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So many of the comments here are affirming what I have long observed: much anti-religious sentiment (“much”, not “all”!) is actually a reaction to fundamentalis

So many of the comments here are affirming what I have long observed: much anti-religious sentiment (“much”, not “all”!) is actually a reaction to fundamentalism, which is the bad theology of scriptural literalism, which brings heresies like hating LGBT, insisting the Bible is also a science textbook, superstitious views of certain Middle Eastern lands, and more. Growing up as a mainline Protestant, I thankfully didn’t have much of this to react against in my own churches. But we saw the bad fundamentalist theology in Southern Baptist or too many independent churches (those two mentioned because they were dominant where I grew up). I can appreciate the difference. I’m still happily a mainline Protestant. I’m not instructed to hate anyone, I’m not told to vote a particular way. I’m not going to church to check in my brain to a charlatan who saves me from an angry (false) god. I’m going to be better and to grow my relationship with God.

jboynyc 6y ago
Not just other commenters, the (sociological) science backs you up as well: political backlash is a big reason for recent disaffiliation. https://sociologicalscience.com/articles-vol1-24-423/ https://sociologicalscience.com/articles-vol1-24-423/
- burlesona 6y ago
  That’s the predictable, and in the end, best outcome. The most foolish thing cultural “christianity,” could do is pick a political party. Now that we’re a generation past that, the so-called “religious right” has evolved into a thin veneer of pseudo-religion over a very specific political faction, and that shallow falseness is driving most people away. As for actual Christianity and those who study it, in many ways the teachings of Christ could not be more different than the “religious right” advocates today. Christ taught followers to love their neighbors as themselves, and not to judge other people, because in God’s eyes all humans were equally and impossibly flawed. When a mob formed to stone an “adulteress,” as was the prescribed punishment for that “crime” in ancient Judaea, Jesus said “let the person who is without sin throw the first stone.” The mob dissolved, and he told the woman she was forgiven. Note that this is not what the religious-political faction of Jesus day wanted either, and in the end they arranged for him to be crucified as a result.
  - Karunamon 6y ago
    Jesus also told the woman to "go forth and sin no more" as part of being forgiven, which is a significantly important detail that often gets overlooked when paraphrasing this story. The entire story of Christ is based on redemption from sin - if one tries to eliminate that because having extrajudicial demands on one's conduct is not fashionable in the modern day, what's left is, objectively speaking, not Christianity anymore, not even qualifying as a moral framework, and leaves you with nothing more than a nice story about a nice guy. Let us not forget that Jesus was described as fashioning a whip (which is not something you do on a momentary whim in the bronze age, that takes time and effort, and in this case, likely stewing the whole time) and deploying it against scalpers in the temple. What the "judge not" passage calls for is recognizing that you aren't the ultimate authority worthy of meting out punishment at the end of the day (which also jibes with significant portions of the Israeli covenant and its lethal punishments being deprecated), but it does not demand that people remain tolerant or silent in the face of sin.
    - burlesona 6y ago
      I agree with everything you said. I’ll also admit, it’s hard for me to see much difference between today’s “religious right” and the temple market that Jesus personally wrecked.
      - Karunamon 6y ago
        Agreed.. but I think that intent factors into it a lot more than people tend to give credit for. If one of the key takeaways of Christianity is "don't sin", then right behind it is "you (and everyone else) will screw up, try to be better anyways". And that applies just as well to things like lying and cheating as it does to scrupulosity and being judgmental. Your typical fundamentalist might be nominally Christian by declaration, but they give short shrift to so many things they deem not important that it amounts to shallow virtue signaling. The moral guidelines are all-or-nothing. You either accept it all or you might as well save yourself the time because there's no such thing as partial credit. Sin is sin.
  - coliveira 6y ago
ykevinator 6y ago
But god is not real and you speak with some certainty that he is. Clutching on to the premise is so much of the problem with society. Just because you're a nice believer ( not you personally) doesn't mean you're not part of the problem. Belief in the supernatural retards consensus on science based solutions because it presumes that supernatural based solutions are a legitimate alternative.
mustafa_pasi 6y ago
And what did you gain out of it? I grew up in a non-fundamentalist Christian cult (catholic) and it was at best a massive waste of time. I detest that part of my life.
- AuthorizedCust 6y ago
  > it was at best a massive waste of time Why? Can you expand on that?
  - mustafa_pasi 6y ago
    Because I cannot recall a single good thing I got out of the whole experience.
paulryanrogers 6y ago
After being raised in a non-Fundamentalist denomination I'd say the progressive ones are more insidious and no less harmful. Their foundations are all the same text, no matter how literal or figurative they interpret it. IME they usually also teach the same bad ways of thinking: emotion over logic, testimony over hard evidence, authority beyond your understanding, etc.
- AuthorizedCust 6y ago
  I suspect you're setting up a false dichotomy. There are more choices on theology than ones that require you to check your brain in at the door, such as 1. fundamentalism and 2. feel-good pop psychology. I am not taught emotion over logic. In fact, the Wesleyan Quadrilateral (a framework derived from but not described by him) has you evaluate beliefs with reason being a co-equal base. In confirmation and later in-depth adult classes, we were instructed to wrestle with the scripture. For example, we dug into the context of the times to understand better why certain things would have been said. We acknowledged selected verses made no sense. We agreed some parts we have no choice but to disregard. We frankly don't take Revelations that seriously because it's mostly batshit crazy. :-) I am not taught testimony over evidence. My church fully embraces evolution. We see Genesis for the story and the poetry. Authority beyond understanding: that gets back into the theological allegiance insisted on by the fundamentalists mainly.
  - folkrav 6y ago
    As much as I appreciate your level headed approach of the whole thing, the very basis of most religion is based on _faith_ that [insert relevant scriptures] are holding some truth about the very existence and power of [insert omnipotent entity]. I'll be honest, I have a hard time putting this very fundamental point as having any basis in logic and reason. Even putting beliefs at the same level as reason is rather questionable, IMHO. Edit: I'm not here to tell you you're wrong or to question your beliefs. You're very much free to hold them. I'm just having a hard time equating religion with objectivity when they are fundamentally rooted in something subjective by nature.
    - 6y ago
m0llusk 6y ago
My own experience being raised mainline Protestant was a bit different which might be illustrative: My parents were not at all devout, but still took wisdom and moral lessons from the Bible, especially from the teachings of Jesus. At the same time the preachers in town leaned right in their beliefs and focused on reading and interpreting more obscure passages. This resulted in a modest ongoing tension about what exactly it all meant. Then one Sunday School a conservative leaning preacher taught the kids how to spot witches. That was the last straw and we never went back to Mass or Sunday School and gradually withdrew from everything else with Easter and Christmas being the final holdouts. So I drifted to atheism but still find wisdom in the Bible and dare to compare the passages that focus on Jesus to stories of the Buddha. Culturally there is still quite a bit of influence there, but the fundamentalist component is a massive division like a great wall.
- thechao 6y ago
  As a non-practicing Jew, I found the Jefferson bible very inspiring. Stripping the religious trappings from the teachings tempers the whole thing; I really like the humanity: it’s a story about a man with his own foibles, attempting to teach himself & others to be better people.
  - Balgair 6y ago
    For those that are confused as to what a 'Jefferson Bible' is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_Bible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_Bible "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, commonly referred to as the Jefferson Bible, is one of two religious works constructed by Thomas Jefferson. The first, The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth, was completed in 1804, but no copies exist today. The second, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, was completed in 1820 by cutting and pasting with a razor and glue numerous sections from the New Testament as extractions of the doctrine of Jesus. Jefferson's condensed composition excludes all miracles by Jesus and most mentions of the supernatural, including sections of the four gospels that contain the Resurrection and most other miracles, and passages that portray Jesus as divine." https://uuhouston.org/files/The_Jefferson_Bible.pdf https://uuhouston.org/files/The_Jefferson_Bible.pdf Free here
api 6y ago
I've talked to people of the younger generations (in the USA) who are not even aware that there is anything other than fundamentalist literalism. Either the Earth is 6000 years old and Jonah literally rode in the belly of a whale, or there is no God. This sets up a situation where you have to be willfully ignorant or lie to defend the existence of God, since this stuff is bollocks. In reality fundamentalist literalism is a relatively recent (19th century) theological development, but it's taken over completely in many US denominations. A further wedge has been driven by the total politicization of religion. Many also believe that you must be a far-right Republican to be a Christian. If you'd asked me as a teenager or early 20-something what it meant to be a Christian I'd have thought "you have to support the military and vote Republican."
- luxuryballs 6y ago
  Well given the logical definition of God 6 day creation and riding in a whale are not a problem at all, anything is possible. I never saw a 6000 year old Earth in the Bible though.
