As a believer and someone who attends church regularly, this is sad but not unexpected. From my own personal experience - if the church cannot answer questions clearly, their members will look for answers somewhere else. A lot of churches unfortunately are so elementary in their teaching or turn to "feel good preaching" (see Elevation Church). The longterm effect is that a person ends up being tired of getting the same "baby food" and they look to other places. The churches where theology is solid (and clear) tend to be stronger in number and in regular attendance.
The American evangelical movement is particularly rabid, and subscribes overwhelmingly to Christian nationalism. It is entirely too mixed into politics, and is trying to create a theocratic state where “everyone must live like Christians (for my definition of Christian).”
One of the high points for me regarding religion in the past couple years was finding The Holy Post podcast. One host is Phil Vischer, AKA Bob the Tomato, the creator of Veggie Tales. I have some fundamental (heh) disagreements with their perspective at this point, but they remind me of what I thought the church was while growing up within it, and they still largely reflect what I think it should be. They acknowledge that there’s lots of room for disagreement, they don’t think they have all the answers, and they strike me as genuinely loving people.
If I had heard more people talking like them 20 years ago, I might not have left the church. It’s not a question of “baby food” so much as “cultural identity,” and the cultural identity of the American church is largely flag-waving rah-rah nationalism. Not sure what stats you’re referencing, because megachurches are still quite popular here and quite clear on their “theology.”
If you the parent poster are not located in America, please disregard this post entirely.
Hah, never thought I'd see the Holy Post show up in an HN comment. Fun podcast. I think what they're doing is important - exposing hypocrisy and nationalism in the American Evangelical church while pointing to a more charitable form of Christianity.
I grew up attending church, and on the whole have nothing but good things to say about the whole experience. It gave me both spiritual and moral support when I needed it the most and some of the best people I have ever known, I got to know through church. In fact in ways I mourn the loss of both my faith and my 'church'.
However once I realized that, on a very fundamental level, the core of what they where claiming as true wasn't in fact true, I felt I had no choice to walk away.
I was "in touch" with religion for 12 years (my parents sent me to a very catholic school even though both are atheists)
My experience was seeing huge amounts of falsehood and hypocrisy as religious people followed and repeated all the rituals of the mass but in the day to day life they just did not care about others and pretty much ignored what their religion taught them.
Thank God after those 12 years I saw everything I needed from religion to get as far away from it as I can.
I feel and felt the same. As many other commenters mentioned, a church must be a few elements in order to be sustainable: a community, a set of beliefs, an organization... and each one of these can be more or less important for the individual, and each on of these can go awry in its own way, often without affecting in the same way the other individuals or the other elements. Thus the discussion becomes even more difficult, when individuals have different experiences on each one of those dimensions. I think calling the debate "comparing apples with oranges" is a massive understatement.
I was in the exact same place as you about 10 years ago.
A key thing for me (I'm still not religious, though I'm religion-adjacent in some ways) was seeing that religion - despite what some would tell you - is at its best when it's not made to be about material truths at all. Its truths, really, are truths about the human condition and how best to live it out.
In this sense, even as someone who doesn't believe in metaphysical spirits, the heart of what they're claiming (if you really dig down deep past many of the surface-level particulars) contains a lot of truth.
I'll agree with you that I find their reasoning faulty (I did), but what I dislike about my atheism is that I get lumped in with people who'll tell theists that "they're wrong"
To my mind, most of the planet's population have got to the 'right place' (show love and compassion to those you meet) - and how we all got to this same place is immaterial.
I'm without a doubt an atheist to my core - but doesn't stop me admiring those with faith who use it to lead a good life.
I’ve encountered this claim more often than I’ve encountered actual fundamentalist churches I think are making any sort of strong claim about the world.
So I’m curious to hear what people think is wrong.
As someone who was raised in a religious home who no longer attends any church I think it's less to do with not answering questions and more to do with a hostile rejection of religion generally. It wasn't until I had children of my own that I realized I needed to distance myself from religion. I know there is a large variety of what is taught from religion to religion and sect to sect but I'd like to steer clear from any organization that takes a negative view on basic things like homosexuality. I cannot fathom exposing my (or any) kids to that kind of worldview.
I think it heavily depends on the church and community. One of the reasons we are staying in our current church is because we're open to a wide community (multi-ethnic) with the same core values. Our kids grow up in this community but at the end of the day, it will be their decision if they decide to no longer attend.
There does not seem to be a shortage of church variety to choose from. It's not about churches not being able to answer questions clearly; the reality is just that fewer people believe in gods.
For comparison: in the Netherlands we already dipped below 50% in 2017, and the number of religious people keeps dropping steadily.
In 2019 the remaining religious minority was composed of 20.1% Roman Catholics, 14.8% protestants (various types), 5.0% Muslims, and 5.9% adherents of other religions.
Edit: bear in mind that this is people who consider themselves religious. The percentage of people actually member of a church/mosque/whatever is below 30%.
> There does not seem to be a shortage of church variety to choose from.
I think this is a deceiving metric. Most churches are less places of worship or religious education and more social clubs dressed up in religious phrases and iconography. There are so many of them because each is designed to appeal to a particular social group, but they all feature a very similar watered down message that just reinforces the congregation's preexisting beliefs. They tend to focus less on education and more on community events, activism, fundraising, and growing their community - just like any other social club.
If you're looking for a church that genuinely teaches its congregation, that's much harder to find. They don't tend to be as successful in terms of growth or wealth. To teach someone, you must either add to what they know or challenge something they think they already know. Most people don't like being challenged - they'd rather go somewhere that reinforces what they already think or just ditch religion altogether.
It's no surprise that the social club churches are disappearing. Even the least devoted members of a church congregation feels bad leaving, just as they might feel bad cancelling a gym membership they never actually use. But their kids often have no such attachments.
I no longer see "believing in God" as being necessary per se to practice or benefit from religion. More important is the self-discipline it can create through repetition and habit.
Religion has the same function as "branding" - it's an efficient short-cut to bypass intensive, and possible unavailable intellectual rigor for some. And because Bell Curves are truly reality, providing a moral and ethical framework that works for everyone and that is internally consistent ENOUGH absolutely matters.
NOTHING we can ever know will be absolute truth or knowledge. You can make a simple proof by physical volumes of an individual and of the universe, combined with Shannon's Law. Humans must always come up short on knowledge and understanding of the universe as a result.
Like all things (even science) you can take a thing too far and exceed its limits of explanation or prediction. But that's unavoidable in a static system sense; which is why you dynamic systems defined by reliable and simple rules and waypoints. Religion absolutely provides that in a minimal effort form.
And we shouldn't project upon "average" and "below average" for what we might be familiar with or assume about intellect. Again: Bell curves for all things are reality. The biggest mistake that intellectuals make is that EVERYONE is just like them and thinks exactly the same way. Nope. Not even on a good day.
Even if one believes, the notion that these often corrupt, sometimes malignant control organizations we call churches are a necessary expense of both time and money is a harder sell in the modern world.
The social role that churches play is where the opening raises real concern. What comes after organized religion may well look more like conspiracy theory.
Agreed. This was a major component in my switch from Protestant/Baptist to ("Greek"/Eastern) Orthodox. Having thousands of years of prior religious & philosophical discussions to draw from, as well as the experiences of people living under all manner of political regimes provides a much-needed grounding against whatever may be the current, trendy topics.
And a direct result of that history is that the Church mandates certain practices to shape one's willpower: fasting (roughly half the year, in total, though "fasting" here means small vegan meals), some form of tithing &/or charitable work, explicit self-examination (not only standard prayers, but also Confession with a priest, who helps make a plan against bad habits, as well as an annual event where everyone in the parish asks forgiveness of each other) etc.
This approach, "religion as an operator's manual to living one's life" is one of the very rare arguments in defense of religion I can vaguely resonate with.
Unfortunately this argument entirely fails to support all the rest of the luggage, especially the metaphysical hokum: you can perfectly chose to live your life according to a set of rules that will help you (and others) without having to justify it via the existence of some bearded dude sitting on a cloud.
I grew up in a church that was very serious about "serious" preaching- Primitive Baptist, very focused on Calvinist doctrine and what could be considered scriptural literalism. It was definitely not "baby food"... but they still could not answer some questions clearly, and that is because it is an invention of man rooted in a prescientific understanding of the world. I would argue that church are losing members not because it is being watered down, but because it is losing relevance.
This is what it was smart for the Catholic church to have to issues with evolution. Maintaining a strict creationist stance just gets sillier and sillier over time.
Couldn't agree more. The thing that drove me away from faith was feeling like it was a set of truths that required obscuring the rest of life to keep true.
To me faith is something that you _have_ to understand through the lens of your life. There is no understanding faith before life. Your experiences allow you to understand faith. Which isn't to say that life is more important than faith, not at all, just that life is the lens in which you view faith.
In that mindset, faith seems exceptionally deep and complex. Full of discussion, learning, change. Not a black and white truth, but a series of learnings and understanding. You can't learn (in my mind) without change, and so the idea of a churn that teaches absolute truths felt fundamentally broken to me. I think faith is a journey in knowledge. And so many churches seem almost aggressive towards knowledge. They favor rote memorization, i think, as a method to avoid change. To avoid their doctrine as being mutable.
This mindset also seems pervasive into how these people behave in life, too. Just like how children need to learn to think critically, adults need to practice thinking critically. Such a strong emphasis on rote memorization has wide affects, i think.
No grand statements here, and i mean no offense to religion. Just my thoughts on some denominations.
Do you not consider God a narcissist? When he says "Worship me", no other gods, I'm a jealous god, worship or face hell-fire, literally threatening if you do not worship?
Why does God need/desire your worship? You know, I have kids. I "hope" they love me and always will, but I'll never force them to say it and I'm definitely not going to punish them if they are mad at me and won't prop up my ego.
It's a question of whether or not you buy into the set of assumptions. If you do, you can avail yourself of any one several strong, coherent, self-consistent philosophies and world-views, which many of history's great minds have reasoned about and scrutinized. Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Protestantism, Judaism, Islam: all of them spend a lot of time on this stuff.
It's the on-the-fly, off-the-cuff, brand new, modern theology/philosophy which tends to end up shaky, simply because it's been done with fewer resources and has seen far less attention.
I see no issues with Christianity from a philosophical standpoint. It explains things which our beyond our natural/physical world. Those things impact how we live in this world. I'm curious what you mean in your statement, please unpack your claim.
It's always fascinating to me to observe the small distance between the two in some philosophies.
The Discourse on the Method of Descartes, in which his famous phrase je pense, donc je suis occurs also includes a preceding segment where he considers whether he can know anything at all, or whether he's a disembodied consciousness fed false information by evil demonic powers (if you will, the "Matrix hypothesis"). He rebuts that hypothesis with a simple assertion that a just and loving God wouldn't allow such an arrangement of events to be the true nature of reality.
Depending on your bent, that can either allow the discourse to continue or put the brakes completely on it.
That's like saying "the most solid philosophy is shaky math." Yes, while plenty of philosophers have physics envy and wish that they were mathematicians, it's not necessarily the best philosophy that is written from that perspective.
i mostly got tired of being told i going to burn and choke and scream forever and ever, amen, because i like guys and gals. and if i disagreed, the pastor made sure i got punished.
the long term effects wast that this not a healthy thing to tell a young teenager, and it's time for society to move on.
I believe this is a way bigger factor than OP comment says: church failing to keep up with modern society.
1000% that's why I am against many (perhaps most by % in the US?) of the organized religious congregations.
those that identify queer, gender-fluid, whatever are told their literal existence is sin. it's hard to imagine how damaging that is if you're not in this community. It'd be like telling someone who has orange hair they are going to hell for something they have absolutely no control over.
In the worst cases they push parents to try to 'change' their kids, which has been shown to be incredibly dangerous and damaging.
Even if you're in a 'liberal' church that says we love gays like we love all humans, but don't think about getting married and in some cases can't have sex, that still does a huge amount of psychological damage and putting us on the outside of 'normal.'
I too got tired of the yelling and the fire-and-brimstone-you’re-gonna-burn-in-hell if you’re not God-fearing. That word: “fear”. They were using it as a tool to manipulate.
Finally, I realized, “Why does God want me to be scared all the time?” Shouldn’t God be allaying my fears, not being the source of them?
Some people go to church for answers, but I think a lot are really just there for the community and play along with the religious parts because of inertia.
What are the questions that church leaders are getting from their flock these days? Some big questions are being debated in society, sure, but the church's position on a lot of things is set in stone, is it not?
Maybe this is my ignorance talking, but I thought those with active church membership continue to go to participate in social events and make friends/partners?
The Christian Church has been getting steadily less monolithic for the past 1700 years or so.
Some of the topics being discussed in our (US) church in the past couple of years:
* the devastating personal and economic toll of the pandemic and how we can help individually and in aggregate
* race relations in the US and the history of injustices caused by racism, including police brutality, and how we can respond in our daily lives
* LGBTQ-related topics, including the ability of people of different sexual identities to participate fully at all levels of the church hierarchy
* the environmental impact of our actions at the personal level all the way up to the institutional level as it pertains to human-caused climate change
You can find many churches in the US with people that believe in every possible belief related to all of these issues.
Take a look at the popularity of "prosperity gospel" with poor and middle class individuals. This is as a response to the inequality and social immobility brought about since the mid 70s. I'll leave out explicit mention of the "C word," because I'll get downvotes for it, but the sociological analysis is fascinating on its own.
I get this, but wouldn’t the flip side be the brightness and relief that hypocrisy is being culled through this? Just a thought — but if you stop acting in a way (attending church) that doesn’t jive with what you believe, that seems to be revealing truth (something which all ca rejoice over, even if it’s a tough truth).
On the other hand — if it is people that are losing their faith, that is perhaps different, and I can see your concern.
I think the word hypocrisy is thrown around easily. I think churches have made mistakes and there are no excuses for them - but painting every single church and every single believer with a broad brush and calling everyone a hypocrite is intellectually dishonest.
My personal worldview - at the end of the day, we're human and should see others as humans who make mistakes and give enough grace for them to try to improve.
I'd guess you're a Gen X from your comment? I'd claim that, for the younger generations (middle millennials and younger), that the very claim that the church has all the answers is the problem itself. They deal in relatives and uncertainty as a general rule and the very assertion that one person (or one group of people) has all the answers is laughable. They appreciate humility and acknowledged uncertainty more than clear answers.
I'd posit that these generations are primarily looking for acceptance, not answers. And they're not getting that acceptance, so they leave. Which was my experience - I started questioning teachings (directly based on my reading of scripture) and had leaders shut down on me entirely and refuse to talk further instead of engaging because it didn't fit in the prescribed "answer" - and this was in a fairly "open-minded" church. I'd come back tomorrow if I could find a church that (most importantly) actually accepted me for me and (secondly) would actually engage in tough topics instead of just giving me hollow "answers" that didn't answer the question (and often conflicted directly with scripture!). I guess what I'm looking for is a church that actually practiced grace and acceptance, answers be damned. That's what Jesus did (see hanging out with tax collectors and prostitutes and preaching a message of love for everyone). Why can't the church do it too?
The internet and the ability to discuss these issues anonymously has exacerbated irreligion faster than communism ever could. And unlike stalinist/maoist regimes, people are doing it on their own free will.
As a non believer I love to see it. Believing in something you can’t prove and in turn trying to shove it down everyone’s throat is the antithesis to the world I want to live in. George W Bush and Tony Blair both admitted that the second gulf war was partially a religious crusade. This is who you’re teaming up with.
“Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. 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.”
I prefer Camus personally. The act of rebellion against ...well everything, but in this case against things to worship, against stories that try to hide the absurdity of the universe seems to me a narrative much less likely to be led astray in harmful ways, since it gives you no power or secret insight, only personal despair and personal happiness.
"I don't know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me — that I understand. And these two certainties — my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle — I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my conditions?"
I love Camus as well. His idea of absurdism really struck a chord with me. We're on this ride in life where we just keep passing through absurd situations.
It's a really comical extension to an existentialism.
In that quote, Wallace is just morphing, conflating, and fudging the definition of the word "worship". He says people "worship" (with a variety of subtly different meanings) a variety of things and then, implies that because we can use the same word, "worship", to describe those activities, they are equivalent. I despise this rhetorical technique. I find it both insulting, intellectually dishonest and useless.
From the root worth "worth": weorþ "significant, valuable, of value; valued, appreciated, highly thought-of, deserving, meriting; honorable, noble, of high rank.
What do you hold in highest regard in your life? Family? Truth/honesty? Happiness? Other? (Saint) Thomas Aquinas said that the four typical substitutes for God are wealth, pleasure, power, and honor.
None of those things are necessarily bad in themselves—some amount are often necessary for life, and can be be used to achieve good things—but chasing them for the sake of themselves without a higher principle to guide you once acquire them has probably caused many people problems over the course of history.
Asking yourself "what is the highest good in my life? what is the thing/princple that I hold in highest esteem? what do I 'worship'?" can be a good spiritual/moral exercise.
It's pretty clear that that "worship" here refers to where we practice focusing our heart's yearnings, not to a set of religious rites. Synonyms of this meaning of "worship" include "revere" and "venerate".
I could not disagree more. Wallace's use of language here is instructive, poignant, and immensely useFUL.
I'll bet you're an engineer, data scientist, or other technical professional, not simply b/c you're here, but b/c your response to Wallace's use of ambiguity and multiple layers of meaning reveals as much about the nature of your own relationship with language, which I'd guess prefers that things should be clear, precise, and have singular meaning. (I'm certainly oversimplifying you, so apologies.)
Look into "cognitive decoupling", and you may find a dichotomy that illustrates some of your reaction to Wallace.
In all fairness, this same rhetorical technique was commonly used in the faith that I was raised in. We were often taught that one could violate the Jewish/Christian commandment to "have no other gods before me" by placing more importance on material goods or hobbies (your car, your boat, sports, etc.) than worshiping God.
Given the degree of your outrage, I think something other than "rhetorical technique" has triggered you here. Then again, maybe you are just really really opinionated about "rhetorical techniques" and following strict definitions of words? In that case, you must despise the vast majority of stories and literature because of their metaphors, parables, and subtly different meanings...
You know who also sucks at writing? William Shakespeare
"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet."
In this quote, Shakespeare is just fudging the definition of "name". He says people and flowers both have something called a "name", implying their names are equivalent. This is intellectually dishonest because people's personal names are subtly different than the names you use to describe objects. I find this quote insulting and useless.
He's really not, though. He means that these are the activities from which people derive purpose. People derive purpose from religion, or money, or beauty, or status.
“The question is, ” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty. “which is to be master—that’s all.”
This sort of conflations are typical in social commentary situations, comedy especially. This is absolutely something I could see done in an act done by Carlin or Williams.
Unless you can elaborate and distinguish different kinds of "worship", your accusation is overblown. Maybe he used this word simply because it was the best choice available to capture and communicate the underlined meaning?
Here is a glaring example of debating semantics in hopes to discredit the actual meaning of something or attempt to kill the topic altogether. Appears to be a bad outcome from the rise of STEM worship.
Actually he's making philosophical commentary about the nature of what people dedicate themselves to. But if you want to get emotionally wrapped up in the definition of a word and ignore the message, go for it.
I find the idea that faith can't eat you alive to be strange given that we have so many examples of that happening in real life. Faith is no different than money, power, allure, etc... in that regard.
That's one reason people turn to atheism in the first place, to avoid getting gobbled up by religion.
Personally, I've seen churches eat way more people alive than greed or any other power allure.
Beauty consumes people at the beginning of life, but most get away from it at the start of adult age. The only other things that come close are political ideologies and personality cults.
I really don't understand why some people have to turn to atheism when not participating in organised religion is quite easy enough. This is what the article implies, church membership as opposed to faith. Why even bother to deny something that others believe without proof and needlessly argue about it? Maybe it makes them happy, more secure. Vocal atheists usually annoy me more than christian evanghelists, mostly because of the negative message.
I am an atheist. I am without god. I respect no external judgement upon me.
Am I pure? Have I fallen victim to the seduction of mammon and the innumerable trinkets of existence - of course I have, and accept I will until the day I die.
Do I worship myself and take excessive pride in my self-stated virtues - clearly I do, as you can see if you've read this far.
But outside of my petty rhetoric, I know I came from nothing and at the end of my life-span I will return from whence I came.
I find this comforting.
There's no game to win, no test to pass, no heaven to enter - just a feeling of solidarity with those I share my temporal-blip-in-the-light with.
