13 ms·

Meanwhile religiosity is going nowhere: repetition of mantras, hostility towards science that doesn’t support preconceptions, shaming and shunning of outgroups,

by jl6 5y ago

Meanwhile religiosity is going nowhere: repetition of mantras, hostility towards science that doesn’t support preconceptions, shaming and shunning of outgroups, tribal loyalty, purity purges, supplication before power, confession of sins, forbidden words, tolerance of incoherence… these are all distinctly religious behaviors that seem to be living on happily without the need for the traditional religions that used to host them.

bko 5y ago
I've heard the difference between ideology and religion is that religion asks you to make personal sacrifices, while ideology asks everyone else to make sacrifices for you. We have a lot of people that adhere to an ideology over religion > tolerance of incoherence Do you really think we're living in an overly tolerant society?
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  No need for oversimplifications. Plenty of very popular religions call for taking from others, by divine 'right' or to distribute divine justice.
  - throwawaygal7 5y ago
    I'm trying to think of examples, for instance is this a main theme in any Eastern religions? Islam? I guess you could kinda say that about the conquest of the Holy land in the Old Testament, but I think that's a specific case not a general principle of taking from others by divine right. What examples were you thinking of?
    - trasz 5y ago
      It's certainly the case in Christianity; see all kinds of morally-repulsive rules (discrimination against LGBT, abortion bans) enforced on non-believers by Church-sponsored state laws.
    - paulryanrogers 5y ago
      Religion doesn't need a "main theme" to oppress or harm. Only a few verses explicitly oppress women in the Christian scriptures, yet for centuries and still today people propagate the meme that women shouldn't teach men, or speak in assemblies. As for divine violence all the abrahamic religions have been involved in force land grabs and killing rule breakers or non-believers.
jlawson 5y ago
[flagged]
wombatmobile 5y ago
Those are social behaviours. Isn't religiosity also (primarily?) a personal experience, founded on a form of (learned) introspection?
- x3n0ph3n3 5y ago
  Don't confuse "religiosity" with "spiritualism". I think you've described the latter.
- jltsiren 5y ago
  Religion is primarily about shared belief, shared rituals, and shared culture. Traditionally, it was difficult to draw a hard line between religion and the rest of the society. Someone who rejected the prevailing religion also rejected the society, which is why people found it difficult to tolerate. The emphasis on personal aspects of religion in the recent centuries is mostly due to Protestantism, which values personal faith above all else.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
LightHugger 5y ago
Are they religious behaviors, or just human behaviors that religions were taking advantage of? Human behavior is possible, but difficult to shape on the individual level. There's much more inertia at larger scales and if these are things that should change, it will be very difficult.
- mokus 5y ago
  I feel it’s even more accurate to say they are human behaviors that take advantage of religion (or any other available power structure). In a world dominated by religion they take religious form. If we remove religion from power or power from religion, they will take whatever form allows them to thrive in the new system.
  - smabie 5y ago
    Exactly, these behaviors are memetic and allow a group to continue to exist: groups without some or all of these features certainly exist but don't have the robustness or cohesion to keep themselves together for 100s or 1000s of years. Religion groups have done a very good job at fulfilling their primary purpose: to continue to exist (this purpose is not unique to religions, as continued existence is the purpose of all groups whether they accept it or not)
- colechristensen 5y ago
  Religion is a human behavior, all of those things (and others) tend to organize themselves into religions. Lots of people are just in a primitive religion phase having left a rather organized one and formed various disorganized group behaviors which should eventually evolve into a set of new religions (which might well look a lot different than things we currently understand as religion just as monotheism looks a lot different than polytheism)
- MisterBastahrd 5y ago
  Both? Take the topic of abortion. Catholics have always been against it. Southern Baptists and evangelicals were largely either indifferent or in favor of it being rare but legal until the mid 1970s when the Heritage Foundation lumped it in with a group of other things they sold as "moral issues" in an attempt to sway religious groups on economic issues. Now, given that we're talking about the South here, what issue do you think would be considered a moral issue by a majority white Southern population of that era? If you guessed segregation, give yourself a pat on the back. While the fight for segregation has largely been lost by conservatives, they took that emotional energy and kept it going with abortion and laissez-faire capitalism, basically creating an entire ideological framework from the ground up and "discovering" Biblical support for their positions. Today, evangelicals and southern baptists are steadfast in their opposition to abortion. But Roe was a Southern Baptist, and so was her lawyer, and as the article below shows (with two articles from the era of Roe embedded), https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevin-wax/baptist-press-initial-reporting-on-roe-v-wade/ https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevin-wax/baptist-... that was anything but "biblically settled" doctrine at the time. Funny how we went 1900+ years and abortion only became an issue in an attempt to exclude a group.
trees101 5y ago
