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Comment by gorwell | Hacker News Reader

Religion isn't disappearing, it was simply rebranded. Many replaced it with a new religion called Wokeism.

John McWhorter: “I do not mean that these people’s ideology is ‘like’ a religion. I seek no rhetorical snap in this comparison. I mean that it actually is a religion,” he writes. “An anthropologist would see no difference in type between Pentecostalism and this new form of antiracism.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/books/review/john-mcwhort...

Paul Graham: Organized religion = ideology + god. But the 20th century has shown you can replace the god with a substitute. In communism it was the worker. In wokeness it's various protected classes.

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1468526884921171969

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Years before “wokism” was a slur I stopped going to church because the sermons were just too biased against various out groups like gays or Muslims.

But even while I was still church-going I considered myself an agnostic. Many parts of Christianity were just too unscientific (intelligent design) or lacking in logic (“just have faith” they said).

But I still valued the community and various ideas on how to live a good life. Anyways, the church got way too political and now I’m an atheist.

Weirdly, some atheists/agnostics are now circling back on the intelligent design thing in the form of "simulation theory".

The problem is it’s rather incomprehensible what it would mean to not be in a “simulation”, for sufficiently lax definitions of simulation.

At the absolute core, simulations are differential equations. I believe it was Turing who said something along the lines of “the universe is a set of differential equations, science teaches us the equations, religion teaches us the boundary conditions”.

The age old “did nothing create everything or did something create everything discussion” :)

The church got way too political so you went from agnostic to atheist? How did your perception of the church resolve that ambiguity for you?

I don’t know. Religion isn’t always logical. But if I had to guess I’d say Abrahamic religious belief is based on trusting spiritual authorities. When that trust is killed, I suppose it undermines one’s faith?

I kind of see what you're getting at. I never had a lot of trust "spiritual authorities" to begin with. I do admire them and think its fantastic that some people are able to think about these big questions on a full time basis but it's not the kind of thing where you come away with an answer, at least not one that grants authority in my eyes.

Also bad science doesn't undermine my faith in science.

Do not want to nitpick your words, but can you elaborate on why you put unscientific and intelligent design close to each other? I think you wanted to say intelligent design is not scientific, right?

Just watched this video today related to concept of fine tuning in cosmology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaVlTIymQ3g

Today's scientific facts/theories mean, here are things we learned based on our observations and things we knew from the past, but some answers are still not definitive, especially when it comes intelligent design, fine tuning and multiverses. People thought Newton was right, until Einstein came up with different theory, who knows what next Einstein proves how we were wrong.

I’m fairly certain “unscientific” means “not scientific.” I believe what I was saying is that ID is not scientific. And for a while I’d argue with other Christians about theistic evolution, but even then they’d insist that life was created in a continuous, 7-day period. Or that dinosaurs weren’t real because they’re not documented in the Bible. Or that the traditional biological ontologies that lump humans with other animals is incorrect.

Any questions about things that are beyond the scientific method are by definition unscientific, e.g.

‘Does she love me? What should I wear today? Do I have free will? Etc.’

"Intelligent design" is a label invented deliberately as part of a political strategy by a group of evangelical Christians to teach creationism in American public schools. This history was well documented decades ago so it's bizarre to see someone try to pretend otherwise.

By "intelligent design" different people might mean different things, I don't know the roots of word, but for me fine tuning seems something very close to that concept. Imagine how many values speed of light could have, 1km/hour? 1m/hour? and life would be totally different, not trying to push idea of "intelligent design". My main message was something we could not comprehend today, does not mean it is wrong, someone in the future might prove it. So throwing one huge idea as non-scientific feels like ignorance to me. Like censoring some minority groups if you don't like the idea

> Imagine how many values speed of light could have, 1km/hour? 1m/hour? and life would be totally different

And if that _was_ the case, someone who managed to evolve under those circumstances would be saying "imagine if light was so fast that you didn't experience time dilation when you walked somewhere! That would obviously be ridiculous, so someone must have set it to 1km/h". The conditions we live under appear normal to us because, well, we live under them. That doesn't mean they're the only possible conditions.

On the topic of fine-tuning I found this book from 2011 and subsequent debate quite thought-provoking:

>The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: Why the Universe Is Not Designed for Us (by Victor J. Stenger)

https://www.amazon.com/Fallacy-Fine-Tuning-Why-Universe-Desi...