  - kaybe 6y ago
    The idea is to assume we have an unbroken record of genealogy in the bible and add up all the lifetimes of people mentioned, which gives the ~6000 years. [0] I'm not sure whether there is any basis for this assumption in the text though.. [0] https://creation.com/6000-years https://creation.com/6000-years
    - luxuryballs 6y ago
      Yeah I don’t think there is, and doesn’t need to be either. If you believe it’s the Word of God then it’s got just what it was suppose to have in it, nothing more and nothing less. Most of the debated things are just not that important on the scale with things that are cut and dry, by design. It’s like the science thing, there is science in the Bible, but the Bible is not a science book. Science is more of a way to describe the function of the lego blocks that make up the world around us, the Bible is more concerned with how the lego blocks came about and what the cosmic purpose of them is. Which is why science and Bible are never at odds, just like how metaphysics is never at odds with physics. Or how things like gravity and light are well beyond the scope of biological evolution.
ARandomerDude 6y ago
> ...bad theology...heresies... Without "scriptural literalism" how do you know what bad theology and heresy are? Is good theology not simply that which most closely corresponds to Scripture? Your comment makes sense on a Roman Catholic view – in which the traditions of the church are authoritative – but not on the Protestant view (sola Scriptura).
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  Some are led by consensus and “spirit-leading.” Like the Quakers.
kodah 6y ago
Fundamentalism is still a vague description. I left the Catholic church in my teens and was angry for the experiences I'd had. As I grew as an adult my ire went from "religious institutions" to "certain moral communities". In any moral community there will be outliers and some of those outliers can take hold of a message. You can see this in modern day with secular moral communities as well. My main takeaway, after 20-some years of evaluating this is that morals are something okay to evaluate your group on, but they are not ethics. They cannot apply widely, make their way into law, or try to shape society because by their very definition they are intrinsic to small groups. That doesn't mean these groups can't teach us something, but the foundation of their ideas requires subscription and often holistically.
- AuthorizedCust 6y ago
  > I left the Catholic church in my teens and was angry for the experiences I'd had. I know of too many Catholics who say the same. Not growing up Catholic, it's hard to relate. Their stories often involve excessively strict dogma or scriptural interpretation that denies or vilifies innocent human nature. E.g., taking your girlfriend to mass to hear an incendiary anti-abortion sermon, then losing said girlfriend due to that mass, then later ending your relationship with the church out of frustration.
ramraj07 6y ago
1. Stance on abortion among your brothers in church? As if brothers should even have one that matters? 2. Do you follow the edict that if you’re not baptist then by definition you go to hell? How do you reconcile this with having friends or anyone at all you care about who are then going to hell? Point is, I’m not sure there is any middle ground that’s acceptable. I don’t come here as an atheist, just as someone who’s trying really hard to believe but finding no acceptable ground to stand at all. The only smart people I find religious (especially Christian) are ones who were born and grew up forced to go to church. Typically they’d give up on practising it in their teens, basically break every rule in their book for two decades and then somehow rediscover it because now it’s convenient to find some community and higher purpose in their life. The ones who convert from elsewhere when they are adults are almost always gullible and did so for the most transactional reasons you can think of.
- AuthorizedCust 6y ago
  > Stance on abortion among your brothers in church Denominational stance is reluctance: https://www.umc.org/en/content/ask-the-umc-what-is-the-united-methodist-position-on-abortion https://www.umc.org/en/content/ask-the-umc-what-is-the-unite... > Do you follow the edict that if you’re not baptist then by definition you go to hell I am not Baptist. But the ones I speak to, who are dedicated fundamentalists, seem to believe that I am going to hell since I am not and will never be "saved" in the way they prescribe. Furthermore, in their view, nearly everyone who existed before Jesus's time is condemned to Hell except for a select few who foretold of Jesus's coming. Crazy theology! Also, keep in mind that Baptists have diversity. The Southern Baptists are the firebrand fundamentalists. There are others that are almost indistinguishable from mainline Protestantism.
  - coliveira 6y ago
    The idea of hell was widespread in ancient times. For example, the Greeks believed it. They also believed that everyone went to hell. This is exactly the mythology that christians spread nowadays. The only difference is that Christians believed that the few who accepted Christ would be rescued from Hell, the same way Eurydice was saved by Orpheus (hence the idea that the church is the bride of Jesus). It is all a rehash of ancient myths.
ben_w 6y ago
I was raised liberal Catholic by an atheist father and an eclectic hippie New-Age-Catholic-Hindu-dowsing-crystals-homeopathy-and-runic[0]-divination mother, for the purposes of getting into a good school. While it is fair to say that one specific fundamentalist young-Earth creationist Baptist certainly turned me from “it isn’t true but it doesn’t matter” to “it is actively harmful for people to believe this”, I should also say that the liberal version of Catholicism at my school — liberal enough to not explicitly condemn abortion or homosexuality, even though this was the U.K. in the 1990s and Section 28 still in force — had terrible sex education which completely ignored the existence of e.g. chlamydia, and I do think that was due to the religion given how quickly I learned about it the moment I moved to the next step in my education. The open-mindedness may have been good for me as a teenager going through a goth-paganism phase, but it also meant she gave my dad homeopathic remedies when he got bowel cancer, and she got Alzheimer’s 15 years younger than her mother “despite” her use of Bach flower remedies for memory. [0] naturally this meant I learned to read the outer border of the Allen & Unwin edition of The Hobbit, and the text in the hand drawn maps inside: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/hobbit-cover-large.jpg https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/...
- deleted 6y ago
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dawg- 6y ago
I became an atheist/agnostic as a teenager and now in my late 20's I have slowly come back to religion. So I am really interested in this topic. My comment is specifically about online atheist communities, because I think they are often toxic to both religion and to atheism itself. A lot of these communities are hyper-focused on fundamentalism, to their own detriment. These online atheists communities can be very unfortunate. Your noble search for the truth leads you to question religion - but then you get caught in an echo chamber spending a lot of energy hating on others for their beliefs. A noble pursuit devolved into hatred and groupthink. On the other hand, fundamentalists took a religion which preaches love and acceptance and twisted it into something bitter and hateful. I think it's kind of poetic how much those two communities mirror each other. The fixation on fundamentalism is a combination of two things. First, there are people from those fundamentalist churches who were damaged in some way and have now swung way to the opposite extreme of hating all religion. They grew up learning to see the world through rigid dogma, and online atheist communities tend to be fairly dogmatic themselves. Not hard to see the appeal there. Second, and probably more common, are atheists who never had any close contact with fundamentalism but they justify their beliefs by taking on the low-hanging fruit. It is very easy to pick on young-earth creationists, vehement anti-gay groups, prosperity gospel, etc. Those groups' thinking really does rely on fear and hate, things that the bible actually tells us to reject. What happens when you tell one of those angry atheists that yes, you're a Christian, but you also find evolution to be very cool, you know that the universe is billions of years old, you are pro choice, and you don't believe everything in the bible literally happened? Well, they aren't really sure what to do with you. Because they spend all their time congratulating themselves for being smarter than the lowest common denominator of religion, they aren't really able to have a more sophisticated conversation about their beliefs. As a religious person, it is a bit frustrating that you never see atheists confronting the great theologists and religious philosophers - Origen, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Kierkegaard, or even contemporary thinkers like Alasdair McIntyre. If Christians' beliefs are really so shallow and stupid, those guys should be super easy to refute, right? They think that all Christians are anti-science when Christian monks were pivotal in the discovery of genetics and the big bang theory, among other scientific achievements. They ignore that some giants of Enlightenment philosophy, like Descartes and Spinoza, were attempting to use new rational methods to affirm the existence of God in their major works. The problem is, when you are an atheist engaging in the really complex arguments posed by the most intelligent and eloquent religious people of history, the waters become very muddy. You might even have to concede, just a little bit, that you take your atheism on faith, too. It's much easier to feel good about bashing the usual suspects - Joel Osteen, the 700 Club, Westboro Baptist and friends. And so a lot of people get sucked into that low-level discourse, and never get a chance to make the exhilarating journey back to religion. I don't really care if someone stays an atheist, many good people are atheists. But I do care if they never get a chance to see the promise of religion because of toxic echo chambers and groupthink. As a religious person, I don't hate outspoken atheists. In fact, I very much respect them - they are people who care deeply about the truth. In that respect, they have something in common with any thoughtful religious person.
deleted 6y ago
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snarf21 6y ago
Unfortunately, you are the exception. I grew up in a church household and family. It is sad that so many people see the bible as a weapon to enforce their point of view instead of a manual to direct their own life. It is crazy the amount of hate that my "christian" family members post on FB.