I think of religion's relationship to humanity, in terms of the OSI model for networking. By this analogy, you might consider religion to be questions concerning the Application layer, the layer that 99% of people actively care about. All the rest of the human OSI stack below the surface is transparent to us, e.g. 99% of people don't care about bits and bytes in the same way they don't know the ordering of the bases on their DNA. A data packet from a streaming movie is meaningless when you look at the 1's and 0's going over a wire. You have to step back and impose a framework of understanding, protocols and specifications that exist outside of the computer itself, before you can watch the movie. An atheist transistor could never be given "proof" that a movie exists using a sequence of bits. The concept of "movie" exists outside of the world of binary. Religion is to humanity what protocols and specifications are to a stream of binary data. This is frustrating to the types who consider themselves to be rational and fact based, because by definition it cannot be proven within the system. The difficulty for the hard nosed atheist is that all of the most important human questions, including their desire to convert us all to atheists, cannot be accounted for in their reductionist framework. This is usually dealt with by simply ignoring the dissonance. What you call "religiosity" I would call fundamentalism, and it is a natural human phenomenon which will manifest no matter what the professed religion or non religion of a person. Human concern about the ultimate questions of life will not go away no matter what religion we ascribe to ourselves. The good thing about formal religion like Christianity, is that it incorporates thousands of years of debates by some of the best minds about these issues. Throwing it away and making these questions ad-hoc or even worse, subconscious, is asking for the serious consequences you alluded to in your comment.
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  > The good thing about formal religion like Christianity, is that it incorporates thousands of years of debates by some of the best minds about these issues. And what has humanity gained from all their efforts? Having been raised in a formal religion I'd say nothing was gained and thousands of human years wasted. Years that could have explored more fruitful endeavors or even just lived with less persecution and suffering.
  - 5y ago
willcipriano 5y ago
Similarly I feel the same way about the atheist movement, and I say this as a atheist who had on occasion corresponded with Christopher Hitchens. It is more anti-religion than pro-free-thought as I felt it was in my youth. Science appears to be growing it's own clergy, demanding deference as opposed to encouraging debate. When we first attempted to find truth in the world, the truth seekers called themselves philosophers. Once philosophy had become polluted with Platonism, the more Aristotelian thinkers were driven to science. I think one day science will be left behind in the same way and seekers of truth will go elsewhere.
- medvezhenok 5y ago
  Rationalism is the new philosophy :)
- beambot 5y ago
  I assume Christopher Hitchens is someone of note within some atheist circles(?), but regardless: name dropping for credibility by association in the same paragraph as lamenting "thought clergy" is ironic.
  - willcipriano 5y ago
    I would describe him as a militant antitheist, but he was a product of a different time. Things like teaching evolution in schools wasn't a given. Proper sex education was rare, abstinence only was more typical. State governments would routinely justify choices with biblical verses. They had mandatory prayer in some public schools. Gay people weren't allowed to get married. We needed to fight back against a religious power structure that was visible in media and government. Great news, we won! While all of those issues aren't resolved perfectly, they are largely solved. Religious leaders just don't have the clout they did twenty years ago. Nobody cares what the Pope says. It's over, or will be over soon. Now, in my opinion, atheists should choose to be gracious winners. We should attempt to find common ground with the religious, and agree to disagree where we can. We don't need to turn into the monster that we have just slain and put our boot on their neck. Revenge stories like that are best left in the old testament.
willob33 5y ago
Neuroscience models this at least in part as a limbic-cortex feedback loop. The words may have faded but years of recitation, embedded childhood memory, muscle memory; it’ll take time to rinse out. Bonobo tribes have killed their alphas and developed egalitarian social ways. I sometimes wonder if we have to figuratively end billionaires to end the abstract model of hierarchy. He who is highest on the wealth leader board controls agency like priests of old.
biophysboy 5y ago
On this point, I would highly recommend "Strange Rites" by Tara Burton. She makes the case that people who "leave" religion are often just "remixing" the religion they were raised in, incorporating a weird mishmash of spiritual feeling and secular ideologies/subcultures. For example, libertarians have their biohacking and dreams of immortality, progressives have their pagan fandoms & self-care, and conservatives have, as she puts bluntly, reactionary atavism.
rayiner 5y ago
Relevant: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/books/review/john-mcwhorter-woke-racism.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/books/review/john-mcwhort... At least Christianity has a track record you can judge, for better or worse, and some notion of redemption.
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  Christianity's redemption only costs self denial, hating loved ones (at least relative to the unprovable god), and possibly your natural desires--if they happen to fall outside the biblical norms.
  - rayiner 5y ago
    Christianity doesn't require you to hate anyone. And any moral framework worth it's salt will require self denial and rejecting your natural desires. Being from Bangladesh I like to think of the counterfactual where you run a village according to hedonist atheist american culture. Everyone would quickly die of starvation.
    - paulryanrogers 5y ago
      Luke 14:26 says one must hate family and friends in comparison to their love for an imaginary being. Plenty of atheists are well fed and happy.
  - trees101 5y ago
    Any stable human being has some kind of framework whereby they don't just live to please every desire as soon as it pops us. The closest thing we see to immediate self gratification is the drug addict under the bridge. There is nothing wrong with having a set of norms and using them to regulate desire. It also pays to think about the word "natural" and all that it implies. our desires are not simply rational thoughts that independently arrive in our minds - look at the different objects of desire among different cultures. There is no untouchable "natural" desire that is so holy that it should be off limits to regulation. Religion shouldn't be criticised simply for having a framework for moderating response to desire, and because it offends some sacred cow of "natural" desire.
shiohime 5y ago
I'm not overly religious but am Christian, and feel like many these behaviors you're describing are also shown by ardent atheists. I feel like the key to many problems lies in moderation and in general not harassing people instead of being a zealot for your personal beliefs.

