About Three-in-Ten U.S. Adults Are Now Religiously Unaffiliated
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I often tell people that in my grandparents' generation, people sent their kids to Catholic school because they wanted to reinforce the faith they were being exposed to at home. In my parents' generation, people sent their kids to Catholic school to fill in for the faith they were not being exposed to at home. And in my generation, people send their kids to Catholic school because the uniforms are cute.
I jest, I jest, but this trend is being shaped by decades of changes in America's religious landscape. Just because the survey percentages have climbed significantly over the past 20 years doesn't necessarily mean that there is a recent impetus.
I knew that this result was coming 30 years ago, when I noticed that relatively few of my classmates were in the pews on Sundays, because their parents weren't regular churchgoers. Now they're adults, and most are Nones.
I guess if there's any silver lining, as someone who is still active in my faith, it's that as the numbers have dwindled, the people who have stuck around tend to be more engaged and more vibrant. Our parish started a Whole Family Religious Education Program, and unlike the CCD days when I was a kid, there are a nice group of parents who signed up and really want to learn more about their faith.
And because they are allowed to kick trouble makers. That's the main feature.
I also suspect student behavior would magically improve because the parents would have a real incentive to correct behavioral actions at home.
If you want one thing to fix education in America this would be it. Parents need to be held accountable for the actions of their children and hold their children accountable as well and unfortunately many parents simply do not care. They see it as a free right to childcare and whatever happens at school is the school’s problem.
And before anyone corrects me. Yes, you can get expelled from public school, but you really have to try these days and then after years and years of documented terrible behavior there probably has to be something so egregious and disturbing that there can be no objections any longer.
We've raised a generation of people who watch reality TV and have elective surgery to ape yheir idols.
Conversation has diminished, vocabulary moreso.
Faux news, voting for people who wouldn't throw you a lifering if they had a factory producing them, the litigious society, the blame of victims, the disrespect for our fellow man, the lack of curiosity about how things work.
How can these "parents" be held accountable for actions they don't understand or in many cases even care about?
I heard it said well years ago:
Back in my day, when a policeman brought a child home, the father would open the door, slap the child, send it to its room and then apologise to the cop for whatever happened. The new generation open the door and hug their child, then go on to accuse the police officer of traumatising their delicate little angel by being overbearing and wrong about whatever the accusation was.
We've lost respect for authority because of abuse of power. We've lost faith in politics because it's basically red or blue. We've got to try and get paper results for our kids which have nothing to do with aptitude or ability, merely memory.
So much wrong with the way I wrote that, but I'm passionate about it and don't know how to change it.
Yes, people have expressed similar views to yours for a long time. Quoting the Wikipedia entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Common_Sense_Book_of_Baby_... :
> By the late 1960s, Spock faced widespread criticism for condoning an overly permissive parenting style. Many commentators blamed Spock for helping to create the counterculture of the 1960s. Critics believed the current youth were rebellious and defiant in part because they had been brought up by Baby and Child Care.
In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10404752 I went back even further, by looking for "expect everything to be handed to them on a silver platter" and found
> (1960) 'I've known a lot of kids who were treated like little heroes. Afterward, they expected everything to be handed them on a silver platter— and it wasn't. They couldn't adjust.' "Beyond any doubt, the boys in Williamsport last week were treated as ...
> (1949) We have reared a bunch of weaklings in our young marrieds of today. Too much has been handed to them on a silver platter without their having had to work for it, and they lack the intestinal fortitude to meet life as a challenge.
> (1937) We want to teach them not just to sit back and expect things to be handed to them on a silver platter but with confidence, based on their training, to go out and get what they want. We need to stiffen a moral flabbiness that has been affecting our youth.
So, when was your golden Mayberry era?
Perhaps I should take the advice from 1995 from a letter from a father to his son, a new teacher - https://archive.org/details/sim_secondary-education-today_19...
> Stay out of the teachers’ lounge. It is a dark refuge for hard-core cynics who have nothing more constructive to do than whine. When they are not slandering students, other teachers, administrators, or parents, they are railing like Timon about the inequities of the profession. Three themes are common with these complainers: “Kids today are spoiled: they all want something handed to them on a silver platter but don’t want to work for it...” and “It’s the parents fault . . ” and “If I were running this school . . ” Blah, blah, blah. The lounge lizards know everything. Just ask them. Better yet, ignore them. When they pontificate, just smile and nod.
Smiling and nodding.
> Things are changing much faster today, than they were in 1950
Why are you so sure about that?
The post-war era saw an incredible amount of change. By the end of the 1950s, transatlantic jet travel was cheap enough that ocean liner traffic dropped enormously.
The new atomic age included both the threat of H-bomb annihilation and promise of new power sources and new medical treatments.
New materials were being discovered at an incredible pace. The effective polio vaccine ended decades of outbreaks that left children in iron lungs - church bells rang out in joy when the vaccine was announced.
Computers went from a super-secret war-time project to a commercial industry, with programming languages like Fortran and Lisp being created. The Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, starting the Space Age, and reminding everyone that no place was safe from nuclear weapons.
People felt overwhelmed by the deluge of information, which lead to Toffler's famous "Future Shock" in 1970, which introduced the term "information overload" to the popular culture. But the deluge started already in WWII when new technical reports with cross-cutting topics overwhelmed the existing library management systems. Scientists felt like they couldn't keep up with the publications in their field.
Post-war suburbia started, partially due to low-cost loans from the G.I. Bill, and the new road system (including the Interstate System, which started in 1956). The racist structures at the time encouraged white families to move to the suburbs in a process termed 'white flight'. This flight was connected with the Second Great Migration, which saw black families moving to northern cities. The 1950s brought rulings like Brown v. Board of Education which started to break down segregation, and the rise of the black civil rights movement.
And you say things are happening much faster in this decade?
My wife and I are not religious. I could be convinced to be agnostic but not really. She's all atheist. We've priced out private schools all over the country. The jesus ones are the only ones that are affordable and still haven't had any mass shootings. We won't put our kids in the hand of some weirdo cult but it's tempting.
>"The jesus ones"
Perfectly described in as few words as possible.
Isn't religiosity also (primarily?) a personal experience, founded on a form of (learned) introspection?
The emphasis on personal aspects of religion in the recent centuries is mostly due to Protestantism, which values personal faith above all else.
Human behavior is possible, but difficult to shape on the individual level. There's much more inertia at larger scales and if these are things that should change, it will be very difficult.
