It may be that, given something like 80-90% of humans on earth follow such religious institutions, we as a species have some genetic factors that make us intolerant of differing viewpoints. I can imagine such genetic factors could have played a role in social cohesion early in human evolution.
The problem is the fact that people who hold these viewpoints see religious people as their enemy, so they're weirdly blind to how they themselves are religious. And it's a young and immature religion that hasn't yet been through the formative historical chapter of the Spanish Inquisition, the witch hunts etc., and the reckoning that followed. History will repeat itself.
It’s a fascinating realization. It reminds me of the religious history of the Soviet Union. The Soviets attempted to “delete” religion, which instead of creating a rational secular society, instead pushed people into pseudoscience, occultism and superstition.
It may be that in a culture pushed away from orthodox religions, due in many cases to those religions often actually engaging in hate against certain groups, a kind of replacement religious system takes hold.
First this requires accepting an inaccurate definition of what a religion is, in other words you are mischaracterizing others beliefs. Second it seems like you are shooting your own religious position in the foot by dismissing your opponent's view 'just religion' as well. The rest is condescension.
It is odd that the only people I've ever encountered who thought secularists were religious were Christians though. A contradiction if you actually believe in definitions.
My original point still stands though, not as a matter of combating your viewpoint, but just as an observation, that I bet even the most seemingly iron-clad definition of religion will still have lots of weird and unexpected edge cases.
I'm sure there are plenty of edge cases, but this looks like a red herring to me. The OP in question doesn't actually believe people worship wokeism, view it as god, ultimate reality, divinity, or whatever. Their use was purely pejorative and dismissive in nature.
I was originally thinking the OP meant something like, “hey I’ve heard this quacking noise somewhere before… what could this be…?”
Are you referring to me? See sibling comment. It was not pejorative. And I do think wokeism is a form of worship.
The sibling comment from "friend_and_foe" seems to reflect the point I was trying to make:
> What about believing that you must kill a sizeable portion of the human population to save the mother earth? Could that be characterized as a religious view? Why or why not? What about the idea that a man can be a woman if he wills it so, and that those who don't agree are ~~blasphemers~~ bigots? Could that be characterized as a religious view? Why or why not?
So, to add some meat to the bone here, let's start with Wikipedia's definition of religion:
"Religion is a range of social-cultural systems, including designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relate humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements"
For example, the way some gender theorists would define "gender" as opposed to "sex" makes it look a lot like "gender" is the abstraction that corresponds to "sex" but on the transcendental plane. It is then connected with a social-cultural system that includes behaviours, practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, [ not sure about sanctified places; can't think of any ] prophecies, ethics, and organizations.
Many environmentalists seem to me to have a quintessentially pessimistic view of man and his role in the universe, reflected in the belief that some of them have that the planet would be better off with fewer humans on it. This reminds me a lot of the chatholic doctrine of "original sin". To escape from original sin, man must exhibit certain behaviours, take part in certain practices, adopt certain morals, beliefs, and worldsviews, be part of certain organizations, etc.
That's not their view, and the way you are modifying definitions here means participating in any discussions of philosophy makes you religious, which is absurd.
Please note it's and not or.
>supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements"
>This reminds me a lot of the chatholic doctrine of "original sin". To escape from original sin, man must exhibit certain behaviours, take part in certain practices, adopt certain morals, beliefs, and worldsviews, be part of certain organizations, etc.
Seems a bit too much magical thinking. If I have a dirty house, does cleaning it not solve the problem? Nobody actually believes that they need to be righteous or do rituals to clean up the planet. Again you have a tendency to mischaracterize.
They also imply that the speaker thinks of them positively, similar to how when you say "freedom fighter" you mean the same thing as someone else might mean when saying "terrorist", but you're saying that you think of them positively.
A materialist atheist thinks of all the things that might fall under the categories of the supernatural, transcendental, or spiritual as dumb superstition, while a religious person views them as useful planes of meaning-making and useful ways of motivating behaviour.
