Here's your regular reminder that this survey is a massively trailing indicator, meaning the events that led to this measurement have been decades in the making.
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.
Many people send their kids to religious schools because the quality is higher than public schools, but is cheaper than top tier private schools. The school fees (albeit cheaper than private schools) also provide a high pass filter so you end up with less riff-raff than the average public school.
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.
Changes the whole dynamic of any school. If public schools could kick out students for behavior there wouldn’t be near the incentive for private schools to exist.
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.
Our school system had the “ALC” - alternative learning center. This was back in the aughts, and it was under the local bowling alley and the kids that went there were allowed to smoke. I’m pretty sure it was basically just a daycare for teenagers but it served its purpose.
I'm going to word this in a way which may take away from my score, but I hope my point is clear:
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.
> 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.
> (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.
> 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.
Just because people have complained about "the way things are nowadays" for a long time, doesn't mean there will never be a point where things change and it's legitimate to complain about things nowadays. Things are changing much faster today, than they were in 1950
Of course not. But my question was, when was this halcyon day of yore?
> 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 experience is that Catholic high schools are full of the troublemakers. Usually, ones that have already been kicked out of public and non-religious private schools.
I went to a small religious high school that was a weird mix of super religious kids with kids who were sent there because they got expelled from a different school and their parents were trying to "reform" them.
Meanwhile religiosity is going nowhere: repetition of mantras, hostility towards science that doesn’t support preconceptions, shaming and shunning of outgroups, tribal loyalty, purity purges, supplication before power, confession of sins, forbidden words, tolerance of incoherence… these are all distinctly religious behaviors that seem to be living on happily without the need for the traditional religions that used to host them.
Similarly I feel the same way about the atheist movement, and I say this as a atheist who had on occasion corresponded with Christopher Hitchens. It is more anti-religion than pro-free-thought as I felt it was in my youth. Science appears to be growing it's own clergy, demanding deference as opposed to encouraging debate.
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.
> Science appears to be growing it's own clergy, demanding deference as opposed to encouraging debate.
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.
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.
And yet debate and progress continued. The scientific method doesn’t stop people being people, with all the associated flaws. It just sets a set of standards we can measure against. String theory and expert systems came up short and we moved on, but when you have questions and genuinely don’t know the answers sure, we end up exploring some dead ends. Science is just a heuristics to telling when that’s happening, but it doesn’t stop it happening in the first place.
Specific examples can be quibbled about, but I will first say there is still good science occurring everyday. What I am talking about more are people who have donned the mantle of science. At some point along the line, science went from more of a verb to a proper noun (figuratively). We went from doing the science, to trusting or believing the science.
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.
> Think about the statement "We believe in science in this house". What does that even really mean?
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.
Your issues seem to be rooted in linguistics more than anything. People take poor shortcuts. When they say “we believe in science”, they mean “we respect science”.
> Priests believe in science, but the people who put those signs on their lawns tend not to agree.
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.
Most priests are incredibly educated. There is a reason a lot of colleges and universities were founded by religious orders. There are Catholic priests who are well regarded and published scientists and mathematicians.
It might depend on country. In Poland, for example, the opposite is true: priests are essentially modern political officers, with very poor understanding of pretty much anything. Polish catholic universities are generally mediocre, except for stuff that can’t be corrupted by religion, eg food technology.
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.
Really? Is children's belief in Santa Claus hostile to science?
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.
"Science" is a process. That of collecting observations, building theories and testing those theories, rinse repeat. So yes a belief in Santa is 'hostile' to science, because it is completely at odds with that process.
The ways the human brain can find to bridge two things that seem contradictory to someone outside that experience are numerous. It can be as easy as simply not applying scientific processes to something inherently unscientific. Sometimes there's a lot of unchecked confirmation bias in finding proof of faith.
You only do science on a very small area at most. I mean, if you have a certain bacterial infection do you trust the science that the specific antibiotic is likely to be effective, or do you start to 'do' science?
Can't speak for GP, but generally I believe there is a not insignificant chance that the treatment I'm being provided by the doctor is ineffective or even counterproductive. I'll still generally follow the doctor's advice at least after doing a brief literature search to confirm that the doctor's advice is aligned with contemporary best practices.
Part of science is acknowledging epistemic uncertainty yet still acting on imperfect information.
I agree. I also read the literature, but (at least in my narrow definition) literature review is not doing science (which is creating new knowledge). Literature review is a precondition of reviewing science though.
That's not really a good example of science demanding deference, or "blind faith". It's a silly catchphrase that's maybe worded a bit poorly.
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.
I live by reason and rationality and am also religious. I see "God" as Truth, or a consciousness that knows all truth, and that seeking truth, including natural laws/science, is equivalent to seeking god.