I guess this makes sense if you define “atheism” as “not obsessing over something” and “worship” as a synonym for “unhealthy obsession.” I take issue with those definitions, and also with the premise that an adult must have an unhealthy obsession over something.
What if I told you, I don’t believe in god, nor obsess over money or beauty. Oh, I guess I “worship” all things in moderation and healthy relationships.
forgive me if im not moved by the edict of an alcoholic misogynist trying to assuage his own fears of moral impropriety and existential castaway after failing twice to join the Catholic church. Wallace enrobes the exhausted and derisive narrative of evangelicals confronted with an alternative to the almighty they themselves find personally intolerable in an almost comically dismissive tone. At least Thomas Aquinas had the decency to avoid Reducto ad Absurdum when he published his metaphysical treatise.
Had we only outlawed the semiconductor im sure Gallup would enjoy a more sterling report of gods children, however i myself may be amiss. Christian Evangelism on the whole has seen a marked decline since its apex during the second Bush administration.
I imagine that many people might read this quote (out of context) from his speech "This is Water" and in this thread discussing US church membership, and think, "This seems like DFW is defending religion." But, I think this is far from the case. I think this was DFW indicting modern secular consumer society as no better than religion in its vapidity. "Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship." This is the modern consumer choice, boiled down.
The point of the speech is not to convince you that worshiping religion might be a better idea than worshiping money, things, power, or vanity. Instead, the point of the speech is to convince you that a human's "default setting" (another phrase he uses in the speech) is to worship something. And, often, that worship of something simply happens to adults, as they are going through the motions of the modern drudgery of everyday life.
Thus to move beyond worship requires a level of education (and introspection) not typically accessed by everyday adults -- yet, it's still available to all, should they try hard enough to pursue it and to see it (that is: the water surrounding the fish who swim in it).
This being a college commencement speech, DFW encourages the young graduates to use their education, and the introspection it allows, to rise above the various human psychological biases (especially self-centered behaviors and attitudes) that might make their lives feel meaningless and miserable in the moment (or in retrospect).
> But if we should serve others, and together serve some common goal or idea - for any one you, what is that idea? And who are those people?
> In my experience, you will truly serve only what you love, because, as the prophet says, service is love made visible.
> If you love friends, you will serve your friends.
> If you love community, you will serve your community.
> If you love money, you will serve your money.
> And if you love only yourself, you will serve only yourself. And you will have only yourself. So no more winning. Instead, try to love others and serve others, and hopefully find those who love and serve you in return.
I have absolutely tried to hard wire the "choose how to think" into my brain. It is never easy.
His example of the swerving SUV racing through traffic maybe just possibly driving that way because of a personal emergency stuck with me. I don't have to assume the worst of people who are acting in a way I don't agree with, and to consider this anytime I'm getting worked up over something can be quite helpful.
It is sad that so many people do not understand WHY religion is worse over other things mentioned here.
These things are SHARED among many things, along with religion;
- we humans tend to form social hierarchies
- we all want to be belong
- we want to be the hero of our story
- life is hard, and death is terrifying, so we need lullabies
- some rules/codes required wherever there are more than 1 person alive. Be it religious, moral or written/legal.
- we all need some ideal to work towards
This however, is SPECIAL to religion;
Religion makes it a habit in believers to believe without evidence, forbits questioning, and delays answers to "afterlife".
Hence takes away the power of understanding and reasoning.
It installs a backdoor to people's minds so to speak. From which all the other bullshit are welcome to come in and also take a seat in their mind.
“ Religion makes it a habit in believers to believe without evidence, forbits questioning, and delays answers to "afterlife". Hence takes away the power of understanding and reasoning.”
I haven’t found this to be true, but it is definitely possible in fundamentalist circles.
I have found atheists who run from the question and don’t want to engage with ‘is there meaning, or is there no meaning?’
I think Wallace is right in a sense. But I think 'worship' is the wrong word and if we're interpreting this literally then no, there is such thing as atheism.
I get the sense people too often take this quote out of context to suggest atheism is some form of religion. Wallace was a master of the metaphor. I don't believe that he meant this literally. I think he could have used the word 'nihilist' instead and gotten the point across but I understand why he didn't.
> is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive
I’ve seen plenty of people who have dedicated themselves to religion, made it completely consuming (ie go to church every day, God is the only thing they talk about, and the Bible is their only frame of reference), and they are unhappy because Religion itself has eaten them alive.
I know religious folks who are the most miserable people ever. Because they get jealous when someone else worship more than them. They will criticize and belittle everyone they can. And I know atheists who are way more chill than so called hippie/spiritual/religious folks claim to be. Just because one is atheist doesn't mean they will be greedy capitalist or sex-addict or something else.
Here's what's actually true and not at all weird: religious people from evangelical religions draw parallels to non-religious people by pretending that every human is born with the need to venerate something. It's how they rationalize their evangelism. They have to, because admitting that other people do not share these imperfections is akin to admitting that some people do not need what they have to share. The fun thing about lying is that if you wrap it up in enough gift wrapping, people will tire out and accept it as truth rather than spending the time to uncover the lie.
Nope. I for one don’t worship anything. Everything is flawed and imperfect. But there is still love, happiness, beauty in this world. Right next to hate, despair and ugliness.
> ...pretty much anything else you worship [other than religion] will eat you alive. If you worship money and things... 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.
This is implying that worshiping religion/god/spirituality is exempt from extreme obsession. But I have to contest that religion can create far more extreme of obsessions than other forms of "worship" that Wallace references such as beauty, money, etc..
I grew up religious (in a high-demand religion) and saw that the religion created extremists among most of our church members. While an obsessive "worship" of losing weight can lead to anorexia, we see a good thing become bad. Being interesting in beauty isn't bad by itself, but an obsessive/extreme version can lead to depression and many other things.
Religion is no exception (even though Wallace seems to exclude it). An obsession over religion leads people to over analyze their life in the search of being perfect. It forces them to make unnecessary sacrifices for a reward that they will never actually attain. I've seen it tear apart families as bad as alcohol abuse or domestic violence can. There is a very dark, evil side to religion. The religion I was involved with put so much pressure on people to live life a certain way, to be perfect, that it was unattainable. The religion's goal is to enforce compliance and promote unity through shared suffering. But it has negative effects too. I've lost many close friends (including one roommate) who committed suicide from church pressures. Prescription drug abuse is particularly bad within the community that I grew up in, I personally know several people who have life-long addictions to prescription opioids that started from church pressures. I have seen domestic violence and child sexual abuse, all justified (and protected and buried) under religious arguments. My personal experience with religion shows consequences that far exceed those of other obsessions such as wealth, beauty, fitness, drugs, and so on. So I would be very careful about giving religion a "pass".
Are all religions bad? Probably not. I know plenty of people who have healthy relationships with religion. But the bad stuff is definitely there too, and it is FAR from rare. And I am only talking about relatively tame religions too. We can go even more extreme and start discussing the effects that religion have had on promoting unspeakable acts such as the holocaust, the crusades, the jihads, 9/11 attacks, the inquisition, Boston marathon bombs, numerous mass shootings, Incan & Mayan sacrifices, the KKK, witch hunts, wacko in waco, jim jones mass suicide, and this is a short list.
I am no longer religious myself (it was a religion imposed on me by my parents), but I have no problem with other people being religious. I would just caution that there are extremes, and religion is an easy one to fall into an extreme. You are literally discussing something that is "out of this world" and can not have any proof. The rewards are infinite (eternal life, glory without end, etc), which makes them more desirable to attain and justifies more extremes to earn. They also self-exclude and discriminate other people (your religion is right, everyone else is wrong or evil). The stakes that religion creates are simply so high, that it is easy to fall into the obsessive and extreme category, more so than worrying about an obsession over wealth or fitness.
For comparison, UK church membership is <10% and forecast to fall to to 4% by 2025.
Numbers for those claiming to be of "No religion" range from from 50 to 60% depending on region. 38% don't believe in God or any higher spiritual power.
The interesting thing is people will identify as Christian on the census while also not claiming to subscribe to any particular religion in other surveys.
2021 census (just completed this month) results will be interesting
I think part of the problem is that there is no clear tradition of “cultural Christian” like there is for “atheist Jew”. I don’t believe in God. I love the high church and choral traditions. I attend a church where the minister feels the same. Am I a Christian? No. And yes.
I've been an atheist my entire life, raised by two atheists. But I celebrate christmas and easter, attend my friends weddings in churches even though they are atheists too, so I think I'm a cultural Christian.
This isn’t necessarily true outside the US. The running joke about Greeks is that they are 98% Greek Orthodox (official stats from a while ago) and 40% atheist. You might be atheist and communist (a fairly common combo in Greece) but will still probably roast a lamb on Easter with your family.
I think there are more of you floating in the pews with you than you may expect. As I've grown older it's been hard to belong to a dogmatic religion. But I miss those same things you describe. I too attend on occasion for those exact reasons.
It was startling to me, however, to realize that I'm not alone. A large % of people there in the church find value even if they don't actually believe. And that's a strange comfort that let's me continue to appreciate the tradition without claiming the title.
Growing up in the 80's (UK) as a Roman Catholic, I remember the services being full on Sunday mornings. Not been since I left home at 18, because frankly I stopped believing in God the same time I stopped believing in Father Christmas (7?). The only reason I went was to make my parents happy.
Now I'm in my 40's I do wonder if the lack of religion in society is leading us to a bad place. We know from numerous studies that 2 parent families (mother and father) give the best outcomes for children (education, jobs, etc). In modern no-religion societies, where is the pull for good old family values? What we are seeing is better rights and fairness for individuals (same-sex marriage, etc) but is that good for society as a whole?
There is no evidence that heterosexual parents are better for children than non-het parents. An important factor is that their parents have a stable relationship.
> Now I'm in my 40's I do wonder if the lack of religion in society is leading us to a bad place
I'm an atheist and have considered the same quite a bit. I wonder if some people need something to believe and direction and religion helps fence these people into society friendly pockets.
I wonder today if what I would consider is that overly woke pocket (which I respect is very relative to personal views) and generally more extreme politics on all sides need something to believe in a fight for and religion when done well is a brilliant force for good in society this way to coral that energy to good places.
...but at the same time religion can be horribly controlling and toxic. And when religion finds absolute power it tends to go badly so I think the trade off between too much and too little, we are better going towards too little.
Maybe somehow we need to look at the good parts of religion and work that into a non-religious society. Even little things like I'd love to see shops closed on Sunday again and return this as more simple downtime for family, friends and self. Also realise we dont need to spend money every day.
"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?"
> In modern no-religion societies, where is the pull for good old family values? What we are seeing is better rights and fairness for individuals (same-sex marriage, etc) but is that good for society as a whole?
I understand where you are coming from, I struggle with my atheism/beliefs too.
But without doubt, this is good for society. Think about it, we had slavery because bible and other religions, approved of slavery. Then women had no rights because of religion, finally they do. These are good things. I believe homosexuality is next big step for humanity. Once this is accepted, no one would even think about questioning it.
As for old old family values, I am not really sure what it means, but if it means close family ties, then I have seen non-religious families who are very close and religious families who fight all the time. And vice versa.
> because frankly I stopped believing in God the same time I stopped believing in Father Christmas (7?).
I had a very similar experience. My mother is a (now non-practicing) catholic and my father is more or less an agnostic. We stopped attending church about the time I was 10 because our parish had one of the pedophile priests. My "faith" died out after I learned that all of these supernatural things I was told existed actually didn't, why was the existence of god any different.
Personally, I'd say I ended up an agnostic. I don't go around telling people what I think they should believe and internally I don't really lean one way or the other. One of those "unknowable" things, along with whether there is an afterlife or not. I kind of hope there is something, I can't exactly fathom non-existence.
But as far as "family values" go, I've never felt my parents' moral teachings to be any less reasonable without an underlying fear of damnation to keep you on track. I'd like to think that I'm a good person and that being a good person is my own choice and not something I'm told to do "or else".
Maybe it was Stephen Fry who said it, but there is a quote along the lines of "I'm commiting as many murders, thefts, and rapes as I want - that number is 0" that kind of resonates with me.
This is an interesting point, I think its a valid argument that as America has fractured into vastly different competing social / political groups that the country as a whole has gotten weaker. Media now profits on widening those splits and people find themselves having less and less in common with each other. Religion very likely used to provide a common ground to people and as it fades so too does that ground. I don't think I have ever believed in God or religion but I can understand that it has provided some good. If I was an enemy with a very long timeline (say 100 years) I would work hard at continuing to widen these faults and differences.
That's a term that everyone interprets their own way, without even realising that they have different values to the person standing next to them; different people's "family values" can conflict in significant and very incompatible ways.
So what are "good old family values"? If your young, unmarried daughter falls pregnant, should you cast her out or should you double-down on helping her? Both of those are good old family values.
In modern no-religion societies, where is the pull for good old family values?
Hopefully we figure out how to build more stable unions by rebuilding a supportive framework (which church used to help with). Rather than forbidding divorce- provide tools, education, safety nets, etc, that parents may be more successful nurturing their relationship with each other. I have come to believe community is really valuable for the health of families, despite the nuclear ideal.
As someone who is semi-atheist, I have started to think that the invention of God was mostly to discipline children and to give them hope. Eventually, those children grew up and told same stories to their kids and until one day those stories became religion. Then came prophets who decided to prey upon these people and sold organized religion.
I say this because I got a toddler and sometimes it is easier to make up stories instead of telling truth, like when someone dies they go to heaven. Or if you clean up your room, then maybe elves will come at night and leave a present. It is almost like I can see a religion forming in front of my eyes. Sometimes I am using traditional religious stories like for life and death questions. And at other times, I am using fairytale creatures. This whole thing has made me more atheist while at the same time let me appreciate what religion does.
Which leads me to Santa Claus. I think Santa Claus is a great way to give subtle hint for thinking minds to realize that childhood stories are not real.
But can people still feel good without believing in religion? Do we have atheist societies? What do atheists tell their young kids?
> We know from numerous studies that 2 parent families (mother and father) give the best outcomes for children (education, jobs, etc). In modern no-religion societies, where is the pull for good old family values?
That’s ironic given that the Church of England was solely setup so that the King could divorce his wife)!
> I do wonder if the lack of religion in society is leading us to a bad place
With respect, this is a popular right-wing talking point that has been repeated since the 1970s whenever the US is on the precipice of making real progress in terms of equity and rights.
I'm surprised to see this claim here, as I would have thought the previous four years of the Trump admin, and the disastrous influence of evangelicals on policy making and governance, would have prevented anyone from even bringing it up again.
More recent research indicates that when a society is under immense social pressure and internal conflict, and fails to provide for its citizens, religious adherence tends to increase. However, in peaceful societies where the citizens have access to a wide range of services, religious participation drops considerably.
There's a lot more to this than I'm summarizing, but the data is clear: nonreligious societies are wealthier, happier, and more peaceful.
In the US, the most red, religious states have some of the highest poverty in the developed world. This isn't a coincidence. Religion tends to diminish when good governance provides for its people.
And most tellingly, what did we see happening in the US during the last four years of the previous Trump admin? The rise of Christian nationalism, often aggressive and violent in nature, and the loss of basic governance and services for most Americans.
Source: Ed Diener, Louis Tay, David G. Myers. The religion paradox: If religion makes people happy, why are so many dropping out? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2011
https://doi.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fa0024402
many of the largely atheist countries seem to be doing ok. But atheism isn't really anything other than a lack of belief in the claim there is a god. So what becomes more important is what you choose to make judgements, and many of the more atheist countries tend to have more secular humanist values. It's much more worthwhile talking about positive belief systems like secular humanism rather than lack of belief.
Also I'd be careful with any kind of statistics that measure people who conform more closely with Christian values in societies who are largely Christian or structured around christian ideals. Being outsiders in any society is often problematic because of how the society ends up treating/valuing you.
Other than my Grandma who is in her 90's and one friend who joined a church later in life (his family are atheist) I don't know anyone in the UK who goes to church. At least among my friends its just not a thing. I find it bizarre how many people in America attend church, but I hold nothing against them for it.
Yes, reading this thread as someone from the UK makes me realise the US is very different culturally from the UK. I'm sure the proportion of people for whom religion is important in their lives is much much smaller in the UK than the US. I think most British people only encounter religion at Christmas and weddings, unless they're of a religious minority group.
It isn't evenly distributed and the US doesn't have one culture, plenty of Americans never encounter much religion, particularly in the Western US which is overall less religious.
The US's First Amendment deals with that, in great part to get away from the (at the time) Church of England and prevent that (mixing church and state) from happening here. It doesn't logically surprise me that the country who left that scenario to worship freely has higher numbers of religious people 300 years later than in the country that still lived under much of the corruption for a longer period of time.
It's Holy Week this week (the week before Easter starts) and every day there is a service in each parish. UK, Roman Catholic churches. You have to book online to reserve a place. A quick look at a few parishes in an area for big and small churches shows that all the services for each day of the week and weekend are booked out in advance.
Obviously the numbers able to fit in the churches are capped because of Coronavirus, but it appears as if there are more people who are wanting to attend than can. What I can say with some confidence is that there is at the very least more demand than the capacity.
You have to get tickets to get into Temple on the Jewish High Holy Days too. I know because I take my kids. It doesn't mean we are religious though. I just like to take them for the singing and to see the blowing of the ram's horn, fond memories I have from my own youth.
The difference in politics is interesting too - in the USA politicians have to be shown to be religious - people discuss the possibility that Bernie Sanders' might be atheist like its a potential major scandal. In the UK its the exact opposite, we don't want our leaders to be religious. Its ok for them to go to a big church service or lay a wreath or something but if they start talking about their 'faith' (as Tony Blair did somewhat) we get weirded out.
Jeremy Corbyn's atheism is an interesting example - the right wing press found all sorts of ways to vilify or criticise him, but his atheism never came up as a criticism - because atheism in the UK is a complete non issue. No-one cares. Compare with Bernie Sanders.
If you're running for major office in the US, announcing your fealty to God is a kind of real-world implementation of Pascal's wager. That is, if you are openly atheist you will earn the condemnation of a large cohort of believers, and lose many votes. But if you're religious, only a small few atheists will write you off as a candidate. So it's always to your political advantage to claim religious adherence, even if you're not. Arguably patently insincere lip-service actually works better than principled devotion in this respect.
UK has historically had low church membership. Even novels from the mid 1800s (Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy) talk about how village churches lay mostly empty due to lack of adherents
Having the Church community while growing up was great. But the fact that admission to this community required total philosophical adherence is just bizarre.
Frankly, growing up in the church left me with a broken moral code. It was only once I left it in my teens and had to work things out for myself that I feel like I could properly ground myself ethically. Having a moral system imposed on you can do that.
> But the fact that admission to this community required total philosophical adherence is just bizarre.
I don't think it's bizarre at all. With the church removed from western society something will fill the vacuum. And truly it already has. Our society requires complete unquestioning philosophical adherence to its new religion. What happened during the French revolution? They turned the churches into "Temples of Reason" all the while lopping off the head of anyone that did not wholly and totally adhere to their new moral code. Even in the end the god of this new moral code met his fate by the monster he created. Believe me what is happening is not what anyone here should want. For all of you who are thinking and reasonable. Read the history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dechristianization_of_France_d...
Dechristianization does not equal the french revolution any more than the rise of national catholicism equals Franco's fascist dictatorship. Plenty of western nations have dropped the church as it failed to adapt to modern liberal society, and plenty of atrocious regimes have been aided and abetted by the blessings of churches.
You have to put things in their context though. Not saying that the years of chaotic and arbitrary killing that followed the revolution was great, but religion was a different thing in France back then. It was also (and foremost) politics and a system of power before being a religion.
I wouldn't attach the world "moral" to the catholic church back then because it definitely had none.
People have been talking about the vacuum that Christianity has left or will leave in Western society for over a century. Most of the time, however, those who complain about this then completely miss the point.
The new organizations, ideologies, and new-age pseudo-religions "filling the religion-shaped hole" in society aren't inherently "lesser" than religion (or necessarily better). They are simply filling the niches in an ecosystem that many traditional religious structures by and large refuse to adapt to.
Yes, the sudden decrease in religiosity in society is probably just trading one set of problems for another, but if individuals didn't think that leaving their church was in their best interests then they wouldn't have left in the first place. Secularization is an inevitable consequence of freedom.
Religion and Christianity itself probably won't ever go away for the same reason it has clung to life for millennia: it will change and adapt to those new needs. It's only the stubbornly complacent sects and congregations who will dwindle and go extinct.
