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I used to assume the religious people were missing something and missing out on the latest and greatest. Now I am seeing that often it's us the non-religious t

I used to assume the religious people were missing something and missing out on the latest and greatest. Now I am seeing that often it's us the non-religious that have lost something of value and are trying to replace it with things that don't work as well.

hbn 4y ago
I was raised in a Christian community and went to a private Christian school all the way until graduation, though really stopped believing all the stuff by 11th grade or so. And it's wild the parallels I see between the modern political climate and religion. It really seems that in the process of masses leaving the church, they've gone on to adopt the exact same behaviors but worshipping other things - government, advertising, virtue signalling to show you're the most "on board" with the movement. They've wrapped around to enforcing censorship of art and being against free speech just like the Christians did when they were in charge. But I recall most people in the actual church at least had some form of a community, and many seemed happy and selfless. This modern church that pretends it isn't a church only breeds toxicity, selfishness, vitriol, and depression. Everyone is holding each other hostage, knowing that if anyone steps out of line and questions the status quo they'll be burned in the village square as an example to whoever might do it next. The actual church community I was in was more accepting in almost all regards than this new system. I honestly wish a lot of these people would just find a normal religion. It's way easier to get along with normal religious people than the types people being getting hooked on these new systems of thought.
- lelanthran 4y ago
  Meet the new Puritans, same as the old Puritans.
- alphabettsy 4y ago
  > It really seems that in the process of masses leaving the church, they've gone on to adopt the exact same behaviors but worshipping other things - government, advertising, virtue signalling to show you're the most "on board" with the movement. I think that's because these things aren't from church, they're part of human nature. One of the churches I went to as a child was toxic, the other wasn't. The religious community isn't immune to human nature. 50-60 years ago the country was much more religious and you’d encounter people saying they’d never let their child marry a democrat and vice-versa according to my grandparents. To them, things are mostly better and what we have is the appearance of greater division.
  - titzer 4y ago
    > 50-60 years ago the country was much more religious I think religion adapts and changes; religion was more mainstream, less toxic, and uniform than it is now. The median person is probably less religious (in terms of sticking to an established religion) but the upper 1/3 of the spectrum is more religious, in that they believe more extreme things, with less evidence, and are less likely to compromise. The past 40 years of the evangelical movement, which has been coopted by the conservative movement, has been extremely polarizing.
    - petsfed 4y ago
      I'm not sure that it was any less toxic, just that the background level of toxicity has decreased. My mother clearly remembers being called out in front of her church for the unforgivable sin of attending a school dance, and that was in the mid-60s. Don't forget why the Southern Baptists broke away from the Baptists.
      - hprotagonist 4y ago
        just grinning a little at the phrase "breaking away from the baptists" : really, what's to break away from? It's a denomination primarily defined by everyone being a schismatic from everyone else.
  - hprotagonist 4y ago
    > 50-60 years ago the country was much more religious and 100 years ago, much less! at most 40% of the US regularly attended church services in the 1910s.
    - adrianmonk 4y ago
      Could some of that be due to the shift from a rural to urban society? If getting to church requires taking a horse and buggy 10 miles down dirt roads, then most weeks you might have a DIY religious observance at home on the farm instead. If you live in a town where you can walk to a neighborhood church, you're probably more likely to make it a regular habit.
- lockhouse 4y ago
  Spot on! Science that can’t be questioned isn’t science it’s dogma. The whole Dr. Fauci worship culture and “trust the science” that emerged during the pandemic felt way too much like a religious cult.
- scns 4y ago
  Tribalism is at the core of our species i think. With metaphysical "explanations" or scientific ones.
- hprotagonist 4y ago
  > It really seems that in the process of masses leaving the church, they've gone on to adopt the exact same behaviors but worshipping other things - government, advertising, virtue signalling to show you're the most "on board" with the movement. People serve these idols, and many others, to give meaning to their lives, to justify their existence. They are afraid of death--that is, not only physical death but everything which does or seems to militate against life: alienation, lack of identity, frustration, pain, meaninglessness. And so they grasp, as it were, after aspects of life which seem to promise freedom from some form of death, and serve them as idols. But what they are really serving is death, for the fear of death is the power behind all idolatry. And yet, as we have seen, idolatry can only lead to death in one form or another, to violence and dehumanization and also to the degradation or destruction of what is idolized. It is a distinctive mark of the biblical mind to discern that human history is a drama of death and resurrection and not, as religionists of all sorts suppose, a simplistic conflict of evil vs. good in an abstract sense. For what is "good" is, basically, what is good for man and creation--in other words, what is life-giving, life-preserving, life-perfecting. God, the Living One, is the author of life, he is on the side of life...That which is truly evil is that which thwarts life. And sin is any denial or rejection of the gift of life; an offense against God who bestows the gift. But the wages of sin is death, not by some arbitrary decree on God's part, but because sin by its nature is possessed of death, anti-life, death-dealing, both to the sinner and in the various kinds of death it occasions in the world. You're probably in the right head space to appreciate "Impostors of God: Inquiries Into Favorite Idols" by William Stringfellow (1969). Cryptonomicon is another good one, though far less prophetic/scholarly: To translate it into UNIX system administration terms (Randy's fundamental metaphor for just about everything), the post modern, politically correct atheists were like people who had suddenly found themselves in charge of a big and unfathomably complex computer system (viz, society) with no documentation or instructions of any kind, and so whose only way to keep the thing running was to invent and enforce certain rules with a kind of neo-Puritanical rigor, because they were at a loss to deal with any deviations from what they saw as the norm. Whereas people who were wired into a church were like UNIX system administrators who, while they might not understand everything, at least had some documentation, some FAQs and How tos and README files, providing some guidance on what to do when things got out of whack. They were, in other words, capable of displaying adaptability.
