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As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen

theatlantic.com

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

#471

Post by samhain »

tonymet wrote: post #456
samhain wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the parent, you’re argument almost appears disingenuous to the point of looking like a troll or bait. This perspective is substituting any belief with a religious belief which is a false equivalency. It’s unfortunate that the grandparent is the top comment right now.

Can you share profound beliefs that you don't believe are religious in nature? I know trivial beliefs e.g. today was 85º – we can agree that calling those religious would not be useful.

Check your original comment. You did not qualify that only “profound secular beliefs” are religious in nature. Rather, you speak in general saying “secular beliefs are religious.” So now you’re moving the goal posts.

Using your original logic, -any- belief can be religious in nature. “Today was 85” -is- religious from your original position because perhaps people ritualistically check the weather every morning like a prayer. The weathermen are like priests disseminating knowledge, and small talk is used to find other weather checker cultists.

It does not matter what belief Id offer up, because it will match your original definition because your original definition is so broad as to be meaningless. Other comments have already said this in fewer words. If you are unable to identify what it would look like if you were mistaken, then you shouldn’t be confident that you are correct. So how could someone identify the difference between a secular belief and a religious belief?

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

#472

Post by manmal »

1123581321 wrote: post #465
manmal wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

What led her to change to the religion?

Hard to tell for me what triggered this. She completely changed careers at that point it seems, maybe it was burnout.

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

#473

Post by manmal »

friedman23 wrote: post #309
manmal wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Nothing comes to mind, really. I call people names when they threaten my life in traffic, but that’s about it.

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

#474

Post by pdonis »

BackBlast wrote: post #419
pdonis wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> believing that religious believers accept 100% of religious belief without reasoning about them is a misunderstanding. I didn't say anything about religions and ideologies not using reasoning. Anyone who has read, say, Thomas Aquinas is perfectly aware that religious people can use all kinds of complicated reasoning to justify their beliefs. What I did say is that the set of beliefs in question are "all asserted as…

I see the example you related, and by using it as a proxy... It seems that you are saying that religious beliefs aren't really valid because they aren't based in reality.

> It seems that you are saying that religious beliefs aren't really valid because they aren't based in reality.

For the specific example I gave (Thomas Aquinas), it's not really a question of the beliefs being "valid" or not; it's just that they have no practical impact at all, which means it doesn't really matter whether you believe them or not, at least not if the beliefs are taken in isolation.

However, it is a problem if people then try to use such beliefs to justify actions that do have practical impact. For example, consider the split between different branches of Christianity after the Council of Chalcedon over "homoousios" vs. "homoiousios", which caused several wars over the next few centuries.

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

#475

Post by rsj_hn »

pdonis wrote: post #474
BackBlast wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see the example you related, and by using it as a proxy... It seems that you are saying that religious beliefs aren't really valid because they aren't based in reality.

> It seems that you are saying that religious beliefs aren't really valid because they aren't based in reality. For the specific example I gave (Thomas Aquinas), it's not really a question of the beliefs being "valid" or not; it's just that they have no practical impact at all, which means it doesn't really matter whether you believe them or not, at least not if the beliefs are taken in isolation. However, it is a pr…

> it's just that they have no practical impact at all,

That's funny because a system that kept a civilization together for 1000 years is being claimed to have "no value" by someone who has no idea how to keep any society together and is mimicking the conventional wisdom of those overseeing a disintegrating society as a result of this ignorance.

Not only does the work of Aquinas have value, it has more value over the long run than anything being produced today, as no ethical system that we hold dear has a chance of keeping anything going for even three generations, let alone 100. Modern society is suffering from collapsing birthrates and social disintegration at an alarming rate, and we are pretending to be smarter than those who set the rules of a civilization that was far more stable and productive than our own, with far more profound accomplishments.

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

#476

Post by manmal »

friedman23 wrote: post #324
sidlls wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why bother? I don’t hold any belief strongly enough to merit such a reaction, though I might react negatively for other reasons. For example, past experience showing the insincerity of their own debate tactics and a lack of patience for rehashing it all yet again.