I don't think you're arguing that it's the same motivation as the French revolution, so it would help to elucidate your point if you said what you think that new thing is. It would also help to explain how you think that enforced philosophical adherence by all of western society applies as there are still 47% of Americans who DO belong to a religious institution.
100% that second paragraph. Growing up with morals imposed on my, via the threat of fire and brimstone was weird. I did what I had to do, because I was told to do it or else.
Being an adult and doing the right thing, simply because it's the right thing, and developing my own moral and ethical code of conduct has greatly reduced my stress and anxiety.
I hear you. This, reliance on the Old Testament fire and brimstone teaching is a failure of the church. The Law (and the fire and brimstone) is important to show how we (no one) can live up to being prefect and our need for forgiveness and love. We are to do things out of love, not out of fear.
> Frankly, growing up in the church left me with a broken moral code. It was only once I left it in my teens and had to work things out for myself that I feel like I could properly ground myself ethically. Having a moral system imposed on you can do that.
How did you derive your moral code yourself? Any action you take has side effects in the outside world, and so some minimal, common understanding of morality is necessary for any beneficial interactions with the world and especially other people (I'll leave God aside for a second). Did you rely on the authorities of non-theistic moral authorities in the past, and if so, how did you examine the bases of their moral beliefs? Were you just relying on personal feelings and maybe some experiences? Did you discover the joys of hedonism?
I want to understand.
Edit: looking at some other comments, it seems you might be referring more to "fire and brimstone" preaching? I never experienced that growing up, despite being on the conservative end of mainline Protestantism and still practicing today, so I can kind of understand the reaction.
Not who you were asking, but I had a similar experience.
Ultimately what I ground my beliefs in is empathy, and the understanding that my actions have an impact on other people. The second very important piece is every human being counts equally.
Our society and inner psychology is complex. So we'll mess up and cause harm at times. Occasionally it will be intentional. But I think it's straightforward to understand committing to this as a guiding principle.
If you do that, and also agree with every human being counting equally, then I've got no problem with you or your faith. What disturbs me is how many people use religion as justification for inequality, or how they use concepts of forgiveness and grace to avoid fully owning and learning from their moral failures.
I find the argument that religion is required to understand and practice morality doesn't hold any water. In fact, I'd say religion makes it harder.
Religion gives you a set of rules, and usually involves some horrible cosmic punishment if you break those rules. But those rules are easy to derive without the need to invoke the supernatural. E.g.
- "What goes around comes around."
- Lying tends to produce more lying, leading to consequences for the liar
- Turning the other cheek gives you peace and endears you to others
- Charity is its own reward
- The 7 deadly sins are all eventually toxic to the individual committing them
- etc.
These would all be true even if religion never sprouted up in our world. Religion coopts basic, secular morality and claims it as its own divine truth. It's done this so effectively that people like you become confused about how non-religious people learn to be good people, and some go as far as to equate spirituality with morality.
My question to you (I'm assuming you're Christian) would be, how do you know that you shouldn't kill someone who works on Sunday? The bible explicitly says that you should (Exodus 35:2). If you know that your morality doesn't line up perfectly with the bible, then how did you arrive at it? There are prominent Christian figures you agree with, and plenty that you do disagree with. How do you decide which is which?
You don't need religion to learn about morality. Watching Mr. Rodgers or reading Winnie the Poo would do. As you get older you can get into Machiavelli and start really becoming a principled person.
I sort of feel the opposite, that a moral code that appeals to some authority is much poorer than one justifiable by some first principles. You can get a lot of milage out of just assuming that you do not want to be hurt in some ways and that other people are like you in that regard, and iterate from there.
Moral code is at least partially cultural. Somethings are consider immoral in some cultures while not in others. Although the major ones seem pretty aligned.
However religion isn’t needed for it, as different people from different religious backgrounds more or less got to the same place.
> But the fact that admission to this community required total philosophical adherence is just bizarre.
My grandpa's best friend was a catholic priest. I remember him saying that you really don't need to go to the church if you don't want to, but, if you did good deeds selflessly, always tried to make things right (in the sense of least global damage possible) and to avoid wronging others, you'd be a good enough catolic to pass any reasonable judgement day test.
Which is something I would suspect my idealized Jesus would stand behind.
The only time I saw him actually working as a priest, was when my grandpa died and he delivered his eulogy.
In response to your first paragraph: I was raised Catholic, and for a long time I’ve been a little bit envious of my Jewish friends’ ability to still associate themselves with their religious identity even after they no longer identify with the theistic elements of it. “If you leave you’ll burn in hell for eternity” was effective for a long time, and it worked on me for much of my childhood, but it doesn’t seem like a very effective retention strategy at this point.
Of course, I don’t really care to associate with most Catholics as they stand today anyway. But that might be different if Catholics and “I was raised Catholic”s had a more formal shared identity in the same sense that religious and secular Jews do.
> Having the Church community while growing up was great. But the fact that admission to this community required total philosophical adherence is just bizarre.
If you're not talking about the capital "C" church (which I interpret as the Catholic Church), then, it doesn't, really. You can be a Unitarian Universalist and believe in just about anything you want. Their entire philosophy is almost literally "be excellent to each other."
There's pockets of us UUs all over! Is someone asks me whether I got to a church, I have to ask, "Wait, what's your definition of a church?" Some of us Unitarians would prefer to drop the whole "Church" name entirely and call ourselves "Communities."
- Yes, you can believe whatever you want. Everyone is just genuinely curious about your journey. "My father was Jewish, my mother was Catholic, and I'm Wiccan now." is something that people legitimately say all the time, and never in jest.
- We "believe", if that's even the right word, that no one has it all figured out. There's great wisdom in all the world's traditions--and some nonsense too. Let's talk about it with respect.
- The way we teach sex ed is top-notch, educationally and psychologically. It's called "Our Whole Lives" because we know, from a vast empirical literature as well as our own personal stories that human sexuality is a complex, life-long activity. Our sex ed teacher is usually a guy called Mike. Mike is gay, and everyone agrees he is the best one to teach that class, for a variety of reasons.
- We encourage our kids to explore their own spirituality, in a "make your own religion" activity. We ask the kids themselves whether they think there is a god or not (or gods), and help them however we can.
I also enjoyed the Church community while growing up. It was important and no really 'religious' at the same time. Its hard to replace now that I have my own children. We don't go to church but are most certainly not 'anti-religious'. Like other comments, the sense of community was strong. I think society will be worse off as these communities erode or lose favor
Having an imperfect moral system imposed is better than having no moral system imposed. You have a context for which you can deviate, but if morality is all relative, many will be lost. You need something to ground yourself to. That's where familial culture and religion come in. One isn't necessarily better than another, but its useful to have as a starting point
I completely disagree that religion is the only moral system.
If you are not religious you still have a moral system. In the West this had been heavily influenced by Judeo-Christian values, but if you look at countries without that influence you still see a lot of similarities in morals.
We were only briefly religious growing up to satisfy some elders in the family, but in truth the community around our church was no stronger or any different than any other family based community we were in while growing up. You could have a just as strong of a family community with your kid in rec league sports, for example, because ultimately people just want to have a good time and you don't need a belief system for that when a plate of food will do.
Better to join a church/synagogue/whathaveyou that DOESN’T require total philosophical adherence.
There’s a similar problem in political circles, as politics has in many cases (especially last 5 years) replaced religion. Adherence is mandated by many, but the healthiest political circles/communities do not require strict adherence but instead allow healthy debate.
And in part, it is a difference in tradition. In Minneapolis, I was loosely connected with some Christian community houses (which were wonderful BTW), and one of the people who lived there was a (secular) Jewish person who made a kind of funny observation: She noted how Jewish people tended to get together and bond over arguments over the Torah, but in an evangelical Christian Bible study, everyone would “get together and just AGREE on everything!”
I tend to enjoy the process of philosophical/theological arguing as well, although I come from a evangelical Christian background, not a Jewish one. It’s just way more interesting to argue over stuff. And there is way less agreement out there on a lot of these topics.
Whether we talk about social justice, the ultimate fate of the universe, simulation theory, politics, utilitarianism, right and wrong and how that can or cannot have fundamental scientific bases. And also how spiritual vs physical interact with ideas as powerful entities themselves... Materialism is probably true on a literal basis, but ideas themselves have immense power, analogous to what the Ancients would talked about spirits ...is the Self a physical thing like a brain, or an idea or thought process or software that runs on the brain? How is that similar to the idea of a soul? Is it any different, and is dualism viewed from that perspective really incompatible with materialism? Why are people so resistant to the idea that a strong AI could have consciousness like a human or animal? If materialism is basically true (probably is), then it seems there’s nothing that one couldn’t effectively simulate. And why couldn’t we be in a simulation at this moment? Who runs this (possible) simulation and what are their goals? How is this any different from theological questions, and can we bring better insight to them? Are there things like “love” & “kindness” that we OUGHT to follow as our guiding principle in spite of lack of evidence of their utility? Is “right and wrong” purely situational or should they transcend merely being useful?
Anyway, these ideas, which one might think are obsolete with modern science, aren’t going away even from a purely materialist perspective. And neither do I think the need for community is going away any time. But it sure would be nice if we got rid of the “must have strict philosophical agreement” requirement that many (but not all) religious and political communities have.
"Better to join a church/synagogue/whathaveyou that DOESN’T require total philosophical adherence."
I'm a philosophical materialist and I don't believe in any kind of deity or supernatural world. There is no "church" that would have any place for someone like me, other than maybe the Unitarians, and, well, honestly, they're not that interesting.
I hung out in Marxist study groups and Trotskyist groupings for a while in my 20s. That was my replacement for a bit. :-)
You'll have a broken moral system imposed on you either way then, if not by a church than by the shifting values of politics and society. You'll never derive an absolute moral code by yourself, you are forced to accept the changing values of society or risk being ostracized. Most people just allow their morals to shift with society rather than dig in their heels or try to develop an absolute moral code.
> You'll have a broken moral system imposed on you either way
I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how moral systems work, one that is perpetuated by the church.
In Christianity, there is a specific "source" of morality, one that's (supposedly) infallible and unquestionable. This leads to problems when the infallible-unquestionable source of morality endorses things like slavery [1]: if it's unquestionable and infallible, how can your moral system be adapted to address this shortcoming? (This is usually handwaved away by theists by saying something like "oh that's the old covenant", or "that was a different god", which uses strange internal doctrinal shenanigans to somehow justify this supreme perfect being's obvious moral shortcommings, and looks to everyone outside the religion like someone just playing the cup game.)
Outside of religion, there is no single "source" of morality. There's a codified system of laws that our societies adhere to, certainly, but there's plenty of examples of how the laws do not codify morality (e.g. I am not required to be even a minimally-decent Samaritan to anyone I encounter on the street). Morality instead is something that an individual has to build for themselves, as a framework for decisionmaking in the wider world: how do you choose between your available actions? what are your guiding principals?
Some decide that, for various reasons, they cannot support industrial animal agriculture, and turn vegan. Some decide they fundamentally disagree with the structure of our police forces. Some turn pacifist--but all come to these conclusions through their reasoning. They absolutely can (and do) borrow reasoning from other sources, but it's impossible for it to be 'imposed' on them because there is no 'higher power' that has the absolute moral right.
This is something that's frustrated me when trying to engage with religious people on other moral issues; a few months ago I was talking to my mom about the concept of wealth redistribution, as to me it seemed incredibly immoral that people like Jeff Bezos can have an insane amount of wealth while we still have children in our schools who can't afford lunch or library books or are even homeless. My mother (Christian) couldn't get around the idea that she had no right to impose her perceived morality on another: that it would be wrong to support laws requiring the redistribution of wealth. She had similar issues with LGBT rights: she could see the harm caused to LGBT people, and did not want to participate in that harm, but struggled to support them because she felt like codifying moral support for something, which she didn't have the power to do.
This removal of one's own ability to develop and test morals is part of what disturbs me greatly about the church. It makes it very difficult to demonstrate when people make mistakes, how they have harmed other people, and how they might go about avoiding that in the future.
I had a unique experience growing up in a religious family (that is very tolerant and respectful of all world religions) while simultaneously being immersed in Scientology via a private school experience.
The thing that underscores all of my experiences has been hypocrisy. So many people just want to belong to a group, or were raised in it and know nothing better. They don’t practice what they preach.
I can’t help but think the world will be better off when we abolish big religion.
>The thing that underscores all of my experiences has been hypocrisy.
This is, consistently, what I hear from friends and family as to why they have drifted away from the Catholic church, and is solidly my own reason as well.
You see people, day-in-day out being terrible, judgmental, hateful people, except on Sunday when they're in the front row being holier than thou. It grates on you, and leaves a bad taste. It's even worse, because those people tend to be the ones who gravitate toward leadership positions within your local church.
My theory is that people have always felt that way, but it was harder to nail down these awful people before social media. Now that everyone puts everything on social media, it's easy to see, in plain black and white print, that the deacon really is an asshole.
The one thing that I do genuinely lament from the death of large religious congregations (at least in my part of the states), is that there are no replacement social constructs for people to gather and feel a sense of community. I'm certain this has something to do with the splintering of American discourse; not the religion inherently, but the social aspect is lacking and legitimately missed by most folks.
> This is, consistently, what I hear from friends and family as to why they have drifted away from the Catholic church, and is solidly my own reason as well.
I was raised Catholic and decided, as a teenager, that I didn't want to be Catholic as an adult.
> My theory is that people have always felt that way, but it was harder to nail down these awful people before social media.
IMO, two things:
1: The changes in the 1960s to the English (native language) mass
2: The shift towards conservative politics
Have you been to a latin mass? (The old-style mass that the Church conducted until the 1960s.) It's a very different experience than modern Catholicism, and much more similar to eastern-style worship.
But, more importantly, the latin mass has a lot less preaching. It's a meditation, and then a social gathering afterwards. It's a lot more universal in the sense that you don't really have to explicitly align with the beliefs to still be comfortable with the community. (Edit: As in, if you don't believe in the whole Jesus thing, you can just enjoy the chanting at let your mind drift away.)
But, the thing that really turned me off of the Catholic church was the drift towards conservative politics. I attended a friend's wedding where the church had a massive anti-abortion billboard over their parking lot for the whole town to see. Another time I went to a mass in honor of some deceased family members and there were posters in the church advocating that members vote against marijuana legalization.
> You see people, day-in-day out being terrible, judgmental, hateful people, except on Sunday when they're in the front row being holier than thou.
But you see this nearly everywhere, with every type of organization/group. A prime example would be politicians and political groups who constantly talk about how they want to help people, but then throw those same people under the bus to get what they want. This is not something unique to any one type of organization.
From my experience, there are lots of good people in most religious organizations. I would venture to say, at least in the northeast US (which is where most of my experience is), it's the majority of the people. However, as with any organization, it's common for the bad apples to be the ones that rise in power, because they don't care who they hurt to get do so. This, too, is true everywhere.
"I can’t help but think the world will be better off when we abolish big religion."
So those people who want to belong to a group and believe in it without seeing what might be better can move into political groups for their identity? The actions and methods are human nature, so I think they will just move to a different domain.
As one who loves the Catholic faith, despite the failings of its members, and who yet also fails to live it well -- I agree with you that hypocrisy is a massive problem.
The group Jesus is harshest with in the Gospels is in fact the hypocrites. He even calls them white washed tombs full of dead men's bones! What a lamentable state of things.
G.K. Chesterton's words in "What's Wrong with the World" come to mind where he points out "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried."
Perhaps this applies to all major belief systems though, and not Christianity alone.
I think hypocrisy is inevitable for a couple of reasons.
1) In theory, people go to church because they want to improve, not because they are already perfect. It's not hypocritical to make mistakes.
2) Hypocrisy is everywhere. No one really does scrum, no one really does TDD, no motivational speaker is happy all the time, and no christian is without sin. This shouldn't be surprising.
The hypocrisy is that they preach and ideal and fail to achieve it?
One thinks this is because ideals are meant to strived towards but not necessarily achieved.
A solution of throwing out ideals because they are hard to achieve and a little myopic in my opinion.
What i find an interesting thought is that you either believe these teachings are from a higher power or they are just from man.
The former had obvious implications, but the with the latter you will then need to answer the question is it written by lunatics or people that actually knew what they were doing?
> The hypocrisy is that they preach and ideal and fail to achieve it?
No, I don't think that's the case. I think the hypocrisy is that they don't try. What turns people off of organized religion is seeing so many who participate with words but not with their hearts. Of course when you have Jesus Christ as your role model you're going to fail to live up to it a lot of the time, but if you're not at least trying then in what sense are you a Christian?
I’m not religious in the slightest, but the hypocrisy has always been fairly obvious from the outside.
That said, I have serious doubts religion and hypocrisy are aligned anymore than the other sources of truth - especially when followed without applying critical thinking skills.
Sports, online forums, student fraternities, social clubs of every variety, etc. There are many ways to get active in society that don't involve beliefs in higher beings.
> So many people just want to belong to a group, or were raised in it and know nothing better. They don’t practice what they preach.
And it's not necessarily a bad thing when you frame it as a cultural institution. For many people, they grew up with the church and its traditions. Their families and friends share the same traditions, and it's part of their identity. They may not believe in the supernatural stuff or even feel aligned with the moral system, but it's still part of their culture.
You could say that's hypocritical, but we expect a an attitude of humility in regards to many cultures who have even more "backwards" practices than this. I think we ought to apply the same attitude here.
It becomes a problem though when you don’t subscribe or even understand the core tenets of your faith - and yet it is your identity. So you vote with your friends and family even if you don’t know what you’re voting for. And when you feel your tribe being threatened, you get defensive and defend your tribe - even when you don’t know what you are defending.
That is why the US has become so divided recently. That is why the blind devotion to a cause should be questioned by every believer. “Wait a sec, do I really believe this? Do I really want this to be my identity?”
You can be a good person without being a Catholic or a Muslim.
There's a long way from freedom of belief to the kind of identity politics practiced by religious groups. Ironically religious people are under the risk of getting cancelled by their own group if they dare wrongthink, so they are less free.
When I say abolish big religion I mean the way it’s integrated so tightly in society. The war on drugs, abortion, non profit tax avoidance, so many fucked up things stem from the belief that my religion is better than yours and you need to believe what I believe.
You can believe whatever the hell you want - but it’s not for you or society or anyone else to decide how I can live my life.
So many of the comments here are affirming what I have long observed: much anti-religious sentiment (“much”, not “all”!) is actually a reaction to fundamentalism, which is the bad theology of scriptural literalism, which brings heresies like hating LGBT, insisting the Bible is also a science textbook, superstitious views of certain Middle Eastern lands, and more.
Growing up as a mainline Protestant, I thankfully didn’t have much of this to react against in my own churches. But we saw the bad fundamentalist theology in Southern Baptist or too many independent churches (those two mentioned because they were dominant where I grew up). I can appreciate the difference.
I’m still happily a mainline Protestant. I’m not instructed to hate anyone, I’m not told to vote a particular way. I’m not going to church to check in my brain to a charlatan who saves me from an angry (false) god. I’m going to be better and to grow my relationship with God.
I grew up mainline Protestant too before throwing it away (I was young ~12 which makes it easier). My objection is to the broken nature of the reasoning and how that tends to corrupt evidence based reasoning elsewhere most of them time (though weirdly not always - people are inconsistent).
If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals?
Obviously religious people remain the vast majority and being a good person or not is largely disconnected from religiousness. It’s difficult for me though to not think that a religious person’s reasoning is broken in some way, and to be more skeptical of how they verify ideas in general.
If they can’t get something basic right, why would they be right about something more complicated?
A lot of the rationalization of religious people is complicated in a way that suggests they have some underlying idea of what the accurate world model is (they just want to believe otherwise): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-...
One thing I credit the internet for is allowing me to read and learn enough to escape it. I think most people will end up with whatever belief system they grow up surrounded by.
As someone who went in the opposite direction, I observed as I got older that “evidence based reasoning” is less useful than I had assumed. Nearly everyone has beliefs about the world that are based on faith whether they call it that or not. Very few political premises are based on scientific evidence that’s well established as say anthropogenic climate change. For the most part the data is mixed and hard to interpret and peoples’ views aren’t really based on the data anyway. (Try talking with a gun control advocate. First note that homicides went down in Australia after gun buybacks. Note reaction. Then note that homicides were going down at the same rate before gun buybacks as after gun buybacks. Note reaction.)