- pjc50 4y ago
  A certain amount of this conformism is human nature .. but a lot of people, especially anyone queer, was rejected by the church rather than left. I suspect you're not seeing this because you're not in the reject category. The failure mode of churches (and, yes, some of the more optimistic commune arrangements) is toxic positivity: everything is great, and anyone who doesn't agree is going to be dealt with. This makes it extremely difficult to report when someone has been raping adults or children.
- Lewton 4y ago
  This has way more to do with the kind of person who leans areligious in a religious society than being areligious itself. In a religious society, most normal people will be religious In more atheistic countries, the religious people are the ones that are harder to get along with, as normal people are a lot less religious.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  No only are people worshiping dishonest politicians, but since radical people don't abandon their ideas, the churches have gone through a selection process where all but the most radical of them weakened. We have lost something very important on the conversion of our society to laic values. We have gained very important things too, so I don't think the best correction is to reverse anything, but we have some work to do on those things that we lost.
- FredPret 4y ago
  I think the cat's out of the bag - there's no sky friend looking out for us. There's no going back now for most people. This has been replaced by ersatz religions, but I think we should start explicitly worshipping the concept of civilization and progress. From a certain point of view, civilization is a cybernetic organism that encompasses all of us and gives us all sorts of neat things.
  - titzer 4y ago
    > replaced by ersatz religions There's no doubt about that. Humans have a very strong religious bent that is bred into us by evolution selecting for motivated, tenacious people who fight to survive but whose brains can't stop patterning-matching, perceiving threats and agency behind things, and performing rituals. Not to mention, organizing around common beliefs. Without various sky-friend myths, we organize around other myths. Thankfully we have good science now, but that's unfortunately often less sexy (and more difficult) than pseudo-science and fads.
  - svieira 4y ago
    > I think we should start explicitly worshipping the concept of civilization and progress Isn't this exactly what the French Revolution's first wave, the Nazis, the Soviets, and the Maoists all did? Or are you suggesting something more explicitly Hegelian like the religion of "The sign of the T" from Brave New World (though that religion was focused on production not transformation)?
    - sovietswag 4y ago
      An interesting idea from the Soviet Union: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/God-Building https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/God-Building
  - svieira 4y ago
    "Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turn, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man." ~ C. S. Lewis
- tastyfreeze 4y ago
  You might like Jordan Peterson's podcast. He talks often about the human need to believe in something outside of ourselves. This need can be satisfied by many things, not all of them good. Dennis Prager is pretty good on this front too. But, he thinks that religion is a necessity for a happy life. I don't follow any faith. There are too many religions for any one to be "correct". But I do see religion as a good moral guide, particularly in times of hardship.
  - alphabettsy 4y ago
    I personally wouldn’t recommend listening to either of these guys. Peterson at least attempts to offer balanced. Prager is a religious quack.
    - tastyfreeze 4y ago
      Just because somebody believes in a religion doesn't mean they have nothing to teach you. As far as I can tell through the internet, both are good honest people. I don't think that it is an overstatement to say that Peterson alone has helped millions improve their lives through his books, talks, and interviews.
      - alphabettsy 4y ago
        Prager is no different from the Rush Limbaughs of the world. He’s another divisive conservative talking head fomenting the culture wars they need to stay relevant. Whether or not the changes many have made in their lives as a result of Peterson’s work are improvements is also debatable.
        tastyfreeze 4y ago
        I suppose the hundreds of people that have made a point to personally thank him for showing them a way to improve their lives are just lieing about his influence. /s
        4y ago
- watwut 4y ago
  Genuinely, you come across as someone who does not interact with non believers and have attitude about them shaped primary by hostile media. Starting from assumption that most people who left Christianity joined "movement" which seems to be mostly euphemism for culture war you are fully into.
- hooverd 4y ago
  What are "normal religious people"? I think religion is really being used as a stand-in for Christian here.
joemazerino 4y ago
Amen to that.
laura_g 4y ago
There are a lot of things religion provides that modern society is really dismal at providing: community, care, socialization across class/career lines, relationships with people who live near you, a support system for sick/hurting people, and other benefits The thing is, none of those are innately tied to religion. We've abandoned churches for what I feel are largely good reasons, but we haven't found something else to fill that void in community and care. We're more insular, more online, less of us know our neighbours or really have a stake in our community welfare in the same way. I don't think the solution is going back to religion.
- xyzelement 4y ago
  Thanks for the response - yes and no. I think you are right in that in theory you could have "all that stuff" sans religion. And in fact I think Atheism in the boomer generation benefited from cultural inertia - like, you could say you don't belong to a religion but still marry, have kids, participate in community etc simply because that's what everyone else (by the virtue of their religion) was doing around you. But today it seems like critical mass is elsewhere, and it seems like the religious folks now have a huge advantage over everyone else in terms of marriage, family formation, community and maybe even mental health. So while in theory it's possible, it seems like in practice all of those things declined among the non-religious, just perhaps with a lag of a generation. The reason I think it might make sense to reengage with religion is the crux of this question: does life have a point, a meaning, etc. Not even "what" the point is but does it exist at all. The idea that the universe is a total accident and nothing is relevant takes you in a certain direction in life and society, while the idea of "there's meaning and purpose" in another. I think it's hard to anchor your life in the value of meaning without logically accepting a creator of that meaning. So I think there's an element of faith - either you chose to believe there's meaning or you chose to believe there isn't, everything else is implied by that choice of belief.
