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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

#541

Post by mmsimanga »

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…

As a black man I have been called unblack plenty times when my views differed. It's a pretty effective slur that leads to one keeping their opinion to themselves.

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

#542

Post by baby »

version_five wrote: post #118

I'm not religious, not an atheist either. When I was a kid we went to church. I'm curious what (if anything) other parents substitute for organized religion with their kids. Or do you choose to participate anyway even if not devout? To be clear, I'm a big fan of questioning everything, but I definitely see benefits to being part of something like organized religion and wonder how I will fill that void with my son.

Honestly I don’t know. My parents were not religious and so I’m not baptized and never went to church. It’s like when people ask me: didn’t you miss not having a brother or a sister? Well how can I miss it if I never had it? Instead they had friends and we did camping trips, and dinners, and bbqs, and we went to the movies, and to the acquarium, and stuff…

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

#543

Post by baby »

Swizec wrote: post #24
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.

Isn’t this what Catholicism is all about? We are all sinners and terrible people. Therefore we should see the best in fellow human and give money to the church so it can offset our tab with god I realize most people stick to the “everyone is bad” part and forget that they too are an everyone and gloss over the whole forgiveness and acceptance part.

Is it though, don’t religious people think everyone else not part of their religion is going to hell?

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

#544

Post by K0nserv »

simplify wrote: post #136

There are religions, there are ideologies, and there are tribalisms. Tribalism is the underlying cause of most of humanity's bad behavior. And unfortunately, it creeps into religions and ideologies more often than not. In other words, as the article states, rationality is not going to increase as religion decreases. Tribalism is a fundamental human tendency, and few religions / ideologies address it correctly – if at…

I have a theory that tribalism is simultaneously the most important condition for civilisations and also often their undoing. The great filter[0] argues that it’s unlikely for a civilisation to reach the stage where it can visit other star systems and this is why earth hasn’t been visited by aliens.

Tribalism is a fundamental component in starting on the road to a modern civilisation, without it there is not capacity to innovate as all individuals are occupied with gathering food and finding shelter. Only when humans settled down in groups did we have the ability for some individuals to be freed from the toil of daily life to invent things.

In any case, if you assume this tribalism is crucial for civilisations to get started, then all alien civilisations would have had the same component. However, while tribalism is crucial in the earliest life of a civilisation I think it’s detrimental later. In particular, it makes tackling global challenges like climate change difficult and in the presence of word ending weapons it makes total destruction likely.

We’ve already seen examples of this e.g. inaction on climate change because China won’t do their part and with the mutually assured destruction of nuclear weapons.

So in essence I agree with you and because tribalism is an evolutionary trait I expect it will also be our undoing long term.

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter

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

#545

Post by colordrops »

tonymet wrote: post #170
pdonis wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 have adopted. Not all secular beliefs are ideologies. I think there are two key common factors between religious beliefs and ideologies that call themselves "secular": First, people don't acquire the beliefs by considering and weighing evidence; they acquire them by being told them,…

Let’s be honest, most people don’t have the time to weigh the evidence of say 90% of their beliefs. They go to school & watch television, and generally adopt the beliefs of their surroundings. And believing that religious believers accept 100% of religious belief without reasoning about them is a misunderstanding.

People have plenty of time, they just don't have the motivation.

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

#546

Post by Ieghaehia9 »

gbronner wrote: post #489

The issue isn’t so much that Americans have become less religious, it is that many fewer of them were raised in homes that had at least one religious parent. the experience of practicing a religion, even if you don’t believe it, tends to protect you from the single minded politics as religion thought process

That theory would suggest that the less religious a country, the more religious its politics. But plenty of countries in Europe are at least as irreligious as the US[1][2], yet the same effect doesn't seem to hold there.

[1] https://www.pewforum.org/2018/05/29/being-christian-in-weste... [2] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/12/06/10-facts-ab...

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

#547

Post by erklik »

aloisdg wrote: post #522
mrone wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Muslims agree on who God is and who are his prophets.

> and who are his prophets. Well this one may differ if you ask a Sunni or a Shi'ite.

> Well this one may differ if you ask a Sunni or a Shi'ite.

Prophets are the same in both denominations. I am not sure why you think otherwise.

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

#548

Post by the-smug-one »

Jare wrote: post #534
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 –…

That's some serious mental gymnastics you're doing there! Al lot of what you call "religious tendencies" are just cognitive and organizational tools. Religions use and codify (some of) them in their own ways, and other aspects and approaches to human life use and / or codify in their own ways too. Whatever leads you to wish for more structure and codification in your life and the world that surrounds, and you find th…

To me, it sounds like they really hit you on a sore spot :).

What OP talked about regarding ideology reminds me of the stuff that Zizek talks about. I'm no philosopher, but the thought that ideology has subsumed religion doesn't seem too far fetched. We, as a species, do seem to have a tendency to form religions and hold different biases.

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

#549

Post by DrBazza »

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 –…

> 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 have adopted.

Are you saying science method is a secular ideology then? Nothing else is required to analyse, understand and explain the world around us. Nothing.

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

#550

Post by andrewjl »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #101
rubyn00bie wrote: post #87

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 United States has the world's largest Christian population, and its founding was directly influenced by religion; the Church of England and the Puritans.[1][2][3][4] To suggest otherwise is to completely ignore not only history, but the present. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plymouth_Colony [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_of_New_England#Establ... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Province_of_Mas…

This isn't really the whole story. Many of the founders were Deist and/or practically irreligious.

The other important distinction is that the Church of England is essentially a state church. In many ways the U.S. Constitution, on which Nonconformists had far more influence, is its antithesis. [1] Puritanism/Nonconformism views religion as a personal or at most a local matter.

One of the references you shared has an interesting quote to this effect stating that when England tried to impose it's unelected colonial official rule, Puritan officials "were of opinion that God would never suffer me to land again in this country, and thereupon began in a most arbitrary manner to assert their power higher than at any time before." [2]

A much more accurate picture of what the U.S. started out as and has become today would be a mosaic or a patchwork of various religions and/or philosophies where one always has a choice whether to participate (or abstain).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonconformist_(Protestantism)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_of_New_England#Dudley...

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