The two do (religion and rationality) are not mutually exclusive concepts.
> 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.
What if believing in it is proven to have significant benefits, regardless of the scientific truth value of the doctrinal propositions? How do you really judge the rationality of that?
The issue is, as is amply shown in the United States, is that minds that can accept things without evidence that are considered benign, can also accept things that are harmful. A mind that doesn't consider truth to be an important part of a belief system can believe anything. This "My Truth" is a pervasive virus that is occurring here in the US, and you see it every day destroying our society.
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.
If that's how you see "god" then the only thing we differ on, as such, is the meaning of the label 'religious'. For me, religious means following a specific set of beliefs, behaviours, and traditions - which is somewhat incompatible with the idea of seeking truth inasmuch that some newfound truths may be incompatible with said beliefs, behaviours, and traditions.
According my mental dictionary, religion and rationality are mutually exclusive when the religious doctrine is proven irrational.
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.
There are numerous examples of this, but I think the most glaring would be on issues relating to the COVID pandemic.
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.
People are flawed and when they have insufficient evidence or misleading evidence, or questionable incentives they make mistakes. Science doesn’t stop that happening, it doesn’t stop people being flawed. It just generates the evidence to tell us when it has happened so we can correct. It worked. Job done.
> 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.
You can't see the amount of dislikes this video had (Thanks Google), but you really should watch NIH Director's interview as he fumbles on the most basic questions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRZE-SJShkE
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.
Can you link to specific timestamps where there were stumbles? I watched the first 8 minutes and it seemed like he was on top of things and answering well.
This is not all "science's" fault. This whole thing has been political from the beginning, both in that those in power during the initial outbreak tried to downplay the dangers, and those opposing them tried to overcompensate to distance themselves.
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.
It's not the fault of "science" in the abstract or even the fault of most scientists (who're sincere and open to debate and disagreement, and generally acknowledge the limits of their epistemic certainty).
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".
It seems like you’ve skipped a step to “therefore there is a science clergy.” Who are these supposed clergy, and how do they resemble religious clergy? A credentialed scientist saying something they knew was incorrect or later learned to be incorrect seems unrelated to the concept of clergy.
The institutions are the clergy. To a small extent this can include credentialed scientists, peer-reviewed journals, etc., but really it's the government institutions (e.g. WHO, CDC, FDA, Surgeon General) and media institutions (e.g. newspapers, cable news, and social media platforms) that constitute the clergy.
The "Science" dogma that the general public is induced to adhere to gets filtered through these institutions.
This is the part I find scary. Credentialism has given rise to a new clerisy. This is especially evident in fields where “there’s no there there” like social studies.
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.
> At first there wasn’t evidence that masks worked, once that had been accrued science was pro-mask.
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?"
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).
I don't think this particular issue was viewed through the lens of science for many. It's been a confusing two years and Americans got a lot of mixed messaging from elites in general, and definitely from the FDA. This was seen as institutional failure though, not scientific failure. JTBC, I'm not arguing what it _was_, but how it was perceived.
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.
And with veganism. Not that I've given up on being 100% plant-based, but I got bored with it after learning the 10 or so repeated talking points (and the derivations in response to people who criticize veganism). Proselytizing was the next step and I didn't feel particularly interested in that. So I left.
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 is one of those examples that actually allows me, as a white male living a life of privilege, to come remotely close to understanding the trivialising power of a 'label'.
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!”
My impression is that that was kind of the case a decade ago and now basically isn't. Though I've had a slightly feeling it might be returning, but regardless I don't expect it to go anywhere. Atheism is becoming too boring and common place for the angsty side to be so alluring.
Yeah there was the whole Atheism+ thing and then it kind of just petered out and people started increasingly becoming nonbelievers or just nondenominational believers without needing to have a big organized movement / identity around it. Arguably, a lot of the reason for the atheism movement's existence no longer exists - prayer and creationism in public schools seems to be a thing of the past.
The angst is still there though - it's just directly applied towards modern culture war fault-lines rather than towards religion / belief in god.
The fight has always been about people's beliefs. and the actions they take because of those beliefs. Very few people care about what you believe in the privacy of your own home, it's when people take those beliefs and act on them in the legislature, courtroom, police station, schools, etc, etc. That's how it started, that's how it will end. There hasn't been a significant change over time.
> Once philosophy had become polluted with Platonism, the more Aristotelian thinkers were driven to science.
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 assume Christopher Hitchens is someone of note within some atheist circles(?), but regardless: name dropping for credibility by association in the same paragraph as lamenting "thought clergy" is ironic.