And basing your world views on faith is fine because for the most part evidence based reasoning can’t really tell you how to structure your communities and economies and raise and educate your children. Not for metaphysical reasons, just because the strong conclusions you can reliably reach with the current state of social and political science is just very limited.
> If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals?
That line would only hold if fundamentalists have correctly identified the fundamentals. I wage they have badly missed it, which is why their theology is so bad.
> being a good person or not is largely disconnected from religiousness
Being a good person is not the primary point of religion. It is rather a hoped for outcome. Religion is not therapy.
> Obviously religious people remain the vast majority and being a good person or not is largely disconnected from religiousness.
Religiosity is highly inversely correlated with criminality amount Americans.[1] Religious people also donate significantly more money to charity. To a large extent religious participation does seem to make people behave more pro-socially.
It's certainly not the only way to promote ethical behavior. But even as an atheist, I'll freely admit that religion serves a pretty beneficial important role in our society. A role that we haven't really figured out how to replace with secular counterparts.
> If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals?
Not a bad argument, but if we need religion to be 100% accurate then we'd only ever support the most modern and innovative religion.
The issue is that most religions (including my own) place tremendous importance on the accuracy of teachings that go back hundreds or thousands of years. It was impossible for the original authors to know what we know today, yet we either fault them for it or declare any advances in knowledge to be heretical. Clearly, both of these positions are wrong in the extreme.
And yet, there's a good reason for that, too. If we subject religion to every modern idea, then the religion doesn't really stand for anything. It simply mirrors society back at it.
I don't know the solution to this. There may not be one (short of saying "f--- religion" as a whole, which I think would be a terrible mistake).
If anyone has ever participated in a 12-step program, you can see this in action in a much more modern way. Every program has an unchanging dogma, based on the assumption that the founders hit on something special and right, and that any changes would risk watering it down. As a result, you end up with programs that have ideas that would have been very mainstream when they were founded, but are now largely viewed as wrong-headed or even cruel. And yet, these programs continue to be a lifeline to many people who would have otherwise spiralled into self-destruction.
" before throwing it away (I was young ~12 which makes it easier). My objection is to the broken nature of the reasoning and how that tends to corrupt evidence based reasoning elsewhere most of them time "
Age 12 is pretty young to come to that conclusion.
Also, it's not about direct rational inquiry, yes it can sometimes a source of aberration, but that would be missing the point.
Spirituality is about who you are, your relationship to the greater good.
You make strong assertions that would be difficult to prove in general and based on a lot of assumptions (e.g. that materialistic reductionism is the only accurate worldview). I believe the viewpoint you espouse that religious people have broken reasoning is bit myopic in understanding human rationality and intellectual pursuits as well. Humans are complicated as is our understanding of reality we all share.
Good counterpoints are people like Donald E. Knuth, who is a preeminent mathematician, Turing Award recipient, and also a devout Lutheran [1]. He gave a talk on science and religion at Google even that gives a more nuanced view on science and religion [2]. There's also Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome project who is a devout Christian as well. Other non-western examples include Ramanujan who attributed his mathematics to "divinity" [3]. Of course otherwise rational scientists can also become besot with irrational pursuits and beliefs, like Linus Pauling obessions with Vitamin C [4].
More broadly the religious concepts implicit in the Judeo-Christian creation mythos (and other major world religions) also encourage (in many scholars opinions and mine as well) a view that the world is a result of rational thought and not purely a choatic war that man happens to be besot by and perhaps might survive. For example compare the differences of Genesis to the Enuma Elish "There is no suggestion of any primordial battle or internecine war which eventually led to the creation of the universe. The one God is above the whole of nature, which He Himself created by His own absolute will. The primeval water, earth, sky, and luminaries are not pictured as deities or as parts of disembodied deities, but are all parts of the manifold works of the Creator. Man, in turn, is not conceived of as an afterthought, as in Enuma Elish, but rather as the pinnacle of creation." [5]. It's my belief that the inception of science (not mere technologists vs philosophers as the ancient Greeks or Romans had) is encouraged by a societal belief that the world has rational underpinnings and isn't just mad chaos.
>If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals?
What people call fundamentalists are often not all about the actual fundamentals. Rather, they're stuck on one or another bad, but still old idea. Actual fundamentals do not reflect the hateful, angry, bitter image that's conjured up by the term "fundamentalist."
My own experience being raised mainline Protestant was a bit different which might be illustrative: My parents were not at all devout, but still took wisdom and moral lessons from the Bible, especially from the teachings of Jesus. At the same time the preachers in town leaned right in their beliefs and focused on reading and interpreting more obscure passages. This resulted in a modest ongoing tension about what exactly it all meant. Then one Sunday School a conservative leaning preacher taught the kids how to spot witches. That was the last straw and we never went back to Mass or Sunday School and gradually withdrew from everything else with Easter and Christmas being the final holdouts. So I drifted to atheism but still find wisdom in the Bible and dare to compare the passages that focus on Jesus to stories of the Buddha. Culturally there is still quite a bit of influence there, but the fundamentalist component is a massive division like a great wall.
As a non-practicing Jew, I found the Jefferson bible very inspiring. Stripping the religious trappings from the teachings tempers the whole thing; I really like the humanity: it’s a story about a man with his own foibles, attempting to teach himself & others to be better people.
This demonstrates the big flaw of Christianity. Even thought there are millions of sincere, loving and friendly Christians around the world, the whole thing is based around a book that espouses views that are exactly what you call fundamentalism. Sooner or later someone will be confronted with the fundamentalist ideas about women, non-christians, and sexual diversity (for example), and start spreading the hate ideas contained in parts of that book.
I take it that "last straw" means the "straw that broke the camel's back". I just hope that stories like that won't be conflated with healthy practice of Christianity in people's minds.
Grew up Protestant and rejected it because of the hypocrisy I saw around me. I saw "good church going people" who I knew were not good people and I saw how they were able to use the authority of their positions to exert influence. I also found that asking too many inconvenient questions in youth group meetings led to uncomfortable situations. It became clear that the religion part of things had little to no impact on how good, bad or decent the people practicing it were. People were good or bad, religious people simply had a metaphysical framework they could use to excuse themselves... and the bad ones would do just this. Led me to reject confirmation and leave altogether. Now it's been 40 years and I am more convinced than ever that I made the correct decision. Religion is fundamentally flawed as I see it practiced around me and needs to be kept out of civil society strictly and completely. You want to practice it in your home or church? Go for it. You want to inject it into civil society (schools, government, etc)... you need to be stopped utterly and completely.
After being raised in a non-Fundamentalist denomination I'd say the progressive ones are more insidious and no less harmful. Their foundations are all the same text, no matter how literal or figurative they interpret it. IME they usually also teach the same bad ways of thinking: emotion over logic, testimony over hard evidence, authority beyond your understanding, etc.
I suspect you're setting up a false dichotomy. There are more choices on theology than ones that require you to check your brain in at the door, such as 1. fundamentalism and 2. feel-good pop psychology.
I am not taught emotion over logic. In fact, the Wesleyan Quadrilateral (a framework derived from but not described by him) has you evaluate beliefs with reason being a co-equal base. In confirmation and later in-depth adult classes, we were instructed to wrestle with the scripture. For example, we dug into the context of the times to understand better why certain things would have been said. We acknowledged selected verses made no sense. We agreed some parts we have no choice but to disregard. We frankly don't take Revelations that seriously because it's mostly batshit crazy. :-)
I am not taught testimony over evidence. My church fully embraces evolution. We see Genesis for the story and the poetry.
Authority beyond understanding: that gets back into the theological allegiance insisted on by the fundamentalists mainly.
Not sure I follow. If the religious outfit is teaching things like:
- This book is a set of moral guidance aimed to cause favorable social outcome.
- These stories are myths.
- We should analyze these books to critically determine their relevance to our modern lives.
- Your personal understanding of spirituality is unique to yourself.
It seems only productive? It seems a much more dangerous stance, one even paralleling a fundamentalist stance, that there might be nothing to learn at all from scripture and millennia of human organized religion and so it must be completely discarded.
I've seen the churches you talk about, and I would almost call them "progressive-fundamentalist". The hallmark of fundamentalism isn't really adhering strictly to the text (after all, the text is so multifaceted that there's not even just one definition of "strict adherence", despite what they would tell you). The defining trait is turning the text into a battle-cry instead of an invitation for contemplation and love and self- and community-work. Progressives are just as likely to do this as conservatives.
I was raised Roman Catholic and attended Catholic schools until college. When I was in high school I recall having serious issues with what they were teaching. Here's a few of the gems they left me with:
1. You should only get married if you intended on having children.
2. If you were unable to have children, the marriage should be annulled.
3. Homosexuality was abhorrent and sinful.
4. Women should not obtain positions of power in the church. They used Adam and Eve to justify their position.
Many years later I found out that the reason why my freshman year biology teacher left unexpectedly over the summer was because he had been shuffled to another location after molesting young boys. He was eventually imprisoned for this, after being extradited to Australia. The church and the school knew this but said nothing to the parents or the students and it was swept under the rug. It was complete silence until they were forced to say something at a point where those who were molested were fairly far into their lives.
Thinking back on all of this still makes me angry today. A priest in my elementary school was brought in and then quietly and suddenly left a few months later and I am left with unanswered questions.
I don't need that in my life. I don't need religion to be a moral person, and from my point of view the system that I was raised in was very far from moral. The Catholic church has done more to affirm my Atheist .. non-beliefs? .. than anything else.
> If you were unable to have children, the marriage should be annulled.
This depends on a lot of things. If two people get married, and one of them already knows that they are sterile or for whatever reason cannot have children, but they don't reveal that to the other until after they are married, that is grounds for the other person to seek an annulment. This is not the same thing as saying that the marriage "should" be annulled.
If on the other hand, knowledge of the person's sterility doesn't arise until after they are married, I don't think that's grounds for an annulment.
That’s the predictable, and in the end, best outcome. The most foolish thing cultural “christianity,” could do is pick a political party. Now that we’re a generation past that, the so-called “religious right” has evolved into a thin veneer of pseudo-religion over a very specific political faction, and that shallow falseness is driving most people away.
As for actual Christianity and those who study it, in many ways the teachings of Christ could not be more different than the “religious right” advocates today. Christ taught followers to love their neighbors as themselves, and not to judge other people, because in God’s eyes all humans were equally and impossibly flawed. When a mob formed to stone an “adulteress,” as was the prescribed punishment for that “crime” in ancient Judaea, Jesus said “let the person who is without sin throw the first stone.” The mob dissolved, and he told the woman she was forgiven.
Note that this is not what the religious-political faction of Jesus day wanted either, and in the end they arranged for him to be crucified as a result.
For me, and many I know, anti-religious sentiment is pretty simple. We just think it is science fiction, and thus not good to believe it is real. Even if its all very nice and friendly and reasonable fiction, it is better to understand it isn't real.
My anti-religious sentiment goes far beyond that. I could not care less if people believe in science fiction. We all believe lies, don't we?
My problem is that religions dictate universal truth, which is used as a justification to oppress. Many of us were abused or oppressed by mainstream religons as children.
The reason fundamentalists are so appealing is because they at least try to maintain some level of consistency.
How does one know which parts of the bible to accept or which parts are metaphor and which parts are literal or which version of the bible to believe? At least the most literal interpretation always tries to be consistent.
What makes any interpretation better than scriptural literalism? Is it the fact that some happen to agree with current social trends? Seems like the source material is flawed and unnecessary in the first place.
Totally agree. I'm not religious at all, but at least being a "fundamentalist" seems intellectually honesty. If you believe your religious text is the true word of an all powerful God, surely it's infallible? What gives you the right to pick and choose which parts to take literally or not?
Would an all powerful God who wants "true believers" to find salvation leave them for thousands of years muddling through with just an ambiguous and inconsistent book to live by?
I think fundamentalists care less about consistency than closure. They want to minimize mystery and unknowns by insisting that even some very implausible parts of the Bible are expressly and unquestionably true. Similarly, Catholicism seems also to be quite formal about Biblical interpretation, but willing to let the church decide which tenets should be explicit vs metaphor. In contrast to both, I understand that Orthodoxy is less concerned about closure and more willing to leave 'lesser' questions unanswered or remain ambiguous.
Religious truth isn't decided only by scripture or church hermeneutics. Sometimes it's just what your community chooses to care about (or not).
Without "scriptural literalism" how do you know what bad theology and heresy are? Is good theology not simply that which most closely corresponds to Scripture? Your comment makes sense on a Roman Catholic view – in which the traditions of the church are authoritative – but not on the Protestant view (sola Scriptura).
Fundamentalism is still a vague description. I left the Catholic church in my teens and was angry for the experiences I'd had. As I grew as an adult my ire went from "religious institutions" to "certain moral communities".
In any moral community there will be outliers and some of those outliers can take hold of a message. You can see this in modern day with secular moral communities as well. My main takeaway, after 20-some years of evaluating this is that morals are something okay to evaluate your group on, but they are not ethics. They cannot apply widely, make their way into law, or try to shape society because by their very definition they are intrinsic to small groups. That doesn't mean these groups can't teach us something, but the foundation of their ideas requires subscription and often holistically.
> I left the Catholic church in my teens and was angry for the experiences I'd had.
I know of too many Catholics who say the same. Not growing up Catholic, it's hard to relate. Their stories often involve excessively strict dogma or scriptural interpretation that denies or vilifies innocent human nature. E.g., taking your girlfriend to mass to hear an incendiary anti-abortion sermon, then losing said girlfriend due to that mass, then later ending your relationship with the church out of frustration.
Unfortunately, you are the exception. I grew up in a church household and family. It is sad that so many people see the bible as a weapon to enforce their point of view instead of a manual to direct their own life. It is crazy the amount of hate that my "christian" family members post on FB.
Jesus drove people out of the temple with a whip for disrespecting it. He called people (these are all based on KJV translation) "generation of vipers", "hypocrites", "whited sepulchres full of dead men's bones", he said it would be better some people to not have been born, that it would be better for some to have a millstone hanged on their neck and be drowned in the sea.
None of that was hatred. It was love. He was dealing with people's religious and moral failings.
It is not love to tell people they are okay when they are morally bankrupt.
I've talked to people of the younger generations (in the USA) who are not even aware that there is anything other than fundamentalist literalism. Either the Earth is 6000 years old and Jonah literally rode in the belly of a whale, or there is no God.
This sets up a situation where you have to be willfully ignorant or lie to defend the existence of God, since this stuff is bollocks.
In reality fundamentalist literalism is a relatively recent (19th century) theological development, but it's taken over completely in many US denominations.
A further wedge has been driven by the total politicization of religion. Many also believe that you must be a far-right Republican to be a Christian. If you'd asked me as a teenager or early 20-something what it meant to be a Christian I'd have thought "you have to support the military and vote Republican."
Well given the logical definition of God 6 day creation and riding in a whale are not a problem at all, anything is possible. I never saw a 6000 year old Earth in the Bible though.
Nobody hates you. The gallup just shows that your belief system is slowly becoming irrelevant. If you can still draw anything from it (while leaving the rest of the competing sects alone), all the more power to you.
The beauty of protestantism is that there is no ultimate arbiter to decide that one sect is "good" or "bad."
You view certain fundamentalists' interpretation as somehow "bad?" So what? They probably view your sect as being equally degenerate.
What gives you standing to cast this judgment?
The framework of Protestantism allows and accounts for these divergent views. So you really can't throw down the "no true Scotsman" fallacy against those sects you disagree with in its broader defense.
I think you're missing the bitterness that comes from growing up with a set of coping mechanisms and losing them. Moderate Christianity, taught by moral and good people, nevertheless can lead one to use the thought of eternal life as a psychological coping mechanism to deal with the reality of death and suffering in the world. If you eventually lose your ability to believe in that (which is involuntary for many), it can be quite painful.
1. Stance on abortion among your brothers in church? As if brothers should even have one that matters?
2. Do you follow the edict that if you’re not baptist then by definition you go to hell? How do you reconcile this with having friends or anyone at all you care about who are then going to hell?
Point is, I’m not sure there is any middle ground that’s acceptable. I don’t come here as an atheist, just as someone who’s trying really hard to believe but finding no acceptable ground to stand at all. The only smart people I find religious (especially Christian) are ones who were born and grew up forced to go to church. Typically they’d give up on practising it in their teens, basically break every rule in their book for two decades and then somehow rediscover it because now it’s convenient to find some community and higher purpose in their life. The ones who convert from elsewhere when they are adults are almost always gullible and did so for the most transactional reasons you can think of.
> Point is, I’m not sure there is any middle ground that’s acceptable.
I grew up fundamentalist, then swung hard atheist, then ended up, as one friend who went to seminary described it, "the most christian atheist he's ever met". I've known Christians ignorant and intellectual, hateful and openly loving, urban and rural, liberal and conservative, and everything in-between.
Here's my take: A healthy faith is not about rules at all, or about finding a system for understanding the physical world or anything like that. If you get obsessed with rules you become a bitter fundamentalist; if you get fed-up with religion but stay obsessed with rules you become a bitter atheist.
A healthy faith is about people. Yourself, your community, the world. Cultivating habits of forgiveness and growth toward yourself, and openness and love toward others. Having a specific segment of your life dedicated to contemplation of the most important things in life, and doing so in a community on a regular basis. The iconography and the texts, ideally, are just a communal conduit for those ideas; symbols people can point to and use to talk about their thoughts and feelings around this stuff with others, and also to spark new thoughts and points of discussion.
Many (not all) of my close friends are christians, and none of them have ever tried to convert me. Some of them don't really think hell exists; most of them don't think some magic prayer is all that's needed to keep you out of it. Most, I think, see that even if it does, the best thing they can do for others is simply to love them and to help them be better through example and osmosis, if anything. They know they don't control others and they can't force them into whatever. They can only be Good and hope that it spreads.
I like this quote from Pope Francis:
> We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.
> Do you follow the edict that if you’re not baptist then by definition you go to hell
I am not Baptist. But the ones I speak to, who are dedicated fundamentalists, seem to believe that I am going to hell since I am not and will never be "saved" in the way they prescribe. Furthermore, in their view, nearly everyone who existed before Jesus's time is condemned to Hell except for a select few who foretold of Jesus's coming. Crazy theology!
Also, keep in mind that Baptists have diversity. The Southern Baptists are the firebrand fundamentalists. There are others that are almost indistinguishable from mainline Protestantism.
> 2. Do you follow the edict that if you’re not baptist then by definition you go to hell? How do you reconcile this with having friends or anyone at all you care about who are then going to hell?
I'm not a Baptist, but presumably nearly all of them find it sad and unfortunate and feel compassion for most of humanity.
I'm not sure what you're getting at, though. Only believing things that make you happy isn't a very good philosophy of life.
That's fair, but to play devils advocate, every sect can point the finger at some other sect, or at heretics within their own sect. No sect will agree to any negative critique, and because their doctrines tend to be self consistent, critique is pointless anyway. Yet the sects are not completely separate, but are collusive to some degree. And individual beliefs may be a mishmash of ideas from multiple sects. Indeed for this reason, the divisions between sects are not hard edged.
American fundamentalism would have no political power without the tacit consent of the mainstream. The predominant sects in my state are mainline, yet they voted en masse to outlaw gay marriage (before the US supreme court ruled otherwise).
Fundamentalism is corrosive and detrimental to society. I don't get angry at moderate religious views but I still think they're laughable superstition. I respect your right as a human to believe I just think it's silly.
I'm not sure the narrative you're trying to paint here actually works. If you dig deeper into the actual poll, it says:
> In addition to Protestants, declines in church membership are proportionately smaller among political conservatives, Republicans, married adults and college graduates. These groups tend to have among the highest rates of church membership, along with Southern residents and non-Hispanic Black adults.
For better or worse, conservative (both politically and theologically) people seem to be holding on to their Christian faith in greater numbers (at least marginally) than their more progressive or liberal leaning counterparts.
Anyway, as someone who almost left the faith, I would agree with the overall narrative that Christianity became ineffective in the late 20th century. Personally though, I would attribute it to a lack of focus on youth and issues relevant to youths. I can't find it now, but I'm pretty sure I saw a poll that indicated most people who leave do so in the transition from high school to college. That certainly lines up with what I observed, most people just didn't care enough to keep going (regardless of what branch they were in). I would have been one of them myself, if I hadn't been able to find a college Christian community that was dramatically more vibrant than what I grew up with. But overall I think I'm one of the lucky ones.
