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As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen

theatlantic.com

171–180 of 823 posts

Re: As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen

#171
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a very western take on religion. Some have no belief in an end time with a static or cyclical world. Sin/evil isn’t really a thing in many religions. Polytheistic religions for example can have multiple contradictory ideas for what the correct actions are.

Eschatology doesn't just have to do with the end times. It is "concerned with death, judgment, and the final destiny of the soul". Hinduism and Buddhism clearly address this. Confucianism and Shinto may be exceptions, and of course there are plenty others that I'm not familiar with, but eschatology is far from being only a preoccupation of Western religions.

Dropping the end of that quote completely changes the meaning it’s. "the part of theology concerned with death, judgment, and the final destiny of the soul and of humankind" It’s a separate idea from simple questions of the afterlife.

Buddhism is really interesting here because there was such a wide range of different beliefs involved some of which fit that idea and others don’t. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_eschatology

Re: As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen

#172

Uhhh... this article is really out of touch with the world and I'm pretty sure they totally didn't understand at a minimum half of what they're talking about. I'd really like to point out something that's just a fact, that was told to me, while I was abroad, by non-US citizens: The USA is the only country where you can move to and say you're from. I can't ever move to France and call myself French. I can't move to Ge…

> The USA is the only country where you can move to and say you're from. I can't ever move to France and call myself French. I can't move to Germany and be German, no more than I can ever move to Japan and call myself Japanese. One can however, move to the United States, and call themselves American.

Not the only country, the same is true of Australia. I mentioned in another comment the Australian politician Kristina Keneally, who was born in Nevada, grew up in Ohio, didn't move to Australia until her 20s. To me, she's an Australian. I think most Australians would probably say the same thing.

Re: As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen

#173
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the USA really offer the greatest opportunities to the greatest number of poor people as a share of the total population, of all countries in the world? Why do so many people from the USA believe this tripe without question? It feels like the 'shining city on the hill' was extremely effective propaganda, for the domestic population.

I am an American, and I have known a number of immigrants over the years, one who won the lottery in order to come to the US. They have mostly but not all been from Eastern bloc countries. Every single one of those people is grateful to have come here, is amazed that the people born here do not take advantage of their birthright of opportunities, and absolutely does not think that talk about the greatest opportunitie…

I have had similar sentiments expressed to me from immigrants who have come to the country where I'm from (Australia).

It's possible that the opportunities given to migrants relocating to any highly developed nation are equivalent. That is, not a phenomenon unique to the USA.

Re: As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen

#174
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are social animals. A religion is what scientists call a “paradigm”. The socially acceptable ideas/paradigms of today are the religions of next century. Hegel was right.

There are parts of Europe that have far more community and where people are far more social but far less religious than the US. Religion is just a long surviving irrational belief system. It may serve a more social purpose or a less social purpose. Oppositely, the purpose of unifying a community can be served by a number of things, religion isn't necessary for that. As other mention, extreme religiosity is rising in…

This is an extremely ignorant position that trivializes "religion". First of all, as I have written elsewhere, everyone is religious. The question is: how good and true is your religion? To call it merely irrational is to show a total lack of understanding of the subject. And because religions are many, it makes little sense to speak of "religion" categorically in this way because they often have little or nothing in common. You have to address and criticize particular religions for particular reasons.

Furthermore, those who defect from the religious faith on which their society or civilization was built often ride the coat tails of that religious faith without working out the logical consequences of their rejection. That is, it is better to describe the rejector as a heretic or an apostate than someone who has somehow freed himself from the faith in question and all its trappings. Many of these ideologies we're seeing are profound distortions or perversions of some selected element of Christianity or previous heretical position. That's one reason heresy was always regarded as dangerous. It comes from the Greek hairesis meaning "a taking or choosing for oneself, a choice"[0] meaning taking a cafeteria approach toward the dogmas of the faith which exist as a coherent whole. Any distortion or selectivity produces severe downstream consequences like ideology. Secularism and liberalism are examples. They are Christian heresies and cannot be comprehended apart from the Christian context within which they emerged.

Nietzsche, who was an atheist, was smart enough to see this. The "Twilight of the Idols" is all about how silly this secular triumphalism, or even just contentment, is because it fails to see that the consequences of having "killed God" are not yet fully made manifest, but eventually will be made manifest because this state of affairs is unsustainable, and that this will result ultimately in total disorientation and chaos (I disagree with Nietzsche that God was merely an instrumental idea, but he did at least grasp the parochial and myopic nature of so many atheists and secular people; for him, atheism was a terrible thing). Intellectually serious atheists are all in agreement about how terrible atheism is (i.e., not the provincial variety like Dawkins). This state produces a fertile ground for ideology, i.e., irrational half-assed false religions.