So, having thus defined "religion", maybe this is the way you would define "philosophy", and if you tell me how you would define "philosophy", maybe I might respond by saying "hey, that too kind of sounds like religion to me". This kind of debate would be neither original, nor surprising within the history of intellectual discourse, nor useful in any way.
The more fruitful debate is to be had around this: Why is this even such a hot-button issue? It seems to me like there are a lot of overtly religious people out there who are associated with the established religions, who are just unbelievably bad at it. They use these religious planes of meaning-making and religious ways of motivating behaviour to the effect of adopting insanely stupid beliefs and engaging in insanely counterproductive behaviours. As a result "religious" has become an insult.
If you go to a small town poetry slam, you're likely to hear some very bad poetry. But if you think this is what defines poetry, you would be mistaken. And if you never sought out poetry again in your life after coming across a particularly bad poet, you would miss out big time.
Finally, to close the loop to my other comment about how the rise and fall of religion is kind of cyclical in human experience: You can't ever get rid of the religious element in yourself, so the most productive thing you can do is get good at it. You can't ever get rid of the religious element in society, so the most productive thing you can do is get society to be good at it. -- The more you try to outright deny the religious in society (or yourself), the more it will re-emerge in transformed and hard-to-recognize ways and lead to regression where society is (or you are) just as religious as it was before, but it became less capable of doing religion well.
Margaret Thatcher’s grave is anointed daily
Toyota Tacoma lovers aren't a religion, we agree on that. What about believing that you must kill a sizeable portion of the human population to save the mother earth? Could that be characterized as a religious view? Why or why not? What about the idea that a man can be a woman if he wills it so, and that those who don't agree are ~~blasphemers~~ bigots? Could that be characterized as a religious view? Why or why not?
In addition, what do these two statements have to do with secularism?
100%, in good faith I'm asking you these questions and hoping for a clear and honest answer. You have a genuine opportunity to change my mind on this topic.
>100%, in good faith I'm asking you these questions and hoping for a clear and honest answer.
This does not appear to be the case. Why not make your own argument instead of asking leading questions?
>Sealioning is the name given to a specific, pervasive form of aggressive cluelessness, that masquerades as a sincere desire to understand.
>A Sealion is a person who, when confronted with a fact that they don't care to acknowledge, say, the persistence of systemic racism in America, will ask endlessly for "proof" and insist that it is the other person's job to stop everything they are doing and address the issue to their satisfaction.
Well shoot that's your playbook to a T.
I have a ton of respect for religion, so when I characterize environmentalism, wokeism, and social justice warriordom as sharing characteristics with religion, that's actually not being dismissive at all, but quite the contrary. It implies that the respect I have for religion extends also to those belief systems. -- It strikes me as an internal contradiction that you characterize my position as religious, but also characterize it as a dismissal if I point out that my opponent's position shares characteristics with religion.
It seems, the only thing in what I wrote that could have given offence is that I picked those specific words in the first place. This is similar to how, when you pick the word "terrorist" over "freedom fighter", you've already identified yourself with the political camp that opposes them.
Interestingly, I chose those words precisely because I thought they had greater specificity than alternatives that came to mind (like "liberal" or "left").
I also think it's quite interesting that you seem to think that a concept like "Christian" is specific, while "wokeism" is not. After all the spectrum of different Christian beliefs, number of different social groupings underneath the Christian umbrella, and internal heterogeneity of beliefs within those groups is so great, that, literally, wars have been fought over that.
Another reason I picked those words was because I sincerely don't want to oppose "the left". In fact, the political grouping that historically most closely resembled the beliefs I still hold was the political left in Europe, prior to the financial crisis of 2008. With the tectonic shifts in the political landscape since then, and the likelihood that Americans would misunderstand what I mean by "left", I wanted to avoid that word.
Your argument was clearly pro-religion. Are not not religious? If you are, this falls flat. It was a dismissal because you straight called them "young and immature" and suggested a reckoning was coming. Come on... that's not being careful with your words whatsoever. Nor is it "respectful." Truly baffling.
