages. People need a simple compass to distinguish good and bad. It seems the "political beliefs" are taking up that space in a secular society.
Most religious prescriptions are either common sense (thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not bear false witness) or recipes to avoid social chaos (thou shalt not commit adultery).
Of course religion has also been wielded as a weapon, and I'm the first in line to cherish western secularization, but I don't see it as an inherently socially harmful force.
And this is the narrative of the Extremely Online Atheist. Of the hundreds of religious people I know (though I'm not myself), maybe two fit that description. You are noticing outliers and assuming they represent the entire group.
No one (sensible) said following it was easy.
The unfortunate thing is that this sums up the current state of religious education because we've had a generation that was poorly taught, who then taught the next generation. Now the generation we are raising is not even being taught - which might actually be a good thing since those that are interested will seek that knowledge for themselves instead of being turned off by poor educators.
But for Catholic moral theology for example, it's generally quite complex and exceedingly individual for all but the most black and white situations. What is a sin for me, may not be for you. "Sin" is also in itself a catchall for a whole subset of types of sin - and they're almost all relative to the individual because it will depend on the extent of your free choice, your understanding, and the gravity of the situation. People think it's the 10 Commandments, but that's really just the one thing someone who was poorly educated would remember.
And it's quite tragic because it's actually a whole journey that begins with natural law. Then slowly, over generations, you get small revelations of what God's moral teaching is until you reach a big moment with the revelation of Mosaic law (part of which are the 10 Commandments). Then generations later, you have Jesus drop by and quite literally say that because you were too hard of heart, that was the law revealed to you, but that now you are ready for a higher moral standard.
Even if one has no interest in Catholicism, it's fascinating to watch from the perspective of the evolution of a moral code over generations.
And then you have to consider that Catholic moral theology is just the foundation for Catholic social teaching, which is exactly what is taught to deal with the everyday complex issues where it may not even be a question of "is this a sin?", but rather, "how should I act?".
That's very much not the case.
Religion is demonstrably useless when it comes to practical morality, because it's not in any sense a coherent and stable moral system.
It's really about crafting individual and tribal justifications for arbitrary behaviours supported by various power hierarchies. Some may be considered moral, while others are clearly damaging, hateful, and abhorrent.
It's impossible to deny this without denying centuries of religious history.
There's far more of value in psychological research than there is any religious teaching. Even though it's just getting started, it's a far more coherent body of knowledge than the random mess of conflicting and contradictory opinions and justifications that the religious industries have generated.
I'm not sure how you'd propose to measure that, but in terms of charitable giving at least religious people have been found to give significantly more: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/oct/30/religious-p...
It's not hard to see why: religious orthodoxy brings with it the highly intoxicating and addictive frameworks of unambiguously delineated good and evil, right and wrong, us versus them, and the equally addictive sense of moral righteousness that follows from it. In short, many people have a psychological dependence on religion; they need such a thing."[0]
[0] The Rise of Newchurch (https://www.devever.net/~hl/newchurch)
All are forms of religion in practice, value and effect though everyone is loath to admit it.
What is your definition of "religion"?
A key moment in the development of the current conservative mindset was Goldwater’s 1964 campaign, nearly 60 years ago by now. Goldwater (and every Republican who succeeded him) has used the same rhetorical lynchpins: the media cannot be trusted, it’s the coastal elites against the heartland, &c. An entire generation of conservatives grew up with Goldwater conservativism as their frame of reference, and cheered when the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine was undone. The last 30 or so years of American conservative politics are on a relatively straight track from there: radio politics, the Contract With America, an increasing dependency on evangelical voters and a corresponding shift towards their social issues, &c.
But note: this started when religion was a much larger part of American life. So, at least to my mind, America’s (relatively modest) secular shift is not the primary mover here.
AFAIK Kennedy as the first Catholic president was considered somewhat of an outsider.
But while race definitely mattered (and more), religion mattered in-race as well. Same thing for casteism in India. Religion matters, but so does caste even within Hinduism.
Yes, I'm the same low-agreeableness person from Reddit.