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It's still not clear to me how that implies I have a religion. Being influenced, consciously or subconsciously does not mean I have a religion, but maybe I'm m

It's still not clear to me how that implies I have a religion. Being influenced, consciously or subconsciously does not mean I have a religion, but maybe I'm misunderstanding your point.

keiferski 6y ago
Well, it basically comes down to how you are defining religion. The idea being that defining it as inherently supernatural is impossible and simply a linguistic reshuffling, when it's really more like "you've simply started calling your belief system something else, but it's actually still just Christian." Keep in mind here that Christianity, like all religions, is a really big tent. Put in other terms, the Western world in 2020 likes to act as if it reinvented itself afresh in the 1700-1800-1900s, but in reality, everything about "secular" knowledge has been formed in thousands of years of Christian culture. For example, the idea of universal human worth, human rights, and subsequently democracy (in the sense of every human being, not the Ancient Greek kind), is absolutely rooted in a Christian context. Had a different society had the industrial revolution first, things might be very different. Or to ask a different question: if your values and actions indicate you as a group of X, but you vehemently deny (only with words) being a member of X, what does that mean? Is expressed spoken belief the final decider? Or does action factor in too? This is a really long-winded way of saying that what "religion" is defined as is constantly changing. The book I recommended explains it much better than I can.
- acqq 6y ago
  Attempting to redefine "religion" to include "all the values people have" is a poor trick in distraction. Exactly in the Western world "religion" really means the belief in a number of supernatural deities, at least one much more powerful than the others, and/or in some form of life after death and supernatural punishment, and the institutions and organizations supporting such beliefs, dependent on their active believers. Everything else is simply not "a religion." And I also have a whole book to cite: https://www.amazon.com/Faith-Versus-Fact-Religion-Incompatible/dp/0143108263 https://www.amazon.com/Faith-Versus-Fact-Religion-Incompatib... "Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible" by Jerry A. Coyne "Evolutionary biologist Jerry A. Coyne lays out in clear, dispassionate detail why the toolkit of science, based on reason and empirical study, is reliable, while that of religion—including faith, dogma, and revelation—leads to incorrect, untestable, or conflicting conclusions." Also, Merriam-Webster Dictionary: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/religion https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/religion "Definition of religion 1a : the state of a religious (e.g. "a nun in her 20th year of religion") 1b(1) : the service and worship of God or the supernatural 1b(2) : commitment or devotion to religious faith or observance 2 : a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices 3 archaic : scrupulous conformity : conscientiousness 4 : a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith" If you think "4" fits with the bad attempt to redefine the real meaning, it in to explain the use in the sentence like "rock'n'roll is his religion."
- quanticle 6y ago
  Put in other terms, the Western world in 2020 likes to act as if it reinvented itself afresh in the 1700-1800-1900s, but in reality, everything about "secular" knowledge has been formed in thousands of years of Christian culture. That makes sense only if you redefine "Christianity" to mean "respect for universal human rights". By that logic most everyone is a Christian. Most Hindus and Buddhists would be Christian too. The problem is that changing the definition of a word does not change boundaries in reality. I can call my automobile a "Leaf", but that doesn't mean my car does photosynthesis. Similarly, you can say that Christianity just means "respect for human rights", but that doesn't mean that everyone accepts the divinity of Jesus Christ.
  - keiferski 6y ago
    That's not what I claimed at all. I simply said the values were formed in a Christian context. Today, in our global world, the same values absolutely have changed previously different cultures. Japan prior to 1946 doesn't have a universalist (formed in Christianity) democratic tradition, which was forced upon it by the West. India has a similar story with the caste system. It doesn't mean that they are Christians, but simply that ideas strongly formed by Christianity are now extremely powerful there.