I don't know you and can't speak for you. But my point that all the people on here criticizing people on their moral systems are baseless stands. These same people would've been in the mob in salem executing so called witches a couple hundred years ago and would have been just as certain in their beliefs then.

AFAIK witch hunts were often driven by political reasons and the church lent their credibility for it. Sometimes the church initiated them. Claiming atheists would have been a part of this is a bit far fetched, to put it mildly.

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

#477

Post by skissane »

rogerkirkness wrote: post #23
briefcomment wrote: post #17

People feel the urge to label some one, group, or idea, as bad. I get around this by accepting that I am bad. It helps me see the best in everyone else, and makes me hold myself to really high standards. It is sometimes unpleasant though. It's probably some sort of natural calibration process.

I've come to terms with this by denouncing morals and focusing on ethics.

The problem with talking about "morals"-vs-"ethics" is that it isn't very clear what is the actual difference between them.

One point of view–to which I subscribe–is that the terms are synonyms. One comes from Latin, the other comes from Greek. English does that sometimes.

Others insist they differ in meaning. But there doesn't seem to be any consensus on what the actual difference is. I've heard many proposals, and the only thing I've found they have in common is that they disagree with each other.

Some people say "morals" is about principles and "ethics" is about their application. Others say "morals" are religious and "ethics" are secular. Yet others say "morals" are personal and "ethics" are professional and/or political. I'll just stick with using the two words as interchangeable synonyms myself.

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

#478

Post by meowface »

betwixthewires wrote: post #445

I also think that religiosity is a neurological phenomenon and is as much a part of being a human as language, music, money or tool use. Nobody, including myself, can escape it. I see a lot of talk in this thread about making the definition of "religion" meaningless by broadening it too much, but I think the definition that gets narrowed in is "the phenomenon of humans engaging in dogmatic belief." A good example of…

>A good example of this is transhumanism, specifically, the idea that you can upload your mind to a computer. It is all but given based on our current scientific understanding that the mind is inseparable from the body, yet somehow particularly atheist people behave as if they are separate things. This is a dogmatic belief.

It's unknown if such a technology will be possible one day, but I don't find transhumanism or that idea dogmatic. The human mind is of course part of the human body, but there's nothing that prescribes any particular mind must be part of a biological body. This is known as "substrate independence". If substrate independence is true, it would suggest creation of conscious machines and simulation of conscious beings is feasible.

There are additional difficulties when it comes to the possibility of actually "uploading" one's mind, but it seems incorrect to say "atheists who trust science believe the mind and body are inseparable, yet here they act like they can be separated". The atheist/physicalist/scientific claim is that the mind emerges from the brain, and that the brain is made of ordinary matter - not that they're "inseparable" in the sense that there can't be such a thing as a mind without a fleshy body.

It's orthogonal to "bodiness" or an idea of anything like a soul. If substrate independence is true, then a mind is a thing which must exist on some physical substrate composed of matter. It's fine if you believe substrate independence isn't true, but I don't see any dogma. Perhaps a dogma would be "substrate independence is true" without demonstrating any evidence of it, but I haven't seen that claim. This'll probably only ever be known for sure if some group actually manages to instantiate a seemingly-conscious mind on a non-biological substrate, and if it seems to pass every possible test for consciousness we can devise.

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

#479

Post by brailsafe »

tonymet wrote: post #167
brailsafe wrote: post #122

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.

The first person, because religion isn't simply a matter of content ingestion. If it was, this wouldn't be an issue.

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

#480

Post by gradschoolfail »

jeofken wrote: post #134
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…

To clarify the point, when other Swedes act a little “unswedish” it may be cosmopolitan cool, but it is limited to the national/ethnic in group. When Arabs, Somalians, or Nigerians, or other foreign peoples act unswedish its expected, and if loud, an annoyance

Ditto for “unamerican”. To call a Russian immigrant unamerican would get one mystified looks at best, probably.
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