I would describe him as a militant antitheist, but he was a product of a different time. Things like teaching evolution in schools wasn't a given. Proper sex education was rare, abstinence only was more typical. State governments would routinely justify choices with biblical verses. They had mandatory prayer in some public schools. Gay people weren't allowed to get married. We needed to fight back against a religious power structure that was visible in media and government.
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.
Well said. I still see Hitchens and Dawkins as the people that changed my life for the better. I was in highschool and their influence has led me to live a more fulfilling life. I am grateful for that.
Meanwhile in the US in several states christian fundamentalists managed to introduce an abortion ban. Similar stuff is happening in parts of Eastern Europe.
As an atheist I actually believe (some) religious establishments have found their niche in providing care, attention, and even love for people who have no other avenue for such things. A lightning rod for the less fortunate, as is their doctrine. There for those who need it, can be ignored, or even appreciably but minimally acknowledged, by those who do not.
I thought Christopher Hitches is someone relatively difficult to avoid if one's done any research on atheism. Christopher Hitchens is _the_ definition of militant atheist.
If you've not heard of him, look him up, there's gold you're missing.
polluted with Platonism, the more Aristotelian thinkers were driven to science.
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?
> Could you clarify this? Plato & Aristotle have both gone in & out of fashion within different communities of thought over the centuries
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.
Thanks-- so more recently then. I agree about Plato and the common man, though I think a lot of that also came more from later interpretations by christeo platonists who espoused a sort dualism where spirit was good and matter was bad. But yeah, his idea of "philosopher kings" ruling over things doesn't really elevate then common man either, and that's without getting into criticism of the idea itself. I do like his way if talking out a problem with ever more precise questions disections and dissections if a problem, but it's a little too strong on pure reason and not enough on empiricism.
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
It's not all roses though. Aristotle's teleology for example, made it's way into both religion (with enormous harm via Thomas Aquinas) and the sciences. We're still trying to stamp it out of the latter when it occasionally still pops up in places like evolutionary biology.
Let's be fair, "[my group] is being persecuted" is the only thing most Americans agree on. It's the steady state fodder of fine-grained segregation of news sources by ideological subset.
Are they religious behaviors, or just human behaviors that religions were taking advantage of?
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.
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),
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.
This is a much longer story than the 70s gets you to, and "always been against it" is certainly a reading of the past that some prefer these days, but...
> 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.
Roe v Wade is a fascinating study in the evolution of US political discourse. Aside from the religious angle, the courts decision was driven by republican appointed judges who thought the government should stay out of peoples choices on this. How things change.
Religion is a human behavior, all of those things (and others) tend to organize themselves into religions. Lots of people are just in a primitive religion phase having left a rather organized one and formed various disorganized group behaviors which should eventually evolve into a set of new religions (which might well look a lot different than things we currently understand as religion just as monotheism looks a lot different than polytheism)
I feel it’s even more accurate to say they are human behaviors that take advantage of religion (or any other available power structure). In a world dominated by religion they take religious form. If we remove religion from power or power from religion, they will take whatever form allows them to thrive in the new system.
Exactly, these behaviors are memetic and allow a group to continue to exist: groups without some or all of these features certainly exist but don't have the robustness or cohesion to keep themselves together for 100s or 1000s of years.
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)
I think of religion's relationship to humanity, in terms of the OSI model for networking. By this analogy, you might consider religion to be questions concerning the Application layer, the layer that 99% of people actively care about. All the rest of the human OSI stack below the surface is transparent to us, e.g. 99% of people don't care about bits and bytes in the same way they don't know the ordering of the bases on their DNA.
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.
> 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.
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.
Perhaps you can help me understand which of the beneficial philosophies originated with Christianity? As far as I'm aware whatever good is there can be attributed to older sources such as the code of Hammurabi.
I've heard the difference between ideology and religion is that religion asks you to make personal sacrifices, while ideology asks everyone else to make sacrifices for you. We have a lot of people that adhere to an ideology over religion
> tolerance of incoherence
Do you really think we're living in an overly tolerant society?
I'm trying to think of examples, for instance is this a main theme in any Eastern religions? Islam?
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?
Religion doesn't need a "main theme" to oppress or harm. Only a few verses explicitly oppress women in the Christian scriptures, yet for centuries and still today people propagate the meme that women shouldn't teach men, or speak in assemblies.
As for divine violence all the abrahamic religions have been involved in force land grabs and killing rule breakers or non-believers.
It's certainly the case in Christianity; see all kinds of morally-repulsive rules (discrimination against LGBT, abortion bans) enforced on non-believers by Church-sponsored state laws.
Religion is primarily about shared belief, shared rituals, and shared culture. Traditionally, it was difficult to draw a hard line between religion and the rest of the society. Someone who rejected the prevailing religion also rejected the society, which is why people found it difficult to tolerate.