brundolf 6y ago
[Posted this under a reply below that got downvoted, so reposting here] I grew up fundamentalist, then swung hard atheist, then ended up, as one friend who went to seminary described it, "the most christian atheist he knows". I've known Christians ignorant and intellectual, hateful and openly loving, urban and rural, liberal and conservative, and everything in-between (and these are all independent axes, to be clear). Here's my take: A healthy faith is not about technicalities, or about finding a system for understanding the physical world or anything like that. If you get obsessed with technicalities you become a bitter fundamentalist; if you get fed-up with religion but stay obsessed with technicalities you become a bitter atheist. A healthy faith is about people. Yourself, your community, the world. Cultivating habits of forgiveness and growth toward yourself, and openness and love (as well as forgiveness and growth) toward others. Having a specific segment of your life dedicated to contemplation of the most important things in life, and doing so in a community on a regular basis. The iconography and the texts, ideally, are just a communal conduit for those ideas; symbols people can point to and use to talk about their thoughts and feelings around this stuff with others, and also to spark new thoughts and points of discussion. Many (not all) of my close friends are christians, and none of them have ever tried to convert me (if they were to do that on a regular basis, we wouldn't be close friends). Some of them don't really think hell exists; most of them don't think some magic prayer is all that's needed to keep you out of it; they know that spirituality is a matter of the heart, and the heart isn't so simple. Most, I think, see that even if hell does exist, the best thing they can do for others is simply to love them and to help them be better through example and friendship, if anything. They know they don't control others and they can't force them into anything. They can only be Good and hope that it spreads. I like this quote from Pope Francis: > We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there. ADDENDUM: So where has that left me? I don't practice religion, though I read from the occasional religious author and I think spirituality in the broader sense is a useful metaphor for matters surrounding the heart and trying to be a better member of the world. I have really nice conversations, even with religious people, around those subjects. I've been known to go with a friend or relative to the odd church service (as long as it's at a church that's reasonably compatible with the above), and I often get some benefit from it in the form of meditation on myself and my relationship with the world. I've thought about finding a church to join for the sake of community, though I go back and forth on that since I don't believe in even the smallest literal sense (I try to let go of my literalism, but I still have mental habits from the days when I thought it was all about that, both religious and not). Maybe one day I'll find the right church and get past that.
gameswithgo 6y ago
For me, and many I know, anti-religious sentiment is pretty simple. We just think it is science fiction, and thus not good to believe it is real. Even if its all very nice and friendly and reasonable fiction, it is better to understand it isn't real.
- smt88 6y ago
  My anti-religious sentiment goes far beyond that. I could not care less if people believe in science fiction. We all believe lies, don't we? My problem is that religions dictate universal truth, which is used as a justification to oppress. Many of us were abused or oppressed by mainstream religons as children.
utopcell 6y ago
Nobody hates you. The gallup just shows that your belief system is slowly becoming irrelevant. If you can still draw anything from it (while leaving the rest of the competing sects alone), all the more power to you.
kongolongo 6y ago
The reason fundamentalists are so appealing is because they at least try to maintain some level of consistency. How does one know which parts of the bible to accept or which parts are metaphor and which parts are literal or which version of the bible to believe? At least the most literal interpretation always tries to be consistent. What makes any interpretation better than scriptural literalism? Is it the fact that some happen to agree with current social trends? Seems like the source material is flawed and unnecessary in the first place.
- randcraw 6y ago
  I think fundamentalists care less about consistency than closure. They want to minimize mystery and unknowns by insisting that even some very implausible parts of the Bible are expressly and unquestionably true. Similarly, Catholicism seems also to be quite formal about Biblical interpretation, but willing to let the church decide which tenets should be explicit vs metaphor. In contrast to both, I understand that Orthodoxy is less concerned about closure and more willing to leave 'lesser' questions unanswered or remain ambiguous. Religious truth isn't decided only by scripture or church hermeneutics. Sometimes it's just what your community chooses to care about (or not).
  - hajile 6y ago
    The whole implausible argument always struck me as lacking. You accept the idea of an omniscient, omnipotent god, but then say they couldn’t possibly do anything supernatural because that would go against the science they created.
- billti 6y ago
  Totally agree. I'm not religious at all, but at least being a "fundamentalist" seems intellectually honesty. If you believe your religious text is the true word of an all powerful God, surely it's infallible? What gives you the right to pick and choose which parts to take literally or not? Would an all powerful God who wants "true believers" to find salvation leave them for thousands of years muddling through with just an ambiguous and inconsistent book to live by?
eslaught 6y ago
I'm not sure the narrative you're trying to paint here actually works. If you dig deeper into the actual poll, it says: > In addition to Protestants, declines in church membership are proportionately smaller among political conservatives, Republicans, married adults and college graduates. These groups tend to have among the highest rates of church membership, along with Southern residents and non-Hispanic Black adults. From the actual first-party news article on the poll: https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-below-majority-first-time.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-... For better or worse, conservative (both politically and theologically) people seem to be holding on to their Christian faith in greater numbers (at least marginally) than their more progressive or liberal leaning counterparts. Anyway, as someone who almost left the faith, I would agree with the overall narrative that Christianity became ineffective in the late 20th century. Personally though, I would attribute it to a lack of focus on youth and issues relevant to youths. I can't find it now, but I'm pretty sure I saw a poll that indicated most people who leave do so in the transition from high school to college. That certainly lines up with what I observed, most people just didn't care enough to keep going (regardless of what branch they were in). I would have been one of them myself, if I hadn't been able to find a college Christian community that was dramatically more vibrant than what I grew up with. But overall I think I'm one of the lucky ones.
- randcraw 6y ago
  Yeah, I suspect this news story (and poll) only scratches the surface as to identifying the multiple demographic trends afoot. Most notable to my eye was the 15% drop in church membership between GenX and Millenial. Of course, to do that metric justice we'd need to monitor change in that age group over time. Are today's 18-to-30 year olds so different than 18-to-80 year olds were in the 1970's or 1990s? I suspect the range of ages that are today's Millenials has forever been less traditional than other age groups. That's unsurprising given they have the least personal history of any adult group to weigh when deciding their life's priorities, and are likely to think least about their relationship to others in their family (since they just left the parents behind and have yet to add any more). At that age, the need to join another 'family' and adopt a bunch of new familial responsibilities is likely to be less compelling a notion than it may be a few years hence.
2ion 6y ago
> which brings heresies like hating LGBT This is funny to read because LGBT and a series of other movements cause me to feel much the same as I do about "religious" fundamentalism. Excessive self-styling and countering any adverse ideas with a refusal to compromise or cede any ground. Not tolerating adverse ideas and manifestations thereof in daily life but "calling it out" and attacking them constantly. Extremism in opiniated/constructed ideas, polarized cancel culture etc has become much more popular and dominating in the public discourse and media than it has been for the past 50+ years. I just don't get how fundamentalists can remain so busy going on about their fundaments. It's all very tiresome.
- deleted 6y ago
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throwawaygal7 6y ago
Since mainline protestantism is in full collapse, is it really true the progressive christianity has any chance of surviving long term?
- sudosteph 6y ago
  I wouldn't write it off yet. The popularity of protestantism is very prone to wax and wane with the times. A really charismatic preacher or two can make a big impact. Most of the mainlines we see in the US today started from just itinerant preachers and camp meetings. Personally, I think that's because the emphasis on "personal relationships" with God lends itself to more of a "social contagion" model of popularity, as people seek to imitate friends and neighbors who share spiritual experiences. That's not a negative thing necessarily. But they can't lean on tradition like the Orthodox or Catholics do.
- randcraw 6y ago
  A lot can change in a couple of centuries. Right now, Catholicism is still growing in South America and Africa. As people in those regions become better educated and affluent, they may indeed follow the evolutionary path of other more affluent economies. But with the resounding recent rise throughout the world in populism (which is a form of faith, but in a person or a dream rather than an economy), it's hard to know how humankind will respond to the challenges of the modern world. We could choose to retreat from our current immersion in fast-paced life via technology and withdraw into one (or many) 'simpler' ways of life. If we do it wouldn't surprise me if we also choose to reimagine the world that surrounds us as being less concrete and more a realm of possibility in which choose our own reality.
