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As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen

theatlantic.com

221–230 of 823 posts

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

#221

It’s interesting how you’ve written so much here and not given what concrete example. Makes it very difficult to examine your argument, when you simply state that secular ideology is religious. I think it’s worth noting the definition of secular is: > denoting attitudes, activities, or other things that have no religious or spiritual basis.

Secular beliefs are invariably religious positions.

It comes down to what you believe is axiomatic about the world.

For example, asserting that life is soulless and meaningless is to take a stand on something that you cannot know. It's a religious position.

All secular beliefs stem from similarly foundationless religious positions.

Or maybe not foundationless, but without acknowledgement of the religious roots (that is, positions that require faith), which is probably worse than acknowledging that the beliefs you hold cannot be proven.

It's worse because it leads people to believe they have a leg up on those religious clods with their backwards ways. When you don't recognize the things you assume about the world require faith, there is no corrective mechanism capable of opening your mind to other possibilities. Secular people and secular beliefs are ironically very close minded.

Take all the things that you believe to be true and work backwards to first principles. What are the assumptions that those principles require to be true?

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

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of the things in the secular world must be taken on faith (belief absent inassailable truth). Truth is difficult and unclear.

Can you give me an example or two to clarify? Many things might not be well known to someone, but could be if they wanted to track down that information. That's a little different than something which has to be taken on faith by everyone .

Well the scientific method is fundamentally faith based in that we assume that there are immutable properties of thebuniverse that can be discovered and that our perception allows us to interrogate these properties.

Yes this is a very well corroborated claim, but fundamentally faith based nonetheless.

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

#224
My observation shows it has less to do with religion and more with the large influence of the media (not just the news)

TV, radio, news, internet, personal voice - comments posts such as hacker news.

People would have never connected before social media, tv, radio to align in mass.

Religion has been more about social that faith for decades. Now people have another option - internet and social media.

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

#225
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long time ago I was accused of being "un-Canadian(TM)" by neighbor because I do not watch hockey. Actually I do not watch sports at all but it did not matter to him. God knows what would've happened had I admitted not pouring maple syrup on my morning eggs and bacon.

> had I admitted not pouring maple syrup on my morning eggs and bacon. That sounds tasty. Can I be an honorary Canadian?

Ewww ;) I hate mixing salt and sweets.

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

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Many are interpretations of what happened. take the covid - pericarditis link. is it that the fda is investigating reports of slightly elevated rare side effect? or is it that the vaccine may be more harmful to kids than the virus but the government is forcing you to take it anyways. both are actual headlines. One is ideological reinforcement masquerading as news — that’s what op was getting at. Watch enough of that stuff and the real world will become ever more difficult to see.

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

#227
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inc…

> Either something means something, or it doesn't.

This is a peculiar idea.

What does my cat mean?

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

#228
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 –…

We see religious tendencies in the secular world because we really don't know what we're doing running the secular world. Nobody really knows how to organize an economy to work well. All the plausible systems have failed at some point, often in unexpected ways.

"Free markets" are just turning loose an optimizer that optimizes for - something. Central planning just pushes the problem back to the planning level. Combining the two for political ends tends to produce strange results because economics has very poor predictive power.

This uncertainty tends to drive people to faith-based positions. That doesn't work either, but it satisfies some basic human need.

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

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the 1880s to 2000 this may have been the case, but I don't think it is anymore. Any country with public health insurance that is decent is more attractive than the US. People are not blind, they see Americans dying of diabetes because they can't afford insulin that they attempted to crowdfund. [1] The US has evolved into a modern dystopia under the first-past-the-post system and cloture in the senate. I think th…

> The US has evolved into a modern dystopia > America's democracy may not even be a democracy > Republicans are currently digging themselves in to remove as much democracy Here's the ideological intensity that the article mentioned. This is delusional. The smartest, most driven people still come to the US to start businesses and seek fortune, because it's the best place in the world to do so.

> The smartest, most driven people still come to the US to start businesses and seek fortune, because it's the best place in the world to do so.

Rates of entrepreneurship are higher in Scandinavian countries[1].

It's also easier to start your own business in such countries because you don't already have to be wealthy enough to afford spending $36k in premiums alone each year for your family's health insurance on the individual market.

[1] https://www.oecd.org/sdd/business-stats/EAG-2018-Highlights....

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

#230
post #13

Well…yeah! Religion serves a function. Even if that function is psychological. When you take religion away, something else will fill the utility-gap. Silly humans failing to grasp the purpose of stories/narratives. Edit for the downvoters (who clearly don’t understand): the question “Why do science and philosophy matter?” has only religious/ideological answers.

> “Why do science and philosophy matter?” has only religious/ideological answers

The question needs not be asked. But most people are not areligious, they have been raised within a context of religion where the question was asked to them. Religion begets religion because it teaches people that there are higher meanings and pushes people to seek their answers.

A true areligious person does not ponder about the meaning of life, why we are here, and what it is we need to do with ourselves. An areligious person can simply exist in peace, guided simply by ones natural desires for fun, pleasure, comfort, safety, growth and love.

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