The emphasis on personal aspects of religion in the recent centuries is mostly due to Protestantism, which values personal faith above all else.
I'm not overly religious but am Christian, and feel like many these behaviors you're describing are also shown by ardent atheists. I feel like the key to many problems lies in moderation and in general not harassing people instead of being a zealot for your personal beliefs.
Christianity's redemption only costs self denial, hating loved ones (at least relative to the unprovable god), and possibly your natural desires--if they happen to fall outside the biblical norms.
Christianity doesn't require you to hate anyone. And any moral framework worth it's salt will require self denial and rejecting your natural desires.
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.
Any stable human being has some kind of framework whereby they don't just live to please every desire as soon as it pops us. The closest thing we see to immediate self gratification is the drug addict under the bridge. There is nothing wrong with having a set of norms and using them to regulate desire.
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.
> 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.
I have always found this 'religion justifies war' argument to be somewhat weak. I guess you can say Islamic expansion and the crusades were examples of this but I don't feel these sorts of conflicts would have been prevented by both sides sharing a common religion - there were plenty of wars within Christian Europe or the Islamic world, after all.
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.
> 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.
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.
Religion does have some upsides , at a communal and individual level. If we weigh those along with the negatives who is to say what's best? Clearly, it's a human meme that has some positives and no dramatic downside that would have caused it to die out.
> If we weigh those along with the negatives who is to say what's best?
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.
> Both religious and non-religious memes can be bad at the same time.
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.
A number of more religious states (Utah, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Iowa, etc.) have sustainable or near-sustainable birth rates. It’s not like these are exactly third world countries. And most of this “education” isn’t in anything real anyway.
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.
> And most of this “education” isn’t in anything real anyway.
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.
On this point, I would highly recommend "Strange Rites" by Tara Burton. She makes the case that people who "leave" religion are often just "remixing" the religion they were raised in, incorporating a weird mishmash of spiritual feeling and secular ideologies/subcultures. For example, libertarians have their biohacking and dreams of immortality, progressives have their pagan fandoms & self-care, and conservatives have, as she puts bluntly, reactionary atavism.
I think one reason why religions have historically been so popular is that they fill a wide array of different needs:
• 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.
As one of these unaffiliated I actually think it is kind of sad in some ways that religion is so tied to shared origin stories (of earth, mankind etc) because I want many of the other things religion offers in my life: community, philosophizing about the big questions, shared guidelines on how to live a good life etc etc. It just so happens I don't believe in much of a god so it is hard to participate.
We figured out that many of the origin stories were incorrect so we tossed the whole thing without replacing the actually crucial components.
I spent a few weeks living with religious relatives. While it wasn't really my thing, I was impressed by how it brings the community together (they met twice a week) and by the heavy emphasis on morality (even if I disagreed on the particulars). I feel like we've really lost something. I suppose the regular meetings thing exists today with most clubs, but clubs are way more niche -- it used to be that the whole village got together every week. Though I suppose the same was true (weekly meetings in a town hall) of Viking society before Christianization.
>>it used to be that the whole village got together every week
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.
Sure, but the point is that they’re niche, so if you get ostracized from one, you can seek other communities. It doesn’t work that way if there’s just one community in your village.
That hasn't been my experience. Rather clubs have formed more loosely around common, nonreligious interests. Now in the COVID era even more are online.
If you haven't had the chance to check it out, Unitarian Universalism [1] is pretty much what you describe -- community and support for figuring out life's big stuff, without being tied to a creed. It is perfectly acceptable to be an atheist UU member. If you are in the northeast US there are many congregations around here.
Unfortunately, the high-demand religions with explicit origin stories are the ones that maintain their membership numbers, whereas the more open religions are seeing their communities disintegrate more quickly.
I would suggest that it may be more related to the declining birthrate. Having just had a second child, I can say that kids have made me more active in my local religious institution, and I have observed the same among other friends with kids. I suspect that many people wander back to their childhood religion once they have kids, especially if their major cultural events are at least nominally religious (e.g. Christmas).
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 a lot of people that are marginalized by the communities they were born into, I’d say the illusion is still better. Assuming they haven’t actually found communities that accepts them that is.
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
What are you smoking? Islam, Hinduism and pretty much all religions face similar problems. Which religion in the world doesn’t exclude people for being different? Last I checked even Scientologists chastise people for not being true believers. It’s not Christianity I’m taking offense to.
That's more of a description of why Christianity is popular. Not every religion was big on charity, had a happy afterlife, or even particularly ethical gods.
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.
Peer Pressure / persecution/ discrimination I would say is up there is why people identified with some religion ?
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.
I'll take the opportunity to self-promote my book[0], which is subtitled, "Plundering religion to benefit the Nones", and addresses precisely these points!
