6 ms·

One of my favorite philosophy books is A Secular Age by Charles Taylor. It has a lot of interesting ideas, but a key one is that the “subtraction thesis” of sec

One of my favorite philosophy books is A Secular Age by Charles Taylor. It has a lot of interesting ideas, but a key one is that the “subtraction thesis” of secularity is wrong. By this, he means the narrative that secular society today simply “subtracted” religious beliefs and behaviors of yesteryear. Instead, these things have just morphed into different forms, with astrology being a prime example. It can be understood as a reaction to the disenchantment brought on by the Enlightenment and scientific worldview. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Secular_Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Secular_Age

luc4sdreyer 3y ago
I don't want to support this idea because it goes against my worldview as an atheist from a very conservative society. I grew up on Hitchens and Dawkins. But the YouGov poll [1] that the WaPo article is based seems to support this idea: 30% of Agnostics answered yes to the following question: "Do you believe in astrology, or that the position of the stars and planets influence people’s lives?" [1]: https://today.yougov.com/topics/entertainment/articles-reports/2022/04/26/one-four-americans-say-they-believe-astrology https://today.yougov.com/topics/entertainment/articles-repor...
- keiferski 3y ago
  Dawkins [1] and Hitchens’ works on religion are pop-science/culture books, not serious academic studies. Virtually no scholars in philosophy, religious studies, etc. agree with the narratives they present. Instead, I would read Taylor, Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution, and maybe Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality. 1. His non-biological work, that is.
  - Err_Eek 3y ago
    (As an atheist who found The God Delusion to be one of the most important books I've ever read, as it gave me a solid framework of arguing in what I already considered to be true) It's okay to read more digestible books, and not serious academic studies. In fact it's more than okay -- in order to understand an academic study you likely need to do a lot of reading on the topic before hand. A pop sci/culture book is very self contained. I can assure you that very few people in the world can read The Genealogy of Morals and understand much of it without having read a significant amount of philosophy before. Personally, I read Thus Spoke Zarathustra before reading The God Delusion. I can't remember much of the Nietzsche book, but The God Delusion's arguments are forever etched into my brain. It doesn't matter if I didn't get the Russell's teapot argument from a primary source, it matters that I got it.
    - keiferski 3y ago
      It’s not so much about accessibility, just quality of argument. As I said, basically no one that has read and thought significantly about religion thinks that Dawkins’ works are anything other than simple-minded polemics. It’s the equivalent of watching a 5-hour YouTube video about programming and thinking you understand computer science, except that books by Dawkins et al are not even very good, impartial introductions to the topic. All I can say is: if the topic of religion is interesting to you, these are not good books to start with. I also really don’t think Genealogy of Morality is all that complicated. Edit: I just remembered this excellent book by Julian Young, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Religion. I really recommend that if you’re looking for a more nuanced but modern take of what Nietzsche thought about religion.
      - rapsacnz 3y ago
        The more the nuanced the take, the less people will be drawn to it. Hence the popularity of the Bible and the Koran etc.
        keiferski 3y ago
        The Bible has over fifty books and is perhaps one of the most nuanced works of all time, hence the wide variety of Christian denominations. I'm not familiar enough with the Qur'an to comment on it.
        atq2119 3y ago
        The Bible isn't nuanced because it's not even coherent. It's pretty much all over the place. This is a feature for its followers, because they can and do pick and choose the parts they like and ignore the rest.
        lesuorac 3y ago
        I don't think the Bible is as popular as you make it out to be. Its really the songs / performances that carry the Christian belief; few people actually read the bible but they can all re-iterate to you that Christ was born in a manager because there was no room in the inn (not in the Bible).
  - 7952 3y ago
    But I guess most people are not really interested in religous studies. The useful thing to understand is that thought rooted in religon can be discarded out of hand.
- XorNot 3y ago
  Agnostic isn't a consistent belief position though: if you claim you don't know if a higher power exists, the question is which one and how is the impact of this different to being an atheist. So that bucket collecting random other beliefs isn't too surprising.
  - XajniN 3y ago
    Agnostic is just a pussy version of atheist.
    - fatuna 3y ago
      Nope, any scientist should be agnostic ;). Since the existence of a god can not be proven nor disproven. Do I have an elephant in my living room? Chances are incredibly low, but can you prove it?
      - XajniN 3y ago
        While you are technically correct about the logic, there is no scientific reason to even consider the existence of any higher power.
- SapporoChris 3y ago
  Please remember that polls are often inaccurate. Internet polls are especially inaccurate. YouGov is a British international Internet-based market research and data analytics firm. https://www.pewresearch.org/2010/12/29/how-accurate-are-online-polls/ https://www.pewresearch.org/2010/12/29/how-accurate-are-onli...
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    _Good quality_ internet polls these days are fairly comparable in accuracy to high quality traditional polling. This isn't the CEO of Yougov posting a twitter poll; there's a process.
- yorwba 3y ago
