Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 823 posts

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

#301

Post by sudosysgen »

reddog wrote: post #247
hilbertseries wrote: post #120

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.

The best example I can think of would be the Chinese cultural revolution. Millions killed and hundreds of millions had their lives destroyed because they were perceived by the "faithful" (by mostly highschool and college age Chinese, not police or military) as as not being true to Maos teaching.

That's pretty easy to understand in terms of power and secular belief, I don't see why religion is needed or particularly helpful.

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

#302

Post by hpoe »

klipt wrote: post #217
hilbertseries wrote: post #120

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.

One example I've noticed of a non-religious group acting similarly to a religious group is certain very online feminist communities. Instead of original sin, they believe that society hates women, and this is the root of all society's problems. Instead of regular repentance, they advise regularly checking your privilege / fighting your internalized misogyny. Anyone who questions their beliefs must be a heretic who ha…

Now you're getting it most people need and want something to believe in. But because traditional religion isn't fashionable they've found their new religion in the church of Social Justice.

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

#303

Post by meowster »

wolfretcrap wrote: post #273
tonymet wrote: 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 –…

From my person experience, religious people have scammed/hurt me to the most in life and business.

I don't know what happened, but did religion make them do it, or did bad people use religion as an excuse?

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

#304

Post by angrais »

sudosteph wrote: post #194

> In his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, Martin Luther King Jr. wished that “one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.” The very idea that a nation might have a creed—a word associated primarily with religion—illustrates the uniqueness of American identity as well as its predicament. That was a quote from the _Reverend_ Martin Luther King Jr, no less, so it's fair to say he knew the…

You've confused me. Are you saying that "leftists" cannot quote king because he was Christian? Why's that matter? Also, quotes can be used for many purposes outside of their origin, e.g., love thy neighbour, etc.

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

#305

Post by joe_the_user »

ukj wrote: post #281
joe_the_user wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an extremely ignorant position that trivializes "religion". First of all, as I have written elsewhere, everyone is religious. -- I can't see how that statement doesn't trivialize religion at least as much. IE, if everyone is "religious", you've set a very low bar for what qualifies as religious I think made it clear you have religious beliefs, which involve ... clearly false views of the cosmos (with the poss…

> if everyone is "religious", you've set a very low bar for what qualifies as religious And if everyone has “beliefs” then you have set a very low bar for what qualifies as belief which makes everyone a believer. You are playing a silly power game where you dismiss other people’s conceptual schemes so you can peddle your own. My view of the cosmos is that it is a computer simulation. It isn’t clearly false. But it is…

And if everyone has “beliefs” then you have set a very low bad for what qualifies as belief.

Sure, if you look at what qualifies as a belief, it's pretty random.

My view of the cosmos is that it is a computer simulation.

It seems like the main thing this shares with religion is that it's wholly unverifiable. If you develop it in common with others and perhaps add rituals, you could qualify it along with Pastafarians [1]. But Pastafarian know it's a joke.

I might have some wholly unverifiable beliefs but I don't have a commitment to maintain such beliefs. That's where I'd locate the difference.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster

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

#306

Post by TimPC »

friedman23 wrote: post #293
sidlls wrote: post #199

> Few people understand that most religions e.g. Judaism and Christianity have an apologetic discipline – a deliberate arm open to debate. The range of permissible debate is quite narrow in reality, and usually start from an assumption that the core tenets are more or less true. > If you believe you are not religious, it just means that you don’t have the cognitive tools to recognize the secular ideology that you hav…

> usually start from an assumption that the core tenets are more or less true. You use this as a criticism of religion but I find it's true of secular people as well who have baseless beliefs that are just as deeply ingrained. Telling someone on hackernews you are religious you will probably get a ton of criticism and downvotes. You know what will get the same reaction? Telling someone you are a moral nihilist. Why i…

There is an entire branch of Philosophy called Ethics that gives us better answers to these questions and a better framework for grappling with them then religion ever has. It is quite arrogant to assume that atheists have no answers at all to these questions.