  - throwawaygal7 6y ago
    I find it perplexing that you describe catholicism as progressive, since it maintains strict sexual purity standards, a male clergy, anti abortion and homosexuality etc.(Perhaps I misread you) Isnt it true that SA is having extreme growth of the prosperity gospel form of fundamentalism too?
fossuser 6y ago
I grew up mainline Protestant too before throwing it away (I was young ~12 which makes it easier). My objection is to the broken nature of the reasoning and how that tends to corrupt evidence based reasoning elsewhere most of them time (though weirdly not always - people are inconsistent). If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals? Obviously religious people remain the vast majority and being a good person or not is largely disconnected from religiousness. It’s difficult for me though to not think that a religious person’s reasoning is broken in some way, and to be more skeptical of how they verify ideas in general. If they can’t get something basic right, why would they be right about something more complicated? A lot of the rationalization of religious people is complicated in a way that suggests they have some underlying idea of what the accurate world model is (they just want to believe otherwise): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-belief https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-... One thing I credit the internet for is allowing me to read and learn enough to escape it. I think most people will end up with whatever belief system they grow up surrounded by.
- garmaine 6y ago
  > If they can’t get something basic right, why would they be right about something more complicated? Compartmentalization.
  - fossuser 6y ago
    I think that's the reason it's possible, but how can you trust they've compartmentalized the right thing? Basically you can be a great surgeon and religious, but you can't be a great evolutionary biologist and a creationist (at least not without some serious blinders). If I'm talking to a doctor that's a creationist and they're skeptical about a vaccine - my prior would be that it's more likely this doctor was corrupted by anti-vaxx pseudoscience woo than has an accurate model of the vaccine's risk. I'd want to talk to someone who I know doesn't have a core example of corrupted reasoning.
    - AuthorizedCust 6y ago
analog31 6y ago
That's fair, but to play devils advocate, every sect can point the finger at some other sect, or at heretics within their own sect. No sect will agree to any negative critique, and because their doctrines tend to be self consistent, critique is pointless anyway. Yet the sects are not completely separate, but are collusive to some degree. And individual beliefs may be a mishmash of ideas from multiple sects. Indeed for this reason, the divisions between sects are not hard edged. American fundamentalism would have no political power without the tacit consent of the mainstream. The predominant sects in my state are mainline, yet they voted en masse to outlaw gay marriage (before the US supreme court ruled otherwise).
JeremyNT 6y ago
The beauty of protestantism is that there is no ultimate arbiter to decide that one sect is "good" or "bad." You view certain fundamentalists' interpretation as somehow "bad?" So what? They probably view your sect as being equally degenerate. What gives you standing to cast this judgment? The framework of Protestantism allows and accounts for these divergent views. So you really can't throw down the "no true Scotsman" fallacy against those sects you disagree with in its broader defense.
gspr 6y ago
Even without the hate, isn't it harmful to indoctrinate children into believing in fantasy? Sure, adding hate makes it far worse, but one fantasy god with a fantasy origin story and fantastical powers is one too many.
clairity 6y ago
it also depends on the church and with time. the southern baptist church i went to when young didn't have much if any extreme fundamentalism. the one i attended for a bit as a teenager (not by choice) was a little more fundamentalist, but not extreme. i stopped going to church after that. but really, teasing apart the strains doesn't matter in the long run. our gods are changing, just as they always have.
frogpelt 6y ago
Jesus drove people out of the temple with a whip for disrespecting it. He called people (these are all based on KJV translation) "generation of vipers", "hypocrites", "whited sepulchres full of dead men's bones", he said it would be better some people to not have been born, that it would be better for some to have a millstone hanged on their neck and be drowned in the sea. None of that was hatred. It was love. He was dealing with people's religious and moral failings. It is not love to tell people they are okay when they are morally bankrupt.
- Trasmatta 6y ago
  In that case, I will show love by saying that many religions are morally bankrupt.
gaoshan 6y ago
Grew up Protestant and rejected it because of the hypocrisy I saw around me. I saw "good church going people" who I knew were not good people and I saw how they were able to use the authority of their positions to exert influence. I also found that asking too many inconvenient questions in youth group meetings led to uncomfortable situations. It became clear that the religion part of things had little to no impact on how good, bad or decent the people practicing it were. People were good or bad, religious people simply had a metaphysical framework they could use to excuse themselves... and the bad ones would do just this. Led me to reject confirmation and leave altogether. Now it's been 40 years and I am more convinced than ever that I made the correct decision. Religion is fundamentally flawed as I see it practiced around me and needs to be kept out of civil society strictly and completely. You want to practice it in your home or church? Go for it. You want to inject it into civil society (schools, government, etc)... you need to be stopped utterly and completely.
- AuthorizedCust 6y ago
  Just curious: which denomination were you?
  - gaoshan 6y ago
    Generic Presbyterian. The vanilla ice cream of religions.
    - prophesi 6y ago
      Do you know if it was PC USA (which is more mainline) or PCA (which is more evangelical/fundamentalist)? It's actually a pretty huge split in that denomination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestantism_in_the_United_States#Mainline_vs._evangelical https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestantism_in_the_United_St...
      - gaoshan 6y ago
        This was PC USA.
tootie 6y ago
Fundamentalism is corrosive and detrimental to society. I don't get angry at moderate religious views but I still think they're laughable superstition. I respect your right as a human to believe I just think it's silly.
gbrown 6y ago
I think you're missing the bitterness that comes from growing up with a set of coping mechanisms and losing them. Moderate Christianity, taught by moral and good people, nevertheless can lead one to use the thought of eternal life as a psychological coping mechanism to deal with the reality of death and suffering in the world. If you eventually lose your ability to believe in that (which is involuntary for many), it can be quite painful.
Spooky23 6y ago
I had a similar experience as a Catholic in the northeast. Lately as the politics of old people and loud young people have tilted right-wing, and more extreme philosophy is accepted, it’s disturbing how the theology has followed the money. I probably sound like a simpleton here, but I’ve always found religion to be a source of peace and solace and a positive influence. Some of that is a result of ignoring teachings that are more... noxious to me personally or focusing away from behavior of the human agents of the church. Unfortunately, cycles of religious fundamentalism is a feature of the American body politic.
loceng 6y ago
Seeing those same comments in this thread reminded me of something Jordan Peterson questions: with this decline of religious-based narratives for guidelines, what is replacing it?
fullstop 6y ago
I was raised Roman Catholic and attended Catholic schools until college. When I was in high school I recall having serious issues with what they were teaching. Here's a few of the gems they left me with: 1. You should only get married if you intended on having children. 2. If you were unable to have children, the marriage should be annulled. 3. Homosexuality was abhorrent and sinful. 4. Women should not obtain positions of power in the church. They used Adam and Eve to justify their position. Many years later I found out that the reason why my freshman year biology teacher left unexpectedly over the summer was because he had been shuffled to another location after molesting young boys. He was eventually imprisoned for this, after being extradited to Australia. The church and the school knew this but said nothing to the parents or the students and it was swept under the rug. It was complete silence until they were forced to say something at a point where those who were molested were fairly far into their lives. Thinking back on all of this still makes me angry today. A priest in my elementary school was brought in and then quietly and suddenly left a few months later and I am left with unanswered questions. I don't need that in my life. I don't need religion to be a moral person, and from my point of view the system that I was raised in was very far from moral. The Catholic church has done more to affirm my Atheist .. non-beliefs? .. than anything else.
- philsnow 6y ago
  > If you were unable to have children, the marriage should be annulled. This depends on a lot of things. If two people get married, and one of them already knows that they are sterile or for whatever reason cannot have children, but they don't reveal that to the other until after they are married, that is grounds for the other person to seek an annulment. This is not the same thing as saying that the marriage "should" be annulled. If on the other hand, knowledge of the person's sterility doesn't arise until after they are married, I don't think that's grounds for an annulment.
  - fullstop 6y ago
    No, this was "if you can not conceive children you should be single." It wasn't about being hiding things from your spouse or anything like that.
Breza 6y ago
It's so refreshing to see somebody who has had a similar experience to my own. I've never been a member of a church like the ones that people describe in a lot of the comments. We focus on devotion to God and improving the earth. For example, here's how we marked our church's 100th birthday: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/on-its-100th-birthday-a-church-repents-for-its-racist-founders/2017/10/08/55ae11b6-ac5d-11e7-a908-a3470754bbb9_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/on-its-100th-birthday-a...