  I don't think the poll supports the idea of spiritual morphing. The 30% of agnostics is not much different from the population average of 27% and less than catholics at 31%, while atheists believe in astrology less (10%) than any of the other groups. If abandoning religious beliefs of yesteryear really just morphed them into others like astrology, those new beliefs should be much more common among people who've abandoned the old. I think a better explanation of the data is that some people have strong opinions on spirituality, ranging from dismissing it all to holding up some particular scripture as the single source of truth, which then informs their stance on astrology, while others just go with whatever, so they're distributed across denominations at roughly the base rate and believe in astrology at roughly the base rate.
- vhcr 3y ago
  Maybe I'm reading it too literally, but I think the question is just badly formulated. Of course the position of the stars and planets influence people's lives, that's called the seasons. I think the same when they ask people if they think dinosaurs co-existed with humans, of course the answer is yes, as birds are dinosaurs.
  - midoridensha 3y ago
    I can easily argue the opposite of your assertions, simply by picking different definitions. The "stars and planets" do not influence peoples' lives through the seasons, only the Earth and its relative position to the Sun do, and when someone talks about the "stars and planets" in the context of astrology, they mean other stars and planets besides the Earth and Sun. Dinosaurs do not co-exist with humans, and never have: "birds" are the distant descendants of some of the "dinosaurs", but are not part of the same group. (I'm pretty sure any dictionary definition of "dinosaur" does not include modern-day "birds".)
    - zmgsabst 3y ago
      From Wikipedia: > Birds are feathered theropod dinosaurs and constitute the only known living dinosaurs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird Bird are in the dinosaur clade, ie the biological group defined by the dinosaur family. Birds are dinosaurs in the same way that humans are mammals.
      - badcppdev 3y ago
        I'm not going to argue with your clear reference but I will reference this article: https://askabiologist.asu.edu/questions/birds-dinosaurs-reptiles https://askabiologist.asu.edu/questions/birds-dinosaurs-rept... which adds a bit of useful context. "So a reptile is any animal descended from the original group called reptiles. Both birds and mammals share ancestors sometimes referred to as reptile-like animals (Reptiliomorpha), but it's not very common for people to talk about mammals as reptiles."
- DrBazza 3y ago
  It seems like these people should be required to read Douglas Adams. Though they'd likely miss the point.
Lamad123 3y ago
Conspiracy theories and pseudoscience in all its forms might also be aspects of this fake industrialized religiosity!!
n1b0m 3y ago
From the popularity of astrology, piercing and tattoos it feels like rather than becoming more secular we’re moving back to paganism
anon-3988 3y ago
This is why I think that it is perhaps beneficial to not completely remove religion, but replace it with something that is more aligned to the 21st century. Let's be honest, humans are very flawed and prone to succumb to religious thinking; regardless of how smart/dumb you are. Superstitious thinking can arise from simple day to day observation. So it is much better to fill in the void with something dull like "do good, because mother Gaia watches over you" than to let some random beliefs to fill it. I personally belief that the self-introspection, consciousness-obsessed cultures like Hindu and Buddhism actually have one. Consciousness is the one thing in this world that is actually mysterious. So let's start mysticism from there.
- junofan 3y ago
  Like it or not, the replacement is politics. Atheists have edged out Jews as the most politically active group in the US, even when controlling for education. Because they donate money to politicians at incredible rates, expect more messaging aimed at this group.
  - saiya-jin 3y ago
    that's pretty messed up take from parent's suggestion... and I don't agree a zilch, politics cater to other aspects of our (often irrational) needs compared to what religions aim for
    - worrycue 3y ago
      > politics cater to other aspects of our (often irrational) needs compared to what religions aim for It’s a team to bat for and even comes with its own dogma for you to blindly believe in. Usually lead by charismatic leaders providing/promising simple and easy to understand explanations/solutions to complex problems. To quote H L Mencken, “Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.”
- idoubtit 3y ago
  What's the point if this mysticism doesn't make "better" people than any random superstition or religion? I fear it's more dangerous than most basic superstitions. I mean, these "self-introspection, consciousness-obsessed cultures like Hindu and Buddhism" are a source of hatred and violence. The Hindu majority is India is on this brutal trend. And in Burma-Birmania-Myanmar, the Buddhist population was almost unanimous in supporting the discrimination against muslims and the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya. People feel they belong to a religion and that those who do not are unenlightened strangers. The phenomena is well known and studied: religion leads to intolerance. Astrology is stupid, but at least it does not create that feeling of community, so it won't spread intolerance and xenophobia.
odiroot 3y ago
Just take cult of Stalin, Mao and Kims. Perfect examples.
walleeee 3y ago
See also near-religious faith in narrow, unexamined concepts of growth, progress and technology
brutal_true_101 3y ago
Any other books you can recommend? I am just getting into reading about this stuff. It has made me realize that I am not as rational as I once thought I was.
- keiferski 3y ago
  There are a lot of great suggestions here: https://fivebooks.com/category/religion/ https://fivebooks.com/category/religion/ But other than Taylor, I recommend Robert Bellah's Religion in Human Evolution, William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience, and most books by Nietzsche, but specifically Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morality. You might want to pick up an anthology of papers / topics, like Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology by Pojman. Max Weber and Durkheim are also considered to be foundational thinkers in religious sociology. If you get through all that and are looking for something a bit more obscure but super interesting, I would also check out "process philosophy" or "process theology", which addresses a lot of the traditional issues with religious arguments.