[0] https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=heresy

Re: As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems that British nationalism runs pretty deep too, no? How else would you explain brexit?

Many would argue that Brexit was more about English nationalism than British nationalism. What makes the UK very complex is the coexistence of two layers of national identity – British layered over English, Scottish, Welsh, (Northern) Irish. Which layer a person identifies with is very often determined by their politics, and sometimes also by religious/cultural background. (British vs Irish identity in Northern Irela…

Would it have better fit in with those layers if instead of voting on the UK leaving the EU they had instead voted on England leaving the UK?

Re: As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think religion does imply the organized belief in a supernatural deity vs in a secular ideology it's unorganized belief in a somewhat connected set of ideas which are debated more discretely between people who want to. Seems silly to say that engaging with a secular ideology is the same as being in a religion.

Which person is more committed to a religion: someone who goes to a sermon 1 hr / week, or someone who watches the news for 3 hours / day? The news content will contain the same ideological elements of the sermon: where you come from, what you should believe, what you should do with your life, what is right / wrong.

News is made up of things that literally happened and often have video proof.

Religion is made up of things that did not happen and have no evidence. If something does have evidence of being true, it is called history.

You are confusing obsession and focus with religion.

Re: As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen

#177
post #4

As predicted by Nietzsche. For a great modern explainer, check out Beyond Reason, by Jordan Peterson. Rule VI, abandon ideology covers this.

I don't know why you were downvoted for this. It's something he explicitly described. You see it in the form of "corporate values." Corporations don't have values, people have values, and the subcontext of corporate values is that leadership at those companies make their own values.[1][2] When you hear about a corporation espousing "values," they're practicing corporate Nietzscheism. Most of the time, they're not doi…

What's interesting about stated/explicit corporate values is they are almost always based on what you'd call "slave morality", like being good, traditionally moral participants. That's because those values are for underlings and PR for the general public, though set by the top.

But of course, they are actually run under the master morality of doing what is expedient to achieve the goal (usually money).

> Most of the time, they're not doing it because they knowingly follow Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy, but rather that they parrot the philosophy from other corporate examples... as predicted by Nietzsche.

It could also be that in the modern world, most powerful institutions don't associate themselves with religion directly (like pre-modern power structures, kingdoms and empires, etc) so they have no default values to fall back on. Large corporations transcend nations and cultures, so cannot even fall back on those specific cultural values. Thus they must make their own, not necessarily to mimick others, but because having a large organization with no publicly stated values is simply confusing to us hairless apes.

Re: As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen

#178
post #93

Becoming more religious has helped me identify religious tendencies in the secular world. Ideology doesn’t imply supernatural deities, and some worldly phenomenon can be elevated to a supernatural level. Secular belief contains rituals, origin stories, deities, saints, priesthood, blasphemy, vice & virtue just as religion does. One aspect of religion I appreciate is that these aspects are well codified and debated –…

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Re: As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is false. A lot of people found religion in the 60's and 70's due to psychedelics, and have continued to do so ever since. As an example, many people were first drawn to Eastern religions through psychedelic experiences. Also, arguments have been made that even the mainstream religions were originally founded (and in their early years sustained) due to psychedelic use. For an example see Allegro's "The Sacred Mu…

I'm sure plenty of them did. But it's interesting I don't see Christians, Jews, or Muslims talk about how they get high all the time. They'd be put off by you suggesting it. It's even a central practice to not do so.

One thing I learned from psychedelic usage is the powerful of the minds ability to imagine things about reality and present them as reality itself. I think the realization of this sort of thing might contribute to many psychedelic users to adopt a more ~spiritual outlook on life, which I believe is more aligned with how things really are.

Re: As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen

#180
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you that in the absence of what we conventionally call "religion" doesn't mean the essential character of religion is erased. Abandoning one religion means adopting another. Abandoning a religious faith with thousands of years of refinement for some quackery invented yesterday, especially without proportional reason, is not exactly the move of a sound mind. I also think religion serves a real need, but a…

What is the utility of truth? If it has none then I don’t need it. Reflexivity is precisely where meaning/religion comes from. From the self.

> What is the utility of truth?

I don't understand the question. Truth is the correspondence of the mind with the real. The value of some truths is mostly instrumental. The value of others is that it is good for us to know them for themselves. If you are using "utility" to mean "value", then maybe you accept this, but utility is typically something like a species of value, as I understand it. Pure practicality is incoherent. They needs to be a terminus.

What is "need" here? Toward what end? Need is always about ends.

> Reflexivity is precisely where meaning/religion comes from. From the self.

Meaning doesn't come from ourselves. We cannot invent meaning. Either something means something, or it doesn't. What you describe is mental illness and delusion. I also don't see what this has to do with truth/utility.

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