jboynyc 6y ago

Not just other commenters, the (sociological) science backs you up as well: political backlash is a big reason for recent disaffiliation. https://sociologicalscience.com/articles-vol1-24-423/ https://sociologicalscience.com/articles-vol1-24-423/

burlesona 6y ago
That’s the predictable, and in the end, best outcome. The most foolish thing cultural “christianity,” could do is pick a political party. Now that we’re a generation past that, the so-called “religious right” has evolved into a thin veneer of pseudo-religion over a very specific political faction, and that shallow falseness is driving most people away. As for actual Christianity and those who study it, in many ways the teachings of Christ could not be more different than the “religious right” advocates today. Christ taught followers to love their neighbors as themselves, and not to judge other people, because in God’s eyes all humans were equally and impossibly flawed. When a mob formed to stone an “adulteress,” as was the prescribed punishment for that “crime” in ancient Judaea, Jesus said “let the person who is without sin throw the first stone.” The mob dissolved, and he told the woman she was forgiven. Note that this is not what the religious-political faction of Jesus day wanted either, and in the end they arranged for him to be crucified as a result.
- Karunamon 6y ago
  Jesus also told the woman to "go forth and sin no more" as part of being forgiven, which is a significantly important detail that often gets overlooked when paraphrasing this story. The entire story of Christ is based on redemption from sin - if one tries to eliminate that because having extrajudicial demands on one's conduct is not fashionable in the modern day, what's left is, objectively speaking, not Christianity anymore, not even qualifying as a moral framework, and leaves you with nothing more than a nice story about a nice guy. Let us not forget that Jesus was described as fashioning a whip (which is not something you do on a momentary whim in the bronze age, that takes time and effort, and in this case, likely stewing the whole time) and deploying it against scalpers in the temple. What the "judge not" passage calls for is recognizing that you aren't the ultimate authority worthy of meting out punishment at the end of the day (which also jibes with significant portions of the Israeli covenant and its lethal punishments being deprecated), but it does not demand that people remain tolerant or silent in the face of sin.
  - burlesona 6y ago
    I agree with everything you said. I’ll also admit, it’s hard for me to see much difference between today’s “religious right” and the temple market that Jesus personally wrecked.
    - Karunamon 6y ago
      Agreed.. but I think that intent factors into it a lot more than people tend to give credit for. If one of the key takeaways of Christianity is "don't sin", then right behind it is "you (and everyone else) will screw up, try to be better anyways". And that applies just as well to things like lying and cheating as it does to scrupulosity and being judgmental. Your typical fundamentalist might be nominally Christian by declaration, but they give short shrift to so many things they deem not important that it amounts to shallow virtue signaling. The moral guidelines are all-or-nothing. You either accept it all or you might as well save yourself the time because there's no such thing as partial credit. Sin is sin.
- coliveira 6y ago

ykevinator 6y ago

But god is not real and you speak with some certainty that he is. Clutching on to the premise is so much of the problem with society. Just because you're a nice believer ( not you personally) doesn't mean you're not part of the problem. Belief in the supernatural retards consensus on science based solutions because it presumes that supernatural based solutions are a legitimate alternative.

mustafa_pasi 6y ago

And what did you gain out of it? I grew up in a non-fundamentalist Christian cult (catholic) and it was at best a massive waste of time. I detest that part of my life.

AuthorizedCust 6y ago
> it was at best a massive waste of time Why? Can you expand on that?
- mustafa_pasi 6y ago
  Because I cannot recall a single good thing I got out of the whole experience.

paulryanrogers 6y ago

After being raised in a non-Fundamentalist denomination I'd say the progressive ones are more insidious and no less harmful. Their foundations are all the same text, no matter how literal or figurative they interpret it. IME they usually also teach the same bad ways of thinking: emotion over logic, testimony over hard evidence, authority beyond your understanding, etc.

AuthorizedCust 6y ago
I suspect you're setting up a false dichotomy. There are more choices on theology than ones that require you to check your brain in at the door, such as 1. fundamentalism and 2. feel-good pop psychology. I am not taught emotion over logic. In fact, the Wesleyan Quadrilateral (a framework derived from but not described by him) has you evaluate beliefs with reason being a co-equal base. In confirmation and later in-depth adult classes, we were instructed to wrestle with the scripture. For example, we dug into the context of the times to understand better why certain things would have been said. We acknowledged selected verses made no sense. We agreed some parts we have no choice but to disregard. We frankly don't take Revelations that seriously because it's mostly batshit crazy. :-) I am not taught testimony over evidence. My church fully embraces evolution. We see Genesis for the story and the poetry. Authority beyond understanding: that gets back into the theological allegiance insisted on by the fundamentalists mainly.
- folkrav 6y ago
  As much as I appreciate your level headed approach of the whole thing, the very basis of most religion is based on _faith_ that [insert relevant scriptures] are holding some truth about the very existence and power of [insert omnipotent entity]. I'll be honest, I have a hard time putting this very fundamental point as having any basis in logic and reason. Even putting beliefs at the same level as reason is rather questionable, IMHO. Edit: I'm not here to tell you you're wrong or to question your beliefs. You're very much free to hold them. I'm just having a hard time equating religion with objectivity when they are fundamentally rooted in something subjective by nature.
  - 6y ago

m0llusk 6y ago

My own experience being raised mainline Protestant was a bit different which might be illustrative: My parents were not at all devout, but still took wisdom and moral lessons from the Bible, especially from the teachings of Jesus. At the same time the preachers in town leaned right in their beliefs and focused on reading and interpreting more obscure passages. This resulted in a modest ongoing tension about what exactly it all meant. Then one Sunday School a conservative leaning preacher taught the kids how to spot witches. That was the last straw and we never went back to Mass or Sunday School and gradually withdrew from everything else with Easter and Christmas being the final holdouts. So I drifted to atheism but still find wisdom in the Bible and dare to compare the passages that focus on Jesus to stories of the Buddha. Culturally there is still quite a bit of influence there, but the fundamentalist component is a massive division like a great wall.

thechao 6y ago
As a non-practicing Jew, I found the Jefferson bible very inspiring. Stripping the religious trappings from the teachings tempers the whole thing; I really like the humanity: it’s a story about a man with his own foibles, attempting to teach himself & others to be better people.
- Balgair 6y ago
  For those that are confused as to what a 'Jefferson Bible' is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_Bible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_Bible "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, commonly referred to as the Jefferson Bible, is one of two religious works constructed by Thomas Jefferson. The first, The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth, was completed in 1804, but no copies exist today. The second, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, was completed in 1820 by cutting and pasting with a razor and glue numerous sections from the New Testament as extractions of the doctrine of Jesus. Jefferson's condensed composition excludes all miracles by Jesus and most mentions of the supernatural, including sections of the four gospels that contain the Resurrection and most other miracles, and passages that portray Jesus as divine." https://uuhouston.org/files/The_Jefferson_Bible.pdf https://uuhouston.org/files/The_Jefferson_Bible.pdf Free here

api 6y ago

I've talked to people of the younger generations (in the USA) who are not even aware that there is anything other than fundamentalist literalism. Either the Earth is 6000 years old and Jonah literally rode in the belly of a whale, or there is no God. This sets up a situation where you have to be willfully ignorant or lie to defend the existence of God, since this stuff is bollocks. In reality fundamentalist literalism is a relatively recent (19th century) theological development, but it's taken over completely in many US denominations. A further wedge has been driven by the total politicization of religion. Many also believe that you must be a far-right Republican to be a Christian. If you'd asked me as a teenager or early 20-something what it meant to be a Christian I'd have thought "you have to support the military and vote Republican."

luxuryballs 6y ago
Well given the logical definition of God 6 day creation and riding in a whale are not a problem at all, anything is possible. I never saw a 6000 year old Earth in the Bible though.
- kaybe 6y ago
  The idea is to assume we have an unbroken record of genealogy in the bible and add up all the lifetimes of people mentioned, which gives the ~6000 years. [0] I'm not sure whether there is any basis for this assumption in the text though.. [0] https://creation.com/6000-years https://creation.com/6000-years
  - luxuryballs 6y ago
    Yeah I don’t think there is, and doesn’t need to be either. If you believe it’s the Word of God then it’s got just what it was suppose to have in it, nothing more and nothing less. Most of the debated things are just not that important on the scale with things that are cut and dry, by design. It’s like the science thing, there is science in the Bible, but the Bible is not a science book. Science is more of a way to describe the function of the lego blocks that make up the world around us, the Bible is more concerned with how the lego blocks came about and what the cosmic purpose of them is. Which is why science and Bible are never at odds, just like how metaphysics is never at odds with physics. Or how things like gravity and light are well beyond the scope of biological evolution.