>After all the spectrum of different Christian beliefs, number of different social groupings underneath the Christian umbrella, and internal heterogeneity of beliefs within those groups is so great, that, literally, wars have been fought over that.
You're talking about two different things here. Sets of beliefs versus classifications. I have no doubt if you asked people on the street in the US if Christianity was a religion 9/10 or better would say it was. This is not a serious argument, it's throwing shade only your in-group would understand.
1. Woke people think that white people are born into sin due to the deeds of their ancestors, which is the doctrine of original sin.
2. This sin can be cleansed by becoming an "ally", "doing the work" etc, this is a bit like conversion.
3. Related: this notion that people are born pure and it's police/law (society) that corrupts them, so if you get rid of the police then crime will go away, this is like the Christian teaching of the Fall.
4. Trans stuff is an assertion that people have a sort of (gendered) soul distinct from their body.
5. The obsession with the virtue of minorities is similar to the story of the Good Samaritan and how Christian's are supposed to valorize the meek and the mild.
and so on. There's more of these especially when you get into their actions and not just beliefs, which yeah, do start to resemble Spanish Inquisition albeit with less physical torture thank goodness. So it's a walks like a duck quacks like a duck argument.
For example there's no particular reason why "pro-choice" and "climate change" should be bundled together (if anything you'd expect conservatives to be the ones trying to conserve the environment, and progressives to be the ones trying to tarmac the planet) but they have a pretty strong correlation in US politics.
But the people talking about religion mean something more than just an arbitrary ideological package, they mean it has specific elements that are surprisingly close to the beliefs found in Christianity, rebranded. Like the elements in my list.
Are you sure? They don't track together nearly so strongly in, say, France. They don't naturally, or necessarily, go together IMO.
In your list, items 1 and 3 contradict each other. Item 4 I read as Cartesian dualism. Mind and body, no soul required (I also seriously doubt your interpretation). Item 5... the Parable of the Good Samaritan isn't about being meek and mild, it's about obeying the Golden Rule, and the Good Samaritan is atypical: he doesn't represent all Samartians. Jesus wasn't making a point about the virtue of Samartians in general.
Honestly, I think you're building a straw man here.
I took care not to strictly subsume them under the term of "religion". Specifically, in my initial post I said "overlap with psychology behind religion", I said that people who hold these beliefs are "religious" -- the use of the noun "religion" as an adjective lessens the character of the subsumption so that one reading is that it's just pointing out an analogy or similarity rather than stating a strict subsumption.
And I also predicted that these things all have the potential to undergo a similar historical development as religions did, that they have the potential to bring about something similar to the Spanish Inquisition, or the witch hunts. Not all belief systems have that potency.
So what I'm doing is pointing out an analogy that comes with lots of implications, not all of which I strictly believe to be true, but all of them are things that I find at least interesting to consider. For example, using the Wikipedia definition of "religion", besides implying a belief system, a religion also comes with behaviours, practices, morals, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations. -- Environmentalism, wokism and social justice warriordom definitely all come with practices as well as just beliefs. Morals and ethics are more than just beliefs. Environmentalism, for example, clearly has prophecies ("doomsday cult" would be an interesting analogy), and it's interesting to think about what that does to the human psyche.
There is a lot in religion that trumps rationality in terms of its salience and psychological potency. And precisely this ability to trump rationality makes religions quite a different animal from belief systems that are strictly grounded in rationality.
For example, if the divide between the political right and left were just about "free market economy vs communist-style planned economy with redistribution" or "low taxes" vs "high taxes" or "small government" vs "big government", it would be about belief systems strictly grounded in rationality. But now add into the mix the thought that many on the political right are associated with established religions and on the political left things like environmentalism, wokism and social justice warriordom increasingly start looking like religions. Now the distinction between the political right and the left starts looking like a religious divide, and that's a whole other level. It used to be "We can't agree on the proper economic system." Now it's "Help! My identity is under attack!"
When I was young, I saw most religious people as bigots, while the message I mostly got from areligious people was that they were preaching tolerance, pluralism, minority protection, etc.