>The Fine-Tuning of the Universe for Intelligent Life ... This paper can be viewed as a critique of Stenger's book, or read independently.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1112.4647

>Defending The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning (by Victor J. Stenger)

https://arxiv.org/abs/1202.4359

"Seems designed"

We don't believe things because they seem a certain way. You need to prove it is designed.

And even if something is designed, how does that drag along the 2000 years of baggage associated with the popular religions? OK so there is a creator. How do I prove they actually turned Lot's wife into a pillar of salt?

And if we aren't talking about the "christian god" necessarily, then what this the point of the conversation? Spiritualism outside of the major religions is a rounding error, and I won't debate your belief in that, unaffiliated spiritualists are not organizing and designing the laws in our country to align with their unproven beliefs.

A lot of these people have a traditional mishmash of religious beliefs, spiritual kookiness, beliefs in aliens, and other conspiracy theories... they are not all educated atheists drunk on Woke koolaid.

catholic priests have raped hundreds of kids but yeah it’s “wokism” that’s hurting religion

So have adults in all organizations that mix adults and children. If you count public schools as a single organization, teachers are worse than priests.

Except that sex abuse in Catholic Church was (and to some extent still is) an organised endeavour. It wasn't something that some priests did, it was something that the entire Church cooperated on, up to (and including) Vatican. Do you remember how pedophile archbishop Wesołowski avoided all responsibility thanks to Vatican diplomatic immunity?

yeah but schools aren’t a single organization, the Vatican was aware of multiple cover ups and chose to stay silent

Unfortunately so have teachers, coaches, police, politicians, neighbors, and family members.

Most of those don’t hold themselves up as moral authorities.

and guess how people feel about the groups in that list that do...

sure but we’re talking about the decline of religion here

Is a religion defined by its outliers, or are humans complicated? :)

I'm not sure I'd call the Vatican an outlier... they were complicit for decades, the pope relocated one of the most high-profile abusers to Rome...

...and when does something stop being an outlier? the 10,000 children abused in the US? the 200,000 in France? tens of thousands in Australia? the 1300 mass graves of indigenous children in Canada?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-44209971

>I wouldn't blame that on the Church--the secular boarding schools for indigenous children weren't any better.

fair, but as someone else mentioned up stream... the catholic church has been claiming the moral high ground for centuries, turns out it was a bunch of nonsense and they're the same, if not worse, than everyone else

Those numbers, while horrible, work out to about a couple incidents per parish per generation when the time and population-scales are accounted for.

Unfortunately some ~1-4% percentage of humans tend to abuse positions of power. We should always strive for more transparency because these people thrive in secrecy.

> ...and when does something stop being an outlier? ... the 1300 mass graves of indigenous children in Canada?

I wouldn't blame that on the Church--the secular boarding schools for indigenous children weren't any better.

I really don't agree that you can replace god with a substitute and it still be religion. If there's no god or mystical force of some kind then it's not a religion. It might be like a religion, but it's something else.

Nonsense.

What exactly is nonsense?

> Religion didn't disappear, it merely changed shaped. Many replaced it with the new religion of Wokeism.

People are not replacing god with cancelling people on Twitter. Those things are completely unrelated.

Not all religions are centered around the existence of a god though. A religion can be centered around any ideology, you only have to treat it as sacrosanct.

Original comment is specifically stating that people are replacing their religions with wokeism

I'm not so sure, I think people are actually filling it with lots of other ideological stuff. Wokeism is one example, but Trumpism is kind of another? Similarly a lot of crypto people treat it almost religiously.

People like to have some sort of tribal affiliation and it tends to be around some sort of ideology or at least gestures towards one. I think this is often harmful, but a lot of this stuff is related to an underlying human truth.

> "An anthropologist would see no difference in type between Pentecostalism and this new form of antiracism."

"Tell me you're racist without saying you're racist."

"Tell me you're a sinner without telling me a sinner".

This is what you're saying. I'm well aware of how puritanical religions and cults work. Heretics who speak blasphemy must be shunned for defying the approved dogma. You are the righteous, the unenlightened are the r/sinners/racists. It's nothing new.

good lord get over yourself

Nice try, but John McWhorter is black so he's allowed to have an opinion.

Tell me you are an infidel without saying you're an infidel

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