- serverholic 4y ago
  I think you’re right. Religion isn’t the only answer, it’s just the answer that people are most familiar with.
ralmidani 4y ago
I was born into a Muslim family and have remained a Muslim my entire life, but I have had ups and downs in how observant I have been. I’ve had periods where I was less enthusiastic than my parents. On the flip side, I’ve flirted with extremism a few times and even started alienating my immediate family members. Now, over 40 years old, I feel like I’ve found the right balance: a strong relationship with God, without being seen as obnoxious or dangerous. It feels amazing both personally and when subtly sharing what I believe is the most important factor in having a happy, fulfilling life. Interestingly, Muslims believe most messengers began their missions at or around 40, so maybe everything before is “formative years”. The one known exception is Jesus Christ, whom we believe was raised to God at 33 but still has a huge role to play in shaping the world.
chasing 4y ago
Not all non-religious people suffer from some kind of spiritual or ethical deficiency. I get saddened when religious storytelling fills people with fairy tales and arbitrary hate and makes them incapable of seeing things about existence that are truly beautiful.
- username3 4y ago
  What are examples of things about existence that are truly beautiful?
  - Night_Thastus 4y ago
    Not the person who you replied to, however: I'm not sure exactly how to explain this, but the seemingly infinite level of "detail" or "texture" or "complexity" to our universe. No matter how small or large you go, there's always some patterns, some structures, some details to be seen. There's always some other perspective or way of grouping and organizing to reveal new information. The complexity is infinitely deep, wide and layered. Some of that I think is inherent, and some of it is what we create as living entities - which is a great privilege we enjoy. Take a white painted wall made of drywall. Relatively uninteresting most of the time. But the potential amount of information about it is almost infinite: * What are all the layers of construction needed to make it? * What did it cost? For every cent of that money, where did it eventually go? All of them can be tracked from its creation until the end of the currency. * What people designed the methods to construct it? What were their lives like, what led to them doing so? * What does the surface look like if you were to look at it at 10x, 100x, 10,000x, etc. scale? How does all of that structure change when it's under pressure? Or wet? Or on fire? Or crushed? Or at different temperatures? * What does it look like as molecules of air bounce off of it and it insulates the room? * What are its physical properties? What does it look like in all the different wavelengths of light? * What is it history, from the retrieval of the materials to its final destruction some time in the future? What is its eventual fate? Will it be destroyed to make room for a newer building? Or in a war? A natural disaster? * What people were near it? What were they doing and why? Office workers? Secretaries? Programmers? Nurses? Was it separating people who were friends or hated each other? * What's the history of the design of the pigment used on the wall? What previous pigments did it replace and why? * If you look at the pattern of bumps and valleys on the surface, does it match some existing pattern? What mathematical formula would most closely re-create the surface variations? What's the closest match to that pattern anywhere in the universe, at any scale? Maybe there's some sand on a beach or a cluster of stars that when viewed from just the right angle matches the pits and valleys on the wall. * What does the surface feel like? Not just for one person, but for all humans? If you were to take every single human who has ever lived and let them feel the wall, what would happen? Which ones would tell jokes? Which ones would remember something from their past? Which would have some interesting specialist perspective on it? Which ones would like it? Hate it? How would they all describe it? We only have access to a tiny fraction of that information. But it's all there! You could spend an eternity studying a single blade of grass and it's relation to everything else and all of the history. There's always some new abstraction or perspective or way to look at everything.
nerddadnear40 4y ago
Most of us suffer a kind of nihilism that mankind has never really faced before due to modern science. Materialistic understanding of the world has broken our ability to recognize patterns of being that were once obvious to our ancestors. They would find a modern atheist and fundamentalist equally blind in these areas as they saw the reality of the world much more alive and predictable over vast time periods than we do now and they had the language to understand it. John Vervaeke and the Pageau Brothers are working hard on this front. I'd highly recommend John's Meaning Crisis Videos, Mathieu Pageau's book on Cosmic Symbolism and Johnathan's educational videos. If you are new to this, it can be a bit mind bending, but it's duly needed in our time. https://www.meaningcrisis.co/all-transcripts/ https://www.meaningcrisis.co/all-transcripts/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIJuIN6kUcU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIJuIN6kUcU https://www.amazon.com/Language-Creation-Symbolism-Genesis-Commentary/dp/1981549331 https://www.amazon.com/Language-Creation-Symbolism-Genesis-C... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtmLCK1keFI&t=1874s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtmLCK1keFI&t=1874s
HDThoreaun 4y ago
I really wish I could be religious. I know that the community and meaning it provides would bring me a lot of happiness, I just can't look past it being untrue.
- Starwatcher2001 4y ago
  You might consider humanism. It provides purpose and community, without requiring a deity.
- acjohnson55 4y ago
  Unitarian Universalism is a church without dogma. Basically, people who generally believe there's a purpose to life, that nobody has any sort of monopoly on the truth, and that there's value to congregating.
psychomugs 4y ago
"There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness." - DFW Academic science resembles religion with its dogmas, nepotism, bureaucracies, and favor-currying shibboleths. Deep learning in particular is akin to modern alchemy [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7psGHgatGM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7psGHgatGM
- rubicon33 4y ago
  Everyone is always quick to tell you why you need to be religious, and I don’t even disagree with most of the reasons. What’s frustrating is nobody tells you how to reverse a life of agnosticism bordering on atheism, and suddenly be catholic,Buddhist,etc
  - DoingSomeThings 4y ago