ARandomerDude 6y ago

> ...bad theology...heresies... Without "scriptural literalism" how do you know what bad theology and heresy are? Is good theology not simply that which most closely corresponds to Scripture? Your comment makes sense on a Roman Catholic view – in which the traditions of the church are authoritative – but not on the Protestant view (sola Scriptura).

Robotbeat 6y ago
Some are led by consensus and “spirit-leading.” Like the Quakers.

kodah 6y ago

Fundamentalism is still a vague description. I left the Catholic church in my teens and was angry for the experiences I'd had. As I grew as an adult my ire went from "religious institutions" to "certain moral communities". In any moral community there will be outliers and some of those outliers can take hold of a message. You can see this in modern day with secular moral communities as well. My main takeaway, after 20-some years of evaluating this is that morals are something okay to evaluate your group on, but they are not ethics. They cannot apply widely, make their way into law, or try to shape society because by their very definition they are intrinsic to small groups. That doesn't mean these groups can't teach us something, but the foundation of their ideas requires subscription and often holistically.

AuthorizedCust 6y ago
> I left the Catholic church in my teens and was angry for the experiences I'd had. I know of too many Catholics who say the same. Not growing up Catholic, it's hard to relate. Their stories often involve excessively strict dogma or scriptural interpretation that denies or vilifies innocent human nature. E.g., taking your girlfriend to mass to hear an incendiary anti-abortion sermon, then losing said girlfriend due to that mass, then later ending your relationship with the church out of frustration.

ramraj07 6y ago

1. Stance on abortion among your brothers in church? As if brothers should even have one that matters? 2. Do you follow the edict that if you’re not baptist then by definition you go to hell? How do you reconcile this with having friends or anyone at all you care about who are then going to hell? Point is, I’m not sure there is any middle ground that’s acceptable. I don’t come here as an atheist, just as someone who’s trying really hard to believe but finding no acceptable ground to stand at all. The only smart people I find religious (especially Christian) are ones who were born and grew up forced to go to church. Typically they’d give up on practising it in their teens, basically break every rule in their book for two decades and then somehow rediscover it because now it’s convenient to find some community and higher purpose in their life. The ones who convert from elsewhere when they are adults are almost always gullible and did so for the most transactional reasons you can think of.

AuthorizedCust 6y ago
> Stance on abortion among your brothers in church Denominational stance is reluctance: https://www.umc.org/en/content/ask-the-umc-what-is-the-united-methodist-position-on-abortion https://www.umc.org/en/content/ask-the-umc-what-is-the-unite... > Do you follow the edict that if you’re not baptist then by definition you go to hell I am not Baptist. But the ones I speak to, who are dedicated fundamentalists, seem to believe that I am going to hell since I am not and will never be "saved" in the way they prescribe. Furthermore, in their view, nearly everyone who existed before Jesus's time is condemned to Hell except for a select few who foretold of Jesus's coming. Crazy theology! Also, keep in mind that Baptists have diversity. The Southern Baptists are the firebrand fundamentalists. There are others that are almost indistinguishable from mainline Protestantism.
- coliveira 6y ago
  The idea of hell was widespread in ancient times. For example, the Greeks believed it. They also believed that everyone went to hell. This is exactly the mythology that christians spread nowadays. The only difference is that Christians believed that the few who accepted Christ would be rescued from Hell, the same way Eurydice was saved by Orpheus (hence the idea that the church is the bride of Jesus). It is all a rehash of ancient myths.

ben_w 6y ago

I was raised liberal Catholic by an atheist father and an eclectic hippie New-Age-Catholic-Hindu-dowsing-crystals-homeopathy-and-runic[0]-divination mother, for the purposes of getting into a good school. While it is fair to say that one specific fundamentalist young-Earth creationist Baptist certainly turned me from “it isn’t true but it doesn’t matter” to “it is actively harmful for people to believe this”, I should also say that the liberal version of Catholicism at my school — liberal enough to not explicitly condemn abortion or homosexuality, even though this was the U.K. in the 1990s and Section 28 still in force — had terrible sex education which completely ignored the existence of e.g. chlamydia, and I do think that was due to the religion given how quickly I learned about it the moment I moved to the next step in my education. The open-mindedness may have been good for me as a teenager going through a goth-paganism phase, but it also meant she gave my dad homeopathic remedies when he got bowel cancer, and she got Alzheimer’s 15 years younger than her mother “despite” her use of Bach flower remedies for memory. [0] naturally this meant I learned to read the outer border of the Allen & Unwin edition of The Hobbit, and the text in the hand drawn maps inside: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/hobbit-cover-large.jpg https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/...

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dawg- 6y ago

I became an atheist/agnostic as a teenager and now in my late 20's I have slowly come back to religion. So I am really interested in this topic. My comment is specifically about online atheist communities, because I think they are often toxic to both religion and to atheism itself. A lot of these communities are hyper-focused on fundamentalism, to their own detriment. These online atheists communities can be very unfortunate. Your noble search for the truth leads you to question religion - but then you get caught in an echo chamber spending a lot of energy hating on others for their beliefs. A noble pursuit devolved into hatred and groupthink. On the other hand, fundamentalists took a religion which preaches love and acceptance and twisted it into something bitter and hateful. I think it's kind of poetic how much those two communities mirror each other. The fixation on fundamentalism is a combination of two things. First, there are people from those fundamentalist churches who were damaged in some way and have now swung way to the opposite extreme of hating all religion. They grew up learning to see the world through rigid dogma, and online atheist communities tend to be fairly dogmatic themselves. Not hard to see the appeal there. Second, and probably more common, are atheists who never had any close contact with fundamentalism but they justify their beliefs by taking on the low-hanging fruit. It is very easy to pick on young-earth creationists, vehement anti-gay groups, prosperity gospel, etc. Those groups' thinking really does rely on fear and hate, things that the bible actually tells us to reject. What happens when you tell one of those angry atheists that yes, you're a Christian, but you also find evolution to be very cool, you know that the universe is billions of years old, you are pro choice, and you don't believe everything in the bible literally happened? Well, they aren't really sure what to do with you. Because they spend all their time congratulating themselves for being smarter than the lowest common denominator of religion, they aren't really able to have a more sophisticated conversation about their beliefs. As a religious person, it is a bit frustrating that you never see atheists confronting the great theologists and religious philosophers - Origen, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Kierkegaard, or even contemporary thinkers like Alasdair McIntyre. If Christians' beliefs are really so shallow and stupid, those guys should be super easy to refute, right? They think that all Christians are anti-science when Christian monks were pivotal in the discovery of genetics and the big bang theory, among other scientific achievements. They ignore that some giants of Enlightenment philosophy, like Descartes and Spinoza, were attempting to use new rational methods to affirm the existence of God in their major works. The problem is, when you are an atheist engaging in the really complex arguments posed by the most intelligent and eloquent religious people of history, the waters become very muddy. You might even have to concede, just a little bit, that you take your atheism on faith, too. It's much easier to feel good about bashing the usual suspects - Joel Osteen, the 700 Club, Westboro Baptist and friends. And so a lot of people get sucked into that low-level discourse, and never get a chance to make the exhilarating journey back to religion. I don't really care if someone stays an atheist, many good people are atheists. But I do care if they never get a chance to see the promise of religion because of toxic echo chambers and groupthink. As a religious person, I don't hate outspoken atheists. In fact, I very much respect them - they are people who care deeply about the truth. In that respect, they have something in common with any thoughtful religious person.