But now, doing my best to adopt a stance of tolerance myself, my impression is that the people who think of themselves as areligious have constructed grand narratives that increasingly look like religions, without even noticing that particular analogy, and have increasingly taken to bigotry themselves. That's my central thesis here.
McCarthy, pogroms, Dreyfus Affair, Armenian genocide, Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, Lavender Scare, Khmer Rouge, Operation Condor, Aktion T4, Rwandan genocide. Holocaust.
Not all religions produce witch hunts.
> Environmentalism, for example, clearly has prophecies
Predictions. You know, the heart of a testable hypothesis? Science?
Your definition of religion is out of whack.
I think, getting a Ph.D. in a field that calls itself a science from a top university should have given me a passing familiarity with that thing called science.
Environmentalist "prophecies" may be intertwined with pieces of science that have implications on what to expect for the future, but they add an element of psychological framing to the facts that does not itself stand on scientific ground but is instead culturally ingrained and ultimately simply "made up".
One possible framing might be "nature wants me dead": You can think "With all those cold nights, lack of food in the winter, pathogens, etc. it looks a lot to me like nature wants me dead, and I'm lucky to have civilization to protect me from nature's violence." You can emphasize to yourself that nature has been there for billions of years before man came around. Now, for what is just a brief blip in natural history called the "anthropocene", man has become a weirdly dominant force, and the anthropocene will very likely end by man making the planet uninhabitable to himself in some way or another. The question is not whether it will happen, but when and how exactly. But regardless of the specifics of the when and how, the duration of the anthropocene will be dwarfed by the billions of years that the planet will happily go on producing life after man is long gone.
Another framing might be the "mother nature" framing, where nature is a fragile harmony, and any disturbance of that harmony cuts life off from what nurtures it. You can further go on to think that all life is sacred, and killing a fly is not morally any different from killing a man. Currently, the greatest disturbance to the harmony of nature is man, and it happens every time you turn on a light bulb, for that consumes energy, and takes something away from nature that would otherwise sustain life somewhere on the planet. Wasting energy, even if it's just a light bulb that you don't strictly need, is therefore a great sin.
Now, both of these framings are compatible with the same scientific facts about nature, but under the "mother nature" framing your behaviours will start to look like those of an environmentalist, while under the "nature wants me dead" framing, they will not. Neither of those two framings are themselves in any way grounded in science.
Neither of those two framings are religions, either.
> You can further go on to think that all life is sacred, and killing a fly is not morally any different from killing a man.
I don't recognise environmentalism in your description of it. I still think this is straw manning. I admit it's a broad church, and you could probably find somebody that thinks like this, but you're not describing any kind of mainstream.
(Feel free to reply, but I'm out. But I just wanted to say you've been completely reasonable while putting forth your viewpoint.)
I think, on a generous reading of Kierkegaard's "Three stages of life" [1], I could probably say that Kierkegaard probably thought that way.
Also, interestingly, people like Dawkins himself seem to be waking up to this way of thinking. Right there on his YouTube channel [2] he has a video called "Is Religion Inevitable?" In it, Peter Boghossian states the "substitution hypothesis": As one form of deranged belief (of which he thinks religion is one kind) recedes, another (like wokism) expands to fill the void. Dawkins says he hadn't really thought of that before. He thinks it's plausible, and hopes it's wrong, because it would mean he has wasted his life. Of course there's a few steps missing to get from there to my position.
The first is that they call it "deranged belief", where I call it "religion". But it would make a lot more sense, if the substitution hypothesis simply was: As one form of religion recedes, another expands to fill the void.
The second element that's missing is that they can't get themselves to be optimistic about it, which I am. I believe, religion can be a good thing if it's done well, which, usually, it's not, which is where I too am a pessimist, so the two positions aren't that far apart after all.