by jl6 5y ago

bko 5y ago

I've heard the difference between ideology and religion is that religion asks you to make personal sacrifices, while ideology asks everyone else to make sacrifices for you. We have a lot of people that adhere to an ideology over religion > tolerance of incoherence Do you really think we're living in an overly tolerant society?

paulryanrogers 5y ago
No need for oversimplifications. Plenty of very popular religions call for taking from others, by divine 'right' or to distribute divine justice.
- throwawaygal7 5y ago
  I'm trying to think of examples, for instance is this a main theme in any Eastern religions? Islam? I guess you could kinda say that about the conquest of the Holy land in the Old Testament, but I think that's a specific case not a general principle of taking from others by divine right. What examples were you thinking of?
  - trasz 5y ago
    It's certainly the case in Christianity; see all kinds of morally-repulsive rules (discrimination against LGBT, abortion bans) enforced on non-believers by Church-sponsored state laws.
  - paulryanrogers 5y ago
    Religion doesn't need a "main theme" to oppress or harm. Only a few verses explicitly oppress women in the Christian scriptures, yet for centuries and still today people propagate the meme that women shouldn't teach men, or speak in assemblies. As for divine violence all the abrahamic religions have been involved in force land grabs and killing rule breakers or non-believers.

jlawson 5y ago

[flagged]

wombatmobile 5y ago

Those are social behaviours. Isn't religiosity also (primarily?) a personal experience, founded on a form of (learned) introspection?

x3n0ph3n3 5y ago
Don't confuse "religiosity" with "spiritualism". I think you've described the latter.
jltsiren 5y ago
Religion is primarily about shared belief, shared rituals, and shared culture. Traditionally, it was difficult to draw a hard line between religion and the rest of the society. Someone who rejected the prevailing religion also rejected the society, which is why people found it difficult to tolerate. The emphasis on personal aspects of religion in the recent centuries is mostly due to Protestantism, which values personal faith above all else.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