luc4sdreyer 3y ago

I don't want to support this idea because it goes against my worldview as an atheist from a very conservative society. I grew up on Hitchens and Dawkins. But the YouGov poll [1] that the WaPo article is based seems to support this idea: 30% of Agnostics answered yes to the following question: "Do you believe in astrology, or that the position of the stars and planets influence people’s lives?" [1]: https://today.yougov.com/topics/entertainment/articles-reports/2022/04/26/one-four-americans-say-they-believe-astrology https://today.yougov.com/topics/entertainment/articles-repor...

keiferski 3y ago
Dawkins [1] and Hitchens’ works on religion are pop-science/culture books, not serious academic studies. Virtually no scholars in philosophy, religious studies, etc. agree with the narratives they present. Instead, I would read Taylor, Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution, and maybe Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality. 1. His non-biological work, that is.
- Err_Eek 3y ago
  (As an atheist who found The God Delusion to be one of the most important books I've ever read, as it gave me a solid framework of arguing in what I already considered to be true) It's okay to read more digestible books, and not serious academic studies. In fact it's more than okay -- in order to understand an academic study you likely need to do a lot of reading on the topic before hand. A pop sci/culture book is very self contained. I can assure you that very few people in the world can read The Genealogy of Morals and understand much of it without having read a significant amount of philosophy before. Personally, I read Thus Spoke Zarathustra before reading The God Delusion. I can't remember much of the Nietzsche book, but The God Delusion's arguments are forever etched into my brain. It doesn't matter if I didn't get the Russell's teapot argument from a primary source, it matters that I got it.
  - keiferski 3y ago
    It’s not so much about accessibility, just quality of argument. As I said, basically no one that has read and thought significantly about religion thinks that Dawkins’ works are anything other than simple-minded polemics. It’s the equivalent of watching a 5-hour YouTube video about programming and thinking you understand computer science, except that books by Dawkins et al are not even very good, impartial introductions to the topic. All I can say is: if the topic of religion is interesting to you, these are not good books to start with. I also really don’t think Genealogy of Morality is all that complicated. Edit: I just remembered this excellent book by Julian Young, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Religion. I really recommend that if you’re looking for a more nuanced but modern take of what Nietzsche thought about religion.
    - rapsacnz 3y ago
      The more the nuanced the take, the less people will be drawn to it. Hence the popularity of the Bible and the Koran etc.
      - keiferski 3y ago
        The Bible has over fifty books and is perhaps one of the most nuanced works of all time, hence the wide variety of Christian denominations. I'm not familiar enough with the Qur'an to comment on it.
        atq2119 3y ago
        The Bible isn't nuanced because it's not even coherent. It's pretty much all over the place. This is a feature for its followers, because they can and do pick and choose the parts they like and ignore the rest.
      - lesuorac 3y ago
        I don't think the Bible is as popular as you make it out to be. Its really the songs / performances that carry the Christian belief; few people actually read the bible but they can all re-iterate to you that Christ was born in a manager because there was no room in the inn (not in the Bible).
- 7952 3y ago
  But I guess most people are not really interested in religous studies. The useful thing to understand is that thought rooted in religon can be discarded out of hand.
XorNot 3y ago