Religion groups have done a very good job at fulfilling their primary purpose: to continue to exist (this purpose is not unique to religions, as continued existence is the purpose of all groups whether they accept it or not)
Take the topic of abortion. Catholics have always been against it. Southern Baptists and evangelicals were largely either indifferent or in favor of it being rare but legal until the mid 1970s when the Heritage Foundation lumped it in with a group of other things they sold as "moral issues" in an attempt to sway religious groups on economic issues.
Now, given that we're talking about the South here, what issue do you think would be considered a moral issue by a majority white Southern population of that era?
If you guessed segregation, give yourself a pat on the back. While the fight for segregation has largely been lost by conservatives, they took that emotional energy and kept it going with abortion and laissez-faire capitalism, basically creating an entire ideological framework from the ground up and "discovering" Biblical support for their positions.
Today, evangelicals and southern baptists are steadfast in their opposition to abortion. But Roe was a Southern Baptist, and so was her lawyer, and as the article below shows (with two articles from the era of Roe embedded),
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevin-wax/baptist-...
that was anything but "biblically settled" doctrine at the time. Funny how we went 1900+ years and abortion only became an issue in an attempt to exclude a group.
> The Leges Henrici Primi, written c. 1115, treated pre-quickening abortion as a misdemeanor, and post-quickening abortion as carrying a lesser penalty than homicide. "Quickening", a term often used interchangeably with "ensoulment" or "animation", was associated with the first movement of the fetus in utero. This movement is generally felt by women sometime in the third to fifth month of pregnancy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_abortion#Christiani...
(The fun sectarian conflicts back then look much, much wilder from today's viewpoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharism )
A data packet from a streaming movie is meaningless when you look at the 1's and 0's going over a wire. You have to step back and impose a framework of understanding, protocols and specifications that exist outside of the computer itself, before you can watch the movie. An atheist transistor could never be given "proof" that a movie exists using a sequence of bits. The concept of "movie" exists outside of the world of binary. Religion is to humanity what protocols and specifications are to a stream of binary data. This is frustrating to the types who consider themselves to be rational and fact based, because by definition it cannot be proven within the system. The difficulty for the hard nosed atheist is that all of the most important human questions, including their desire to convert us all to atheists, cannot be accounted for in their reductionist framework. This is usually dealt with by simply ignoring the dissonance.
What you call "religiosity" I would call fundamentalism, and it is a natural human phenomenon which will manifest no matter what the professed religion or non religion of a person.
Human concern about the ultimate questions of life will not go away no matter what religion we ascribe to ourselves. The good thing about formal religion like Christianity, is that it incorporates thousands of years of debates by some of the best minds about these issues. Throwing it away and making these questions ad-hoc or even worse, subconscious, is asking for the serious consequences you alluded to in your comment.
And what has humanity gained from all their efforts? Having been raised in a formal religion I'd say nothing was gained and thousands of human years wasted. Years that could have explored more fruitful endeavors or even just lived with less persecution and suffering.
When we first attempted to find truth in the world, the truth seekers called themselves philosophers. Once philosophy had become polluted with Platonism, the more Aristotelian thinkers were driven to science. I think one day science will be left behind in the same way and seekers of truth will go elsewhere.
Great news, we won! While all of those issues aren't resolved perfectly, they are largely solved. Religious leaders just don't have the clout they did twenty years ago. Nobody cares what the Pope says. It's over, or will be over soon.
Now, in my opinion, atheists should choose to be gracious winners. We should attempt to find common ground with the religious, and agree to disagree where we can. We don't need to turn into the monster that we have just slain and put our boot on their neck. Revenge stories like that are best left in the old testament.
It’s nowhere near resolved yet.
If you've not heard of him, look him up, there's gold you're missing.
What are some examples of this? I'm also an atheist (although I detest the label) who was raised Catholic and seriously considered joining the priesthood. But a life guided by reason and rationality I've found to be so much more fulfilling than the guilt and fear that made up much of my Catholic life.
At the start, the scientific dogma was that masks don't work, and travel bans don't work, and worrying about COVID was irrational alarmism. Anyone who suggested otherwise was treated as not believing in science (this extended to censorship or at least misinformation banners on major social media platforms).
Now, the scientific dogma has flipped, and for example anyone questioning the effectiveness of masks is treated as a science denier.
The "Science" dogma that the general public is induced to adhere to gets filtered through these institutions.
Science changes course as more data comes in.
At first there wasn’t evidence that masks worked, once that had been accrued science was pro-mask.
The reason people questioning the effectiveness of masks is called a science denier is because there have been innumerable studies on the effectiveness of masks, and every one that has stood up to scrutiny has come out in favor of masks.
Calling scientific consensus that is backed but huge amounts of direct evidence “dogma” is nonsense.
Dogma is an absolute opinion on something in the absence of (or indeed denied by) evidence.
And that's reason to express epistemic uncertainty when basing one's conclusions off limited data.
> At first there wasn’t evidence that masks worked, once that had been accrued science was pro-mask.
First of all, there was already evidence that masks worked.
Second, officials did not tell people that we lacked evidence that masks work - they told people that masks don't work period.
> The reason people questioning the effectiveness of masks is called a science denier is because there have been innumerable studies on the effectiveness of masks, and every one that has stood up to scrutiny has come out in favor of masks. Calling scientific consensus that is backed but huge amounts of direct evidence “dogma” is nonsense.
The studies show limited effectiveness of masks, particularly with newer variants that have higher exhaled viral loads. People who argue that the benefits of masking are outweighed by the costs are labeled science deniers. This is despite there being some evidence of negative impacts from masking (e.g. on childhood development).
Some said we lacked evidence, others said they didn’t work. There was no single voice on this.
This is not how that worked. The evidence in terms of tests and trials is inconclusive, either for or against masks, in terms of experimental evidence of effectiveness. Nevertheless East Asia was all fro masks from the beginning and the WHO, CDC, FDA, Surgeon General were against, very vehemently. The western establishment changed their minds based not on experimental evidence but on people going "Are you morons? You're saying masks are literally useless? Not of limited use, actually worthless? Do you understand how airflow and droplets work at all?"
Besides, it is perfectly scientific to change your beliefs and guidance based on new evidence, especially when it comes to novel diseases and a generation-defining pandemic.
But there is clearly a faction of media and political institutions which wield "Science (TM)" as a cudgel to stifle public debate / opinions - and they aren't even doing it out of bad faith / political opportunism - they're doing it because they believe it's important to have the general public universally believe in established science "facts".