And third: If it were me debating Dawkins, and I wanted to make the debate really interesting, I would confront him with the idea that the hypothesis might apply to individuals. As one person denies his religiosity, a new religiosity will take hold within him to fill the void, that he may not even recognize as such. And by implication Dawkins himself has been religious all his life without knowing it. There is even a word for what Dawkins' religion would be if that were the case, and that word is "scientism" [3].
Finally, I want to mention the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams who is a heavy hitter not just as a religious leader but also a public intellectual with strong ties to academia, including science. I recall him saying in a sermon that religion, if it's treated as if it were science, makes for very bad science. That's how you get stupid beliefs like creationism that seem to be the thing that people like Dawkins are primarily bothered by. But also: Science, if it's treated as if it were a religion, makes for a very bad religion. And, in my mind, that's an interesting way of characterizing a lot of the problems facing society at the moment.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_S%C3%B8ren_Kierk...
Check out our conversation in the light of functional (maximalist) and substantive (minimalist) definitions of religion: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/concept-religion/
Eg "Famously, a functional approach can hold that even atheistic forms of capitalism, nationalism, and Marxism function as religions" vs "all three of these versions are “substantive” definitions of religion because they determine membership in the category in terms of the presence of a belief in a [supernatural, transcendent or superempirical] reality".
For three you're right, I should have said "non white people". Their belief system is that "white" men are born into sin and other types are born pure then corrupted. More or less. I mean, I wouldn't expect an emerging religion to be internally consistent.
Mind is the same thing as soul in this context. They believe you can have a genetically male brain but the soul (or mind if you prefer) of a woman or vice versa.
For five, yes my sketch is rough and I appreciate the clarifications you're forcing on me here. It's the first time I've written down these thoughts, others have done so better. What I was getting at was the focus on the supposedly weakest members of society as a justification for attacking the strongest (tax collectors, the rich etc).
Not at all, it's a scarily accurate definition. There's a new church of the "woke", complete with scripture, high priestesses, and orthodoxy:
<armchair anthropology time>
I recall a recent genetics study[1] concluding that the homo sapiens (or direct ancestor) population bottle neck was ~1000 people for about 100,000 years.
My mind immediately wondered whether that length of time was long enough for some evolution to occur that reflected those conditions. Surely that world was insular for the people/hominids and extreme enough that survival was at the forefront of nearly all behaviours and social phenomena.
If any of that rubbed off on our genetics and all of human evolution and history since has not provided any sufficient forces to alter those traits, then it stands to reason our psychology is somewhat hard wired for catastrophic/post-apocalyptic in-group survival defensiveness/aggressiveness beyond even our animal/primate cousins.
All of that rests however on what time periods are required for evolutionary changes. My vague memory of studying a tiny bit of population genetics is that big changes can happen pretty quickly if there are factors capable of altering the size of the population substantially and that persist for a few generations.
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Otherwise, yea ... seems pretty obvious to me that our world (global society) and its complexity is very much a "reach exceeding grasp" scenario for our species.
Generally, I suspect greater stability and prosperity is rather possible but would require a drastic change in what we prioritise in our education and upbringing, where I would guess that we have a fundamental choice between what is compartmentalised or distributed in the way of social thinking, processing and decision making. It seems to me we've de-prioritised the average ability of the population to effectively participate and understand broad social and economic issues and decisions, and, are instead emphasising specialised/compartmentalised economic roles.
Naively, I would propose that investing in more distributed social/economic understanding would be better for society at large, which has arguably taken place with modern wealthy western civilisation. But, in line with my armchair anthropology above, I wouldn't be at all surprised if plugging more humans into the broad social issues of the day, however good attempts at their education etc have been, will naturally lead to tumult and division that is inevitably irrational and driven by inapt or misaligned psychological drives.
Going sci-fi on this ... it's curious to think about whether the "great filter" may simply be whether a species evolves intelligence etc by following only a narrow, and therefore unlikely, set of evolutionary paths or biological/geological histories that confer the required innate traits for being able to scale up to larger and well coordinated civilisations. Like, could the ice age dynamic of our planet have limited the possible evolutionary paths a species could take to those which make population scaling difficult and unproductive?