I'd only add to your list,
* Shared rituals to structure and celebrate life's mileposts
There's definitely a deficit. It's pretty hard to have shared beliefs unless they are the table stakes. It would be great to have an organization that provided community, charity etc but it's hard these days to get people to agree on anything. I've thought about starting a new church and calling it something like the Church of Jesus Christ, Storybook Character. Keep the life lessons, dump the strained interpretation as non-fiction. Not sure how it would work out in practice.
Religion in the US has become too political. When I was a kid in the Midwest, the church told us to avoid politics. Then, almost overnight, "abortion" became an issue, and religious beliefs were no longer confined to church. Now we were supposed to get out and vote. Ever since it's just felt more like a PAC than anything else.
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.
I'd layer on that "Religion was always political... but in the US it didn't need to be overtly political". By that I'd say since the silent majority of the population was Protestant then dominant Protestant religion would freely be intertwined with government. It's only when there is no longer a dominant Protestant religion that Religion becomes visible in politics.
I can't say I've had much direct experience of the religious-political nexus in the US but as an external observer one thing that stands out to me was the objection to John F. Kennedy becoming president because he was Catholic and would be "beholden" to the papacy.
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.
Our media has never been representative of the population's views. It was always spinning an image that looked like the people doing the presenting, even when they didn't mean to. I doubt many people actually cared about the president's religion. They might for a brief moment while the media was making a big deal out of it, but they forgot they ever cared as quickly as they took the issue up.
The memory hole in 1984 wasn't just something Orwell made up from nothing.
ugh, this was the biggest thing that pushed me out of church. It was back when you-know-who was running for president and attending events with church members and hearing them justify how he was a great candidate on a faith basis really killed me inside. It wasn’t even a “less of two evils” for them, it was a sincere belief that he would rally in a new era for Christians. Of course that didn’t happen.
> Then, almost overnight, "abortion" became an issue, and religious beliefs were no longer confined to church.
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.'
Except that civil rights were an actual problem, as was slavery. Abortion, on the other hand, is not - it's an artificial problem invented for political reasons.
Ironically, abortion is in fact a continuation of civil rights, society is just still in the dark ages on it. Society has been dehumanizing people to deny them basic rights forever, the civil rights movement has been the fight against that, and today the most dehumanized group is unwanted babies.
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.
Quite the opposite: abortion ban dehumanises woman by denying them their basic human right: the right to decide about their body. Abortion ban isn't fundamentally any different from mandatory organ donation from living donors.
(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.)
Probably because a some churches will put a disproportionate amount of political rallying around banning something that Numbers 5:11-31 requires in some cases, but absolutely never mention marching or voting to feed the poor, help children, or other things.
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.
It's pretty clear to me how this happens, I'm one of those people who became unaffiliated. I was raised in a religious household. I got fed a lot of objectively weird things from my parents' religion:
- 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.
There are more Adventists than Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Southern Baptists, etc. Most of Christianity's different sects agree that they're the normal ones, by 'mainstream' I just mean that people aren't going to treat you like a cult member at work if you're part of that religion.
I was doing some thinking on the whole "third place"[0] problem today, and reading this I wonder if it's possible we have it backwards. Maybe people don't go to church because they no longer have the time (or the need) for the third place, as opposed to people no longer having a third place because of not going to church (or a bar, bowling alley, whatever). Maybe it's a privilege and not a need as people thought about it pre-Internet, and since you can see people any time you want from home, you don't have the incentive to go see them live.
"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've been thinking along similar lines, and one thing I keep coming back to is the danger of making online spaces your "third place." Spending time on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, even HN, can be really dangerous when it's a third place and not just a way to interact occasionally.
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.
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
Strange times when asking a polite follow-up question is “jumping on”. To be honest, that seems like an equally reasonable/likely question to ask at a pub.
Physical locations don't let me participate in massive numbers of discussions at once- I engage more fully with one person/group of people. And on HN, I can spend hours and hours here without anyone likely noticing, while people would notice that I haven't left the coffee shop. And I would likely need to leave the coffee shop to get something done, while HN can be constantly on the side of my screen.
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.
There's no direct interaction. It's just different to make a joke and see the other person smile, or make a mean comment and see the other person look offended. I think that's the reason why people are so much more likely to troll on the internet-- there's less of an emotional connection
I don't think so. We have an epidemic of loneliness. I think it's much more likely that people are turning away from churches because they are rejecting religion, and that the alternatives just aren't there.
True, but religion creates extra tribalism (no gays! no Muslims!) and adds a healthy dose of justification for the tribalism.
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 plenty of non-religious homophobia in Europe. Besides, the Bible doesn't talk about homosexuality nearly as much as other things that many Christians ignore (or so I've heard). It's all tribalism at the core. Trump could be out doing abortions on Times Square and not lose any votes.