Your portrayal of the recent scientific dogma as being discriminatory of people who don't wear masks does not match mine, however. As far as I know, the current dogma is "get vaccinated and no one really cares if you have a mask on or not, maybe wear one when your grandma comes over though and consider getting a booster if your regional leaders are advising you to".
Anyway. The culture war is still firmly between the un/vaccinated, not the vaccinated but unmasked.
edit: Maybe try leaving the bay area if you disagree.
> travel bans don't work, and worrying about COVID was irrational alarmism…
Clearly you were listening to different medical and scientific advice than I was seeing at the time. The medical establishment was warning about the dangers from very early on. The question about travel bans was mainly about timing, not whether they would be needed or not.
This is not some crackpot interviewer.
I work with good hearted scientists everyday. Science is amazing. Science is the foundation for my whole goddamn life. But, our leadership did not hold up to the standard I was expecting them to. And, they crumbled under political influence and their inability to lead with objectivity and truth. They are weak. Almost childish (see it for yourself). It is no surprise they eroded public trust.
String theory? Read Smolin, who points out that for decades, string theorists dominated physics, despite the absence of experimental evidence.
Expert systems? I saw this back in the mid 1980s at Stanford, when the CS department had gone all-in on expert systems. Claims were made that strong AI was just around the corner. This from a technology that doesn't really do all that much. You write simple statements about something in a notation based on predicate calculus, after which you can ask questions. You get out pretty much what you put in. Systems like that still exist, mostly as chatbots for answering the easy questions so customer support doesn't have to talk to you. A programmed FAQ, basically.
And those are hard sciences. Economics is hopeless. Psychology is worse.
(I made the unpopular comment at the time that expert systems would turn out to be more important than syntax-directed parsing, but less important than relational databases.)
As Fred Hoyle once said, "Science is prediction, not explanation". The parts of science that work lead to engineering that works and products that work. Belief is then unnecessary.
If we look at the history of the Varna, particularly the Brahmin, if I'm not mistaken... From my fragmented recollection, the Brahmins created increasingly sophisticated and esoteric rituals which began to jointly increase in expense. They were eventually castigated [EDIT: the Vedic religion was actually challenged by a variety of religions, this period, ≈700BCE, gave rise to Buddhism and Jainism.] for this — I'd say science draws a pretty close parallel.
It's increasingly opaque, expensive, esoteric, and despite all that it's informing opinion, debate, and policy. It's also a closed circle that is arbitrarily delimited, and given high autonomy and authority in society. Not to mention most people have a poor grasp of the fact that science isn't the truth. It also does little to inform us in the way of morality, yet it appears the "rationalists" (pardon, I've no better term) in usurping religion, have little in the way of an answer for this. Yet the constituent mass that composes it is one of the most trusted groups[1]. Which is easily exploitable if you factor all this together, not unlike religion. And it has been leveraged for maligned purposes, before and will continue to be.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2019/08/02/trust-and-mis...
Think about the statement "We believe in science in this house". What does that even really mean? As you considered joining the priesthood, you should know there is a great deal of scholarship that priests engage in. Not just religious scholarship, but the study of the natural world. Many of the minds that pushed humanity forward were priests. Priests believe in science, but the people who put those signs on their lawns tend not to agree.
That gets me to my point, science isn't a noun to me. Yet everyday I keep hearing how the science has spoken. Often, when I look at the evidence provided and I deem what was said to be correct. Just as often, I find small sample sizes, hacked p values or a logical flaw with the conclusion. If I start a dialog about my findings in the wrong places, I get told I'm anti-science by people who didn't even read the paper.
If forced to provide a good example it would the talk of Covid escaping the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This has become a more main stream opinion in the past month or so, but if you wanted to discuss the possibility of this around this time last year, you would've been called a conspiracy theorist by people who reportedly "believe in science" or even be censored by some of the major platforms in the name of science. That is the opposite of the science I grew up with.
Part of science is acknowledging epistemic uncertainty yet still acting on imperfect information.
I think for most people it means that they believe the process of using science to discover how the world works is better than the other alternatives offered by religion, philosophy, conspiracy theories, etc. They don’t usually think it’s infallible, just better than the alternatives.
I don't see how you can claim with a straight face that priests believe in science. Religion at its core is asking for belief without proof. Science is the opposite.
Further: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lay_Catholic_scientist...
You are robbing yourself if you don't speak to priests you encounter. They tend to be very well read people, with an interesting perspective on the world if you can be tolerant enough of them.
What I've meant above is hostility in the literal sense. As in, trying to oppose science with some religious fantasies, like with Intelligent Design, or pretty much anything Catholicism says about human sexuality.
Faith is believing things without evidence.
If you have evidence for a thing, you don't say, "i believe it on faith".
I've seen a few things quite concerning, specifically with COVID. However, the overall message (that I'm guessing you'd disagree with) to trust the experts, isn't necessarily a call for deference/faith either.
The concern is that people will go out looking for validation of their preconceived biases, listen to misinformed parties, possibly with perverse incentives, or political motivations. It's not all about shutting down discussion, as much as keeping the crazies from preventing the public from gaining herd immunity.
The two do (religion and rationality) are not mutually exclusive concepts.
Only if the religion is unfalsifiable. If it can be proven false then it's irrational to believe in it. If it can be proven true there is no need for faith.
If the beliefs are benign then one could make a case. Even so I prefer believing only what can be proven over ignorance and self deception.
If i don't need evidence,
I can believe white people are better than black people and take it on faith. I can believe men are better than women and take it on faith. I can believe cis people are better than lbgtq+ people and take it on faith.
If i don't have to demonstrate the accuracy of my claims, My claims are as valid as your claims.
According my mental dictionary, religion and rationality are mutually exclusive when the religious doctrine is proven irrational.
The angst is still there though - it's just directly applied towards modern culture war fault-lines rather than towards religion / belief in god.
I'm an atheist, but my atheism is my own.
And, in that, I realise that the number of degrees of freedom of an atheist are only slightly greater than those of a devout religious type, in that there are almost infinite things that "label" doesn't define, whilst a very limited number of things (1 for an atheist, a few more for a religious person) that a label does define.
You are an atheist. You are a catholic. You are a woman. You are Japanese. Few words, but even less meaning.
I just (re)watched the space snake episode of Rick and Morty last night:
“Imagine being a racist snake. Hey, other snake, I hate you because you’re the wrong colour snake!”