Yeah, I suspect this news story (and poll) only scratches the surface as to identifying the multiple demographic trends afoot. Most notable to my eye was the 15% drop in church membership between GenX and Millenial. Of course, to do that metric justice we'd need to monitor change in that age group over time. Are today's 18-to-30 year olds so different than 18-to-80 year olds were in the 1970's or 1990s?
I suspect the range of ages that are today's Millenials has forever been less traditional than other age groups. That's unsurprising given they have the least personal history of any adult group to weigh when deciding their life's priorities, and are likely to think least about their relationship to others in their family (since they just left the parents behind and have yet to add any more). At that age, the need to join another 'family' and adopt a bunch of new familial responsibilities is likely to be less compelling a notion than it may be a few years hence.
I became an atheist/agnostic as a teenager and now in my late 20's I have slowly come back to religion. So I am really interested in this topic.
My comment is specifically about online atheist communities, because I think they are often toxic to both religion and to atheism itself. A lot of these communities are hyper-focused on fundamentalism, to their own detriment.
These online atheists communities can be very unfortunate. Your noble search for the truth leads you to question religion - but then you get caught in an echo chamber spending a lot of energy hating on others for their beliefs. A noble pursuit devolved into hatred and groupthink. On the other hand, fundamentalists took a religion which preaches love and acceptance and twisted it into something bitter and hateful. I think it's kind of poetic how much those two communities mirror each other.
The fixation on fundamentalism is a combination of two things. First, there are people from those fundamentalist churches who were damaged in some way and have now swung way to the opposite extreme of hating all religion. They grew up learning to see the world through rigid dogma, and online atheist communities tend to be fairly dogmatic themselves. Not hard to see the appeal there. Second, and probably more common, are atheists who never had any close contact with fundamentalism but they justify their beliefs by taking on the low-hanging fruit. It is very easy to pick on young-earth creationists, vehement anti-gay groups, prosperity gospel, etc. Those groups' thinking really does rely on fear and hate, things that the bible actually tells us to reject.
What happens when you tell one of those angry atheists that yes, you're a Christian, but you also find evolution to be very cool, you know that the universe is billions of years old, you are pro choice, and you don't believe everything in the bible literally happened? Well, they aren't really sure what to do with you. Because they spend all their time congratulating themselves for being smarter than the lowest common denominator of religion, they aren't really able to have a more sophisticated conversation about their beliefs.
As a religious person, it is a bit frustrating that you never see atheists confronting the great theologists and religious philosophers - Origen, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Kierkegaard, or even contemporary thinkers like Alasdair McIntyre. If Christians' beliefs are really so shallow and stupid, those guys should be super easy to refute, right? They think that all Christians are anti-science when Christian monks were pivotal in the discovery of genetics and the big bang theory, among other scientific achievements. They ignore that some giants of Enlightenment philosophy, like Descartes and Spinoza, were attempting to use new rational methods to affirm the existence of God in their major works.
The problem is, when you are an atheist engaging in the really complex arguments posed by the most intelligent and eloquent religious people of history, the waters become very muddy. You might even have to concede, just a little bit, that you take your atheism on faith, too. It's much easier to feel good about bashing the usual suspects - Joel Osteen, the 700 Club, Westboro Baptist and friends. And so a lot of people get sucked into that low-level discourse, and never get a chance to make the exhilarating journey back to religion. I don't really care if someone stays an atheist, many good people are atheists. But I do care if they never get a chance to see the promise of religion because of toxic echo chambers and groupthink.
As a religious person, I don't hate outspoken atheists. In fact, I very much respect them - they are people who care deeply about the truth. In that respect, they have something in common with any thoughtful religious person.
> just a little bit, that you take your atheism on faith
Well, that's the whole point: Atheists don't.
Indeed we can't explain everything, not even close. But we don't have any reason to even remotely believe in any kind of supernatural power, which in turn begs an explanation it self ad infinitum.
>What happens when you tell one of those angry atheists that yes, you're a Christian, but you also find evolution to be very cool, you know that the universe is billions of years old, you are pro choice, and you don't believe everything in the bible literally happened? Well, they aren't really sure what to do with you. Because they spend all their time congratulating themselves for being smarter than the lowest common denominator of religion, they aren't really able to have a more sophisticated conversation about their beliefs.
I'd say you're being inconsistent with your religion and that the religious part of how you came to these views is unnecessary. Sure I agree attacking the very worst of religion is easy, but even at its very best, religion doesn't make a compelling argument for its necessity.
The reason for fixation on fundamentalism is because they have the most consistent story that can be argued against. Once you start cherry picking whatever pieces of the bible seem like it could fit into today's social norms and current understanding of the physical world, you're basically showing none of it necessary.
What would you say to someone that believes a giant turtle created everything, is the one true god and also held those same stances on evolution etc? They just prepend the fact that a giant turtle created everything and then vanished without a trace. Anyone could come up with a number of creative stories that are unverifiable or disprovable and seemingly are compatible with our current scientific understanding of the world. What makes your god or any god(s) in particular more reasonable or necessary than the great turtle?
I don’t understand atheist online communities like you talk about. I’m very much an atheist, but I’m baffled by anyone who desires to have atheist get-togethers. What is the point? is it like fake bacon for people who like the taste of being preached to and preaching, but are atheist? Religious people do it because their are supposed to but what reason would atheists do it? When you were exploring atheism why did you go?
This is such a refreshing comment. It's far better to engage in dialogue with those whom you disagree in order to understand their position opposed to assuming they are evil, stupid, or otherwise sub-human. Wouldn't it be wonderful if such an approach was applied not only to religious conversations but those of politics, work disputes, conflicts with your significant other...everything?
> As a religious person, it is a bit frustrating that you never see atheists confronting the great theologists and religious philosophers - Origen, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Kierkegaard, or even contemporary thinkers like Alasdair McIntyre. If Christians' beliefs are really so shallow and stupid, those guys should be super easy to refute, right?
The main issue with most of these philosophical arguments is that they don't prove anything even worth refuting. Almost all of them simply attempt to prove the existence of a deistic God that does not meaningfully interact with the world (beyond creating it or sustaining it).
Deistic Gods by their vary nature don't provide any meaningful knowledge. Believing that there was a creator doesn't provide any useful information about how to help live your life or how the world works.
As a starting point I don't think there are any good arguments for why a person should believe that the bible was influenced/written by God any more than other books.
I'm not a Christian, but a lot of this matches my experience with the overwhelming majority of atheists. There's a severe echo chamber effect and ignorance of both Christianity itself and especially of other religions, to the point that they make wide-ranging pronouncements that only really apply to a single perverted branch of a particular religion.
> As a religious person, I don't hate outspoken atheists. In fact, I very much respect them - they are people who care deeply about the truth. In that respect, they have something in common with any thoughtful religious person.
I disagree here though. In a secular world, rejecting religion isn't exactly the mark of a radical truth-seeker. When I started through my own atheistic phase as a teen, the greatest disappointment was the observation that my 'companions' in that regard weren't exactly insightful, just followers of the zeitgeist; if anything they mirrored the fundamentalists in their ignorance.
> "that you take your atheism on faith, too."
This is a nonsensical statement. Atheism is a recognition that there is zero evidence for the existence of any gods. It requires no faith.
> "Origen, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Kierkegaard, or even contemporary thinkers like Alasdair McIntyre ... should be super easy to refute, right?"
You're shifting the burden of proof; there is nothing to refute. It's not the job of atheists to disprove your assertions. Regardless of a persons' intelligence, they cannot argue their deity into existence. It either exists or it doesn't. None of the aforementioned scholars ever presented evidence for their god or demonstrated supernatural causation.
It's so refreshing to see somebody who has had a similar experience to my own. I've never been a member of a church like the ones that people describe in a lot of the comments. We focus on devotion to God and improving the earth. For example, here's how we marked our church's 100th birthday:
I was raised liberal Catholic by an atheist father and an eclectic hippie New-Age-Catholic-Hindu-dowsing-crystals-homeopathy-and-runic[0]-divination mother, for the purposes of getting into a good school.
While it is fair to say that one specific fundamentalist young-Earth creationist Baptist certainly turned me from “it isn’t true but it doesn’t matter” to “it is actively harmful for people to believe this”, I should also say that the liberal version of Catholicism at my school — liberal enough to not explicitly condemn abortion or homosexuality, even though this was the U.K. in the 1990s and Section 28 still in force — had terrible sex education which completely ignored the existence of e.g. chlamydia, and I do think that was due to the religion given how quickly I learned about it the moment I moved to the next step in my education.
The open-mindedness may have been good for me as a teenager going through a goth-paganism phase, but it also meant she gave my dad homeopathic remedies when he got bowel cancer, and she got Alzheimer’s 15 years younger than her mother “despite” her use of Bach flower remedies for memory.
it also depends on the church and with time. the southern baptist church i went to when young didn't have much if any extreme fundamentalism. the one i attended for a bit as a teenager (not by choice) was a little more fundamentalist, but not extreme. i stopped going to church after that.
but really, teasing apart the strains doesn't matter in the long run. our gods are changing, just as they always have.
A lot can change in a couple of centuries. Right now, Catholicism is still growing in South America and Africa. As people in those regions become better educated and affluent, they may indeed follow the evolutionary path of other more affluent economies.
But with the resounding recent rise throughout the world in populism (which is a form of faith, but in a person or a dream rather than an economy), it's hard to know how humankind will respond to the challenges of the modern world.
We could choose to retreat from our current immersion in fast-paced life via technology and withdraw into one (or many) 'simpler' ways of life. If we do it wouldn't surprise me if we also choose to reimagine the world that surrounds us as being less concrete and more a realm of possibility in which choose our own reality.
I wouldn't write it off yet. The popularity of protestantism is very prone to wax and wane with the times. A really charismatic preacher or two can make a big impact. Most of the mainlines we see in the US today started from just itinerant preachers and camp meetings. Personally, I think that's because the emphasis on "personal relationships" with God lends itself to more of a "social contagion" model of popularity, as people seek to imitate friends and neighbors who share spiritual experiences. That's not a negative thing necessarily. But they can't lean on tradition like the Orthodox or Catholics do.
Seeing those same comments in this thread reminded me of something Jordan Peterson questions: with this decline of religious-based narratives for guidelines, what is replacing it?
I had a similar experience as a Catholic in the northeast.
Lately as the politics of old people and loud young people have tilted right-wing, and more extreme philosophy is accepted, it’s disturbing how the theology has followed the money.
I probably sound like a simpleton here, but I’ve always found religion to be a source of peace and solace and a positive influence. Some of that is a result of ignoring teachings that are more... noxious to me personally or focusing away from behavior of the human agents of the church.
Unfortunately, cycles of religious fundamentalism is a feature of the American body politic.
[Posted this under a reply below that got downvoted, so reposting here]
I grew up fundamentalist, then swung hard atheist, then ended up, as one friend who went to seminary described it, "the most christian atheist he knows". I've known Christians ignorant and intellectual, hateful and openly loving, urban and rural, liberal and conservative, and everything in-between (and these are all independent axes, to be clear).
Here's my take: A healthy faith is not about technicalities, or about finding a system for understanding the physical world or anything like that. If you get obsessed with technicalities you become a bitter fundamentalist; if you get fed-up with religion but stay obsessed with technicalities you become a bitter atheist.
A healthy faith is about people. Yourself, your community, the world. Cultivating habits of forgiveness and growth toward yourself, and openness and love (as well as forgiveness and growth) toward others. Having a specific segment of your life dedicated to contemplation of the most important things in life, and doing so in a community on a regular basis. The iconography and the texts, ideally, are just a communal conduit for those ideas; symbols people can point to and use to talk about their thoughts and feelings around this stuff with others, and also to spark new thoughts and points of discussion.
Many (not all) of my close friends are christians, and none of them have ever tried to convert me (if they were to do that on a regular basis, we wouldn't be close friends). Some of them don't really think hell exists; most of them don't think some magic prayer is all that's needed to keep you out of it; they know that spirituality is a matter of the heart, and the heart isn't so simple. Most, I think, see that even if hell does exist, the best thing they can do for others is simply to love them and to help them be better through example and friendship, if anything. They know they don't control others and they can't force them into anything. They can only be Good and hope that it spreads.
I like this quote from Pope Francis:
> We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.
ADDENDUM: So where has that left me? I don't practice religion, though I read from the occasional religious author and I think spirituality in the broader sense is a useful metaphor for matters surrounding the heart and trying to be a better member of the world. I have really nice conversations, even with religious people, around those subjects. I've been known to go with a friend or relative to the odd church service (as long as it's at a church that's reasonably compatible with the above), and I often get some benefit from it in the form of meditation on myself and my relationship with the world. I've thought about finding a church to join for the sake of community, though I go back and forth on that since I don't believe in even the smallest literal sense (I try to let go of my literalism, but I still have mental habits from the days when I thought it was all about that, both religious and not). Maybe one day I'll find the right church and get past that.
This is funny to read because LGBT and a series of other movements cause me to feel much the same as I do about "religious" fundamentalism. Excessive self-styling and countering any adverse ideas with a refusal to compromise or cede any ground. Not tolerating adverse ideas and manifestations thereof in daily life but "calling it out" and attacking them constantly.
Extremism in opiniated/constructed ideas, polarized cancel culture etc has become much more popular and dominating in the public discourse and media than it has been for the past 50+ years.
I just don't get how fundamentalists can remain so busy going on about their fundaments. It's all very tiresome.
I suspect one factor in the declining membership is shared with other mid-century social groups that have also dwindled (e.g., men's lodges): it's easier to find community elsewhere.
For my parents -- born in 1940 -- church and men's service clubs/lodges were the primary areas of social interaction outside work. Dad ran his own veterinary practice, so his social interaction there was limited (I mean, everybody worked for him). Mom stayed at home until the late 70s. Church was the center of their social life.
Now, nobody wanted to say that out loud; it was all about the faith. But that's what it was.
In my life I've had no need for that, because people of my generation (b 1970) have generally found other communities of support/friendship/connection. None of my friends are Masons, either.
Men's lodges, fraternal organizations, and so on around here tend to have a religious underpinning of specific faiths, or seem to be charities of some kind with a connection to religion. As such, I think declining church membership would drag them down as well.
I wonder if men's clubs exist which are neither, just completely secular. I haven't been able to find any when searching, aside from The Club, which technically fits but as a bathhouse for hookups, wasn't really what I had in mind. I know lodges centered around professions more or less fell apart, and perhaps the last vestige of secular groups would be country clubs.
It's hard to tell how much of this is just "people aren't joiners anymore" and how much is declining church membership.
It's definitely not true that all men's lodges/clubs were religious in nature. The big three service clubs (in the US, at least) are Rotary, Kiwanis, and Lions, and none of them have ever been religious in nature. (Though certain in the eras and areas where they had the biggest membership, the populations would be overwhelmingly American protestants -- but that's demographics, not organizational affiliation.)
Freemasonry may or may not be "religious" depending on your definitions, but has traditionally been a target of some faiths due to perceived conflict between the club and the church.
This misses the forest for the trees: Membership is down at organizations across the board - scouting, group athletics, Rotary clubs, unions, even things like PTAs and neighborhood associations and model train clubs.
There is a society wide "apathy" event happening right under our noses. Maybe we're just seeing a new generation moving to new niche groups that aren't being seen yet. But it seems that technology is doing something with our desire to form communal bonds.
I don't see it as apathy. I suspect people are simply choosing to put their time into pursuits other than attending meetings with other people.
In the past 20 years, there's been a large rise in the time the average person spends on the social web. In the past 10 years, with the rise of mobile platforms, that time has gone up even more. In addition, streaming media has become very big, thereby consuming even more of our free time.
That additional time spent online has to come from somewhere. As Sherry Turkle put it, we are increasingly choosing to be "Alone Together" probably at the cost of old school forms of togetherness like church and social clubs.
Yes I agree. This seems to be a continuation of the trends described in “Bowling Alone”. The book argued in 2000 that television was a contributing factor. It is probably further worsened by the rise in online entertainment since.
Hard to tell if that's permanent; it may be a temporary thing due to COVID, people being afraid of gatherings. Is that possible? Probably only part of the picture: the poll sited elsewhere in this thread says the trend goes on for quite some time: https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-...
Membership is down at in-person organizations across the board. I doubt the census includes the many different online communities I am a part of.
I have friends I have known for 10+ years which I have never met in real life. Friendships which are deeper and longer lasting than anything I have “in real life”.
Readit News
One of the high points for me regarding religion in the past couple years was finding The Holy Post podcast. One host is Phil Vischer, AKA Bob the Tomato, the creator of Veggie Tales. I have some fundamental (heh) disagreements with their perspective at this point, but they remind me of what I thought the church was while growing up within it, and they still largely reflect what I think it should be. They acknowledge that there’s lots of room for disagreement, they don’t think they have all the answers, and they strike me as genuinely loving people.
If I had heard more people talking like them 20 years ago, I might not have left the church. It’s not a question of “baby food” so much as “cultural identity,” and the cultural identity of the American church is largely flag-waving rah-rah nationalism. Not sure what stats you’re referencing, because megachurches are still quite popular here and quite clear on their “theology.”
If you the parent poster are not located in America, please disregard this post entirely.
Dead Comment
However once I realized that, on a very fundamental level, the core of what they where claiming as true wasn't in fact true, I felt I had no choice to walk away.
My experience was seeing huge amounts of falsehood and hypocrisy as religious people followed and repeated all the rituals of the mass but in the day to day life they just did not care about others and pretty much ignored what their religion taught them.
Thank God after those 12 years I saw everything I needed from religion to get as far away from it as I can.
A key thing for me (I'm still not religious, though I'm religion-adjacent in some ways) was seeing that religion - despite what some would tell you - is at its best when it's not made to be about material truths at all. Its truths, really, are truths about the human condition and how best to live it out.
In this sense, even as someone who doesn't believe in metaphysical spirits, the heart of what they're claiming (if you really dig down deep past many of the surface-level particulars) contains a lot of truth.
To my mind, most of the planet's population have got to the 'right place' (show love and compassion to those you meet) - and how we all got to this same place is immaterial.
I'm without a doubt an atheist to my core - but doesn't stop me admiring those with faith who use it to lead a good life.
I’ve encountered this claim more often than I’ve encountered actual fundamentalist churches I think are making any sort of strong claim about the world.
So I’m curious to hear what people think is wrong.
For comparison: in the Netherlands we already dipped below 50% in 2017, and the number of religious people keeps dropping steadily.
In 2019 the remaining religious minority was composed of 20.1% Roman Catholics, 14.8% protestants (various types), 5.0% Muslims, and 5.9% adherents of other religions.
Edit: bear in mind that this is people who consider themselves religious. The percentage of people actually member of a church/mosque/whatever is below 30%.
I think this is a deceiving metric. Most churches are less places of worship or religious education and more social clubs dressed up in religious phrases and iconography. There are so many of them because each is designed to appeal to a particular social group, but they all feature a very similar watered down message that just reinforces the congregation's preexisting beliefs. They tend to focus less on education and more on community events, activism, fundraising, and growing their community - just like any other social club.
If you're looking for a church that genuinely teaches its congregation, that's much harder to find. They don't tend to be as successful in terms of growth or wealth. To teach someone, you must either add to what they know or challenge something they think they already know. Most people don't like being challenged - they'd rather go somewhere that reinforces what they already think or just ditch religion altogether.
It's no surprise that the social club churches are disappearing. Even the least devoted members of a church congregation feels bad leaving, just as they might feel bad cancelling a gym membership they never actually use. But their kids often have no such attachments.
Religion has the same function as "branding" - it's an efficient short-cut to bypass intensive, and possible unavailable intellectual rigor for some. And because Bell Curves are truly reality, providing a moral and ethical framework that works for everyone and that is internally consistent ENOUGH absolutely matters.
NOTHING we can ever know will be absolute truth or knowledge. You can make a simple proof by physical volumes of an individual and of the universe, combined with Shannon's Law. Humans must always come up short on knowledge and understanding of the universe as a result.
Like all things (even science) you can take a thing too far and exceed its limits of explanation or prediction. But that's unavoidable in a static system sense; which is why you dynamic systems defined by reliable and simple rules and waypoints. Religion absolutely provides that in a minimal effort form.
And we shouldn't project upon "average" and "below average" for what we might be familiar with or assume about intellect. Again: Bell curves for all things are reality. The biggest mistake that intellectuals make is that EVERYONE is just like them and thinks exactly the same way. Nope. Not even on a good day.
The social role that churches play is where the opening raises real concern. What comes after organized religion may well look more like conspiracy theory.
