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Comment by kfprt | Hacker News Reader

Religious authoritarians. Puritans.

Theological adherence is a spiral. They have an absolute doctrine. This is what happens when you shift your moral philosophy to doctrinal adherence. Introspection is not needed when you are a perfect adherent to the one true faith.

It should also be noted that religion is older than language and has a basis in biology. Just because they do not fit the modern legal categorization of religion does not mean that culturally it is not the same.

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I don't really follow the academic freedom debate that closely, but I did notice that in the video that was circulating yesterday regarding a protest at Netflix over this class of issue, one of the protesters was saying "Repent, motherf*ker! Repent!" The "repent" language does seem to have a strong religious authoritarian quality.

My pet theory is that puritanism is an inherited trait (not sure if genetic or cultural). america has a lot of it due to its history. The descendants of the puritans have given up all sense of religion, which actually, for them, was a net benefit, since having an external, well-organized religion actually would pull them back from their religious zealotry (by discouraging pride for example).

Now, completely unmoored from their actually somewhat stabilizing traditions, these children -- already predisposed to puritanism, zealotry, etc -- have taken up new belief structures, except now there's nothing to bring them back to reality.

While no doubt there is a genetic component it would be less precise and more likely just account for a general authoritarian personality. I think this shift is too sudden to be attributable to genetics. The work of Robert Putnam on the decline of social trust in the west is more likely to be the cause.

> attributable to genetics.

I didn't claim it was genetic (I did at first, but then edited my post). It could be cultural too.

I'm not convinced it's cultural by way of inheritance. If anything it's the decline of traditional culture. A power vacuum that consumerism does not fill.

Maybe behavioral is the right term. It's clear to me that parents can pass on behaviors.

I agree... the decline of traditional culture means that there's nothing to ground these people.

>It's clear to me that parents can pass on behaviors.

Absolutely.

Check out: https://www.puttingourdifferencestowork.com/pdf/j.1467-9477....

That paper is fascinating. Have you read any of Putnam's books? Are there any you'd recommend?

In the context of civic engagement the only work by Putnam I could suggest is Bowling Alone. I also recommend Pew Research.

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

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2014/06/12/political-po...

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/10/05/rising-...

It seems to be a combination of authoritarian personality and a disconnection from physical reality. This is a mob that was formed online and mostly consists of privileged, coddled minds. That's why they are so fragile and equate mere disagreement with violence.

> religion is older than language and has a basis in biology

This is the giant gaping hole in the ideas of enlightenment atheists like Sam Harris that think that we can just dispense with religion already. Religion will have us, via that label or otherwise; if you think we can elucidate our way out of the need to communicate and share our most base values you are simply mistaken. Religion is simply the name we use for the foundation of the basic human values, rejecting it wholesale because "religion" is a bad word to you after you've seen the sins of our ancestors is shortsighted and opens you up to attacks from a religious perspective.

It's true that religion has stagnated, but that means we need to evolve religion into its next phase, pretending that what we're reinventing is not religion does nobody any favors.

I wouldn't say religion has stagnated, it's more of an invisible force. For example in the quote "like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children" it refers to the Roman God Saturn, a God of a religion that had been dead a thousand years and was never followed in France. Of course much like Indo European language descends from a common source so do the Gods, so the Celts would have an equivalent. This shows that Religion never disappears and only morphs with time. Atheism as practiced by the Sam Harris types is an appeal to rationalism divorced from any semblance of community and thus doomed.

> Religion is simply the name we use for the foundation of the basic human values

Is it? Doesn't religion imply belief in some kind of deity? Whereas you can have values without such a belief.

It is. If you examine the proto indo european pantheon you will find that the many gods are merely archetypes from early societies everyday life. Religion exists as stories to guide the human experience and is the cultural tradition of tens of millennia. The difference between god and man was intentionally blurred.

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