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snarf21 6y ago

Unfortunately, you are the exception. I grew up in a church household and family. It is sad that so many people see the bible as a weapon to enforce their point of view instead of a manual to direct their own life. It is crazy the amount of hate that my "christian" family members post on FB.

brundolf 6y ago

[Posted this under a reply below that got downvoted, so reposting here] I grew up fundamentalist, then swung hard atheist, then ended up, as one friend who went to seminary described it, "the most christian atheist he knows". I've known Christians ignorant and intellectual, hateful and openly loving, urban and rural, liberal and conservative, and everything in-between (and these are all independent axes, to be clear). Here's my take: A healthy faith is not about technicalities, or about finding a system for understanding the physical world or anything like that. If you get obsessed with technicalities you become a bitter fundamentalist; if you get fed-up with religion but stay obsessed with technicalities you become a bitter atheist. A healthy faith is about people. Yourself, your community, the world. Cultivating habits of forgiveness and growth toward yourself, and openness and love (as well as forgiveness and growth) toward others. Having a specific segment of your life dedicated to contemplation of the most important things in life, and doing so in a community on a regular basis. The iconography and the texts, ideally, are just a communal conduit for those ideas; symbols people can point to and use to talk about their thoughts and feelings around this stuff with others, and also to spark new thoughts and points of discussion. Many (not all) of my close friends are christians, and none of them have ever tried to convert me (if they were to do that on a regular basis, we wouldn't be close friends). Some of them don't really think hell exists; most of them don't think some magic prayer is all that's needed to keep you out of it; they know that spirituality is a matter of the heart, and the heart isn't so simple. Most, I think, see that even if hell does exist, the best thing they can do for others is simply to love them and to help them be better through example and friendship, if anything. They know they don't control others and they can't force them into anything. They can only be Good and hope that it spreads. I like this quote from Pope Francis: > We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there. ADDENDUM: So where has that left me? I don't practice religion, though I read from the occasional religious author and I think spirituality in the broader sense is a useful metaphor for matters surrounding the heart and trying to be a better member of the world. I have really nice conversations, even with religious people, around those subjects. I've been known to go with a friend or relative to the odd church service (as long as it's at a church that's reasonably compatible with the above), and I often get some benefit from it in the form of meditation on myself and my relationship with the world. I've thought about finding a church to join for the sake of community, though I go back and forth on that since I don't believe in even the smallest literal sense (I try to let go of my literalism, but I still have mental habits from the days when I thought it was all about that, both religious and not). Maybe one day I'll find the right church and get past that.

gameswithgo 6y ago

For me, and many I know, anti-religious sentiment is pretty simple. We just think it is science fiction, and thus not good to believe it is real. Even if its all very nice and friendly and reasonable fiction, it is better to understand it isn't real.

smt88 6y ago
My anti-religious sentiment goes far beyond that. I could not care less if people believe in science fiction. We all believe lies, don't we? My problem is that religions dictate universal truth, which is used as a justification to oppress. Many of us were abused or oppressed by mainstream religons as children.

utopcell 6y ago

Nobody hates you. The gallup just shows that your belief system is slowly becoming irrelevant. If you can still draw anything from it (while leaving the rest of the competing sects alone), all the more power to you.

kongolongo 6y ago

The reason fundamentalists are so appealing is because they at least try to maintain some level of consistency. How does one know which parts of the bible to accept or which parts are metaphor and which parts are literal or which version of the bible to believe? At least the most literal interpretation always tries to be consistent. What makes any interpretation better than scriptural literalism? Is it the fact that some happen to agree with current social trends? Seems like the source material is flawed and unnecessary in the first place.

randcraw 6y ago
I think fundamentalists care less about consistency than closure. They want to minimize mystery and unknowns by insisting that even some very implausible parts of the Bible are expressly and unquestionably true. Similarly, Catholicism seems also to be quite formal about Biblical interpretation, but willing to let the church decide which tenets should be explicit vs metaphor. In contrast to both, I understand that Orthodoxy is less concerned about closure and more willing to leave 'lesser' questions unanswered or remain ambiguous. Religious truth isn't decided only by scripture or church hermeneutics. Sometimes it's just what your community chooses to care about (or not).
- hajile 6y ago
  The whole implausible argument always struck me as lacking. You accept the idea of an omniscient, omnipotent god, but then say they couldn’t possibly do anything supernatural because that would go against the science they created.
billti 6y ago
Totally agree. I'm not religious at all, but at least being a "fundamentalist" seems intellectually honesty. If you believe your religious text is the true word of an all powerful God, surely it's infallible? What gives you the right to pick and choose which parts to take literally or not? Would an all powerful God who wants "true believers" to find salvation leave them for thousands of years muddling through with just an ambiguous and inconsistent book to live by?

eslaught 6y ago

I'm not sure the narrative you're trying to paint here actually works. If you dig deeper into the actual poll, it says: > In addition to Protestants, declines in church membership are proportionately smaller among political conservatives, Republicans, married adults and college graduates. These groups tend to have among the highest rates of church membership, along with Southern residents and non-Hispanic Black adults. From the actual first-party news article on the poll: https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-below-majority-first-time.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-... For better or worse, conservative (both politically and theologically) people seem to be holding on to their Christian faith in greater numbers (at least marginally) than their more progressive or liberal leaning counterparts. Anyway, as someone who almost left the faith, I would agree with the overall narrative that Christianity became ineffective in the late 20th century. Personally though, I would attribute it to a lack of focus on youth and issues relevant to youths. I can't find it now, but I'm pretty sure I saw a poll that indicated most people who leave do so in the transition from high school to college. That certainly lines up with what I observed, most people just didn't care enough to keep going (regardless of what branch they were in). I would have been one of them myself, if I hadn't been able to find a college Christian community that was dramatically more vibrant than what I grew up with. But overall I think I'm one of the lucky ones.

randcraw 6y ago
Yeah, I suspect this news story (and poll) only scratches the surface as to identifying the multiple demographic trends afoot. Most notable to my eye was the 15% drop in church membership between GenX and Millenial. Of course, to do that metric justice we'd need to monitor change in that age group over time. Are today's 18-to-30 year olds so different than 18-to-80 year olds were in the 1970's or 1990s? I suspect the range of ages that are today's Millenials has forever been less traditional than other age groups. That's unsurprising given they have the least personal history of any adult group to weigh when deciding their life's priorities, and are likely to think least about their relationship to others in their family (since they just left the parents behind and have yet to add any more). At that age, the need to join another 'family' and adopt a bunch of new familial responsibilities is likely to be less compelling a notion than it may be a few years hence.

2ion 6y ago

> which brings heresies like hating LGBT This is funny to read because LGBT and a series of other movements cause me to feel much the same as I do about "religious" fundamentalism. Excessive self-styling and countering any adverse ideas with a refusal to compromise or cede any ground. Not tolerating adverse ideas and manifestations thereof in daily life but "calling it out" and attacking them constantly. Extremism in opiniated/constructed ideas, polarized cancel culture etc has become much more popular and dominating in the public discourse and media than it has been for the past 50+ years. I just don't get how fundamentalists can remain so busy going on about their fundaments. It's all very tiresome.

deleted 6y ago
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throwawaygal7 6y ago

Since mainline protestantism is in full collapse, is it really true the progressive christianity has any chance of surviving long term?

sudosteph 6y ago
I wouldn't write it off yet. The popularity of protestantism is very prone to wax and wane with the times. A really charismatic preacher or two can make a big impact. Most of the mainlines we see in the US today started from just itinerant preachers and camp meetings. Personally, I think that's because the emphasis on "personal relationships" with God lends itself to more of a "social contagion" model of popularity, as people seek to imitate friends and neighbors who share spiritual experiences. That's not a negative thing necessarily. But they can't lean on tradition like the Orthodox or Catholics do.
randcraw 6y ago
A lot can change in a couple of centuries. Right now, Catholicism is still growing in South America and Africa. As people in those regions become better educated and affluent, they may indeed follow the evolutionary path of other more affluent economies. But with the resounding recent rise throughout the world in populism (which is a form of faith, but in a person or a dream rather than an economy), it's hard to know how humankind will respond to the challenges of the modern world. We could choose to retreat from our current immersion in fast-paced life via technology and withdraw into one (or many) 'simpler' ways of life. If we do it wouldn't surprise me if we also choose to reimagine the world that surrounds us as being less concrete and more a realm of possibility in which choose our own reality.
- throwawaygal7 6y ago
  I find it perplexing that you describe catholicism as progressive, since it maintains strict sexual purity standards, a male clergy, anti abortion and homosexuality etc.(Perhaps I misread you) Isnt it true that SA is having extreme growth of the prosperity gospel form of fundamentalism too?