And a direct result of that history is that the Church mandates certain practices to shape one's willpower: fasting (roughly half the year, in total, though "fasting" here means small vegan meals), some form of tithing &/or charitable work, explicit self-examination (not only standard prayers, but also Confession with a priest, who helps make a plan against bad habits, as well as an annual event where everyone in the parish asks forgiveness of each other) etc.
Unfortunately this argument entirely fails to support all the rest of the luggage, especially the metaphysical hokum: you can perfectly chose to live your life according to a set of rules that will help you (and others) without having to justify it via the existence of some bearded dude sitting on a cloud.
To me faith is something that you _have_ to understand through the lens of your life. There is no understanding faith before life. Your experiences allow you to understand faith. Which isn't to say that life is more important than faith, not at all, just that life is the lens in which you view faith.
In that mindset, faith seems exceptionally deep and complex. Full of discussion, learning, change. Not a black and white truth, but a series of learnings and understanding. You can't learn (in my mind) without change, and so the idea of a churn that teaches absolute truths felt fundamentally broken to me. I think faith is a journey in knowledge. And so many churches seem almost aggressive towards knowledge. They favor rote memorization, i think, as a method to avoid change. To avoid their doctrine as being mutable.
This mindset also seems pervasive into how these people behave in life, too. Just like how children need to learn to think critically, adults need to practice thinking critically. Such a strong emphasis on rote memorization has wide affects, i think.
No grand statements here, and i mean no offense to religion. Just my thoughts on some denominations.
Why does God need/desire your worship? You know, I have kids. I "hope" they love me and always will, but I'll never force them to say it and I'm definitely not going to punish them if they are mad at me and won't prop up my ego.
It's the on-the-fly, off-the-cuff, brand new, modern theology/philosophy which tends to end up shaky, simply because it's been done with fewer resources and has seen far less attention.
The Discourse on the Method of Descartes, in which his famous phrase je pense, donc je suis occurs also includes a preceding segment where he considers whether he can know anything at all, or whether he's a disembodied consciousness fed false information by evil demonic powers (if you will, the "Matrix hypothesis"). He rebuts that hypothesis with a simple assertion that a just and loving God wouldn't allow such an arrangement of events to be the true nature of reality.
Depending on your bent, that can either allow the discourse to continue or put the brakes completely on it.
the long term effects wast that this not a healthy thing to tell a young teenager, and it's time for society to move on.
1000% that's why I am against many (perhaps most by % in the US?) of the organized religious congregations.
those that identify queer, gender-fluid, whatever are told their literal existence is sin. it's hard to imagine how damaging that is if you're not in this community. It'd be like telling someone who has orange hair they are going to hell for something they have absolutely no control over.
In the worst cases they push parents to try to 'change' their kids, which has been shown to be incredibly dangerous and damaging.
Even if you're in a 'liberal' church that says we love gays like we love all humans, but don't think about getting married and in some cases can't have sex, that still does a huge amount of psychological damage and putting us on the outside of 'normal.'
Finally, I realized, “Why does God want me to be scared all the time?” Shouldn’t God be allaying my fears, not being the source of them?
Maybe this is my ignorance talking, but I thought those with active church membership continue to go to participate in social events and make friends/partners?
Some of the topics being discussed in our (US) church in the past couple of years:
* the devastating personal and economic toll of the pandemic and how we can help individually and in aggregate
* race relations in the US and the history of injustices caused by racism, including police brutality, and how we can respond in our daily lives
* LGBTQ-related topics, including the ability of people of different sexual identities to participate fully at all levels of the church hierarchy
* the environmental impact of our actions at the personal level all the way up to the institutional level as it pertains to human-caused climate change
You can find many churches in the US with people that believe in every possible belief related to all of these issues.
No, it's not just potlucks and singles nights :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology#Socioecono...
On the other hand — if it is people that are losing their faith, that is perhaps different, and I can see your concern.
My personal worldview - at the end of the day, we're human and should see others as humans who make mistakes and give enough grace for them to try to improve.
I'd posit that these generations are primarily looking for acceptance, not answers. And they're not getting that acceptance, so they leave. Which was my experience - I started questioning teachings (directly based on my reading of scripture) and had leaders shut down on me entirely and refuse to talk further instead of engaging because it didn't fit in the prescribed "answer" - and this was in a fairly "open-minded" church. I'd come back tomorrow if I could find a church that (most importantly) actually accepted me for me and (secondly) would actually engage in tough topics instead of just giving me hollow "answers" that didn't answer the question (and often conflicted directly with scripture!). I guess what I'm looking for is a church that actually practiced grace and acceptance, answers be damned. That's what Jesus did (see hanging out with tax collectors and prostitutes and preaching a message of love for everyone). Why can't the church do it too?
David Foster Wallace
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/camus/
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Camus
"I don't know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me — that I understand. And these two certainties — my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle — I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my conditions?"
It's a really comical extension to an existentialism.
"Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?"
It is etymologically correct though: condition of being worthy, dignity, glory, distinction, honor, renown.
* https://www.etymonline.com/word/worship
From the root worth "worth": weorþ "significant, valuable, of value; valued, appreciated, highly thought-of, deserving, meriting; honorable, noble, of high rank.
* https://www.etymonline.com/word/worth
What do you hold in highest regard in your life? Family? Truth/honesty? Happiness? Other? (Saint) Thomas Aquinas said that the four typical substitutes for God are wealth, pleasure, power, and honor.
None of those things are necessarily bad in themselves—some amount are often necessary for life, and can be be used to achieve good things—but chasing them for the sake of themselves without a higher principle to guide you once acquire them has probably caused many people problems over the course of history.
Asking yourself "what is the highest good in my life? what is the thing/princple that I hold in highest esteem? what do I 'worship'?" can be a good spiritual/moral exercise.
I'll bet you're an engineer, data scientist, or other technical professional, not simply b/c you're here, but b/c your response to Wallace's use of ambiguity and multiple layers of meaning reveals as much about the nature of your own relationship with language, which I'd guess prefers that things should be clear, precise, and have singular meaning. (I'm certainly oversimplifying you, so apologies.)
Look into "cognitive decoupling", and you may find a dichotomy that illustrates some of your reaction to Wallace.
https://everythingstudies.com/2018/05/25/decoupling-revisite...
"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet."
In this quote, Shakespeare is just fudging the definition of "name". He says people and flowers both have something called a "name", implying their names are equivalent. This is intellectually dishonest because people's personal names are subtly different than the names you use to describe objects. I find this quote insulting and useless.
That quotation is one paragraph in a much longer essay. It may be useful to go to the full source:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_Water
* https://fs.blog/2012/04/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI (where he originally delivered it as a speech)
The key phrase is "day-to day trenches of adult life".
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Can you expand on why the distinction you are drawing is important?
It's nowhere near as insulting, intellectually dishonest, and useless, as pedantic comments like yours.
That's one reason people turn to atheism in the first place, to avoid getting gobbled up by religion.
Beauty consumes people at the beginning of life, but most get away from it at the start of adult age. The only other things that come close are political ideologies and personality cults.
I am an atheist. I am without god. I respect no external judgement upon me.
Am I pure? Have I fallen victim to the seduction of mammon and the innumerable trinkets of existence - of course I have, and accept I will until the day I die.
Do I worship myself and take excessive pride in my self-stated virtues - clearly I do, as you can see if you've read this far.
But outside of my petty rhetoric, I know I came from nothing and at the end of my life-span I will return from whence I came.
I find this comforting.
There's no game to win, no test to pass, no heaven to enter - just a feeling of solidarity with those I share my temporal-blip-in-the-light with.
What if I told you, I don’t believe in god, nor obsess over money or beauty. Oh, I guess I “worship” all things in moderation and healthy relationships.
Had we only outlawed the semiconductor im sure Gallup would enjoy a more sterling report of gods children, however i myself may be amiss. Christian Evangelism on the whole has seen a marked decline since its apex during the second Bush administration.
The point of the speech is not to convince you that worshiping religion might be a better idea than worshiping money, things, power, or vanity. Instead, the point of the speech is to convince you that a human's "default setting" (another phrase he uses in the speech) is to worship something. And, often, that worship of something simply happens to adults, as they are going through the motions of the modern drudgery of everyday life.
Thus to move beyond worship requires a level of education (and introspection) not typically accessed by everyday adults -- yet, it's still available to all, should they try hard enough to pursue it and to see it (that is: the water surrounding the fish who swim in it).
This being a college commencement speech, DFW encourages the young graduates to use their education, and the introspection it allows, to rise above the various human psychological biases (especially self-centered behaviors and attitudes) that might make their lives feel meaningless and miserable in the moment (or in retrospect).
In my opinion, it's one of the best graduation speeches of all time.
And a transcript: https://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2011/06/colb...
> But if we should serve others, and together serve some common goal or idea - for any one you, what is that idea? And who are those people?
> In my experience, you will truly serve only what you love, because, as the prophet says, service is love made visible.
> If you love friends, you will serve your friends.
> If you love community, you will serve your community.
> If you love money, you will serve your money.
> And if you love only yourself, you will serve only yourself. And you will have only yourself. So no more winning. Instead, try to love others and serve others, and hopefully find those who love and serve you in return.
His example of the swerving SUV racing through traffic maybe just possibly driving that way because of a personal emergency stuck with me. I don't have to assume the worst of people who are acting in a way I don't agree with, and to consider this anytime I'm getting worked up over something can be quite helpful.
These things are SHARED among many things, along with religion;
- we humans tend to form social hierarchies
- we all want to be belong
- we want to be the hero of our story
- life is hard, and death is terrifying, so we need lullabies
- some rules/codes required wherever there are more than 1 person alive. Be it religious, moral or written/legal.
- we all need some ideal to work towards
This however, is SPECIAL to religion;
Religion makes it a habit in believers to believe without evidence, forbits questioning, and delays answers to "afterlife". Hence takes away the power of understanding and reasoning.
It installs a backdoor to people's minds so to speak. From which all the other bullshit are welcome to come in and also take a seat in their mind.
Oh wait, there was this video that was explains these more elegantly than I can. Okay I've found it: https://twitter.com/billmaher/status/1357915846731997185
I haven’t found this to be true, but it is definitely possible in fundamentalist circles.
I have found atheists who run from the question and don’t want to engage with ‘is there meaning, or is there no meaning?’
I get the sense people too often take this quote out of context to suggest atheism is some form of religion. Wallace was a master of the metaphor. I don't believe that he meant this literally. I think he could have used the word 'nihilist' instead and gotten the point across but I understand why he didn't.
Must be DFW.
I’ve seen plenty of people who have dedicated themselves to religion, made it completely consuming (ie go to church every day, God is the only thing they talk about, and the Bible is their only frame of reference), and they are unhappy because Religion itself has eaten them alive.
How wrong Wallace was.
What does he actually say instead of grieve? I have never been able to recognize the word. Plant?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI after 18:40.
" Then you got your nothing. Some folks believe in nothing. But if you believe in nothing, then what's to keep the nothing from coming for you?
... Call me silly Call me sappy Call me many things the first of which is happy
You doubt, but you're sad. I don't, but I'm glad. I guess we're even. At least that's what I believe in And there are much worse things
- Written by Adam Schlesinger (RIP)
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This is implying that worshiping religion/god/spirituality is exempt from extreme obsession. But I have to contest that religion can create far more extreme of obsessions than other forms of "worship" that Wallace references such as beauty, money, etc..
I grew up religious (in a high-demand religion) and saw that the religion created extremists among most of our church members. While an obsessive "worship" of losing weight can lead to anorexia, we see a good thing become bad. Being interesting in beauty isn't bad by itself, but an obsessive/extreme version can lead to depression and many other things.
Religion is no exception (even though Wallace seems to exclude it). An obsession over religion leads people to over analyze their life in the search of being perfect. It forces them to make unnecessary sacrifices for a reward that they will never actually attain. I've seen it tear apart families as bad as alcohol abuse or domestic violence can. There is a very dark, evil side to religion. The religion I was involved with put so much pressure on people to live life a certain way, to be perfect, that it was unattainable. The religion's goal is to enforce compliance and promote unity through shared suffering. But it has negative effects too. I've lost many close friends (including one roommate) who committed suicide from church pressures. Prescription drug abuse is particularly bad within the community that I grew up in, I personally know several people who have life-long addictions to prescription opioids that started from church pressures. I have seen domestic violence and child sexual abuse, all justified (and protected and buried) under religious arguments. My personal experience with religion shows consequences that far exceed those of other obsessions such as wealth, beauty, fitness, drugs, and so on. So I would be very careful about giving religion a "pass".
Are all religions bad? Probably not. I know plenty of people who have healthy relationships with religion. But the bad stuff is definitely there too, and it is FAR from rare. And I am only talking about relatively tame religions too. We can go even more extreme and start discussing the effects that religion have had on promoting unspeakable acts such as the holocaust, the crusades, the jihads, 9/11 attacks, the inquisition, Boston marathon bombs, numerous mass shootings, Incan & Mayan sacrifices, the KKK, witch hunts, wacko in waco, jim jones mass suicide, and this is a short list.
I am no longer religious myself (it was a religion imposed on me by my parents), but I have no problem with other people being religious. I would just caution that there are extremes, and religion is an easy one to fall into an extreme. You are literally discussing something that is "out of this world" and can not have any proof. The rewards are infinite (eternal life, glory without end, etc), which makes them more desirable to attain and justifies more extremes to earn. They also self-exclude and discriminate other people (your religion is right, everyone else is wrong or evil). The stakes that religion creates are simply so high, that it is easy to fall into the obsessive and extreme category, more so than worrying about an obsession over wealth or fitness.
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Numbers for those claiming to be of "No religion" range from from 50 to 60% depending on region. 38% don't believe in God or any higher spiritual power.
The interesting thing is people will identify as Christian on the census while also not claiming to subscribe to any particular religion in other surveys.
2021 census (just completed this month) results will be interesting
https://faithsurvey.co.uk/uk-christianity.html
I think there are more of you floating in the pews with you than you may expect. As I've grown older it's been hard to belong to a dogmatic religion. But I miss those same things you describe. I too attend on occasion for those exact reasons.
It was startling to me, however, to realize that I'm not alone. A large % of people there in the church find value even if they don't actually believe. And that's a strange comfort that let's me continue to appreciate the tradition without claiming the title.
Now I'm in my 40's I do wonder if the lack of religion in society is leading us to a bad place. We know from numerous studies that 2 parent families (mother and father) give the best outcomes for children (education, jobs, etc). In modern no-religion societies, where is the pull for good old family values? What we are seeing is better rights and fairness for individuals (same-sex marriage, etc) but is that good for society as a whole?
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01494929.2015.10...
https://journals.lww.com/jrnldbp/Abstract/2016/04000/Same_Se...
I'm an atheist and have considered the same quite a bit. I wonder if some people need something to believe and direction and religion helps fence these people into society friendly pockets.
I wonder today if what I would consider is that overly woke pocket (which I respect is very relative to personal views) and generally more extreme politics on all sides need something to believe in a fight for and religion when done well is a brilliant force for good in society this way to coral that energy to good places.
...but at the same time religion can be horribly controlling and toxic. And when religion finds absolute power it tends to go badly so I think the trade off between too much and too little, we are better going towards too little.
Maybe somehow we need to look at the good parts of religion and work that into a non-religious society. Even little things like I'd love to see shops closed on Sunday again and return this as more simple downtime for family, friends and self. Also realise we dont need to spend money every day.
It's important to make a distinction between lack of religion and lack of community.
I understand where you are coming from, I struggle with my atheism/beliefs too.
But without doubt, this is good for society. Think about it, we had slavery because bible and other religions, approved of slavery. Then women had no rights because of religion, finally they do. These are good things. I believe homosexuality is next big step for humanity. Once this is accepted, no one would even think about questioning it.
As for old old family values, I am not really sure what it means, but if it means close family ties, then I have seen non-religious families who are very close and religious families who fight all the time. And vice versa.
I had a very similar experience. My mother is a (now non-practicing) catholic and my father is more or less an agnostic. We stopped attending church about the time I was 10 because our parish had one of the pedophile priests. My "faith" died out after I learned that all of these supernatural things I was told existed actually didn't, why was the existence of god any different.
Personally, I'd say I ended up an agnostic. I don't go around telling people what I think they should believe and internally I don't really lean one way or the other. One of those "unknowable" things, along with whether there is an afterlife or not. I kind of hope there is something, I can't exactly fathom non-existence.
But as far as "family values" go, I've never felt my parents' moral teachings to be any less reasonable without an underlying fear of damnation to keep you on track. I'd like to think that I'm a good person and that being a good person is my own choice and not something I'm told to do "or else".
Maybe it was Stephen Fry who said it, but there is a quote along the lines of "I'm commiting as many murders, thefts, and rapes as I want - that number is 0" that kind of resonates with me.
Whose family? Which values?
This honestly just sounds like a “back in my day...” rant to be honest.
That's a term that everyone interprets their own way, without even realising that they have different values to the person standing next to them; different people's "family values" can conflict in significant and very incompatible ways.
So what are "good old family values"? If your young, unmarried daughter falls pregnant, should you cast her out or should you double-down on helping her? Both of those are good old family values.
Hopefully we figure out how to build more stable unions by rebuilding a supportive framework (which church used to help with). Rather than forbidding divorce- provide tools, education, safety nets, etc, that parents may be more successful nurturing their relationship with each other. I have come to believe community is really valuable for the health of families, despite the nuclear ideal.
I say this because I got a toddler and sometimes it is easier to make up stories instead of telling truth, like when someone dies they go to heaven. Or if you clean up your room, then maybe elves will come at night and leave a present. It is almost like I can see a religion forming in front of my eyes. Sometimes I am using traditional religious stories like for life and death questions. And at other times, I am using fairytale creatures. This whole thing has made me more atheist while at the same time let me appreciate what religion does.
Which leads me to Santa Claus. I think Santa Claus is a great way to give subtle hint for thinking minds to realize that childhood stories are not real.
But can people still feel good without believing in religion? Do we have atheist societies? What do atheists tell their young kids?
Yes. This shouldn't even be a question.
That’s ironic given that the Church of England was solely setup so that the King could divorce his wife)!
With respect, this is a popular right-wing talking point that has been repeated since the 1970s whenever the US is on the precipice of making real progress in terms of equity and rights.
I'm surprised to see this claim here, as I would have thought the previous four years of the Trump admin, and the disastrous influence of evangelicals on policy making and governance, would have prevented anyone from even bringing it up again.
More recent research indicates that when a society is under immense social pressure and internal conflict, and fails to provide for its citizens, religious adherence tends to increase. However, in peaceful societies where the citizens have access to a wide range of services, religious participation drops considerably.
There's a lot more to this than I'm summarizing, but the data is clear: nonreligious societies are wealthier, happier, and more peaceful.
In the US, the most red, religious states have some of the highest poverty in the developed world. This isn't a coincidence. Religion tends to diminish when good governance provides for its people.
And most tellingly, what did we see happening in the US during the last four years of the previous Trump admin? The rise of Christian nationalism, often aggressive and violent in nature, and the loss of basic governance and services for most Americans.
Source: Ed Diener, Louis Tay, David G. Myers. The religion paradox: If religion makes people happy, why are so many dropping out? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2011 https://doi.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fa0024402
Also I'd be careful with any kind of statistics that measure people who conform more closely with Christian values in societies who are largely Christian or structured around christian ideals. Being outsiders in any society is often problematic because of how the society ends up treating/valuing you.
Obviously the numbers able to fit in the churches are capped because of Coronavirus, but it appears as if there are more people who are wanting to attend than can. What I can say with some confidence is that there is at the very least more demand than the capacity.
Unfunny quip aside, it is a social gathering and it is undeniably positive for the community.
Jeremy Corbyn's atheism is an interesting example - the right wing press found all sorts of ways to vilify or criticise him, but his atheism never came up as a criticism - because atheism in the UK is a complete non issue. No-one cares. Compare with Bernie Sanders.
Frankly, growing up in the church left me with a broken moral code. It was only once I left it in my teens and had to work things out for myself that I feel like I could properly ground myself ethically. Having a moral system imposed on you can do that.
I don't think it's bizarre at all. With the church removed from western society something will fill the vacuum. And truly it already has. Our society requires complete unquestioning philosophical adherence to its new religion. What happened during the French revolution? They turned the churches into "Temples of Reason" all the while lopping off the head of anyone that did not wholly and totally adhere to their new moral code. Even in the end the god of this new moral code met his fate by the monster he created. Believe me what is happening is not what anyone here should want. For all of you who are thinking and reasonable. Read the history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dechristianization_of_France_d...