LightHugger 5y ago

Are they religious behaviors, or just human behaviors that religions were taking advantage of? Human behavior is possible, but difficult to shape on the individual level. There's much more inertia at larger scales and if these are things that should change, it will be very difficult.

mokus 5y ago
I feel it’s even more accurate to say they are human behaviors that take advantage of religion (or any other available power structure). In a world dominated by religion they take religious form. If we remove religion from power or power from religion, they will take whatever form allows them to thrive in the new system.
- smabie 5y ago
  Exactly, these behaviors are memetic and allow a group to continue to exist: groups without some or all of these features certainly exist but don't have the robustness or cohesion to keep themselves together for 100s or 1000s of years. Religion groups have done a very good job at fulfilling their primary purpose: to continue to exist (this purpose is not unique to religions, as continued existence is the purpose of all groups whether they accept it or not)
colechristensen 5y ago
Religion is a human behavior, all of those things (and others) tend to organize themselves into religions. Lots of people are just in a primitive religion phase having left a rather organized one and formed various disorganized group behaviors which should eventually evolve into a set of new religions (which might well look a lot different than things we currently understand as religion just as monotheism looks a lot different than polytheism)
MisterBastahrd 5y ago
Both? Take the topic of abortion. Catholics have always been against it. Southern Baptists and evangelicals were largely either indifferent or in favor of it being rare but legal until the mid 1970s when the Heritage Foundation lumped it in with a group of other things they sold as "moral issues" in an attempt to sway religious groups on economic issues. Now, given that we're talking about the South here, what issue do you think would be considered a moral issue by a majority white Southern population of that era? If you guessed segregation, give yourself a pat on the back. While the fight for segregation has largely been lost by conservatives, they took that emotional energy and kept it going with abortion and laissez-faire capitalism, basically creating an entire ideological framework from the ground up and "discovering" Biblical support for their positions. Today, evangelicals and southern baptists are steadfast in their opposition to abortion. But Roe was a Southern Baptist, and so was her lawyer, and as the article below shows (with two articles from the era of Roe embedded), https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevin-wax/baptist-press-initial-reporting-on-roe-v-wade/ https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevin-wax/baptist-... that was anything but "biblically settled" doctrine at the time. Funny how we went 1900+ years and abortion only became an issue in an attempt to exclude a group.

trees101 5y ago

I think of religion's relationship to humanity, in terms of the OSI model for networking. By this analogy, you might consider religion to be questions concerning the Application layer, the layer that 99% of people actively care about. All the rest of the human OSI stack below the surface is transparent to us, e.g. 99% of people don't care about bits and bytes in the same way they don't know the ordering of the bases on their DNA. A data packet from a streaming movie is meaningless when you look at the 1's and 0's going over a wire. You have to step back and impose a framework of understanding, protocols and specifications that exist outside of the computer itself, before you can watch the movie. An atheist transistor could never be given "proof" that a movie exists using a sequence of bits. The concept of "movie" exists outside of the world of binary. Religion is to humanity what protocols and specifications are to a stream of binary data. This is frustrating to the types who consider themselves to be rational and fact based, because by definition it cannot be proven within the system. The difficulty for the hard nosed atheist is that all of the most important human questions, including their desire to convert us all to atheists, cannot be accounted for in their reductionist framework. This is usually dealt with by simply ignoring the dissonance. What you call "religiosity" I would call fundamentalism, and it is a natural human phenomenon which will manifest no matter what the professed religion or non religion of a person. Human concern about the ultimate questions of life will not go away no matter what religion we ascribe to ourselves. The good thing about formal religion like Christianity, is that it incorporates thousands of years of debates by some of the best minds about these issues. Throwing it away and making these questions ad-hoc or even worse, subconscious, is asking for the serious consequences you alluded to in your comment.

