5 ms·

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

by 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.

by hbn 4y ago

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.