    Further. Religion requires something to assent and belong to. That will always be a choice to some degree. As someone who is formerly deeply Christian and left for intellectual/theological reasons. I miss the communal binding of organized worship. But reversing or getting back to that place requires either 1) letting go of intellectual integrity, or 2) finding a group who is similarly interested in dispassionate community organizing without supernatural theology. The 1st has proven personally impossible. The 2nd seems very unlikely. All the attempts of secular church I have seen never pick up steam and trail off over time. Thus, the person who sees religious association as a broad good is left without a natural landing spot.
viggity 4y ago
You've discovered a (large) group of people who have torn down Chesterton's Fence without fully appreciating why it was there to begin with. Same with people who "smash the (patriarchy|capitalism)", they end up extremely discontent to realize that other things end up filling the vacuum and they're often worse, much worse. https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence
eatsyourtacos 4y ago
The real question is it better to lie to yourself and believe in something that is simply not true? Or to be true to yourself and deal with the loneliness that is existence. To me the choice to clear- be true to yourself. In that sense, organized religion has no place in this world.
- Rury 4y ago
  I think you're mistaking (along with many people including many religious people themselves), what religion's purpose actually is. IMO, religion isn't really about truth, or "there is an afterlife", or "there's a magical almighty person(s) out there". Rather, it's mostly just a bunch of advice, principles and curated wisdom passed down from generation and generation to help people live a happy, meaningful life. Like "you shall not kill", or "you shall not steal" or "treat your neighbor like you would yourself" - are arguably good principles to follow if you want to live in a peaceful society free from violence, as obeying these rules minimizes desire for anyone to have vengeance upon their neighbor. Or take Buddhism, which preaches that nirvana is absence of desire and craving, which shows that sometimes your own greed and ambitions can be the cause of your suffering, and by simply being grateful, can bring you happiness. In this sense, I think it's valuable and has a place in the world. I mean, are we alone in existence, and is death the end? I think so, but if it makes some people feel better thinking otherwise is possible, then what's wrong with letting them believe or put hope into that? So to me, religion isn't so much about "what is true and not true", but more rather: "here's some wisdom on how to lead an enjoyable life".
AlwaysRock 4y ago
Community is the main thing religious provides. But in exchange, you typically have to believe in some type of sky magician. It's too bad because I enjoyed the community aspect of religion growing up but never really was able to buy into the sky magician part.
vlunkr 4y ago
As a religious person who has deeply considered leaving it, I've never understood the arrogance of some atheists. For me it was disturbing to try to internalize the ideas that the universe is uncaring, that good and evil are made up, that your consciousness is basically like the contents of a stick of RAM that will vanish when it loses its power source. Even the original "God is dead" quotes from Nietzsche sound mournful, not arrogant. From what I understand he was trying to convey the same thing you are: that by turning away from religion, we are undoing many of the basic moral underpinnings of our culture. Now we have to rebuild them with something new, and quite obviously, people can't agree on one set of ideas.
- timeon 4y ago
  For me believing in omnipotent and good god seems arrogant as well. Is good that some people were born disabled?
  - vlunkr 4y ago
    Sure, anyone can be arrogant about anything, I'm just saying I don't understand it.
- 13415 4y ago
  Just like some atheists need to the corresponding lesson about theists, it's worth taking a step back and remind yourself that not everybody was raised in a religious way. Don't forget that to some of us religious stories contain nothing of particular interest or are similar to ancient fairy tales, and the history of various churches and religions is a mere part of the general human history of power struggles between elites in various countries. When you haven't been raised in religious ways, you feel no guilt about making blasphemous remarks and do not fear the wrath of supposed supernatural entities.
- The_Colonel 4y ago
  > For me it was disturbing to try to internalize the ideas that the universe is uncaring, that good and evil are made up, that your consciousness is basically like the contents of a stick of RAM that will vanish when it loses its power source. How is that arrogant? It seems humble to me to acknowledge that I as an individual and a society on the whole don't actually mean much.
spacedcowboy 4y ago
I don't think they're missing out. I just think they're deluded. It's not the worst thing in the world to be deluded - and frankly I just don't care what they do and say unless it starts to impact me and mine. It's not religion per se I dislike - people are free to live their lives as they see fit, it's the control-structure scam of an organized religion that reels in the gullible, the poor, the disadvantages, those who believe what they're being told. That is disgusting, IM(ns)HO. These megapastors (and even not-so-megapastors) bilking their flock to pay for the latest Learjet... I think they believe in religion as much as I do, tbh.
- ralmidani 4y ago
  You’re using the most extreme example to condemn essentially all organized religion. Many religious scholars and preachers live modest lives, sometimes even by choice. Of course “religious” folks who tell people they should simply endure, rather than resist, injustice and inequality are disgusting. But sometimes despite your best efforts, the bad guys still win (temporarily). Telling people that this life is not the end-all-be-all is only manipulative if it’s meant to make people passive. And I know that not everyone informs people about the afterlife out of malice.
- OJFord 4y ago
  I think you'll find many of them believe more in values than in what you're calling delusions in their own right.
karaterobot 4y ago
Same. I met so many religious people who were smarter, more widely read, and wiser than me that my childhood prejudices about them had to be drastically re-evaluated, even though my fundamental position on the existence of God is unchanged. Faith is now on an entirely separate axis from intelligence or wisdom for me.
- xyzelement 4y ago
  That's kinda my process as well. The next step was to be curious and ask those people - you are so smart how are you engaging with this thing that makes no sense to me at all. They may give an interesting perspective.
- acjohnson55 4y ago
  That's interesting to me because for me, it's kind of the opposite. I was deeply religious the first half of my life. But eventually, I found it was the non-religious people in my life who challenged me to grow. And I find that many of the most religious people I know are frustratingly limited in the things they're willing to learn and think, to things that don't significantly challenge the particular edifices of their faith. To be clear, this can be true of non-religious people, too.
drumttocs8 4y ago
Absolutely. I wish there was secular community that offered as much.