Could you clarify this? Plato & Aristotle have both gone in & out of fashion within different communities of thought over the centuries, sometimes in with one group and out with another at the same time. Humanism and Platonism came together around the 14th century in a push back against pure Aristotelian thought, and that seems like it would be much earlier than the shift you have observed. Further down the road, Leibniz described himself as closer to Plato than Aristotle but was part of the natural philosophy tradition that evolved into modern science. More recently both, Bertrand Russel and Kurt Godel were both platonists of some flavor. =
Is the shift more recent, the past half-century or so? Or a specific aspect of platonism that has taken hold?
To this point, I have a few things to say. Plato's more abstract and metaphysical thinking is largely compatible with the teachings of the Catholic Church. It is my reading of history that when we have embraced these more metaphysical ideas, it has often lead to great suffering and barbarism. The inquisition, the crusades, etc.
There was a time where only the clergy were able to talk about religion, as a common person you would simply be ignored out of hand. I see that sort of thinking in the allegory of the cave. I see this sort of thinking today where it is claimed that someone without a degree can't have a opinion on a scientific topic.
In contrast, the Wikipedia article for Aristotelianism claims that:
"In the Islamic Golden Age, Avicenna and Averroes translated the works of Aristotle into Arabic and under them, along with philosophers such as Al-Kindi and Al-Farabi, Aristotelianism became a major part of early Islamic philosophy."[0]
This is why lots of stars have Arabic names, during their golden age they were the first to discover and chart them.
From there, it is my view that Aristotle's ideas form the core of thinking that lead to the Renaissance as access to his works became more common in Europe. The Renaissance obviously was a huge influence on the founding fathers. America with it's right of free speech, is probably the only place that something like modern scientific thinking could take off.
In contrast to the allegory of the cave above, Aristotle was the first to speak about "common sense"[1]. He elevated the common man (it was almost two thousand years ago, cut him some slack) where Plato felt them unworthy.
> Is the shift more recent, the past half-century or so? Or a specific aspect of platonism that has taken hold?
It's subtle, and I'll be the first to admit this isn't something I can prove, it's more how I feel. Roughly 15 years ago I noticed the start of the idea that someone needs credentials to speak on a topic within the skeptic community, prior to that you'd be called out for making argument from authority[2]. We went from, lets have a debate to shut up, are you a expert, show me your papers. I'm no philosopher, but I see the former as more Aristotelian and the latter as Platonism.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotelianism
My own observations on the recent issues of authority are a little different though, viewing it as part of a longer trend. From my (limmited) perspective it seemed like before the power of the internet, Expertise ruled the day. When the internet really hit mainstream in the early 00's there began a great skepticism of experts, that there was no reason to regard their assessment any higher than another. And there's a little something to that since there's no inherent reason why a non expert can't understand something too. But then it seemed to go too far-- expertise is sort of just another way of saying someone has a lot of experience, which can provide a useful perspective. And citing authority is not always a fallacy of appeal to authority. But the push against expertise went too far, and people began discounting someone's point of view precisely because they were an expert if there was a disagreement rather than on the merits. I saw this play out in things like Wikipedia Talk pages about topics.
Now perhaps the pendulum is swinging back in the other direction again. I guess the hope is that at some point, at least for a while, it will stay in the middle for a while. As Aristotle liked to say: "The mean between extremes". I've always tried to keep that outlook-- skepticism towards most extremes. So it goes
I had this same experience with atheism groups too (albeit when I was much younger)... it just gets boring. I think the repetition in religion is much more drawn out. You've got thousands of pages of text and so it takes a lot longer to reach that point of "yeah I've heard this before..." and by that time you've built up a community that has more activities than just reading a sacred text.
This sentence is meaningful once you define what you mean by Platonism and Aristotelian, and once you do so with definite meanings sufficiently close to what they seem to mean, I really don't think this is correct at all.
I'd say that is more the weird american athiest-as-persecutee strand.
> tolerance of incoherence
Do you really think we're living in an overly tolerant society?
I guess you could kinda say that about the conquest of the Holy land in the Old Testament, but I think that's a specific case not a general principle of taking from others by divine right. What examples were you thinking of?
As for divine violence all the abrahamic religions have been involved in force land grabs and killing rule breakers or non-believers.
At least Christianity has a track record you can judge, for better or worse, and some notion of redemption.
It also pays to think about the word "natural" and all that it implies. our desires are not simply rational thoughts that independently arrive in our minds - look at the different objects of desire among different cultures. There is no untouchable "natural" desire that is so holy that it should be off limits to regulation.
Religion shouldn't be criticised simply for having a framework for moderating response to desire, and because it offends some sacred cow of "natural" desire.
Oh I'm not criticizing religion for having a framework. I'm criticizing it because it's the wrong framework. Of course some natural desires must be regulated. That's just self control. People don't need unprovable superstitions to stop killing each other. For whatever small crumbs of peace religious harmony may have brought religion has brought plenty of excuses for war, murder, and hatred.
Cults are central to culture, it's true but we can still show a lot of conflicts around ethnic, cultural lines that seem to lack a religiously motivated dimension.
I think this line of argumentation should be retired - it's just not robust. It is an attempt to gain the moral high ground by secularists and maybe before the 19th and 20th centuries we could imagine it would be true but there have been too many secualr conflicts of a massive scale to sincerely hold this polemic in 2021.
Existence of problematic non-religious frameworks doesn't negate the wrongness/harmful of religion.
Both religious and non-religious memes can be bad at the same time.
> I think this line of argumentation should be retired - it's just not robust. It is an attempt to gain the moral high ground by secularists...
Even if you dismiss thousands of years of wasted effort and active harm there is the ongoing harm and waste still happening. This isn't harmless LARPing. People are being shamed, ostracized, and even killed in 2021 over these--at best unprovable--beliefs. Religion also encourages lazy thinking with appeals to authority, confirmation bias, and often faith over evidence.
Perhaps those weakest and most marginalized by these memes.
> Clearly, it's a human meme that has some positives and no dramatic downside that would have caused it to die out.
Is it so clearly positive? Not in my experience. Natural selection doesn't instantaneously stop every injustice. It could be humanity had just been caught in a valley between the least bad options until it could ascend out of a malaise, like the dark ages. The Middle East has some of the most religious populations yet I wouldn't say they evolved into a beacon of human progress.
As a framework for society at scale, Christianity gave us the western world as we know it. It gave us abolition of slavery at a time when belief in the equality of people was a religious belief that couldn't easily reconciled with the self-evident disparities in the level of development of different civilizations. Atheism gave us eugenics, communist horrors, etc.
Your point is correct on its face, but the fact is that people will believe in some framework or another.
Is Christianity the dominant or even a significant factor which made the western world better?
> Atheism gave us eugenics, communist horrors, etc.