    - acqq 6y ago
      But you wrote: "The idea being that defining it as inherently supernatural is impossible and simply a linguistic reshuffling, when it's really more like "you've simply started calling your belief system something else, but it's actually still just Christian."" Where you effectively claim that "Christian religion" can be one where somebody is even one who doesn't believe in supernatural. Because... some other values count too? Can really somebody who doesn't believe that Jesus is a "Christ" (the anointed one, a "Messiah", it's not a surname but the specific role in the universe of believers) be a Christian? And somebody who doesn't believe in any supernatural deity at all? I for example admit I grew up in the area where traditionally most of the inhabitants were real Christian believers, but I surely am not a Christian. The Church would surely not accept that claim. Edit: user keiferski answers below that to him "it's unclear what "supernatural" means in this context." Let me write that even more clearly: I don't believe in the existence of any supernatural deity, i.e. one which can influence the events on Earth that occur among humans or one which can "change the rules" how the universe functions, as established by the scientific experiments and research. I also define the belief in life after death as a belief in supernatural, and I assert that I don't have that belief. Also, the area I grew up was never inhabited by majority of "protestants." I was also never in life an object of any religious ceremony (and I consider myself lucky for growing up in such an environment, learning how most of people in the U.S. live). Most of the people I know who were baptized as children later officially renounced the Church, and the Church wiped them out of its records. All of them never went to any religious school, just state schools (some of them had a subject where they explicitly learned about religion though). People I knew who already died don't have any religious sign on their graves, and didn't believe they will "live" after their death. People who live together with their partners and even have children didn't even officially register in the state institutions, and they even less had any ceremony in any church. It's not "complicated" at all. And I'm not even some special exception -- exactly because not every area in the western world functions like an average "contemporary American" would expect. What is that that those people in my environment and I "do" which you believe could make us "Christians" then? (I also admit I know a few people in the circle of people around me, a very small minority, who do say they believe in Jesus Christ and that they have Christian morale, and attempt to behave according to that, while also not being consistent though their life. But they are a minority, and like I've said, even they don't "do" consistently what "the religion" would "expect" from them).
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  I clearly have christian and western values instilled in me, I grew up in the US. But that doesn't mean I practice or believe in a religion or deity? Idk, this argument seems pretty facile and I've spent a lot of time reading philosophy of religion.
  - keiferski 6y ago
    This is a pretty complex topic, but I'll go back to my question that I posed: if your behaviors indicate one thing, but your spoken word indicates another, what does that mean? Is is possible that modern secular culture is simply Christianity-as-act, but with the explicit verbal affirmation of belief removed? Religions change just as much as cultures do, and I would say that modern culture is quite obsessed with "verbal consent" as being the ultimate decider of what something is. I'm not arguing that this is absolutely the case, but simply that it seems extremely plausible to me.
    - whimsicalism 6y ago
      I think there is a difference between having cultural values and believing in a deity. We can expand the definition of religion to include those sets of cultural values, but then I worry that: a. the word religion loses meaning b. someone who was raised in the Islamic world and comes to the States and converts to Judaism can never stop being a Muslim? Even if they weren't one to start with? That seems absurd to me.
      - kritiko 6y ago