hbn 4y ago

I was raised in a Christian community and went to a private Christian school all the way until graduation, though really stopped believing all the stuff by 11th grade or so. And it's wild the parallels I see between the modern political climate and religion. It really seems that in the process of masses leaving the church, they've gone on to adopt the exact same behaviors but worshipping other things - government, advertising, virtue signalling to show you're the most "on board" with the movement. They've wrapped around to enforcing censorship of art and being against free speech just like the Christians did when they were in charge. But I recall most people in the actual church at least had some form of a community, and many seemed happy and selfless. This modern church that pretends it isn't a church only breeds toxicity, selfishness, vitriol, and depression. Everyone is holding each other hostage, knowing that if anyone steps out of line and questions the status quo they'll be burned in the village square as an example to whoever might do it next. The actual church community I was in was more accepting in almost all regards than this new system. I honestly wish a lot of these people would just find a normal religion. It's way easier to get along with normal religious people than the types people being getting hooked on these new systems of thought.

lelanthran 4y ago
Meet the new Puritans, same as the old Puritans.
alphabettsy 4y ago
> It really seems that in the process of masses leaving the church, they've gone on to adopt the exact same behaviors but worshipping other things - government, advertising, virtue signalling to show you're the most "on board" with the movement. I think that's because these things aren't from church, they're part of human nature. One of the churches I went to as a child was toxic, the other wasn't. The religious community isn't immune to human nature. 50-60 years ago the country was much more religious and you’d encounter people saying they’d never let their child marry a democrat and vice-versa according to my grandparents. To them, things are mostly better and what we have is the appearance of greater division.
- titzer 4y ago
  > 50-60 years ago the country was much more religious I think religion adapts and changes; religion was more mainstream, less toxic, and uniform than it is now. The median person is probably less religious (in terms of sticking to an established religion) but the upper 1/3 of the spectrum is more religious, in that they believe more extreme things, with less evidence, and are less likely to compromise. The past 40 years of the evangelical movement, which has been coopted by the conservative movement, has been extremely polarizing.
  - petsfed 4y ago
    I'm not sure that it was any less toxic, just that the background level of toxicity has decreased. My mother clearly remembers being called out in front of her church for the unforgivable sin of attending a school dance, and that was in the mid-60s. Don't forget why the Southern Baptists broke away from the Baptists.
    - hprotagonist 4y ago
      just grinning a little at the phrase "breaking away from the baptists" : really, what's to break away from? It's a denomination primarily defined by everyone being a schismatic from everyone else.
- hprotagonist 4y ago
  > 50-60 years ago the country was much more religious and 100 years ago, much less! at most 40% of the US regularly attended church services in the 1910s.
  - adrianmonk 4y ago
    Could some of that be due to the shift from a rural to urban society? If getting to church requires taking a horse and buggy 10 miles down dirt roads, then most weeks you might have a DIY religious observance at home on the farm instead. If you live in a town where you can walk to a neighborhood church, you're probably more likely to make it a regular habit.
lockhouse 4y ago
Spot on! Science that can’t be questioned isn’t science it’s dogma. The whole Dr. Fauci worship culture and “trust the science” that emerged during the pandemic felt way too much like a religious cult.
scns 4y ago
Tribalism is at the core of our species i think. With metaphysical "explanations" or scientific ones.
hprotagonist 4y ago
> It really seems that in the process of masses leaving the church, they've gone on to adopt the exact same behaviors but worshipping other things - government, advertising, virtue signalling to show you're the most "on board" with the movement. People serve these idols, and many others, to give meaning to their lives, to justify their existence. They are afraid of death--that is, not only physical death but everything which does or seems to militate against life: alienation, lack of identity, frustration, pain, meaninglessness. And so they grasp, as it were, after aspects of life which seem to promise freedom from some form of death, and serve them as idols. But what they are really serving is death, for the fear of death is the power behind all idolatry. And yet, as we have seen, idolatry can only lead to death in one form or another, to violence and dehumanization and also to the degradation or destruction of what is idolized. It is a distinctive mark of the biblical mind to discern that human history is a drama of death and resurrection and not, as religionists of all sorts suppose, a simplistic conflict of evil vs. good in an abstract sense. For what is "good" is, basically, what is good for man and creation--in other words, what is life-giving, life-preserving, life-perfecting. God, the Living One, is the author of life, he is on the side of life...That which is truly evil is that which thwarts life. And sin is any denial or rejection of the gift of life; an offense against God who bestows the gift. But the wages of sin is death, not by some arbitrary decree on God's part, but because sin by its nature is possessed of death, anti-life, death-dealing, both to the sinner and in the various kinds of death it occasions in the world. You're probably in the right head space to appreciate "Impostors of God: Inquiries Into Favorite Idols" by William Stringfellow (1969). Cryptonomicon is another good one, though far less prophetic/scholarly: To translate it into UNIX system administration terms (Randy's fundamental metaphor for just about everything), the post modern, politically correct atheists were like people who had suddenly found themselves in charge of a big and unfathomably complex computer system (viz, society) with no documentation or instructions of any kind, and so whose only way to keep the thing running was to invent and enforce certain rules with a kind of neo-Puritanical rigor, because they were at a loss to deal with any deviations from what they saw as the norm. Whereas people who were wired into a church were like UNIX system administrators who, while they might not understand everything, at least had some documentation, some FAQs and How tos and README files, providing some guidance on what to do when things got out of whack. They were, in other words, capable of displaying adaptability.
pjc50 4y ago
A certain amount of this conformism is human nature .. but a lot of people, especially anyone queer, was rejected by the church rather than left. I suspect you're not seeing this because you're not in the reject category. The failure mode of churches (and, yes, some of the more optimistic commune arrangements) is toxic positivity: everything is great, and anyone who doesn't agree is going to be dealt with. This makes it extremely difficult to report when someone has been raping adults or children.
Lewton 4y ago
This has way more to do with the kind of person who leans areligious in a religious society than being areligious itself. In a religious society, most normal people will be religious In more atheistic countries, the religious people are the ones that are harder to get along with, as normal people are a lot less religious.
marcosdumay 4y ago
No only are people worshiping dishonest politicians, but since radical people don't abandon their ideas, the churches have gone through a selection process where all but the most radical of them weakened. We have lost something very important on the conversion of our society to laic values. We have gained very important things too, so I don't think the best correction is to reverse anything, but we have some work to do on those things that we lost.
FredPret 4y ago
I think the cat's out of the bag - there's no sky friend looking out for us. There's no going back now for most people. This has been replaced by ersatz religions, but I think we should start explicitly worshipping the concept of civilization and progress. From a certain point of view, civilization is a cybernetic organism that encompasses all of us and gives us all sorts of neat things.
- titzer 4y ago
  > replaced by ersatz religions There's no doubt about that. Humans have a very strong religious bent that is bred into us by evolution selecting for motivated, tenacious people who fight to survive but whose brains can't stop patterning-matching, perceiving threats and agency behind things, and performing rituals. Not to mention, organizing around common beliefs. Without various sky-friend myths, we organize around other myths. Thankfully we have good science now, but that's unfortunately often less sexy (and more difficult) than pseudo-science and fads.
- svieira 4y ago
  > I think we should start explicitly worshipping the concept of civilization and progress Isn't this exactly what the French Revolution's first wave, the Nazis, the Soviets, and the Maoists all did? Or are you suggesting something more explicitly Hegelian like the religion of "The sign of the T" from Brave New World (though that religion was focused on production not transformation)?
  - sovietswag 4y ago
    An interesting idea from the Soviet Union: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/God-Building https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/God-Building
- svieira 4y ago
  "Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turn, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man." ~ C. S. Lewis
tastyfreeze 4y ago
You might like Jordan Peterson's podcast. He talks often about the human need to believe in something outside of ourselves. This need can be satisfied by many things, not all of them good. Dennis Prager is pretty good on this front too. But, he thinks that religion is a necessity for a happy life. I don't follow any faith. There are too many religions for any one to be "correct". But I do see religion as a good moral guide, particularly in times of hardship.
- alphabettsy 4y ago
  I personally wouldn’t recommend listening to either of these guys. Peterson at least attempts to offer balanced. Prager is a religious quack.
  - tastyfreeze 4y ago
    Just because somebody believes in a religion doesn't mean they have nothing to teach you. As far as I can tell through the internet, both are good honest people. I don't think that it is an overstatement to say that Peterson alone has helped millions improve their lives through his books, talks, and interviews.
    - alphabettsy 4y ago
      Prager is no different from the Rush Limbaughs of the world. He’s another divisive conservative talking head fomenting the culture wars they need to stay relevant. Whether or not the changes many have made in their lives as a result of Peterson’s work are improvements is also debatable.
      - tastyfreeze 4y ago
        I suppose the hundreds of people that have made a point to personally thank him for showing them a way to improve their lives are just lieing about his influence. /s
        4y ago
watwut 4y ago
Genuinely, you come across as someone who does not interact with non believers and have attitude about them shaped primary by hostile media. Starting from assumption that most people who left Christianity joined "movement" which seems to be mostly euphemism for culture war you are fully into.
hooverd 4y ago
What are "normal religious people"? I think religion is really being used as a stand-in for Christian here.