Obviously, since speaking heresies like this will get you killed. /s
Take a step back, disengage from the culture war, and take a look at what is actually happening.
The new organizations, ideologies, and new-age pseudo-religions "filling the religion-shaped hole" in society aren't inherently "lesser" than religion (or necessarily better). They are simply filling the niches in an ecosystem that many traditional religious structures by and large refuse to adapt to.
Yes, the sudden decrease in religiosity in society is probably just trading one set of problems for another, but if individuals didn't think that leaving their church was in their best interests then they wouldn't have left in the first place. Secularization is an inevitable consequence of freedom.
Religion and Christianity itself probably won't ever go away for the same reason it has clung to life for millennia: it will change and adapt to those new needs. It's only the stubbornly complacent sects and congregations who will dwindle and go extinct.
I don't think you're arguing that it's the same motivation as the French revolution, so it would help to elucidate your point if you said what you think that new thing is. It would also help to explain how you think that enforced philosophical adherence by all of western society applies as there are still 47% of Americans who DO belong to a religious institution.
Being an adult and doing the right thing, simply because it's the right thing, and developing my own moral and ethical code of conduct has greatly reduced my stress and anxiety.
How did you derive your moral code yourself? Any action you take has side effects in the outside world, and so some minimal, common understanding of morality is necessary for any beneficial interactions with the world and especially other people (I'll leave God aside for a second). Did you rely on the authorities of non-theistic moral authorities in the past, and if so, how did you examine the bases of their moral beliefs? Were you just relying on personal feelings and maybe some experiences? Did you discover the joys of hedonism?
I want to understand.
Edit: looking at some other comments, it seems you might be referring more to "fire and brimstone" preaching? I never experienced that growing up, despite being on the conservative end of mainline Protestantism and still practicing today, so I can kind of understand the reaction.
I'm still curious though.
Ultimately what I ground my beliefs in is empathy, and the understanding that my actions have an impact on other people. The second very important piece is every human being counts equally.
Our society and inner psychology is complex. So we'll mess up and cause harm at times. Occasionally it will be intentional. But I think it's straightforward to understand committing to this as a guiding principle.
If you do that, and also agree with every human being counting equally, then I've got no problem with you or your faith. What disturbs me is how many people use religion as justification for inequality, or how they use concepts of forgiveness and grace to avoid fully owning and learning from their moral failures.
Religion gives you a set of rules, and usually involves some horrible cosmic punishment if you break those rules. But those rules are easy to derive without the need to invoke the supernatural. E.g.
- "What goes around comes around."
- Lying tends to produce more lying, leading to consequences for the liar
- Turning the other cheek gives you peace and endears you to others
- Charity is its own reward
- The 7 deadly sins are all eventually toxic to the individual committing them
- etc.
These would all be true even if religion never sprouted up in our world. Religion coopts basic, secular morality and claims it as its own divine truth. It's done this so effectively that people like you become confused about how non-religious people learn to be good people, and some go as far as to equate spirituality with morality.
My question to you (I'm assuming you're Christian) would be, how do you know that you shouldn't kill someone who works on Sunday? The bible explicitly says that you should (Exodus 35:2). If you know that your morality doesn't line up perfectly with the bible, then how did you arrive at it? There are prominent Christian figures you agree with, and plenty that you do disagree with. How do you decide which is which?
Just because a very old book says that X, Y, or Z is sinful, doesn't mean those actions are immoral if there's no harm to anyone.
However religion isn’t needed for it, as different people from different religious backgrounds more or less got to the same place.
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By thinking about it.
I also read a lot of Spinoza.
My grandpa's best friend was a catholic priest. I remember him saying that you really don't need to go to the church if you don't want to, but, if you did good deeds selflessly, always tried to make things right (in the sense of least global damage possible) and to avoid wronging others, you'd be a good enough catolic to pass any reasonable judgement day test.
Which is something I would suspect my idealized Jesus would stand behind.
The only time I saw him actually working as a priest, was when my grandpa died and he delivered his eulogy.
Thing is, application of it by clergy is not exactly universal :(
Of course, I don’t really care to associate with most Catholics as they stand today anyway. But that might be different if Catholics and “I was raised Catholic”s had a more formal shared identity in the same sense that religious and secular Jews do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_the_Sun
If you're not talking about the capital "C" church (which I interpret as the Catholic Church), then, it doesn't, really. You can be a Unitarian Universalist and believe in just about anything you want. Their entire philosophy is almost literally "be excellent to each other."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarian_Universalism#Belief,...
- Yes, you can believe whatever you want. Everyone is just genuinely curious about your journey. "My father was Jewish, my mother was Catholic, and I'm Wiccan now." is something that people legitimately say all the time, and never in jest.
- We "believe", if that's even the right word, that no one has it all figured out. There's great wisdom in all the world's traditions--and some nonsense too. Let's talk about it with respect.
- The way we teach sex ed is top-notch, educationally and psychologically. It's called "Our Whole Lives" because we know, from a vast empirical literature as well as our own personal stories that human sexuality is a complex, life-long activity. Our sex ed teacher is usually a guy called Mike. Mike is gay, and everyone agrees he is the best one to teach that class, for a variety of reasons.
- We encourage our kids to explore their own spirituality, in a "make your own religion" activity. We ask the kids themselves whether they think there is a god or not (or gods), and help them however we can.
- We vote whether our minister stays or goes.
If you are not religious you still have a moral system. In the West this had been heavily influenced by Judeo-Christian values, but if you look at countries without that influence you still see a lot of similarities in morals.
What's so good about having somebody else decide your moral system?
There’s a similar problem in political circles, as politics has in many cases (especially last 5 years) replaced religion. Adherence is mandated by many, but the healthiest political circles/communities do not require strict adherence but instead allow healthy debate.
And in part, it is a difference in tradition. In Minneapolis, I was loosely connected with some Christian community houses (which were wonderful BTW), and one of the people who lived there was a (secular) Jewish person who made a kind of funny observation: She noted how Jewish people tended to get together and bond over arguments over the Torah, but in an evangelical Christian Bible study, everyone would “get together and just AGREE on everything!”
I tend to enjoy the process of philosophical/theological arguing as well, although I come from a evangelical Christian background, not a Jewish one. It’s just way more interesting to argue over stuff. And there is way less agreement out there on a lot of these topics.
Whether we talk about social justice, the ultimate fate of the universe, simulation theory, politics, utilitarianism, right and wrong and how that can or cannot have fundamental scientific bases. And also how spiritual vs physical interact with ideas as powerful entities themselves... Materialism is probably true on a literal basis, but ideas themselves have immense power, analogous to what the Ancients would talked about spirits ...is the Self a physical thing like a brain, or an idea or thought process or software that runs on the brain? How is that similar to the idea of a soul? Is it any different, and is dualism viewed from that perspective really incompatible with materialism? Why are people so resistant to the idea that a strong AI could have consciousness like a human or animal? If materialism is basically true (probably is), then it seems there’s nothing that one couldn’t effectively simulate. And why couldn’t we be in a simulation at this moment? Who runs this (possible) simulation and what are their goals? How is this any different from theological questions, and can we bring better insight to them? Are there things like “love” & “kindness” that we OUGHT to follow as our guiding principle in spite of lack of evidence of their utility? Is “right and wrong” purely situational or should they transcend merely being useful?
Anyway, these ideas, which one might think are obsolete with modern science, aren’t going away even from a purely materialist perspective. And neither do I think the need for community is going away any time. But it sure would be nice if we got rid of the “must have strict philosophical agreement” requirement that many (but not all) religious and political communities have.
I'm a philosophical materialist and I don't believe in any kind of deity or supernatural world. There is no "church" that would have any place for someone like me, other than maybe the Unitarians, and, well, honestly, they're not that interesting.
I hung out in Marxist study groups and Trotskyist groupings for a while in my 20s. That was my replacement for a bit. :-)
I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how moral systems work, one that is perpetuated by the church.
In Christianity, there is a specific "source" of morality, one that's (supposedly) infallible and unquestionable. This leads to problems when the infallible-unquestionable source of morality endorses things like slavery [1]: if it's unquestionable and infallible, how can your moral system be adapted to address this shortcoming? (This is usually handwaved away by theists by saying something like "oh that's the old covenant", or "that was a different god", which uses strange internal doctrinal shenanigans to somehow justify this supreme perfect being's obvious moral shortcommings, and looks to everyone outside the religion like someone just playing the cup game.)
Outside of religion, there is no single "source" of morality. There's a codified system of laws that our societies adhere to, certainly, but there's plenty of examples of how the laws do not codify morality (e.g. I am not required to be even a minimally-decent Samaritan to anyone I encounter on the street). Morality instead is something that an individual has to build for themselves, as a framework for decisionmaking in the wider world: how do you choose between your available actions? what are your guiding principals?
Some decide that, for various reasons, they cannot support industrial animal agriculture, and turn vegan. Some decide they fundamentally disagree with the structure of our police forces. Some turn pacifist--but all come to these conclusions through their reasoning. They absolutely can (and do) borrow reasoning from other sources, but it's impossible for it to be 'imposed' on them because there is no 'higher power' that has the absolute moral right.
This is something that's frustrated me when trying to engage with religious people on other moral issues; a few months ago I was talking to my mom about the concept of wealth redistribution, as to me it seemed incredibly immoral that people like Jeff Bezos can have an insane amount of wealth while we still have children in our schools who can't afford lunch or library books or are even homeless. My mother (Christian) couldn't get around the idea that she had no right to impose her perceived morality on another: that it would be wrong to support laws requiring the redistribution of wealth. She had similar issues with LGBT rights: she could see the harm caused to LGBT people, and did not want to participate in that harm, but struggled to support them because she felt like codifying moral support for something, which she didn't have the power to do.
This removal of one's own ability to develop and test morals is part of what disturbs me greatly about the church. It makes it very difficult to demonstrate when people make mistakes, how they have harmed other people, and how they might go about avoiding that in the future.
[1]: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+21&versi...
The thing that underscores all of my experiences has been hypocrisy. So many people just want to belong to a group, or were raised in it and know nothing better. They don’t practice what they preach.
I can’t help but think the world will be better off when we abolish big religion.
This is, consistently, what I hear from friends and family as to why they have drifted away from the Catholic church, and is solidly my own reason as well.
You see people, day-in-day out being terrible, judgmental, hateful people, except on Sunday when they're in the front row being holier than thou. It grates on you, and leaves a bad taste. It's even worse, because those people tend to be the ones who gravitate toward leadership positions within your local church.
My theory is that people have always felt that way, but it was harder to nail down these awful people before social media. Now that everyone puts everything on social media, it's easy to see, in plain black and white print, that the deacon really is an asshole.
The one thing that I do genuinely lament from the death of large religious congregations (at least in my part of the states), is that there are no replacement social constructs for people to gather and feel a sense of community. I'm certain this has something to do with the splintering of American discourse; not the religion inherently, but the social aspect is lacking and legitimately missed by most folks.
I was raised Catholic and decided, as a teenager, that I didn't want to be Catholic as an adult.
> My theory is that people have always felt that way, but it was harder to nail down these awful people before social media.
IMO, two things:
1: The changes in the 1960s to the English (native language) mass
2: The shift towards conservative politics
Have you been to a latin mass? (The old-style mass that the Church conducted until the 1960s.) It's a very different experience than modern Catholicism, and much more similar to eastern-style worship.
But, more importantly, the latin mass has a lot less preaching. It's a meditation, and then a social gathering afterwards. It's a lot more universal in the sense that you don't really have to explicitly align with the beliefs to still be comfortable with the community. (Edit: As in, if you don't believe in the whole Jesus thing, you can just enjoy the chanting at let your mind drift away.)
But, the thing that really turned me off of the Catholic church was the drift towards conservative politics. I attended a friend's wedding where the church had a massive anti-abortion billboard over their parking lot for the whole town to see. Another time I went to a mass in honor of some deceased family members and there were posters in the church advocating that members vote against marijuana legalization.
But you see this nearly everywhere, with every type of organization/group. A prime example would be politicians and political groups who constantly talk about how they want to help people, but then throw those same people under the bus to get what they want. This is not something unique to any one type of organization.
From my experience, there are lots of good people in most religious organizations. I would venture to say, at least in the northeast US (which is where most of my experience is), it's the majority of the people. However, as with any organization, it's common for the bad apples to be the ones that rise in power, because they don't care who they hurt to get do so. This, too, is true everywhere.
So those people who want to belong to a group and believe in it without seeing what might be better can move into political groups for their identity? The actions and methods are human nature, so I think they will just move to a different domain.
The group Jesus is harshest with in the Gospels is in fact the hypocrites. He even calls them white washed tombs full of dead men's bones! What a lamentable state of things.
G.K. Chesterton's words in "What's Wrong with the World" come to mind where he points out "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried." Perhaps this applies to all major belief systems though, and not Christianity alone.
1) In theory, people go to church because they want to improve, not because they are already perfect. It's not hypocritical to make mistakes.
2) Hypocrisy is everywhere. No one really does scrum, no one really does TDD, no motivational speaker is happy all the time, and no christian is without sin. This shouldn't be surprising.
One thinks this is because ideals are meant to strived towards but not necessarily achieved.
A solution of throwing out ideals because they are hard to achieve and a little myopic in my opinion.
What i find an interesting thought is that you either believe these teachings are from a higher power or they are just from man.
The former had obvious implications, but the with the latter you will then need to answer the question is it written by lunatics or people that actually knew what they were doing?
No, I don't think that's the case. I think the hypocrisy is that they don't try. What turns people off of organized religion is seeing so many who participate with words but not with their hearts. Of course when you have Jesus Christ as your role model you're going to fail to live up to it a lot of the time, but if you're not at least trying then in what sense are you a Christian?
That said, I have serious doubts religion and hypocrisy are aligned anymore than the other sources of truth - especially when followed without applying critical thinking skills.
What are you replacing this extremely important function with? Vacuum?
And it's not necessarily a bad thing when you frame it as a cultural institution. For many people, they grew up with the church and its traditions. Their families and friends share the same traditions, and it's part of their identity. They may not believe in the supernatural stuff or even feel aligned with the moral system, but it's still part of their culture.
You could say that's hypocritical, but we expect a an attitude of humility in regards to many cultures who have even more "backwards" practices than this. I think we ought to apply the same attitude here.
That is why the US has become so divided recently. That is why the blind devotion to a cause should be questioned by every believer. “Wait a sec, do I really believe this? Do I really want this to be my identity?”
You can be a good person without being a Catholic or a Muslim.
I had a coworker who went there. He had, uh, stories.
You can believe whatever the hell you want - but it’s not for you or society or anyone else to decide how I can live my life.
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Growing up as a mainline Protestant, I thankfully didn’t have much of this to react against in my own churches. But we saw the bad fundamentalist theology in Southern Baptist or too many independent churches (those two mentioned because they were dominant where I grew up). I can appreciate the difference.
I’m still happily a mainline Protestant. I’m not instructed to hate anyone, I’m not told to vote a particular way. I’m not going to church to check in my brain to a charlatan who saves me from an angry (false) god. I’m going to be better and to grow my relationship with God.
If the fundamentalists are a problem, maybe there’s a problem with the fundamentals?
Obviously religious people remain the vast majority and being a good person or not is largely disconnected from religiousness. It’s difficult for me though to not think that a religious person’s reasoning is broken in some way, and to be more skeptical of how they verify ideas in general.
If they can’t get something basic right, why would they be right about something more complicated?
A lot of the rationalization of religious people is complicated in a way that suggests they have some underlying idea of what the accurate world model is (they just want to believe otherwise): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-...
One thing I credit the internet for is allowing me to read and learn enough to escape it. I think most people will end up with whatever belief system they grow up surrounded by.
And basing your world views on faith is fine because for the most part evidence based reasoning can’t really tell you how to structure your communities and economies and raise and educate your children. Not for metaphysical reasons, just because the strong conclusions you can reliably reach with the current state of social and political science is just very limited.
That line would only hold if fundamentalists have correctly identified the fundamentals. I wage they have badly missed it, which is why their theology is so bad.
> being a good person or not is largely disconnected from religiousness
Being a good person is not the primary point of religion. It is rather a hoped for outcome. Religion is not therapy.
Religiosity is highly inversely correlated with criminality amount Americans.[1] Religious people also donate significantly more money to charity. To a large extent religious participation does seem to make people behave more pro-socially.
It's certainly not the only way to promote ethical behavior. But even as an atheist, I'll freely admit that religion serves a pretty beneficial important role in our society. A role that we haven't really figured out how to replace with secular counterparts.
[1] http://marripedia.org/effects_of_religious_practice_on_crime... [2] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/oct/30/religious-p...
Not a bad argument, but if we need religion to be 100% accurate then we'd only ever support the most modern and innovative religion.
The issue is that most religions (including my own) place tremendous importance on the accuracy of teachings that go back hundreds or thousands of years. It was impossible for the original authors to know what we know today, yet we either fault them for it or declare any advances in knowledge to be heretical. Clearly, both of these positions are wrong in the extreme.
And yet, there's a good reason for that, too. If we subject religion to every modern idea, then the religion doesn't really stand for anything. It simply mirrors society back at it.
I don't know the solution to this. There may not be one (short of saying "f--- religion" as a whole, which I think would be a terrible mistake).
If anyone has ever participated in a 12-step program, you can see this in action in a much more modern way. Every program has an unchanging dogma, based on the assumption that the founders hit on something special and right, and that any changes would risk watering it down. As a result, you end up with programs that have ideas that would have been very mainstream when they were founded, but are now largely viewed as wrong-headed or even cruel. And yet, these programs continue to be a lifeline to many people who would have otherwise spiralled into self-destruction.
Again, what's the solution? Heck if I know...
Can you steelman what the basic thing is that religious people get wrong?
"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is often quoted as the fundamental tenet of Christianity.
> If they can’t get something basic right, why would they be right about something more complicated?
Donald Knuth is a devout Christian and he has been right about lots of very complicated things.
Compartmentalization.
Age 12 is pretty young to come to that conclusion.
Also, it's not about direct rational inquiry, yes it can sometimes a source of aberration, but that would be missing the point.
Spirituality is about who you are, your relationship to the greater good.
'Reasoning' is just a tool of the mind.
Science is a tool, not a Truth.
Good counterpoints are people like Donald E. Knuth, who is a preeminent mathematician, Turing Award recipient, and also a devout Lutheran [1]. He gave a talk on science and religion at Google even that gives a more nuanced view on science and religion [2]. There's also Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome project who is a devout Christian as well. Other non-western examples include Ramanujan who attributed his mathematics to "divinity" [3]. Of course otherwise rational scientists can also become besot with irrational pursuits and beliefs, like Linus Pauling obessions with Vitamin C [4].
More broadly the religious concepts implicit in the Judeo-Christian creation mythos (and other major world religions) also encourage (in many scholars opinions and mine as well) a view that the world is a result of rational thought and not purely a choatic war that man happens to be besot by and perhaps might survive. For example compare the differences of Genesis to the Enuma Elish "There is no suggestion of any primordial battle or internecine war which eventually led to the creation of the universe. The one God is above the whole of nature, which He Himself created by His own absolute will. The primeval water, earth, sky, and luminaries are not pictured as deities or as parts of disembodied deities, but are all parts of the manifold works of the Creator. Man, in turn, is not conceived of as an afterthought, as in Enuma Elish, but rather as the pinnacle of creation." [5]. It's my belief that the inception of science (not mere technologists vs philosophers as the ancient Greeks or Romans had) is encouraged by a societal belief that the world has rational underpinnings and isn't just mad chaos.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPpk-1btGZk 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan 4: https://quackwatch.org/related/pauling/ 5: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/creation-and-cosmogony-...
That is pretty ridiculous. It’s like saying if there is bad science the scientific theory is broken.
What people call fundamentalists are often not all about the actual fundamentals. Rather, they're stuck on one or another bad, but still old idea. Actual fundamentals do not reflect the hateful, angry, bitter image that's conjured up by the term "fundamentalist."
I take it that "last straw" means the "straw that broke the camel's back". I just hope that stories like that won't be conflated with healthy practice of Christianity in people's minds.