        I'd suggest you look at Bellah's Civil Religion in America (1967), which suggests that certain ritual practices, e.g. rising for the national anthem before a sporting event, are religious in nature. And not that it's particularly definitive, but I'd note that cult and culture share the same Latin etymology. "Just as Thanksgiving Day, which incidentally was securely institutionalized as an annual national holiday only under the presidency of Lincoln, serves to integrate the family into the civil religion, so Memorial Day has acted to integrate the local community into the national cult. Together with the less overtly religious Fourth of July and the more minor celebrations of Veterans Day and the birthdays of Washington and Lincoln, these two holidays provide an annual ritual calendar for the civil religion. The public school system serves as a particularly important context for the cultic celebration of the civil rituals."
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Put in other terms, the Western world in 2020 likes to act as if it reinvented itself afresh in the 1700-1800-1900s, but in reality, everything about "secular" knowledge has been formed in thousands of years of Christian culture Both sides of that claim are fantastically false. First, while most describe the Enlightenment as novel, almost noone describes it arising ex nihilo rather than as a product of preexisting social forces, both building on and reacting against things present in its immediate context. Second, while obviously it arose in a largely Christian context, there were significant non-Christian influences, and particularly the repopularization of pre-Christian influence (in part from interaction with contemporary non-Christian cultures) played a significant role in the Renaissance which itself set the stage for the Enlightenment. > For example, the idea of universal human worth, human rights, and subsequently democracy (in the sense of every human being, not the Ancient Greek kind), is absolutely rooted in a Christian context. Much of our idea of human rights is a reaction against the practices on all sides of the divides within Western Christendom. > Had a different society had the industrial revolution first, things might be very different. Sure, social evolution is path dependent. And if we adopted a cladistic taxonomy of belief systems, those stemming from the Enlightenment might usefully described as being subsets of "Christianity" because of their origin. But while cladistic taxonomy makes some sense for biological life, it really doesn't make sense for social movements. > Or to ask a different question: if your values and actions indicate you as a group of X, but you vehemently deny (only with words) being a member of X, what does that mean? It probably means that you and the people who think your "values and actions" make you part of X have radically different definitions of "X", and are essentially speaking different languages on that point.
kritiko 6y ago
Your question reminded me of this quote from David Foster Wallace's This is Water: Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
- lukevdp 6y ago
  > There is no such thing as not worshipping Yes there is
- ADayOnEarth 6y ago
  This is bs. I don't worship anything. Where do I draw the "real meaning in life"? I don't think there is "a meaning in life", strictly speaking. I came to be because of laws of nature and biology, and keep living for a while, and then cease to exist. I do think everyone can decide for themselves their personal "meaning of life". I would like humans to colonize other planets, and eventually other star systems. I think I have contributed to that goal by writing software that is used by a lot of people for information processing. I also like to be happy and enjoy life. Having a family, friends, and doing things I like with them helps achieve those goals. Making an espresso is almost like a ritual, but I am not worshipping the bean, or electricty, water or the heat and pressure that makes it all work. All the steps are required to get coffee at the end, which I enjoy drinking. I am not worshipping the gods of wine and food when I drink and eat. I am not sending prayers to other car drivers when I am driving, or walking across the street. I am not praying for imaginary beings to keep my loved ones safe, or ask for divine help when they are sick. I admire people who have worked hard to achieve great things, but I do not worship them. I do not know everything, and some things which I think I know are probably wrong. And yet there is still no need for religion.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