Agnostic isn't a consistent belief position though: if you claim you don't know if a higher power exists, the question is which one and how is the impact of this different to being an atheist. So that bucket collecting random other beliefs isn't too surprising.
- XajniN 3y ago
  Agnostic is just a pussy version of atheist.
  - fatuna 3y ago
    Nope, any scientist should be agnostic ;). Since the existence of a god can not be proven nor disproven. Do I have an elephant in my living room? Chances are incredibly low, but can you prove it?
    - XajniN 3y ago
      While you are technically correct about the logic, there is no scientific reason to even consider the existence of any higher power.
SapporoChris 3y ago
Please remember that polls are often inaccurate. Internet polls are especially inaccurate. YouGov is a British international Internet-based market research and data analytics firm. https://www.pewresearch.org/2010/12/29/how-accurate-are-online-polls/ https://www.pewresearch.org/2010/12/29/how-accurate-are-onli...
- rsynnott 3y ago
  _Good quality_ internet polls these days are fairly comparable in accuracy to high quality traditional polling. This isn't the CEO of Yougov posting a twitter poll; there's a process.
yorwba 3y ago
I don't think the poll supports the idea of spiritual morphing. The 30% of agnostics is not much different from the population average of 27% and less than catholics at 31%, while atheists believe in astrology less (10%) than any of the other groups. If abandoning religious beliefs of yesteryear really just morphed them into others like astrology, those new beliefs should be much more common among people who've abandoned the old. I think a better explanation of the data is that some people have strong opinions on spirituality, ranging from dismissing it all to holding up some particular scripture as the single source of truth, which then informs their stance on astrology, while others just go with whatever, so they're distributed across denominations at roughly the base rate and believe in astrology at roughly the base rate.
vhcr 3y ago
Maybe I'm reading it too literally, but I think the question is just badly formulated. Of course the position of the stars and planets influence people's lives, that's called the seasons. I think the same when they ask people if they think dinosaurs co-existed with humans, of course the answer is yes, as birds are dinosaurs.
- midoridensha 3y ago
  I can easily argue the opposite of your assertions, simply by picking different definitions. The "stars and planets" do not influence peoples' lives through the seasons, only the Earth and its relative position to the Sun do, and when someone talks about the "stars and planets" in the context of astrology, they mean other stars and planets besides the Earth and Sun. Dinosaurs do not co-exist with humans, and never have: "birds" are the distant descendants of some of the "dinosaurs", but are not part of the same group. (I'm pretty sure any dictionary definition of "dinosaur" does not include modern-day "birds".)
  - zmgsabst 3y ago
    From Wikipedia: > Birds are feathered theropod dinosaurs and constitute the only known living dinosaurs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird Bird are in the dinosaur clade, ie the biological group defined by the dinosaur family. Birds are dinosaurs in the same way that humans are mammals.
    - badcppdev 3y ago
      I'm not going to argue with your clear reference but I will reference this article: https://askabiologist.asu.edu/questions/birds-dinosaurs-reptiles https://askabiologist.asu.edu/questions/birds-dinosaurs-rept... which adds a bit of useful context. "So a reptile is any animal descended from the original group called reptiles. Both birds and mammals share ancestors sometimes referred to as reptile-like animals (Reptiliomorpha), but it's not very common for people to talk about mammals as reptiles."
DrBazza 3y ago
It seems like these people should be required to read Douglas Adams. Though they'd likely miss the point.