joemazerino 4y ago

Amen to that.

laura_g 4y ago

There are a lot of things religion provides that modern society is really dismal at providing: community, care, socialization across class/career lines, relationships with people who live near you, a support system for sick/hurting people, and other benefits The thing is, none of those are innately tied to religion. We've abandoned churches for what I feel are largely good reasons, but we haven't found something else to fill that void in community and care. We're more insular, more online, less of us know our neighbours or really have a stake in our community welfare in the same way. I don't think the solution is going back to religion.

xyzelement 4y ago
Thanks for the response - yes and no. I think you are right in that in theory you could have "all that stuff" sans religion. And in fact I think Atheism in the boomer generation benefited from cultural inertia - like, you could say you don't belong to a religion but still marry, have kids, participate in community etc simply because that's what everyone else (by the virtue of their religion) was doing around you. But today it seems like critical mass is elsewhere, and it seems like the religious folks now have a huge advantage over everyone else in terms of marriage, family formation, community and maybe even mental health. So while in theory it's possible, it seems like in practice all of those things declined among the non-religious, just perhaps with a lag of a generation. The reason I think it might make sense to reengage with religion is the crux of this question: does life have a point, a meaning, etc. Not even "what" the point is but does it exist at all. The idea that the universe is a total accident and nothing is relevant takes you in a certain direction in life and society, while the idea of "there's meaning and purpose" in another. I think it's hard to anchor your life in the value of meaning without logically accepting a creator of that meaning. So I think there's an element of faith - either you chose to believe there's meaning or you chose to believe there isn't, everything else is implied by that choice of belief.
serverholic 4y ago
I think you’re right. Religion isn’t the only answer, it’s just the answer that people are most familiar with.