Are you sure you're not throwing out the baby with the bath water?
Racial 'purity' goes back at least to the Torah. Eugenics and other horrors aren't any more the result of atheism than Judaism or Capitalism.
Insofar as a culture is only sustainable through arbitrage—importing people from religious societies (Latin America in the case of the United States, the Muslim world in case of Western Europe)—that seems indicative of a “problem” to me.
Can you elaborate?
> Insofar as a culture is only sustainable through arbitrage...
Culture can be sustained at lower than current population levels. And increasing population is much less painful than reducing it. Also, reasonably well managed immigration is a huge net positive for any society.
That said, a world of uneducated people raised on belief without evidence--all competing for too few resources--isn't exactly sustainable. Even more so now that humanity has so many tools to destroy itself and most complex life.
I'm starting to think... Yes?
Being from Bangladesh I like to think of the counterfactual where you run a village according to hedonist atheist american culture. Everyone would quickly die of starvation.
Plenty of atheists are well fed and happy.
• Community (friends, support group)
• Guidelines for morality / how to live life
• Shared stories / beliefs about the origin of their people
• Optimism and comfort from a belief in afterlife
• Charitable causes
In a way, I think religion has become "unbundled" over time, and these individual needs are increasingly being met my different alternatives (for example, meetups for meeting people, charities for helping others). But, of course, Americans are also just increasingly skeptical of religious beliefs.
Why say 'religion' when they mean 'Christianity'? I don't think Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, or Shintoism are suffering these problems-- in fact most people aren't even familiar with the daily practice of them. It's Christianity that you're actually taking offense to
We figured out that many of the origin stories were incorrect so we tossed the whole thing without replacing the actually crucial components.
It'a a good thing until you end-up being excluded from that big community which means excluded any kind of social life or even worse(i.e killed with stones). I say: good riddance of that kind of community! More niche communities are better because you have more choices and less powerful community leaders.
We live in an atomized society, largely devoid of any kind of community.
I look at Israel as an example. The ultra orthodox have exploded as a percentage of the population and together with conservative Jewry have completely dominated secular Israel- it's clear that demographic trends (if they continue as they have for 70 years) mean that fundamentalist religious perspectives will dominate Israeli culture and life for the foreseeable future. Similarly the Amish and Mormons are quietly taking over vast territories. I think it can be said that only moderate forms of religion are at risk of extinction.
For modern example Scientology in Hollywood you maybe discriminated against or atheism during McCarthy post war period you would be persecuted or killed if you were jew in Nazi Germany.
While by no means completely eliminated, we have kind of gone from genocide -> persecution -> discrimination, so more people are comfortable identifying what they really feel.
The discrimination is still strong, today it is almost unimaginable to elect an explicitly atheist president. Being gay/woman/non-white a candidate would face probably lesser discrimination for presidency than not identifying Christian even if they don't practice in meaningful way like say Trump, also being more devout seem to give no advantage either, but not identifying as Christian seems big challenge for office.
And hosted a conference on it here: summit.opendiv.org
Just thought I’d share — may give you some additional academic perspective!
I'd only add to your list,
* Shared rituals to structure and celebrate life's mileposts
* An array of moral role models
I suspect a lot of the appeal is that people want some explanation for things, and the idea that anyone is running the show is comforting.
We're still in living memory of highly sectarian societies where, for example in Australia, a Catholic was a lower social grade than Church of England and being a Methodist was something else entirely. All of these groups voted differently, associated differently and married differently. This hung on longer in small towns in Australia but was a definite societal attribute right up until the mid-1960s where it started to break down.
We had waves of social change that barely shook that structure: Catholic churches and schools were once almost exclusively Irish, but the immigration from Italy during the 1940s/1950s changed that ethnic mixture significantly with barely a murmur to the social structure or how those people voted (predominantly aligned with the left for working class reasons). The church publically told them how to vote and they did it.
As older churches like the Methodists disappeared (or were subsumed into more liberal church traditions) and the left started embracing social reforms (no-fault divorce, womens liberation, abortion, birth control, the breakdown of racial segregation) the religious part of society bifurcated: the more religious folk went to the right and the less religious folk just started walking away from church.
That division was the end of organised religion as a driving social force. Now, the thing most christians seem to despise the most is other christians of a slightly different faith.
Most organised religions have only themselves to blame for their quickly falling church attendance for that reason.
In one respect though, the US and Australia share the history that our leaders have predominantly been protestant. I think that's far more a social class structure artifact than anything blatantly religious though.
The denomination of the leader doesn't always dictate who gets the ear of the party in our political system though - Gough Whitlam was famously coerced into including the catholic schools into our public funded school system because they were "broke" - a somewhat laughable assertion even at the time, when the Catholic church was, and is, one of the richest institutions on the planet.
The memory hole in 1984 wasn't just something Orwell made up from nothing.
Some undeniably do care about abortion. Some have financial ties to politics and abortion is the easiest wedge issue that they can claim to religiously justify.
Before that, the political issue churches were supporting was civil rights; a century before that, it was the abolition of slavery.
I don't think it is possible for anyone who takes positions on right or wrong to be truly apolitical: 'I avoid politics' mostly means 'I find the status quo tolerable.'
The civil rights struggle has largely been about society coming to terms with oppressed groups being worthy of having equal human rights, whether that was on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, nationality, religion, disability, whatever. Suggesting that a fetus doesn't deserve a right to live is no different than suggesting that any other marginalized, dehumanized group doesn't.
In essence, human rights for the unborn today are where human rights for Black people were in the 1850s. Hopefully someday we'll treat young life with the same respect we treat old life.
(This of course ignores the fact that the ideological basis for abortion ban is literally just stupid; it was Acquinas himself who explained how flawed the idea of "life from conception" was.)
- The pope is the antichrist
- The Catholic Church, according to biblical prophecy, will force everyone to attend church on Sunday
- If you comply with this and don't become a martyr, you will not be saved
These are the Seventh-Day Adventists' beliefs, and this is a pretty mainstream protestant religion in the US. They run a whole huge health care system and they have millions of members and vast amounts of real estate, yet their actual beliefs are objectively totally nuts to me. This is how a lot of the religions sound, when you take a step back they're pure crazy talk wrapped up in some common sense "don't be a jerk" teachings.
If you go back a few hundred years, you'd just be murdered by your neighbors if you came out and said their beliefs are crazy. In a lot of the world today you'll get this treatment. The people who are able to escape this stuff are enjoying a luxury that is rare in the history of the world.