Lamad123 3y ago

Conspiracy theories and pseudoscience in all its forms might also be aspects of this fake industrialized religiosity!!

n1b0m 3y ago

From the popularity of astrology, piercing and tattoos it feels like rather than becoming more secular we’re moving back to paganism

anon-3988 3y ago

This is why I think that it is perhaps beneficial to not completely remove religion, but replace it with something that is more aligned to the 21st century. Let's be honest, humans are very flawed and prone to succumb to religious thinking; regardless of how smart/dumb you are. Superstitious thinking can arise from simple day to day observation. So it is much better to fill in the void with something dull like "do good, because mother Gaia watches over you" than to let some random beliefs to fill it. I personally belief that the self-introspection, consciousness-obsessed cultures like Hindu and Buddhism actually have one. Consciousness is the one thing in this world that is actually mysterious. So let's start mysticism from there.

junofan 3y ago
Like it or not, the replacement is politics. Atheists have edged out Jews as the most politically active group in the US, even when controlling for education. Because they donate money to politicians at incredible rates, expect more messaging aimed at this group.
- saiya-jin 3y ago
  that's pretty messed up take from parent's suggestion... and I don't agree a zilch, politics cater to other aspects of our (often irrational) needs compared to what religions aim for
  - worrycue 3y ago
    > politics cater to other aspects of our (often irrational) needs compared to what religions aim for It’s a team to bat for and even comes with its own dogma for you to blindly believe in. Usually lead by charismatic leaders providing/promising simple and easy to understand explanations/solutions to complex problems. To quote H L Mencken, “Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.”
idoubtit 3y ago
What's the point if this mysticism doesn't make "better" people than any random superstition or religion? I fear it's more dangerous than most basic superstitions. I mean, these "self-introspection, consciousness-obsessed cultures like Hindu and Buddhism" are a source of hatred and violence. The Hindu majority is India is on this brutal trend. And in Burma-Birmania-Myanmar, the Buddhist population was almost unanimous in supporting the discrimination against muslims and the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya. People feel they belong to a religion and that those who do not are unenlightened strangers. The phenomena is well known and studied: religion leads to intolerance. Astrology is stupid, but at least it does not create that feeling of community, so it won't spread intolerance and xenophobia.

odiroot 3y ago

Just take cult of Stalin, Mao and Kims. Perfect examples.

walleeee 3y ago

See also near-religious faith in narrow, unexamined concepts of growth, progress and technology

brutal_true_101 3y ago

Any other books you can recommend? I am just getting into reading about this stuff. It has made me realize that I am not as rational as I once thought I was.

keiferski 3y ago
There are a lot of great suggestions here: https://fivebooks.com/category/religion/ https://fivebooks.com/category/religion/ But other than Taylor, I recommend Robert Bellah's Religion in Human Evolution, William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience, and most books by Nietzsche, but specifically Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morality. You might want to pick up an anthology of papers / topics, like Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology by Pojman. Max Weber and Durkheim are also considered to be foundational thinkers in religious sociology. If you get through all that and are looking for something a bit more obscure but super interesting, I would also check out "process philosophy" or "process theology", which addresses a lot of the traditional issues with religious arguments.