ralmidani 4y ago

I was born into a Muslim family and have remained a Muslim my entire life, but I have had ups and downs in how observant I have been. I’ve had periods where I was less enthusiastic than my parents. On the flip side, I’ve flirted with extremism a few times and even started alienating my immediate family members. Now, over 40 years old, I feel like I’ve found the right balance: a strong relationship with God, without being seen as obnoxious or dangerous. It feels amazing both personally and when subtly sharing what I believe is the most important factor in having a happy, fulfilling life. Interestingly, Muslims believe most messengers began their missions at or around 40, so maybe everything before is “formative years”. The one known exception is Jesus Christ, whom we believe was raised to God at 33 but still has a huge role to play in shaping the world.

chasing 4y ago

Not all non-religious people suffer from some kind of spiritual or ethical deficiency. I get saddened when religious storytelling fills people with fairy tales and arbitrary hate and makes them incapable of seeing things about existence that are truly beautiful.

username3 4y ago
What are examples of things about existence that are truly beautiful?
- Night_Thastus 4y ago
  Not the person who you replied to, however: I'm not sure exactly how to explain this, but the seemingly infinite level of "detail" or "texture" or "complexity" to our universe. No matter how small or large you go, there's always some patterns, some structures, some details to be seen. There's always some other perspective or way of grouping and organizing to reveal new information. The complexity is infinitely deep, wide and layered. Some of that I think is inherent, and some of it is what we create as living entities - which is a great privilege we enjoy. Take a white painted wall made of drywall. Relatively uninteresting most of the time. But the potential amount of information about it is almost infinite: * What are all the layers of construction needed to make it? * What did it cost? For every cent of that money, where did it eventually go? All of them can be tracked from its creation until the end of the currency. * What people designed the methods to construct it? What were their lives like, what led to them doing so? * What does the surface look like if you were to look at it at 10x, 100x, 10,000x, etc. scale? How does all of that structure change when it's under pressure? Or wet? Or on fire? Or crushed? Or at different temperatures? * What does it look like as molecules of air bounce off of it and it insulates the room? * What are its physical properties? What does it look like in all the different wavelengths of light? * What is it history, from the retrieval of the materials to its final destruction some time in the future? What is its eventual fate? Will it be destroyed to make room for a newer building? Or in a war? A natural disaster? * What people were near it? What were they doing and why? Office workers? Secretaries? Programmers? Nurses? Was it separating people who were friends or hated each other? * What's the history of the design of the pigment used on the wall? What previous pigments did it replace and why? * If you look at the pattern of bumps and valleys on the surface, does it match some existing pattern? What mathematical formula would most closely re-create the surface variations? What's the closest match to that pattern anywhere in the universe, at any scale? Maybe there's some sand on a beach or a cluster of stars that when viewed from just the right angle matches the pits and valleys on the wall. * What does the surface feel like? Not just for one person, but for all humans? If you were to take every single human who has ever lived and let them feel the wall, what would happen? Which ones would tell jokes? Which ones would remember something from their past? Which would have some interesting specialist perspective on it? Which ones would like it? Hate it? How would they all describe it? We only have access to a tiny fraction of that information. But it's all there! You could spend an eternity studying a single blade of grass and it's relation to everything else and all of the history. There's always some new abstraction or perspective or way to look at everything.

nerddadnear40 4y ago

Most of us suffer a kind of nihilism that mankind has never really faced before due to modern science. Materialistic understanding of the world has broken our ability to recognize patterns of being that were once obvious to our ancestors. They would find a modern atheist and fundamentalist equally blind in these areas as they saw the reality of the world much more alive and predictable over vast time periods than we do now and they had the language to understand it. John Vervaeke and the Pageau Brothers are working hard on this front. I'd highly recommend John's Meaning Crisis Videos, Mathieu Pageau's book on Cosmic Symbolism and Johnathan's educational videos. If you are new to this, it can be a bit mind bending, but it's duly needed in our time. https://www.meaningcrisis.co/all-transcripts/ https://www.meaningcrisis.co/all-transcripts/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIJuIN6kUcU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIJuIN6kUcU https://www.amazon.com/Language-Creation-Symbolism-Genesis-Commentary/dp/1981549331 https://www.amazon.com/Language-Creation-Symbolism-Genesis-C... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtmLCK1keFI&t=1874s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtmLCK1keFI&t=1874s

HDThoreaun 4y ago

I really wish I could be religious. I know that the community and meaning it provides would bring me a lot of happiness, I just can't look past it being untrue.

Starwatcher2001 4y ago
You might consider humanism. It provides purpose and community, without requiring a deity.
acjohnson55 4y ago
Unitarian Universalism is a church without dogma. Basically, people who generally believe there's a purpose to life, that nobody has any sort of monopoly on the truth, and that there's value to congregating.

psychomugs 4y ago

"There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness." - DFW Academic science resembles religion with its dogmas, nepotism, bureaucracies, and favor-currying shibboleths. Deep learning in particular is akin to modern alchemy [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7psGHgatGM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7psGHgatGM

rubicon33 4y ago
Everyone is always quick to tell you why you need to be religious, and I don’t even disagree with most of the reasons. What’s frustrating is nobody tells you how to reverse a life of agnosticism bordering on atheism, and suddenly be catholic,Buddhist,etc
- DoingSomeThings 4y ago
  Further. Religion requires something to assent and belong to. That will always be a choice to some degree. As someone who is formerly deeply Christian and left for intellectual/theological reasons. I miss the communal binding of organized worship. But reversing or getting back to that place requires either 1) letting go of intellectual integrity, or 2) finding a group who is similarly interested in dispassionate community organizing without supernatural theology. The 1st has proven personally impossible. The 2nd seems very unlikely. All the attempts of secular church I have seen never pick up steam and trail off over time. Thus, the person who sees religious association as a broad good is left without a natural landing spot.

viggity 4y ago

You've discovered a (large) group of people who have torn down Chesterton's Fence without fully appreciating why it was there to begin with. Same with people who "smash the (patriarchy|capitalism)", they end up extremely discontent to realize that other things end up filling the vacuum and they're often worse, much worse. https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence

eatsyourtacos 4y ago

The real question is it better to lie to yourself and believe in something that is simply not true? Or to be true to yourself and deal with the loneliness that is existence. To me the choice to clear- be true to yourself. In that sense, organized religion has no place in this world.