"The story describes a world in which most of the human population has lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth. Each individual now lives in isolation below ground in a standard room, with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent, global Machine. Travel is permitted, but is unpopular and rarely necessary. Communication is made via a kind of instant messaging/video conferencing machine with which people conduct their only activity: the sharing of ideas and what passes for knowledge."
I have also felt a decline in my "second place" (workplace) social connections since I've been working remotely for a long time. I get along with people I work with, but I don't go to lunch or talk at the water cooler, so it's not a social environment the way an office can be. Don't get me wrong, I love remote work, but for anyone already lacking social interaction, I can see that need for connection.
This community wouldn’t fill any gap related to human suffering that real humans do.
According to Oldenburg's criteria HN doesn't really fit.
I think it's the standard social media stuff - pseudo anonymity, lack of nuance or easy clarification, lack of private conversations meaning everything is exposed to the lowest common denominator.
Not saying HN is particularly bad as social media goes, but there is a big difference between having a chat at a bar where you adapt to your conversation partners and have a mutually interesting discussion while being mostly diplomatic, vs posting something for posterity where everyone that passes by can give a hot take or "what about", "source please", "explain what you mean by"...
Your comment is actually a (very benign) example - I don't mean offence, just saying that the gp put a comment out there and now it's available for anyone to come by and jump on, where the dynamic would be different in a pub convo
Physical locations also tend to force me to engage back- if you say something I disagree with, I may not speak up, but my reaction (or lack of reaction) communicates to some extent what I think. Online, I could be annoyed by you, or happy that you think like me, or seething mad, and no-one may ever know if I choose not to.
I don't think HN is generally worse than physical interaction, but it has the potential to be. Social environments often have some moderating influence on participants, through social customs, lack of anonymity, and better communication through body language, tone of voice, etc.
Overtime, making in person, physical connections with people can be crucial to your long term well being.
Now, that is absolutely hilarious! Thanks for a good laugh.
The way many Christian churches have fully embraced the "Jesus wants you to be rich" mantra and the "the poor deserve to be poor" mentality is fully out in the open now.
(There's a particular irony when this happens in Christianity, as one of the main themes of Jesus' teaching is that strictly following religious law doesn't inherently make you a good person; the main villains of the New Testament are holier-than-thou religious types.)
I am talking about organized Christian religions and their affect of increasing tribalism among their members. I gave up trying to convince Christians that they were wrong using their bible quite a while ago; most don't really care.
Churches used to (and still do) provide: a local support network, initiation rituals for children (giving them a sense of belonging - something very important and very lacking in our Western culture without religion) , a social outlet and place to make friends, often have free to use facilities for members so you can have events there like weddings, funerals, birthdays, a shared experience that gives people a sense of belonging, etc.
People might say that these things have all been replaced by other things, and while that might be possible if you go out of your way to find a replacement for each and every one, humans are quite lazy and very few people ever do this. Being part of a church or other religious group gives you all this for free, and despite the other negatives, I think that is a huge positive that many people are starting to miss out on.
As far as I'm concerned the scientific method is a far more productive and fulfilling way to live and solve problems.
There is this Pew study with come information about generations and religious practices: https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/generatio...
I identify myself as atheist but was raised Catholic. If you catch people like me at the right time, we might be answering "Catholic".
Roughly a third go weekly, a third monthly or few times per year, and a third never. So there could be a whole third that are affiliated when asked, but besides Christmas mass, that's the maximum extent of their engagement.
https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/attendanc...
My theory is that, as society becomes more accepting of "unaffiliated" more people admit it. I think the parallel is that we have always, most likely, had the same percentage of the population that is gay for example, but just more people feel safe to admit to it in a more open society that we have today.
I think religion is similar in that; in the past, it would be a career killer or one would be confronted by other challenges if anyone were to discover or if you were to admit to being and atheist, agnostic, unaffiliated or whatever label.
Today, most people in westernized nations, feel free to admit it, but, again, just a hunch, but I am willing to bet that say, 100 years ago, there were plenty of people who had significant doubts but knew that if they didn't want to end up on fire tied to a steak, best to keep it to one's self.
This is very true. I've been an atheist for 40 years and it's really only been the past 10 years or so where being openly atheist doesn't trigger negative responses.
In Canada. I'm not sure I'd be openly atheist in the US South.
My Father thought it was hilarious at the time, then my parents divorced and he, who joked about how stupid religion is, then married his second wife who was evangelical, suddenly, he was a believer. Interesting, here is a person who, jokeed about how religion was for people with weak minds, suddenly becomes a true believer.
My conclusion, from this and a lot of other examples I could bored everyone with, people "believe" when it benefits them, financially, socially, emotionally, sexually, etc.
This is why religion is slowly dying. There are a lot of religious people who are only there for the benefits.
Getting married used to be the only socially acceptable way to have sex or at least the way "non slutty" people did. My parents have gone from "sex outside of marriage is a sin" to "only get married if you want to, living together first is probably a good idea"
It’s why the UN is projecting that the share of non religious globally will actually continue to shrink as the EU fades away and a hundred million Christians are added in China etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Switzerland#Census...
If it's 80% retention per generation, there's no fatherless-blip needed to explain the decline since WW II. 0.8 * 0.8 * 0.8 = 51.2% retention after three generations.
I think this migration to no religious affiliation is probably due (or accelerated) by the internet. Sociologists of Religion such as Peter Berger suggest that a group of people holding a particular worldview create a social structure for the plausibility of the beliefs that underly the worldview. Exposure to more groups means you have more choice, and in fact must chose, between worldviews. The internet opens up a much larger number of plausibility structures which will be the most enticing to those with loose religious affiliation.
In the 2021 NPORS, 4% of respondents describe themselves as atheists (up from 2% in 2011), and 5% describe themselves as agnostics (up from 3% a decade ago). One-in-five U.S. adults (20%) now describe their religion as “nothing in particular,”
In the same way the poll is curious about Protestant vs. Catholic, and Mainline vs Evangelical/Born Again, I'd sure like to know a little bit more about the "nothing in particular" group - especially when 13% of them are praying on a daily basis. Who are the two percent of people responding to this survey who have no religion and pray every day?
Is it none because they think religion is evil? Are they indifferent? Are they spiritual but think organized religion is unnecessary? Are they unaffiliated for intellectual reasons? Or have they never been exposed to religion at all and are mildly curious?
They might eat with their family, who are religious, and go along with the prayer because they think the slight inconvenience isn't worth rocking the boat over.
Nothing in particular is very different than being atheist/agnostic.
In general they are dissatisfied with organized religion or believe it is actually evil.