fossuser 6y ago

I grew up mainline Protestant too before throwing it away (I was young ~12 which makes it easier). My objection is to the broken nature of the reasoning and how that tends to corrupt evidence based reasoning elsewhere most of them time (though weirdly not always - people are inconsistent). If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals? Obviously religious people remain the vast majority and being a good person or not is largely disconnected from religiousness. It’s difficult for me though to not think that a religious person’s reasoning is broken in some way, and to be more skeptical of how they verify ideas in general. If they can’t get something basic right, why would they be right about something more complicated? A lot of the rationalization of religious people is complicated in a way that suggests they have some underlying idea of what the accurate world model is (they just want to believe otherwise): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-belief https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-... One thing I credit the internet for is allowing me to read and learn enough to escape it. I think most people will end up with whatever belief system they grow up surrounded by.

garmaine 6y ago
> If they can’t get something basic right, why would they be right about something more complicated? Compartmentalization.
- fossuser 6y ago
  I think that's the reason it's possible, but how can you trust they've compartmentalized the right thing? Basically you can be a great surgeon and religious, but you can't be a great evolutionary biologist and a creationist (at least not without some serious blinders). If I'm talking to a doctor that's a creationist and they're skeptical about a vaccine - my prior would be that it's more likely this doctor was corrupted by anti-vaxx pseudoscience woo than has an accurate model of the vaccine's risk. I'd want to talk to someone who I know doesn't have a core example of corrupted reasoning.
  - AuthorizedCust 6y ago

analog31 6y ago

That's fair, but to play devils advocate, every sect can point the finger at some other sect, or at heretics within their own sect. No sect will agree to any negative critique, and because their doctrines tend to be self consistent, critique is pointless anyway. Yet the sects are not completely separate, but are collusive to some degree. And individual beliefs may be a mishmash of ideas from multiple sects. Indeed for this reason, the divisions between sects are not hard edged. American fundamentalism would have no political power without the tacit consent of the mainstream. The predominant sects in my state are mainline, yet they voted en masse to outlaw gay marriage (before the US supreme court ruled otherwise).

JeremyNT 6y ago

The beauty of protestantism is that there is no ultimate arbiter to decide that one sect is "good" or "bad." You view certain fundamentalists' interpretation as somehow "bad?" So what? They probably view your sect as being equally degenerate. What gives you standing to cast this judgment? The framework of Protestantism allows and accounts for these divergent views. So you really can't throw down the "no true Scotsman" fallacy against those sects you disagree with in its broader defense.

gspr 6y ago

Even without the hate, isn't it harmful to indoctrinate children into believing in fantasy? Sure, adding hate makes it far worse, but one fantasy god with a fantasy origin story and fantastical powers is one too many.

clairity 6y ago

it also depends on the church and with time. the southern baptist church i went to when young didn't have much if any extreme fundamentalism. the one i attended for a bit as a teenager (not by choice) was a little more fundamentalist, but not extreme. i stopped going to church after that. but really, teasing apart the strains doesn't matter in the long run. our gods are changing, just as they always have.

frogpelt 6y ago

Jesus drove people out of the temple with a whip for disrespecting it. He called people (these are all based on KJV translation) "generation of vipers", "hypocrites", "whited sepulchres full of dead men's bones", he said it would be better some people to not have been born, that it would be better for some to have a millstone hanged on their neck and be drowned in the sea. None of that was hatred. It was love. He was dealing with people's religious and moral failings. It is not love to tell people they are okay when they are morally bankrupt.

Trasmatta 6y ago
In that case, I will show love by saying that many religions are morally bankrupt.

gaoshan 6y ago

Grew up Protestant and rejected it because of the hypocrisy I saw around me. I saw "good church going people" who I knew were not good people and I saw how they were able to use the authority of their positions to exert influence. I also found that asking too many inconvenient questions in youth group meetings led to uncomfortable situations. It became clear that the religion part of things had little to no impact on how good, bad or decent the people practicing it were. People were good or bad, religious people simply had a metaphysical framework they could use to excuse themselves... and the bad ones would do just this. Led me to reject confirmation and leave altogether. Now it's been 40 years and I am more convinced than ever that I made the correct decision. Religion is fundamentally flawed as I see it practiced around me and needs to be kept out of civil society strictly and completely. You want to practice it in your home or church? Go for it. You want to inject it into civil society (schools, government, etc)... you need to be stopped utterly and completely.

AuthorizedCust 6y ago
Just curious: which denomination were you?
- gaoshan 6y ago
  Generic Presbyterian. The vanilla ice cream of religions.
  - prophesi 6y ago
    Do you know if it was PC USA (which is more mainline) or PCA (which is more evangelical/fundamentalist)? It's actually a pretty huge split in that denomination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestantism_in_the_United_States#Mainline_vs._evangelical https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestantism_in_the_United_St...
    - gaoshan 6y ago
      This was PC USA.

tootie 6y ago

Fundamentalism is corrosive and detrimental to society. I don't get angry at moderate religious views but I still think they're laughable superstition. I respect your right as a human to believe I just think it's silly.

gbrown 6y ago

I think you're missing the bitterness that comes from growing up with a set of coping mechanisms and losing them. Moderate Christianity, taught by moral and good people, nevertheless can lead one to use the thought of eternal life as a psychological coping mechanism to deal with the reality of death and suffering in the world. If you eventually lose your ability to believe in that (which is involuntary for many), it can be quite painful.

Spooky23 6y ago

I had a similar experience as a Catholic in the northeast. Lately as the politics of old people and loud young people have tilted right-wing, and more extreme philosophy is accepted, it’s disturbing how the theology has followed the money. I probably sound like a simpleton here, but I’ve always found religion to be a source of peace and solace and a positive influence. Some of that is a result of ignoring teachings that are more... noxious to me personally or focusing away from behavior of the human agents of the church. Unfortunately, cycles of religious fundamentalism is a feature of the American body politic.

loceng 6y ago

Seeing those same comments in this thread reminded me of something Jordan Peterson questions: with this decline of religious-based narratives for guidelines, what is replacing it?

fullstop 6y ago

I was raised Roman Catholic and attended Catholic schools until college. When I was in high school I recall having serious issues with what they were teaching. Here's a few of the gems they left me with: 1. You should only get married if you intended on having children. 2. If you were unable to have children, the marriage should be annulled. 3. Homosexuality was abhorrent and sinful. 4. Women should not obtain positions of power in the church. They used Adam and Eve to justify their position. Many years later I found out that the reason why my freshman year biology teacher left unexpectedly over the summer was because he had been shuffled to another location after molesting young boys. He was eventually imprisoned for this, after being extradited to Australia. The church and the school knew this but said nothing to the parents or the students and it was swept under the rug. It was complete silence until they were forced to say something at a point where those who were molested were fairly far into their lives. Thinking back on all of this still makes me angry today. A priest in my elementary school was brought in and then quietly and suddenly left a few months later and I am left with unanswered questions. I don't need that in my life. I don't need religion to be a moral person, and from my point of view the system that I was raised in was very far from moral. The Catholic church has done more to affirm my Atheist .. non-beliefs? .. than anything else.

philsnow 6y ago
> If you were unable to have children, the marriage should be annulled. This depends on a lot of things. If two people get married, and one of them already knows that they are sterile or for whatever reason cannot have children, but they don't reveal that to the other until after they are married, that is grounds for the other person to seek an annulment. This is not the same thing as saying that the marriage "should" be annulled. If on the other hand, knowledge of the person's sterility doesn't arise until after they are married, I don't think that's grounds for an annulment.
- fullstop 6y ago
  No, this was "if you can not conceive children you should be single." It wasn't about being hiding things from your spouse or anything like that.

Breza 6y ago

It's so refreshing to see somebody who has had a similar experience to my own. I've never been a member of a church like the ones that people describe in a lot of the comments. We focus on devotion to God and improving the earth. For example, here's how we marked our church's 100th birthday: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/on-its-100th-birthday-a-church-repents-for-its-racist-founders/2017/10/08/55ae11b6-ac5d-11e7-a908-a3470754bbb9_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/on-its-100th-birthday-a...