It's still not clear to me how that implies I have a religion. Being influenced, consciously or subconsciously does not mean I have a religion, but maybe I'm misunderstanding your point.

keiferski 6y ago

Well, it basically comes down to how you are defining religion. The idea being that defining it as inherently supernatural is impossible and simply a linguistic reshuffling, when it's really more like "you've simply started calling your belief system something else, but it's actually still just Christian." Keep in mind here that Christianity, like all religions, is a really big tent. Put in other terms, the Western world in 2020 likes to act as if it reinvented itself afresh in the 1700-1800-1900s, but in reality, everything about "secular" knowledge has been formed in thousands of years of Christian culture. For example, the idea of universal human worth, human rights, and subsequently democracy (in the sense of every human being, not the Ancient Greek kind), is absolutely rooted in a Christian context. Had a different society had the industrial revolution first, things might be very different. Or to ask a different question: if your values and actions indicate you as a group of X, but you vehemently deny (only with words) being a member of X, what does that mean? Is expressed spoken belief the final decider? Or does action factor in too? This is a really long-winded way of saying that what "religion" is defined as is constantly changing. The book I recommended explains it much better than I can.

acqq 6y ago
Attempting to redefine "religion" to include "all the values people have" is a poor trick in distraction. Exactly in the Western world "religion" really means the belief in a number of supernatural deities, at least one much more powerful than the others, and/or in some form of life after death and supernatural punishment, and the institutions and organizations supporting such beliefs, dependent on their active believers. Everything else is simply not "a religion." And I also have a whole book to cite: https://www.amazon.com/Faith-Versus-Fact-Religion-Incompatible/dp/0143108263 https://www.amazon.com/Faith-Versus-Fact-Religion-Incompatib... "Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible" by Jerry A. Coyne "Evolutionary biologist Jerry A. Coyne lays out in clear, dispassionate detail why the toolkit of science, based on reason and empirical study, is reliable, while that of religion—including faith, dogma, and revelation—leads to incorrect, untestable, or conflicting conclusions." Also, Merriam-Webster Dictionary: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/religion https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/religion "Definition of religion 1a : the state of a religious (e.g. "a nun in her 20th year of religion") 1b(1) : the service and worship of God or the supernatural 1b(2) : commitment or devotion to religious faith or observance 2 : a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices 3 archaic : scrupulous conformity : conscientiousness 4 : a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith" If you think "4" fits with the bad attempt to redefine the real meaning, it in to explain the use in the sentence like "rock'n'roll is his religion."
quanticle 6y ago
Put in other terms, the Western world in 2020 likes to act as if it reinvented itself afresh in the 1700-1800-1900s, but in reality, everything about "secular" knowledge has been formed in thousands of years of Christian culture. That makes sense only if you redefine "Christianity" to mean "respect for universal human rights". By that logic most everyone is a Christian. Most Hindus and Buddhists would be Christian too. The problem is that changing the definition of a word does not change boundaries in reality. I can call my automobile a "Leaf", but that doesn't mean my car does photosynthesis. Similarly, you can say that Christianity just means "respect for human rights", but that doesn't mean that everyone accepts the divinity of Jesus Christ.
- keiferski 6y ago
  That's not what I claimed at all. I simply said the values were formed in a Christian context. Today, in our global world, the same values absolutely have changed previously different cultures. Japan prior to 1946 doesn't have a universalist (formed in Christianity) democratic tradition, which was forced upon it by the West. India has a similar story with the caste system. It doesn't mean that they are Christians, but simply that ideas strongly formed by Christianity are now extremely powerful there.
  - acqq 6y ago
    But you wrote: "The idea being that defining it as inherently supernatural is impossible and simply a linguistic reshuffling, when it's really more like "you've simply started calling your belief system something else, but it's actually still just Christian."" Where you effectively claim that "Christian religion" can be one where somebody is even one who doesn't believe in supernatural. Because... some other values count too? Can really somebody who doesn't believe that Jesus is a "Christ" (the anointed one, a "Messiah", it's not a surname but the specific role in the universe of believers) be a Christian? And somebody who doesn't believe in any supernatural deity at all? I for example admit I grew up in the area where traditionally most of the inhabitants were real Christian believers, but I surely am not a Christian. The Church would surely not accept that claim. Edit: user keiferski answers below that to him "it's unclear what "supernatural" means in this context." Let me write that even more clearly: I don't believe in the existence of any supernatural deity, i.e. one which can influence the events on Earth that occur among humans or one which can "change the rules" how the universe functions, as established by the scientific experiments and research. I also define the belief in life after death as a belief in supernatural, and I assert that I don't have that belief. Also, the area I grew up was never inhabited by majority of "protestants." I was also never in life an object of any religious ceremony (and I consider myself lucky for growing up in such an environment, learning how most of people in the U.S. live). Most of the people I know who were baptized as children later officially renounced the Church, and the Church wiped them out of its records. All of them never went to any religious school, just state schools (some of them had a subject where they explicitly learned about religion though). People I knew who already died don't have any religious sign on their graves, and didn't believe they will "live" after their death. People who live together with their partners and even have children didn't even officially register in the state institutions, and they even less had any ceremony in any church. It's not "complicated" at all. And I'm not even some special exception -- exactly because not every area in the western world functions like an average "contemporary American" would expect. What is that that those people in my environment and I "do" which you believe could make us "Christians" then? (I also admit I know a few people in the circle of people around me, a very small minority, who do say they believe in Jesus Christ and that they have Christian morale, and attempt to behave according to that, while also not being consistent though their life. But they are a minority, and like I've said, even they don't "do" consistently what "the religion" would "expect" from them).