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I am not taught emotion over logic. In fact, the Wesleyan Quadrilateral (a framework derived from but not described by him) has you evaluate beliefs with reason being a co-equal base. In confirmation and later in-depth adult classes, we were instructed to wrestle with the scripture. For example, we dug into the context of the times to understand better why certain things would have been said. We acknowledged selected verses made no sense. We agreed some parts we have no choice but to disregard. We frankly don't take Revelations that seriously because it's mostly batshit crazy. :-)
I am not taught testimony over evidence. My church fully embraces evolution. We see Genesis for the story and the poetry.
Authority beyond understanding: that gets back into the theological allegiance insisted on by the fundamentalists mainly.
- This book is a set of moral guidance aimed to cause favorable social outcome.
- These stories are myths.
- We should analyze these books to critically determine their relevance to our modern lives.
- Your personal understanding of spirituality is unique to yourself.
It seems only productive? It seems a much more dangerous stance, one even paralleling a fundamentalist stance, that there might be nothing to learn at all from scripture and millennia of human organized religion and so it must be completely discarded.
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Thinking back on all of this still makes me angry today. A priest in my elementary school was brought in and then quietly and suddenly left a few months later and I am left with unanswered questions.
I don't need that in my life. I don't need religion to be a moral person, and from my point of view the system that I was raised in was very far from moral. The Catholic church has done more to affirm my Atheist .. non-beliefs? .. than anything else.
This depends on a lot of things. If two people get married, and one of them already knows that they are sterile or for whatever reason cannot have children, but they don't reveal that to the other until after they are married, that is grounds for the other person to seek an annulment. This is not the same thing as saying that the marriage "should" be annulled.
If on the other hand, knowledge of the person's sterility doesn't arise until after they are married, I don't think that's grounds for an annulment.
As for actual Christianity and those who study it, in many ways the teachings of Christ could not be more different than the “religious right” advocates today. Christ taught followers to love their neighbors as themselves, and not to judge other people, because in God’s eyes all humans were equally and impossibly flawed. When a mob formed to stone an “adulteress,” as was the prescribed punishment for that “crime” in ancient Judaea, Jesus said “let the person who is without sin throw the first stone.” The mob dissolved, and he told the woman she was forgiven.
Note that this is not what the religious-political faction of Jesus day wanted either, and in the end they arranged for him to be crucified as a result.
My problem is that religions dictate universal truth, which is used as a justification to oppress. Many of us were abused or oppressed by mainstream religons as children.
How does one know which parts of the bible to accept or which parts are metaphor and which parts are literal or which version of the bible to believe? At least the most literal interpretation always tries to be consistent.
What makes any interpretation better than scriptural literalism? Is it the fact that some happen to agree with current social trends? Seems like the source material is flawed and unnecessary in the first place.
Would an all powerful God who wants "true believers" to find salvation leave them for thousands of years muddling through with just an ambiguous and inconsistent book to live by?
Religious truth isn't decided only by scripture or church hermeneutics. Sometimes it's just what your community chooses to care about (or not).
Without "scriptural literalism" how do you know what bad theology and heresy are? Is good theology not simply that which most closely corresponds to Scripture? Your comment makes sense on a Roman Catholic view – in which the traditions of the church are authoritative – but not on the Protestant view (sola Scriptura).
In any moral community there will be outliers and some of those outliers can take hold of a message. You can see this in modern day with secular moral communities as well. My main takeaway, after 20-some years of evaluating this is that morals are something okay to evaluate your group on, but they are not ethics. They cannot apply widely, make their way into law, or try to shape society because by their very definition they are intrinsic to small groups. That doesn't mean these groups can't teach us something, but the foundation of their ideas requires subscription and often holistically.
I know of too many Catholics who say the same. Not growing up Catholic, it's hard to relate. Their stories often involve excessively strict dogma or scriptural interpretation that denies or vilifies innocent human nature. E.g., taking your girlfriend to mass to hear an incendiary anti-abortion sermon, then losing said girlfriend due to that mass, then later ending your relationship with the church out of frustration.
None of that was hatred. It was love. He was dealing with people's religious and moral failings.
It is not love to tell people they are okay when they are morally bankrupt.
This sets up a situation where you have to be willfully ignorant or lie to defend the existence of God, since this stuff is bollocks.
In reality fundamentalist literalism is a relatively recent (19th century) theological development, but it's taken over completely in many US denominations.
A further wedge has been driven by the total politicization of religion. Many also believe that you must be a far-right Republican to be a Christian. If you'd asked me as a teenager or early 20-something what it meant to be a Christian I'd have thought "you have to support the military and vote Republican."
I was under the impression that it began with the Protestant Reformation - specifically Calvinism (16th century)
Sure, adding hate makes it far worse, but one fantasy god with a fantasy origin story and fantastical powers is one too many.
You view certain fundamentalists' interpretation as somehow "bad?" So what? They probably view your sect as being equally degenerate.
What gives you standing to cast this judgment?
The framework of Protestantism allows and accounts for these divergent views. So you really can't throw down the "no true Scotsman" fallacy against those sects you disagree with in its broader defense.
2. Do you follow the edict that if you’re not baptist then by definition you go to hell? How do you reconcile this with having friends or anyone at all you care about who are then going to hell?
Point is, I’m not sure there is any middle ground that’s acceptable. I don’t come here as an atheist, just as someone who’s trying really hard to believe but finding no acceptable ground to stand at all. The only smart people I find religious (especially Christian) are ones who were born and grew up forced to go to church. Typically they’d give up on practising it in their teens, basically break every rule in their book for two decades and then somehow rediscover it because now it’s convenient to find some community and higher purpose in their life. The ones who convert from elsewhere when they are adults are almost always gullible and did so for the most transactional reasons you can think of.
I grew up fundamentalist, then swung hard atheist, then ended up, as one friend who went to seminary described it, "the most christian atheist he's ever met". I've known Christians ignorant and intellectual, hateful and openly loving, urban and rural, liberal and conservative, and everything in-between.
Here's my take: A healthy faith is not about rules at all, or about finding a system for understanding the physical world or anything like that. If you get obsessed with rules you become a bitter fundamentalist; if you get fed-up with religion but stay obsessed with rules you become a bitter atheist.
A healthy faith is about people. Yourself, your community, the world. Cultivating habits of forgiveness and growth toward yourself, and openness and love toward others. Having a specific segment of your life dedicated to contemplation of the most important things in life, and doing so in a community on a regular basis. The iconography and the texts, ideally, are just a communal conduit for those ideas; symbols people can point to and use to talk about their thoughts and feelings around this stuff with others, and also to spark new thoughts and points of discussion.
Many (not all) of my close friends are christians, and none of them have ever tried to convert me. Some of them don't really think hell exists; most of them don't think some magic prayer is all that's needed to keep you out of it. Most, I think, see that even if it does, the best thing they can do for others is simply to love them and to help them be better through example and osmosis, if anything. They know they don't control others and they can't force them into whatever. They can only be Good and hope that it spreads.
I like this quote from Pope Francis:
> We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.
Denominational stance is reluctance: https://www.umc.org/en/content/ask-the-umc-what-is-the-unite...
> Do you follow the edict that if you’re not baptist then by definition you go to hell
I am not Baptist. But the ones I speak to, who are dedicated fundamentalists, seem to believe that I am going to hell since I am not and will never be "saved" in the way they prescribe. Furthermore, in their view, nearly everyone who existed before Jesus's time is condemned to Hell except for a select few who foretold of Jesus's coming. Crazy theology!
Also, keep in mind that Baptists have diversity. The Southern Baptists are the firebrand fundamentalists. There are others that are almost indistinguishable from mainline Protestantism.
I'm not a Baptist, but presumably nearly all of them find it sad and unfortunate and feel compassion for most of humanity.
I'm not sure what you're getting at, though. Only believing things that make you happy isn't a very good philosophy of life.
American fundamentalism would have no political power without the tacit consent of the mainstream. The predominant sects in my state are mainline, yet they voted en masse to outlaw gay marriage (before the US supreme court ruled otherwise).
> In addition to Protestants, declines in church membership are proportionately smaller among political conservatives, Republicans, married adults and college graduates. These groups tend to have among the highest rates of church membership, along with Southern residents and non-Hispanic Black adults.
From the actual first-party news article on the poll: https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-...
For better or worse, conservative (both politically and theologically) people seem to be holding on to their Christian faith in greater numbers (at least marginally) than their more progressive or liberal leaning counterparts.
Anyway, as someone who almost left the faith, I would agree with the overall narrative that Christianity became ineffective in the late 20th century. Personally though, I would attribute it to a lack of focus on youth and issues relevant to youths. I can't find it now, but I'm pretty sure I saw a poll that indicated most people who leave do so in the transition from high school to college. That certainly lines up with what I observed, most people just didn't care enough to keep going (regardless of what branch they were in). I would have been one of them myself, if I hadn't been able to find a college Christian community that was dramatically more vibrant than what I grew up with. But overall I think I'm one of the lucky ones.
I suspect the range of ages that are today's Millenials has forever been less traditional than other age groups. That's unsurprising given they have the least personal history of any adult group to weigh when deciding their life's priorities, and are likely to think least about their relationship to others in their family (since they just left the parents behind and have yet to add any more). At that age, the need to join another 'family' and adopt a bunch of new familial responsibilities is likely to be less compelling a notion than it may be a few years hence.
My comment is specifically about online atheist communities, because I think they are often toxic to both religion and to atheism itself. A lot of these communities are hyper-focused on fundamentalism, to their own detriment.
These online atheists communities can be very unfortunate. Your noble search for the truth leads you to question religion - but then you get caught in an echo chamber spending a lot of energy hating on others for their beliefs. A noble pursuit devolved into hatred and groupthink. On the other hand, fundamentalists took a religion which preaches love and acceptance and twisted it into something bitter and hateful. I think it's kind of poetic how much those two communities mirror each other.
The fixation on fundamentalism is a combination of two things. First, there are people from those fundamentalist churches who were damaged in some way and have now swung way to the opposite extreme of hating all religion. They grew up learning to see the world through rigid dogma, and online atheist communities tend to be fairly dogmatic themselves. Not hard to see the appeal there. Second, and probably more common, are atheists who never had any close contact with fundamentalism but they justify their beliefs by taking on the low-hanging fruit. It is very easy to pick on young-earth creationists, vehement anti-gay groups, prosperity gospel, etc. Those groups' thinking really does rely on fear and hate, things that the bible actually tells us to reject.
What happens when you tell one of those angry atheists that yes, you're a Christian, but you also find evolution to be very cool, you know that the universe is billions of years old, you are pro choice, and you don't believe everything in the bible literally happened? Well, they aren't really sure what to do with you. Because they spend all their time congratulating themselves for being smarter than the lowest common denominator of religion, they aren't really able to have a more sophisticated conversation about their beliefs.
As a religious person, it is a bit frustrating that you never see atheists confronting the great theologists and religious philosophers - Origen, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Kierkegaard, or even contemporary thinkers like Alasdair McIntyre. If Christians' beliefs are really so shallow and stupid, those guys should be super easy to refute, right? They think that all Christians are anti-science when Christian monks were pivotal in the discovery of genetics and the big bang theory, among other scientific achievements. They ignore that some giants of Enlightenment philosophy, like Descartes and Spinoza, were attempting to use new rational methods to affirm the existence of God in their major works.
The problem is, when you are an atheist engaging in the really complex arguments posed by the most intelligent and eloquent religious people of history, the waters become very muddy. You might even have to concede, just a little bit, that you take your atheism on faith, too. It's much easier to feel good about bashing the usual suspects - Joel Osteen, the 700 Club, Westboro Baptist and friends. And so a lot of people get sucked into that low-level discourse, and never get a chance to make the exhilarating journey back to religion. I don't really care if someone stays an atheist, many good people are atheists. But I do care if they never get a chance to see the promise of religion because of toxic echo chambers and groupthink.
As a religious person, I don't hate outspoken atheists. In fact, I very much respect them - they are people who care deeply about the truth. In that respect, they have something in common with any thoughtful religious person.
Well, that's the whole point: Atheists don't.
Indeed we can't explain everything, not even close. But we don't have any reason to even remotely believe in any kind of supernatural power, which in turn begs an explanation it self ad infinitum.
I'd say you're being inconsistent with your religion and that the religious part of how you came to these views is unnecessary. Sure I agree attacking the very worst of religion is easy, but even at its very best, religion doesn't make a compelling argument for its necessity.
The reason for fixation on fundamentalism is because they have the most consistent story that can be argued against. Once you start cherry picking whatever pieces of the bible seem like it could fit into today's social norms and current understanding of the physical world, you're basically showing none of it necessary.
What would you say to someone that believes a giant turtle created everything, is the one true god and also held those same stances on evolution etc? They just prepend the fact that a giant turtle created everything and then vanished without a trace. Anyone could come up with a number of creative stories that are unverifiable or disprovable and seemingly are compatible with our current scientific understanding of the world. What makes your god or any god(s) in particular more reasonable or necessary than the great turtle?
The main issue with most of these philosophical arguments is that they don't prove anything even worth refuting. Almost all of them simply attempt to prove the existence of a deistic God that does not meaningfully interact with the world (beyond creating it or sustaining it).
Deistic Gods by their vary nature don't provide any meaningful knowledge. Believing that there was a creator doesn't provide any useful information about how to help live your life or how the world works.
As a starting point I don't think there are any good arguments for why a person should believe that the bible was influenced/written by God any more than other books.
> As a religious person, I don't hate outspoken atheists. In fact, I very much respect them - they are people who care deeply about the truth. In that respect, they have something in common with any thoughtful religious person.
I disagree here though. In a secular world, rejecting religion isn't exactly the mark of a radical truth-seeker. When I started through my own atheistic phase as a teen, the greatest disappointment was the observation that my 'companions' in that regard weren't exactly insightful, just followers of the zeitgeist; if anything they mirrored the fundamentalists in their ignorance.
> "Origen, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Kierkegaard, or even contemporary thinkers like Alasdair McIntyre ... should be super easy to refute, right?"
You're shifting the burden of proof; there is nothing to refute. It's not the job of atheists to disprove your assertions. Regardless of a persons' intelligence, they cannot argue their deity into existence. It either exists or it doesn't. None of the aforementioned scholars ever presented evidence for their god or demonstrated supernatural causation.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/on-its-100th-birthday-a...
I grew up in a non-fundamentalist Christian cult (catholic) and it was at best a massive waste of time. I detest that part of my life.
Why? Can you expand on that?
While it is fair to say that one specific fundamentalist young-Earth creationist Baptist certainly turned me from “it isn’t true but it doesn’t matter” to “it is actively harmful for people to believe this”, I should also say that the liberal version of Catholicism at my school — liberal enough to not explicitly condemn abortion or homosexuality, even though this was the U.K. in the 1990s and Section 28 still in force — had terrible sex education which completely ignored the existence of e.g. chlamydia, and I do think that was due to the religion given how quickly I learned about it the moment I moved to the next step in my education.
The open-mindedness may have been good for me as a teenager going through a goth-paganism phase, but it also meant she gave my dad homeopathic remedies when he got bowel cancer, and she got Alzheimer’s 15 years younger than her mother “despite” her use of Bach flower remedies for memory.
[0] naturally this meant I learned to read the outer border of the Allen & Unwin edition of The Hobbit, and the text in the hand drawn maps inside: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/...
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but really, teasing apart the strains doesn't matter in the long run. our gods are changing, just as they always have.
But with the resounding recent rise throughout the world in populism (which is a form of faith, but in a person or a dream rather than an economy), it's hard to know how humankind will respond to the challenges of the modern world.
We could choose to retreat from our current immersion in fast-paced life via technology and withdraw into one (or many) 'simpler' ways of life. If we do it wouldn't surprise me if we also choose to reimagine the world that surrounds us as being less concrete and more a realm of possibility in which choose our own reality.
Lately as the politics of old people and loud young people have tilted right-wing, and more extreme philosophy is accepted, it’s disturbing how the theology has followed the money.
I probably sound like a simpleton here, but I’ve always found religion to be a source of peace and solace and a positive influence. Some of that is a result of ignoring teachings that are more... noxious to me personally or focusing away from behavior of the human agents of the church.
Unfortunately, cycles of religious fundamentalism is a feature of the American body politic.
I grew up fundamentalist, then swung hard atheist, then ended up, as one friend who went to seminary described it, "the most christian atheist he knows". I've known Christians ignorant and intellectual, hateful and openly loving, urban and rural, liberal and conservative, and everything in-between (and these are all independent axes, to be clear).
Here's my take: A healthy faith is not about technicalities, or about finding a system for understanding the physical world or anything like that. If you get obsessed with technicalities you become a bitter fundamentalist; if you get fed-up with religion but stay obsessed with technicalities you become a bitter atheist.
A healthy faith is about people. Yourself, your community, the world. Cultivating habits of forgiveness and growth toward yourself, and openness and love (as well as forgiveness and growth) toward others. Having a specific segment of your life dedicated to contemplation of the most important things in life, and doing so in a community on a regular basis. The iconography and the texts, ideally, are just a communal conduit for those ideas; symbols people can point to and use to talk about their thoughts and feelings around this stuff with others, and also to spark new thoughts and points of discussion.
Many (not all) of my close friends are christians, and none of them have ever tried to convert me (if they were to do that on a regular basis, we wouldn't be close friends). Some of them don't really think hell exists; most of them don't think some magic prayer is all that's needed to keep you out of it; they know that spirituality is a matter of the heart, and the heart isn't so simple. Most, I think, see that even if hell does exist, the best thing they can do for others is simply to love them and to help them be better through example and friendship, if anything. They know they don't control others and they can't force them into anything. They can only be Good and hope that it spreads.
I like this quote from Pope Francis:
> We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.
ADDENDUM: So where has that left me? I don't practice religion, though I read from the occasional religious author and I think spirituality in the broader sense is a useful metaphor for matters surrounding the heart and trying to be a better member of the world. I have really nice conversations, even with religious people, around those subjects. I've been known to go with a friend or relative to the odd church service (as long as it's at a church that's reasonably compatible with the above), and I often get some benefit from it in the form of meditation on myself and my relationship with the world. I've thought about finding a church to join for the sake of community, though I go back and forth on that since I don't believe in even the smallest literal sense (I try to let go of my literalism, but I still have mental habits from the days when I thought it was all about that, both religious and not). Maybe one day I'll find the right church and get past that.
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This is funny to read because LGBT and a series of other movements cause me to feel much the same as I do about "religious" fundamentalism. Excessive self-styling and countering any adverse ideas with a refusal to compromise or cede any ground. Not tolerating adverse ideas and manifestations thereof in daily life but "calling it out" and attacking them constantly.
Extremism in opiniated/constructed ideas, polarized cancel culture etc has become much more popular and dominating in the public discourse and media than it has been for the past 50+ years.
I just don't get how fundamentalists can remain so busy going on about their fundaments. It's all very tiresome.
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For my parents -- born in 1940 -- church and men's service clubs/lodges were the primary areas of social interaction outside work. Dad ran his own veterinary practice, so his social interaction there was limited (I mean, everybody worked for him). Mom stayed at home until the late 70s. Church was the center of their social life.
Now, nobody wanted to say that out loud; it was all about the faith. But that's what it was.
In my life I've had no need for that, because people of my generation (b 1970) have generally found other communities of support/friendship/connection. None of my friends are Masons, either.
I wonder if men's clubs exist which are neither, just completely secular. I haven't been able to find any when searching, aside from The Club, which technically fits but as a bathhouse for hookups, wasn't really what I had in mind. I know lodges centered around professions more or less fell apart, and perhaps the last vestige of secular groups would be country clubs.
It's hard to tell how much of this is just "people aren't joiners anymore" and how much is declining church membership.
Freemasonry may or may not be "religious" depending on your definitions, but has traditionally been a target of some faiths due to perceived conflict between the club and the church.
Social justice groups (which are not that secular, actually), libertarians, militias.
Church membership declined. Qanon membership soared.
There is a society wide "apathy" event happening right under our noses. Maybe we're just seeing a new generation moving to new niche groups that aren't being seen yet. But it seems that technology is doing something with our desire to form communal bonds.
In the past 20 years, there's been a large rise in the time the average person spends on the social web. In the past 10 years, with the rise of mobile platforms, that time has gone up even more. In addition, streaming media has become very big, thereby consuming even more of our free time.
That additional time spent online has to come from somewhere. As Sherry Turkle put it, we are increasingly choosing to be "Alone Together" probably at the cost of old school forms of togetherness like church and social clubs.
I have friends I have known for 10+ years which I have never met in real life. Friendships which are deeper and longer lasting than anything I have “in real life”.