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

#307

Post by beaconstudios »

lisper wrote: post #282
beaconstudios wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's also a teleological approach (looking at the final state of the interaction of rain, terrain and gravity) - I used evolution as an example because its the first thing that came to mind. Evolution is also a good touchpoint because everybody who considers themselves "rational" accepts it, and yet it is taught, and reasoned about, teleologically - compared to most pop-science topics which are analytical in nature…

I don't think most people would think of puddles as having telos. Telos goes beyond what is and looks at purpose and meaning in terms of what ought to be. Puddles don't really have a purpose in that sense, and neither does evolution. Puddles fill voids, not because that's their purpose, but simply because that's what happens when you have water, gravity, and the right kind of void. Likewise for evolution. I know some…

My understanding is that telos is about the final configuration of something, the outcome of it, as well as its goals in the human sense, and that these two ideas are covered by the concepts of intrinsic and extrinsic telos. Extrinsic telos, as in human purposive use, isn't what I was talking about - I meant intrinsic telos, the settled state that a system will reach if left to its own devices.

If you leave rain to its own devices, it will form puddles through gravity and the depressions in the environment. If you don't change the environment (practically impossible given species are part of the environment themselves, but hey-ho), evolution will (loosely) match the species to said environment, or kill them off, if allowed to run to infinite time.

Those examples both spell out the idea of intrinsic telos to me.

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

#308

Post by grecy »

alkonaut wrote: post #71

I want to point out that this is incorrect: > It’s rare to hear someone accused of being un-Swedish or un-British—but un-American is a common slur, slung by both left and right against the other. Being called un-American is like being called “un-Christian” or “un-Islamic,” a charge akin to heresy. In fact to be unswedish is not just a common idiom it’s a positive one. It’s when you don’t show the typical negative Swe…

One political party in Australia tried to adopt this and starting calling people "un-Australian".

The leader of the other party stood up and tore him to shreds, saying that the magic of Australia is that it's a country of immigrants and that by very definition, everyone there is Australian. It's perfectly fine to disagree about stuff and have discussions, but we're all still Australian. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to tear the country apart and should never be given a microphone again.

The other guy has never tried that childish divisive tactic again.

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

#309

Post by friedman23 »

manmal wrote: post #255
sidlls wrote: post #199

> Few people understand that most religions e.g. Judaism and Christianity have an apologetic discipline – a deliberate arm open to debate. The range of permissible debate is quite narrow in reality, and usually start from an assumption that the core tenets are more or less true. > If you believe you are not religious, it just means that you don’t have the cognitive tools to recognize the secular ideology that you hav…

I had an otherwise enjoyable conversation with a just recently-turned-religious person. As soon as core tenets, as you nicely put it, where up for discussion, conversation came to a screeching halt. People who think the ten amendments must be strictly followed have a lot of cognitive dissonance to resolve, and reasoning is not welcome. The same person asked me into great detail why vaccinations should be a good idea,…

You can't think of anything you believe in that if someone came to you to "discuss" you wouldn't react instantly negative and start calling the other person insults?

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

#310

Post by colechristensen »

tonymet wrote: 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 –…

I have been thinking a lot about region and ideology and what i’ve come up with is that the tendency to form these strong ideological behaviors is a feature of humanity and organized religion is a sort of evolved (perhaps in a meme more than a gene way) response to this tendency.

Essentially groups and ideas survived better when there was an organization and social rules built up around this human tendency. Left unchecked reckless nonsense ideologies spring up too easily, an organized religion gives this human trait an outlet (and often becomes an unchecked wreckless ideology itself, but... less often).

Or in another sense, the big organized religions are the winners in a centuries long evolutionary race of ideas. The nonsense ones destroy themselves eventually, the less nonsense ones survive and spread (seriously, judaism is thousands of years old and has a health code, much of which in context is decent advice).

Post reply on HN