whimsicalism 6y ago
I clearly have christian and western values instilled in me, I grew up in the US. But that doesn't mean I practice or believe in a religion or deity? Idk, this argument seems pretty facile and I've spent a lot of time reading philosophy of religion.
- keiferski 6y ago
  This is a pretty complex topic, but I'll go back to my question that I posed: if your behaviors indicate one thing, but your spoken word indicates another, what does that mean? Is is possible that modern secular culture is simply Christianity-as-act, but with the explicit verbal affirmation of belief removed? Religions change just as much as cultures do, and I would say that modern culture is quite obsessed with "verbal consent" as being the ultimate decider of what something is. I'm not arguing that this is absolutely the case, but simply that it seems extremely plausible to me.
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    I think there is a difference between having cultural values and believing in a deity. We can expand the definition of religion to include those sets of cultural values, but then I worry that: a. the word religion loses meaning b. someone who was raised in the Islamic world and comes to the States and converts to Judaism can never stop being a Muslim? Even if they weren't one to start with? That seems absurd to me.
    - kritiko 6y ago
      I'd suggest you look at Bellah's Civil Religion in America (1967), which suggests that certain ritual practices, e.g. rising for the national anthem before a sporting event, are religious in nature. And not that it's particularly definitive, but I'd note that cult and culture share the same Latin etymology. "Just as Thanksgiving Day, which incidentally was securely institutionalized as an annual national holiday only under the presidency of Lincoln, serves to integrate the family into the civil religion, so Memorial Day has acted to integrate the local community into the national cult. Together with the less overtly religious Fourth of July and the more minor celebrations of Veterans Day and the birthdays of Washington and Lincoln, these two holidays provide an annual ritual calendar for the civil religion. The public school system serves as a particularly important context for the cultic celebration of the civil rituals."
dragonwriter 6y ago
> Put in other terms, the Western world in 2020 likes to act as if it reinvented itself afresh in the 1700-1800-1900s, but in reality, everything about "secular" knowledge has been formed in thousands of years of Christian culture Both sides of that claim are fantastically false. First, while most describe the Enlightenment as novel, almost noone describes it arising ex nihilo rather than as a product of preexisting social forces, both building on and reacting against things present in its immediate context. Second, while obviously it arose in a largely Christian context, there were significant non-Christian influences, and particularly the repopularization of pre-Christian influence (in part from interaction with contemporary non-Christian cultures) played a significant role in the Renaissance which itself set the stage for the Enlightenment. > For example, the idea of universal human worth, human rights, and subsequently democracy (in the sense of every human being, not the Ancient Greek kind), is absolutely rooted in a Christian context. Much of our idea of human rights is a reaction against the practices on all sides of the divides within Western Christendom. > Had a different society had the industrial revolution first, things might be very different. Sure, social evolution is path dependent. And if we adopted a cladistic taxonomy of belief systems, those stemming from the Enlightenment might usefully described as being subsets of "Christianity" because of their origin. But while cladistic taxonomy makes some sense for biological life, it really doesn't make sense for social movements. > Or to ask a different question: if your values and actions indicate you as a group of X, but you vehemently deny (only with words) being a member of X, what does that mean? It probably means that you and the people who think your "values and actions" make you part of X have radically different definitions of "X", and are essentially speaking different languages on that point.

kritiko 6y ago

Your question reminded me of this quote from David Foster Wallace's This is Water: Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

lukevdp 6y ago
> There is no such thing as not worshipping Yes there is
ADayOnEarth 6y ago
This is bs. I don't worship anything. Where do I draw the "real meaning in life"? I don't think there is "a meaning in life", strictly speaking. I came to be because of laws of nature and biology, and keep living for a while, and then cease to exist. I do think everyone can decide for themselves their personal "meaning of life". I would like humans to colonize other planets, and eventually other star systems. I think I have contributed to that goal by writing software that is used by a lot of people for information processing. I also like to be happy and enjoy life. Having a family, friends, and doing things I like with them helps achieve those goals. Making an espresso is almost like a ritual, but I am not worshipping the bean, or electricty, water or the heat and pressure that makes it all work. All the steps are required to get coffee at the end, which I enjoy drinking. I am not worshipping the gods of wine and food when I drink and eat. I am not sending prayers to other car drivers when I am driving, or walking across the street. I am not praying for imaginary beings to keep my loved ones safe, or ask for divine help when they are sick. I admire people who have worked hard to achieve great things, but I do not worship them. I do not know everything, and some things which I think I know are probably wrong. And yet there is still no need for religion.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]