Rury 4y ago
I think you're mistaking (along with many people including many religious people themselves), what religion's purpose actually is. IMO, religion isn't really about truth, or "there is an afterlife", or "there's a magical almighty person(s) out there". Rather, it's mostly just a bunch of advice, principles and curated wisdom passed down from generation and generation to help people live a happy, meaningful life. Like "you shall not kill", or "you shall not steal" or "treat your neighbor like you would yourself" - are arguably good principles to follow if you want to live in a peaceful society free from violence, as obeying these rules minimizes desire for anyone to have vengeance upon their neighbor. Or take Buddhism, which preaches that nirvana is absence of desire and craving, which shows that sometimes your own greed and ambitions can be the cause of your suffering, and by simply being grateful, can bring you happiness. In this sense, I think it's valuable and has a place in the world. I mean, are we alone in existence, and is death the end? I think so, but if it makes some people feel better thinking otherwise is possible, then what's wrong with letting them believe or put hope into that? So to me, religion isn't so much about "what is true and not true", but more rather: "here's some wisdom on how to lead an enjoyable life".

AlwaysRock 4y ago

Community is the main thing religious provides. But in exchange, you typically have to believe in some type of sky magician. It's too bad because I enjoyed the community aspect of religion growing up but never really was able to buy into the sky magician part.

vlunkr 4y ago

As a religious person who has deeply considered leaving it, I've never understood the arrogance of some atheists. For me it was disturbing to try to internalize the ideas that the universe is uncaring, that good and evil are made up, that your consciousness is basically like the contents of a stick of RAM that will vanish when it loses its power source. Even the original "God is dead" quotes from Nietzsche sound mournful, not arrogant. From what I understand he was trying to convey the same thing you are: that by turning away from religion, we are undoing many of the basic moral underpinnings of our culture. Now we have to rebuild them with something new, and quite obviously, people can't agree on one set of ideas.

timeon 4y ago
For me believing in omnipotent and good god seems arrogant as well. Is good that some people were born disabled?
- vlunkr 4y ago
  Sure, anyone can be arrogant about anything, I'm just saying I don't understand it.
13415 4y ago
Just like some atheists need to the corresponding lesson about theists, it's worth taking a step back and remind yourself that not everybody was raised in a religious way. Don't forget that to some of us religious stories contain nothing of particular interest or are similar to ancient fairy tales, and the history of various churches and religions is a mere part of the general human history of power struggles between elites in various countries. When you haven't been raised in religious ways, you feel no guilt about making blasphemous remarks and do not fear the wrath of supposed supernatural entities.
The_Colonel 4y ago
> For me it was disturbing to try to internalize the ideas that the universe is uncaring, that good and evil are made up, that your consciousness is basically like the contents of a stick of RAM that will vanish when it loses its power source. How is that arrogant? It seems humble to me to acknowledge that I as an individual and a society on the whole don't actually mean much.

spacedcowboy 4y ago

I don't think they're missing out. I just think they're deluded. It's not the worst thing in the world to be deluded - and frankly I just don't care what they do and say unless it starts to impact me and mine. It's not religion per se I dislike - people are free to live their lives as they see fit, it's the control-structure scam of an organized religion that reels in the gullible, the poor, the disadvantages, those who believe what they're being told. That is disgusting, IM(ns)HO. These megapastors (and even not-so-megapastors) bilking their flock to pay for the latest Learjet... I think they believe in religion as much as I do, tbh.

ralmidani 4y ago
You’re using the most extreme example to condemn essentially all organized religion. Many religious scholars and preachers live modest lives, sometimes even by choice. Of course “religious” folks who tell people they should simply endure, rather than resist, injustice and inequality are disgusting. But sometimes despite your best efforts, the bad guys still win (temporarily). Telling people that this life is not the end-all-be-all is only manipulative if it’s meant to make people passive. And I know that not everyone informs people about the afterlife out of malice.
OJFord 4y ago
I think you'll find many of them believe more in values than in what you're calling delusions in their own right.

karaterobot 4y ago

Same. I met so many religious people who were smarter, more widely read, and wiser than me that my childhood prejudices about them had to be drastically re-evaluated, even though my fundamental position on the existence of God is unchanged. Faith is now on an entirely separate axis from intelligence or wisdom for me.

xyzelement 4y ago
That's kinda my process as well. The next step was to be curious and ask those people - you are so smart how are you engaging with this thing that makes no sense to me at all. They may give an interesting perspective.
acjohnson55 4y ago
That's interesting to me because for me, it's kind of the opposite. I was deeply religious the first half of my life. But eventually, I found it was the non-religious people in my life who challenged me to grow. And I find that many of the most religious people I know are frustratingly limited in the things they're willing to learn and think, to things that don't significantly challenge the particular edifices of their faith. To be clear, this can be true of non-religious people, too.

drumttocs8 4y ago

Absolutely. I wish there was secular community that offered as much.