Religious texts tend not to contain a lot of the bigoted mores usually ascribed to them--be it the Torah, the Bible, the Quran, what have you. Instead, a lot of this tends to originate from non-scriptual sources, such as the opinions of religious experts over the centuries interpreting these texts and imposing their own beliefs as ironclad scriptual law.
(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.)
> Besides, the Bible doesn't talk about homosexuality nearly as much as other things that many Christians ignore
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.
Unfortunately, very little has filled the void left by religion, and I think this is having a profound negative effect on society.
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.
This. I got absolutely nothing from religion and I tried throughout my whole adolecence. Went to Church every week. It never made sense to me. I never felt the faith, or the community, or anything. I just don’t think I am wired for religion.
People keep equating Christianity with the concept of religion. It is a religion, sure, but only one particular religion. But it's a bit like saying "I dated Christy she just wasted 10 years of my life, it's clear I must be aromantic"
Some of us have explored other religions as well. Most seem to rely on unprovable claims that must be taken on faith, or experiences that cannot be quantified or tested in any meaningful sense.
As far as I'm concerned the scientific method is a far more productive and fulfilling way to live and solve problems.
I was raised going to church. It was never a major part of my life and I haven't been in probably 15 years. Depending on how the question was asked, I might end up identifying as a Christian (or more specifically an Episcopalian.) Despite not really believing any of it, I still feel like it's a part of my identity on some level. I suspect there are plenty of people like me out there.
It is interesting that they do not discuss age at any point in the article. My expectations would be that younger generations are much less religious, and so the 3-in-10 being unaffiliated is mostly due not to current trends but simply due to aging cohorts that were very religious.
Being disowned by family and friends for leaving the church is an even stronger incentive than being told you're going to burn forever for not toeing the line. Just look at all the ex-LDS help groups out there as an example.
A more interesting question is Pew asking the last time people have attended a religious service. The frequency of your attendance is one way to characterize your affiliation.
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.
"Affiliated" covers a wide range, from weekly (or more than weekly) church attendance, to showing up in church for your baptism, confirmation, wedding, and funeral.
I think there are a couple of things at play here. Full disclosure, I have no data to substantiate by "hunch" but I think it would be interesting to see if there is a way of testing it.
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.
> 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.
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.
I became an atheist when I was 14 years old and I was forced to attend confirmation. I asked questions repeatedly about simple obvious things such as dinosaurs and how did they get on that ark, what about kangaroos did that ark get all the away to Australia, lots of obvious questions. I was kicked out of confirmation for asking too many questions.
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.
> 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"
Progress. Once we have the majority, it will be interesting to measure the moral temperament of society. Some might suggest it will be worse. But could it improve? Either way it’s good to see. Once we’re no longer conditioning our children with religious dogma they’ll be more free to grow up into true versions of themselves.
It will have no impact on morality because few people actually derive their morals from a religion, even if they claim to. Religions contextualize and validate morals that adherents hold regardless of their active participation, and some religions even take this premise and run with it (e.g. that people have an innate instinct to do what's morally right which is in tension with their innate instinct to do what's wrong).
This is temporary though due to the non-religious self selecting to have vastly fewer children.
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.
It's not like the religious and non-religious communities reproduce solely by having kids - this trend is driven by religious parents having non-religious children, and also there's the opposite phenomenon; IMHO the choices the teenagers and young adults make far outweigh any difference in fertility rates.
If the father is practicing, it’s something like 80% of the kids will. What we are experiencing now might be a second order blip due to WW1&2 wiping out so many fathers.
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 have to think that the WW1/2 connection is a stretch (would be interested to hear more), but for anyone sceptical about the continuity of the high attendance following fathers' attendance, an article on the subject based on some survey data from the 90s: https://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=16-05-...
My working theory for the growth in the religiously unaffiliated is that they demographic of people who would have been nominal religious attendees a few decades ago. The number of people who attend church weekly (i.e. those with strong religious affiliation) has been basically static for a while now [0]. You could say that there is a difference between those with "weak" religious affiliation and those with "weekly" religious affiliation ;)
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.
As the non-affiliated grow, this poll is starting to create more questions than answers. I think the vast mix of responses in this comments section shows that.
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?
> Who are the two percent of people responding to this survey who have no religion and pray every day?
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'd sure like to know a little bit more about the "nothing in particular" group
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.
Maybe they are just not Christian, but still pray in their religion. Maybe they are agnostic and still want to try to have a connection with the divine, but not within an organized religion complete with dogma.
> Who are the two percent of people responding to this survey who have no religion and pray every day?
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.