paulryanrogers 5y ago
> The good thing about formal religion like Christianity, is that it incorporates thousands of years of debates by some of the best minds about these issues. And what has humanity gained from all their efforts? Having been raised in a formal religion I'd say nothing was gained and thousands of human years wasted. Years that could have explored more fruitful endeavors or even just lived with less persecution and suffering.
- 5y ago

willcipriano 5y ago

Similarly I feel the same way about the atheist movement, and I say this as a atheist who had on occasion corresponded with Christopher Hitchens. It is more anti-religion than pro-free-thought as I felt it was in my youth. Science appears to be growing it's own clergy, demanding deference as opposed to encouraging debate. When we first attempted to find truth in the world, the truth seekers called themselves philosophers. Once philosophy had become polluted with Platonism, the more Aristotelian thinkers were driven to science. I think one day science will be left behind in the same way and seekers of truth will go elsewhere.

medvezhenok 5y ago
Rationalism is the new philosophy :)
beambot 5y ago
I assume Christopher Hitchens is someone of note within some atheist circles(?), but regardless: name dropping for credibility by association in the same paragraph as lamenting "thought clergy" is ironic.
- willcipriano 5y ago
  I would describe him as a militant antitheist, but he was a product of a different time. Things like teaching evolution in schools wasn't a given. Proper sex education was rare, abstinence only was more typical. State governments would routinely justify choices with biblical verses. They had mandatory prayer in some public schools. Gay people weren't allowed to get married. We needed to fight back against a religious power structure that was visible in media and government. Great news, we won! While all of those issues aren't resolved perfectly, they are largely solved. Religious leaders just don't have the clout they did twenty years ago. Nobody cares what the Pope says. It's over, or will be over soon. Now, in my opinion, atheists should choose to be gracious winners. We should attempt to find common ground with the religious, and agree to disagree where we can. We don't need to turn into the monster that we have just slain and put our boot on their neck. Revenge stories like that are best left in the old testament.

willob33 5y ago

Neuroscience models this at least in part as a limbic-cortex feedback loop. The words may have faded but years of recitation, embedded childhood memory, muscle memory; it’ll take time to rinse out. Bonobo tribes have killed their alphas and developed egalitarian social ways. I sometimes wonder if we have to figuratively end billionaires to end the abstract model of hierarchy. He who is highest on the wealth leader board controls agency like priests of old.

biophysboy 5y ago

On this point, I would highly recommend "Strange Rites" by Tara Burton. She makes the case that people who "leave" religion are often just "remixing" the religion they were raised in, incorporating a weird mishmash of spiritual feeling and secular ideologies/subcultures. For example, libertarians have their biohacking and dreams of immortality, progressives have their pagan fandoms & self-care, and conservatives have, as she puts bluntly, reactionary atavism.

rayiner 5y ago

Relevant: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/books/review/john-mcwhorter-woke-racism.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/books/review/john-mcwhort... At least Christianity has a track record you can judge, for better or worse, and some notion of redemption.

paulryanrogers 5y ago
Christianity's redemption only costs self denial, hating loved ones (at least relative to the unprovable god), and possibly your natural desires--if they happen to fall outside the biblical norms.
- rayiner 5y ago
  Christianity doesn't require you to hate anyone. And any moral framework worth it's salt will require self denial and rejecting your natural desires. Being from Bangladesh I like to think of the counterfactual where you run a village according to hedonist atheist american culture. Everyone would quickly die of starvation.
  - paulryanrogers 5y ago
    Luke 14:26 says one must hate family and friends in comparison to their love for an imaginary being. Plenty of atheists are well fed and happy.
- trees101 5y ago
  Any stable human being has some kind of framework whereby they don't just live to please every desire as soon as it pops us. The closest thing we see to immediate self gratification is the drug addict under the bridge. There is nothing wrong with having a set of norms and using them to regulate desire. It also pays to think about the word "natural" and all that it implies. our desires are not simply rational thoughts that independently arrive in our minds - look at the different objects of desire among different cultures. There is no untouchable "natural" desire that is so holy that it should be off limits to regulation. Religion shouldn't be criticised simply for having a framework for moderating response to desire, and because it offends some sacred cow of "natural" desire.

shiohime 5y ago

I'm not overly religious but am Christian, and feel like many these behaviors you're describing are also shown by ardent atheists. I feel like the key to many problems lies in moderation and in general not harassing people instead of being a zealot for your personal beliefs.