I know several people who would describe themselves as "christian" but left the Catholic Church during the paedophilia scandal and, hence, would describe themselves as "nothing in particular". Some of them see "The Church" as evil now.
I also know people who firmly believe there is a higher power guiding the world but don't have a particular god in mind.
I also know quite a few people who believe in a Christian God but find all of the organized religions very unpalatable and hypocritical.
I suspect that this is at least partly because, in some parts of the US, people are quite hostile to atheism as a concept. So it's not that surprising that you'd have people who don't believe in a god but also wouldn't want to identify as an atheist.
> Who are the two percent of people responding to this survey who have no religion and pray every day?
Well, you can get 2% of people to give any weird answer in a poll. But there probably are people who don't have a religion but do pray; it's a social ritual as much as anything else, for people who grew up with it.
I believe that the new global religion isn't even politics per se, as others have pointed to. It is a religion of the promise of technological intervention.
Why waste time with diet and exercise when technology will cure obesity and diabetes in my lifetime?
Why waste time cultivating relationships in real life when the Metaverse is right around the corner?
Why waste time worrying about having a family and kids when life extension and artificial wombs will be invented in my lifetime?
Why waste time going out when technology will soon allow me to never leave my home again?
Why waste time working hard when UBI is right around the corner and inevitable?
Why waste time read scripture when our digital existence will make morality irrelevant?
This is what I used to think. Then I considered having children. My perspective changed quickly. (Though I don't know exactly why it changed.)
* deny science
* attack the basic rights of other people
* aggressively push for laws based on their own religious beliefs at the expense of everyone else
Etc
Given that most studies have shown younger people are more likely to accept science, other people, etc this could simply be reflective of people not wanting to be associated with the loud people.
I'm glad you had a place to hang out with your neighbors but lobbying by religious groups in the US have real negative consequences for a lot of people.
Not every church is the same.
The Catholic church runs many hospitals. They aren't charity hospitals -- they have similar cost structures that other hospitals have and play the same billing games. In many communities they are the only option. But because of their religious ownership, they can prohibit procedures which are otherwise legal.
My mom took my sister and I to a Quaker "meeting" (not church) when we were young and I had the impression that you actually didn't have to believe in God/Jesus. I could be mistaken though. Very cool experience nonetheless (cool people, no pastor/preacher, people just sitting in (meditative?) silence, pews split across the room, facing one another so there is no altar/front, etc.)
This is very much the case. Quakers are very open about the fact that their meetings are open to everyone who is willing to sit quietly.
Anecdotally in christian circles there is a sense that the liberal churches are in big big decline , like methodism , anglicism , other liberal protestants. But churches that are more conservative ( baptist non denom, latin mass catholic ) are growing ( especially amongst the young ).
The Lutherans have Missouri Synod and probably some others.
The United Methodist Church seems to be avoiding any formal gatherings so that they can delay their own upcoming split, too.
I've never seen anything like this elsewhere. Obviously there are religious troubles elsewhere eg the Republicans (Catholics) against the Unionists (Protestants) in Northern Ireland.
I grew up in Australia and we just don't have this radicalism. Abortion isn't a defining hot-button issue. The issue of gay marriage was settled by a popular vote and then largely considered settled and most people just moved on.
I, personally, don't really care what anyone's religion is. That's your choice. But where I draw the line is when that minority tries to enforce their religious view into law. SCOTUS's unwillingness to act against Texas's SB8 bill (where normally they'd stay it pending full review, particularly when it so flagrantly violated 50 years of established constitutional precedent) is shocking and deeply disturbing.
So where I otherwise wouldn't care, I'm pleased to see the decline in this article of evangelicals in particular.
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2021/05/evangel...
1. Leap of faith is risky, while science is based on repeatable experiments. Kind of like when you're building a house, instead of hoping and praying the foundation is stable, test it to be certain.
2. Who knows who made these stories up? Could have been some guy high on mushrooms. I'd rather decide what's right for myself than blindly follow some unknown-source, unchanging-with-the-world and unexplained statements some dude probably made up.
I do agree with most of the ethics and morals of Christianity and similar religions. Society would probably be better if everyone abided by it.
But if they abide through religion then people would also be a little crazy because they're willing to believe things without proper supporting evidence.
What if the leader of the church says, "Yo God hit me up and said if we drown all non-believers in the holy pool tonight, we'll be chilling in heaven by this time tomorrow." I would want to know that my friends would act rationally and not do crazy things.
A lot of culture has become more accepting while religion remains intolerant due to the initial texts being written 2000 years ago. The bible is pro-slavery, it is anti-gay, its values due not meet the standards of modern society.
We now have cameras and proof of everything. Proof of the supernatural has not materialized. It used to be easier to claim you saw an angel on the pulpit when people couldn't ask: "Where was your cellphone?"
I grew up in a rural community, I went to multiple churches growing up. I've been inside. There is intolerance. People love to say "hate the sin not the sinner" but that is cold comfort for a gay teenager who someone will invariably take it upon themselves to convert, or use their religion as a justification to persecute them.
At the end of the day, for me, there is no proof, and I see nothing to admire in the whole enterprise.
I used to be of your view but now I look at the Jesuit reductions and wonder if I might have been inheriting some black legend ideas from the last couple centuries.
- Catholic schools in Canada
- Catholic schools in Australia
- The Nyarubuye massacre
Or do things conducted by catholic organizations on catholic property not meet your goalpost?
Was the purpose and intent of the school systems were to kill the pupils? I'm unconcinced the narrarive around the schools in Canada is pretty weak too - theres really no way to call that a genocide without deliberately hiding some or all of the facts. I'll have to double check but I think you're stretching things a good bit.
[1] https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/05/28/evangelicals-trump-...
My view is that the unique, "democratized" nature of American religion made it more vulnerable to political opportunism because this theological vaccuum existed.
So, the data comes from self-reporting, not from an external or objectively calibrated method.
This makes it difficult to interpret the trend line of this data.
Are we observing a shift in religiosity, or a change in the definition of the terms?
Ergo, what is being measured or tallied is not an internal state, but just a social and/or political identification. It's important to be aware of that limitation of the data.
I'm not sure that there's a particularly effective lab test for whether someone's an evangelical Protestant...
I suppose you could give people an exam, but what you'd find generally is that most people have almost no idea of the religion they identify as.