Religiously unaffiliated means they do not attend a church at all. A lot of people who are asked what their affiliation is just put whatever their parents were or what they grew up in, even if now fully lapsed. Churches have attendance statistics that put religious affiliation in the 5-6% range(Varies with the religion and area, Muslims the highest, but also the most rapidly declining as the youth in the USA/Canada are free to depart)
One of the most interesting podcasts I've listened to this year discussed the roots of meaning, significance, and religious experience in our current culture. Where does meaning come from? How do our brains create meaning? Or is meaning revealed to us?
They may be unaffiliated with formal religions, but that doesn't mean they aren't religious or are more connected to reality. Plenty of people I know who aren't affiliated with a church of some kind think just as mystically as formally religious folks, sometimes even more so.
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?
How much of this is because in America the loudest religious voices:
* 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.
FWIW I grew up under a Baptist umbrella, but was never religious. Tried out a bunch of religion's as an adult but couldn't quite get it. Still, I found that churches for the most part are good-intentioned places, with many flavors, but overall a net benefit to the community.
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.
You are not countering the claims of the person you are replying to, and calling them a bigot is unwarranted. They made no claims about every church. Their claim was that churches in the large have lobbied to expand privileges which comes at the expense of other people.
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.)
> 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.
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.
Like most denominations there is a lot of variation amongst Quakers. There are meetings that are virtually atheists & those that are downright fundamentalist.
its interesting to see catholic tick up a bit as protestantism continues to decline
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 ).
And within your increasingly left-leaning mainline protestants, you have constant splintering. The conservative Episcopals, where they didn't convert to Roman Catholicism as whole congregations, made ACNA, which itself is a loose association that refuses to decide important issues like the ordination of women. This leads to many interesting lawsuits, since the Eoiscopal church is obscenely wealthy and owns all the buildings.
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 was fascinated to learn , recently that the Puritans became Unitarians! Overtime the religion wandered a lot as each generation reinterpreted what they believed- and it went from being what we call 'puritanical' to a generally more progressive faith. You can go into some of the most liberal Unitarian churches in New England and the original pastor was an OG puritan.
That is fascinating, but unfortunately not so surprising.. When you're unmoored from a strong governing structure or tradition, I think it's unlikely to be any other way.
Organized religion may be fading away but faith based beliefs aren't changing. The same primordial need that religion fills is being filled today by political tribalism.
From my experience, the US is unique among developed countries in how effectively religion has been weaponized and has permeated its way into politics. Combine that with the electoral college system and we have minority rule by declining but increasingly radical evangelicals [1]. This Faustian bargain with Trump largely explains his election victory in 2016 and his near-victory in 2020.
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.
Interesting about prayer as it seems positive visualization, law of attraction type mental activities seem to be more popular than they were 20-30 years ago, by people who would never call themselves religious. I’ve always found them to be similar. I think rituals similar to religious rituals but not religion per se come in to fill the void where organized religious practice used to be.
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 religion is an openly corrupt parody of itself. Joel Osteen, Pat Robertson, Falwell Jr. All of the scandals with the catholic priests and the subsequent cover-up. The catholic church and their genocide of indigenous cultures. The stadium-sized mega churches, and their millionaire pastors with their private jets.
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.
Could you list specific genocides you feel were mandated by the catholic church? What were the motives of the church to commit genocide? Are you conflating the Spanish and Portuguese conquests with catholic church mandated genocide?
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.
And you think the above are genocides like the Armenian genocide or the holocaust? Organized and mandated as an official part of the church trying to eliminate a certain ethnic or national group?
The only one that seems to fit the bill is the ethnic cleansing in Rawanda which didn't enjoy support of the international church hierarchy and is pretty recent. EDIT: This is actually a terrible example, the massacre happened at a catholic church where lay people and religious sisters were killed by another ethnic group. this is not fairly a 'catholic church' genocide but rather a masssacre at a catholic church during an existing genocide.
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.
Voluntary response sampling bias. This leads to extreme polarization being represented. So really this just shows that religious Americans are more likely to answer a survey about religion. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It's not about theology. It's about politics. "As political scientist David Campbell of Notre Dame demonstrated in a recent essay, the perceived confluence between Evangelicalism and the most reactionary forces in the Republican party is a major reason for the upsurge in the percentage of Americans who self-identify as nonreligious or wholly secular."
American religions are fairly thin on explicit theology, because they are so individualist and transcendental. Whats the point of making a canon if you have the power of a spiritual witness?