‘When I became convinced that the Universe is natural -- that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell, the dungeon was flooded with light and all the bolts, and bars, and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf or a slave. There was for me no master in all the wide world -- not even in infinite space. I was free -- free to think, to express my thoughts -- free to live to my own ideal -- free to live for myself and those I loved -- free to use all my faculties, all my senses -- free to spread imagination's wings -- free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope -- free to judge and determine for myself -- free to reject all ignorant and cruel creeds, all the "inspired" books that savages have produced, and all the barbarous legends of the past -- free from popes and priests -- free from all the "called" and "set apart" -- free from sanctified mistakes and holy lies -- free from the fear of eternal pain -- free from the winged monsters of the night -- free from the devils, ghosts and gods. For the first time I was free. There were no prohibited places in all the realms of thought -- no air, no space, where fancy could not spread her painted wings -- no chains for my limbs -- no lashes for my back -- no fires for my flesh -- no master's frown or threat -- no following another's steps -- no need to bow, or cringe, or crawl, or utter lying words. I was free. I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously, faced all worlds.
And then my heart was filled with gratitude, with thankfulness, and went out in love to all the heroes, the thinkers who gave their lives for the liberty of hand and brain -- for the freedom of labor and thought -- to those who fell in the fierce fields of war, to those who died in dungeons bound with chains -- those those who proudly mounted scaffold's stairs -- to those whose bones were crushed, whose flesh was scarred and torn -- to those by fire consumed -- to all the wise, the good, the brave of every land, whose thoughts and deeds have given freedom to the sons of men. And then I vowed to grasp the torch that they had held, and hold it high, that light might conquer darkness still.
Let us be true to ourselves -- true to the facts we know, and let us, above all things, preserve the veracity of our souls.
If there be gods we cannot help them, but we can assist our fellow-men. We cannot love the inconceivable, but we can love wife and child and friend.
We can be honest as we are ignorant. If we are, when asked what is beyond the horizon of the known, we must say that we do not know. We can tell the truth, and we can enjoy the blessed freedom that the brave have won. We can destroy the monsters of superstition, the hissing snakes of ignorance and fear. We can drive from our minds the frightful things that tear and wound with beak and fang. We can civilize our fellow-men. We can fill our lives with generous deeds, with loving words, with art and song, and all the ecstasies of love. We can flood our year with sunshine -- with the divine climate of kindness, and we can drain to the last drop the golden cup of joy.’
This graph seems to be correlated. I think humans are still irrational species and trying to make us 100% rational has some consequences. I think religion is something good to keep people calm and caring about each other and helps mentally keep up with real world issues. Couldn't find similar graph for burnout rate, but from what I read recently it is increasing every year as well.
Once you reframe the conversation like this, you realise that there is no such thing as "non religious" people, and in fact denying a religious aspect of life is a form of suppression that could cause damage, because driving the most important questions of life into the subconscious realm makes a person vulnerable to ideological possession, e.g. through politics.
You might think that some people change their values on a whim, but that in fact shows that something like their Self is their top value.
Unless our behaviour was completely random, I don't know how this could be any other way.
If you insist on a citation, I'll refer to St Augustine. Here's a popular culture level article about it https://www.huffpost.com/entry/augustine-sin-quote_n_56980d5...
Sure, move the goalposts and everyone scores
I'm an atheist, I don't believe in higher powers. I'm non religious.
My highest "placeholder" is a society that values all its members equally regardless of race, intelligence, physical abilities, sexual or gender preferences.
Without wanting to take sides on any culture war issues, I think that people from any political persuasion will agree that such higher powers do indeed exist.
I put it to you that much talk of "spirits" is far more aligned to the kind of higher power that you already believe in, rather than the dualistic way of seeing spirits as some kind of invisible smoke hiding inside living creatures. This kind of thinking is a curse of our modern age, handed down from the likes of Descartes and the "Enlightenment".
I can prove that institutional racism exists and patriarchy exist in modern society. The same cannot be said for a god.
Patriarchy and institutional racism are even ascribed agency, they "want" to hurt people, rather than merely being general forces such as gravity or a fluid flow.
If we are digging into the bedrock of "can a thought exist" then you are not worth talking to.
No, they don't. Unless you are actually talking about human power structures, in which case, of course we do.
Doesn't make us "religious".
> I put it to you that much talk of "spirits" is far more aligned to the kind of higher power that you already believe in, rather than the dualistic way of seeing spirits as some kind of invisible smoke hiding inside living creatures. This kind of thinking is a curse of our modern age, handed down from the likes of Descartes and the "Enlightenment".
I don't believe in spirits or souls or any of that. I'm an atheist, stop making up versions of "higher powers" or "something that exists outside of an individual, and across multiple individuals" and insisting I believe must believe in them. I assure you I don't.
I think that we live in a time where our understanding of what a spirit is, is very different to what religions traditionally believed. We only think of some kind of ghostly person which might be in some kind of other dimension which science has yet to discover. But I think that the way we think of Patriarchy is actually much closer to the way that a spirit was thought of in the past. It's not exactly the same, and it lacks some aspects, but it is a much better starting point for a secular person to understand what a spirit is, rather than childhood memories of caspar the friendly ghost.
So, you're proselytizing? This is pretty common reaction when I say I'm atheist. An assumption that I'm just ignorant as to the true nature of God or Spirituality.
Eh? Those are social phenomena, not supernatural forces.
> These are higher powers that are said to exist beyond any individual, and to be propagated subconsciously and perhaps even unwillingly by people?
Again, this is _society_. When people use the term "higher power" in the context of religion, they're generally talking about something supernatural, not just "large groups of people do weird stuff sometimes".
The word "supernatural" is such a worn-out rut of a word. It invokes paranormal movies or Caspar the friendly ghost. The very dichotomy of supernatural/natural is a recent, post-Enlightenment invention.
What I'm trying to do in this conversation is take something that exists in many people's mental framework, and use it to point to something outside that framework.
"Large groups doing weird things" must have a cause, right? And in an example like Patriarchy, no one claims that there is some king Patriarch sitting on a throne somewhere calling the shots. No, the story goes, Patriarchy is in all of us, even in women, perhaps even professing feminists. Patriarchy has real world effects, it isn't consciously controlled by any one person or group, it lives beyond any individual. According to some versions, Patriarchy is more than an impersonal force, it almost has some kind of malicious agency or intent. So much so that we gave it a name, like we do for conscious agents such as dogs or people.
I'm not trying to suggest that Patriarchy is a spirit, or that religious views of spirituality are exactly the same as feminist interpretations of Patriarchy.
I'm just using something from inside your framework to try to explain something outside your framework, because all the words designed for this purpose are worn out and no longer convey the meaning that they once did.