My view is that the unique, "democratized" nature of American religion made it more vulnerable to political opportunism because this theological vaccuum existed.
religion is not spirituality...and humans are evolved to have a spiritual component to their psyche...typically, as humans age, they have a spiritual/religious epiphany...in america, it's usually associated with the christian bible...this is how they dampen their fear of death as they age
There's nothing wrong with not being religious but to me it seems the ethics and morals void hasn't been filled. Doing the right thing even if you don't have to seems to be mocked these days. Someone buys 100 hard drives because a pricing error that person is cheered as a hero not as opportunistic. And really sports is the new religion it seems to be similar in mentality.
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.
We're not supposed to be racist, yet Pew Research Center publishes this report broken down between whites and blacks. It's pretty difficult to treat everyone alike when we're always being bombarded by media contrasting our differences.
Whenever I read about the too-slow demise of religion it warms the cockles of my heart and I am reminded of the insightful words of Robert Ingersoll (and I challenge anyone to find any scripture that meets his words in inspiration, hope and joy):
‘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.’
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.
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”.
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?
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.
"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.
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.
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?
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?
>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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
A useful way to think about religion, is to acknowledge that there are certain universal human features that never go away. For example, there will always be a highest principle by which a person's life is ordered (if they seem to change a lot, that highest principle might be their Self). It is very useful to consciously think about and cultivate the way that we might recognise our highest value, and the way we interact with it. We should realise potentially negative consequences of having the wrong thing for our highest value. This type of consideration is best classified differently to other life questions, and historically questions like this have been classified using the term "religious". This "highest value" is a placeholder in the human mind that Christianity would claim should be occupied by God.
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.
Religion is "The belief in and reverence for a supernatural power or powers, regarded as creating and governing the universe."
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.
Many atheists do believe in higher powers, though. What about something like Patriarchy or institutional racism? These are higher powers that are said to exist beyond any individual, and to be propagated subconsciously and perhaps even unwillingly by people? What is a power other than something that modifies behaviour, and what is "higher" other than something that exists outside of an individual, and across multiple individuals?
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".
> Many atheists do believe in higher powers, though.
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 don't insist that you believe anything, I just tried to pick an example that you might already believe in, and draw analogies to belief in spirits so you can better understand the more nuanced view of spirit that is actually what a religion such as Christianity talks about https://biblehub.com/nlt/ephesians/6.htm.
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 can better understand the more nuanced view of spirit that is actually what a religion such as Christianity talks about
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.
> Many atheists do believe in higher powers, though. What about something like Patriarchy or institutional racism?
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 problem is that words we use are like well-worn tracks in the snow. We use them without pondering what they mean. It takes something like a crisis in our lives, or a psychedelic trip, can jolt us out of the same old mental rut.
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.
what do you mean by "exists"? They don't exist as a solid physical object. They exist more like a gust of wind, which moves all the leaves in the same direction and that's all we see. You can't "prove" that they exist, you can only postulate them as theories that explain why we see a whole collection of physical data that we can see. Your proof might be considered good if it coherently explains a large amount of the data, and makes predictions that come true. But you certainly can't "prove" that they "exist" to the same level of proof that an atheist will demand for the existence of 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.
I don't question the existence of thoughts, I merely pointed out that "existence" is different for different types of things. I think there are "layers" of existence, similar to how the OSI networking model works. One layer is the physical. Something like a single human being is another layer. Collective phenomena such as the patriarchy are another layer. We have limited understanding, so we may not perceive these things accurately, but that does not stop them from being real, in other words "existing". I personally believe that the layers scale right up to levels not visible to the tools of science, which work at a lower layer.
It seems a pity to write people off with a different understanding of the world as not being worth talking to. I recommend being open minded to this perspective even if it doesn't convince you. For a much better presentation of what I'm saying, I recommend looking into Jonathan Pageau; he has a good book or you can catch some interviews here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX78CipFi-Ahttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PGglfl5j_I
The other side of this debate is insisting we are actually spiritual and not really atheist and you are calling us out?
I’ve been an atheist for 40 years now. After you’ve been through these arguments in high school debates, philosophy classes, on Usenet, slashdot, digg and Reddit; you start to recognize the signs for when you need to just walk away from the discussion because you are being sealioned or proselytized or otherwise being engaged in bad faith.
No I've just had these conversations before, and trying to say god exists because science cannot yet detect it is not a new or engaging argument, no matter how much you dress it up with purple prose.
The person I was responding to was not being an honest interlocutor and I don't feel like engaging that person. And now I'm "mean" or "close minded" because I called them out on their dishonestly.
Weird how the atheists are expected to extend infinite grace and participate in the same circular arguments over and over again, but it doesn't matter how dishonest a theist can be.
isn't it just obvious? We have to make decisions. Each decision is made (consciously or subconsciously) by weighing up the predicted outcome according to a set of values. Those values inevitably conflict, so they have in turn to be judged by a yet higher value. And so on until there is a top value.
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.
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.