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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

#551

Post by Ieghaehia9 »

tarsinge wrote: post #492
jart wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rational means you'll make choices that benefit yourself. It's one of the core assumptions of game theory, economics, and policymaking. All the math breaks as soon as that's not the case because irrational is unpredictable. What's nice about rational agency is that it makes cooperation without hierarchy possible so it's been known to rustle the jimmies of the first estate.

> What's nice about rational agency is that it makes cooperation without hierarchy possible And economic liberalism is the belief system that it works for the greater good.

> And economic liberalism is the belief system that it works for the greater good.

Perhaps also anarchism, due to its focus on having the minimum amount of hierarchy possible.

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

#552

Post by fighterpilot »

betwixthewires wrote: post #490
meowface wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Belief that your mind can be moved is a dogmatic belief, if you hold it, seeing as our current scientific understanding of the brain precludes it. That isn't to say a machine cannot be conscious, or that a different type of consciousness cannot exist.

Why does current scientific knowledge preclude it? Is a simulation of the entire human body impossible in principle, or alternatively is it known that such a simulation won't be conscious?

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

#553

Post by pbhjpbhj »

pdonis wrote: post #488
rsj_hn wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> a system that kept a civilization together for 1000 years The fact that most people in a given civilization were Christians does not mean that the particular religious beliefs I was talking about were the ones that kept the civilization together. In fact, as the example I gave of religious wars over "homoousios" vs. "homoiousios" illustrates, those particular beliefs often caused problems that created huge rifts in…

>The fact that most people in a given civilization were Christians //

It's somewhat orthogonal to your argument, but I'd doubt that most people in "Christian countries" (which is a heterodox notion) are/were Christians. Mostly people in the past seem to have followed a societal model, largely imposed as a firm of control.

Where I grew up in the UK the village vicar was not a Christian according to most definitions (they didn't believe in central tenets of the faith as espoused in all the main creeds).

Catholicism has a lot of things that are contradictory to biblical Christianity from basic things like having "special" people, to indulgences which are so contradictory to biblical teachings the only possibly way they were accepted is because most people were ignorant to Scripture. And of course those in power keenly maintained that ignorance.

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

#554

Post by _y5hn »

Define religion as a societal organization, beliefs as mental convictions without proofs, and faith as determination and grit towards hope and higher goals.

Then by the very process of dismantling organized religion, whatever core is left, will not be average: The remaining core will be the more fundamentalist, more extreme and the annoyingly louder part. Its position in society will take time to shift though, all the while new technology platforms make such voices heard louder and wider than before.

When people lose beliefs, the addicted will need something else to hold on to. In this case, the quest for riches, fame and money. So for those already rich, it only makes sense to buy up all sources of knowledge and information, such as media, education and civic spaces. Making the snake eat its tail, prevents it from nibbling your own coffers. Beliefs are governed by being infallible, which is the false core itself.

Whatever direction people take, will be powered by faith. The hope for something better, wether it be in printing more currency, or less. And it makes sense for all involved not to get people engaged in anything that really matters.

So it is not from the outside or from another person true faith will blossom, as faith is ever so much more than mere beliefs.

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

#555

Post by [deleted] »

IncRnd wrote: post #143
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…

> 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. People may be called un-American as a political weapon, but that's about all it is. People in politics use all sorts of childish phrases as weapons. In reality I've…

[deleted]

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

#556

Post by savingsPossible »

pdonis wrote: post #191
tonymet wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> most people don’t have the time to weigh the evidence of say 90% of their beliefs. Most of the "beliefs" you refer to actually don't have to be beliefs at all. They have no practical consequences; they don't change anything about what the person who claims to have them actually does . Such beliefs don't have to have their evidence weighed because they make no practical difference. When people say they "believe" the…

This was interesting, but also somewhat paradoxical.

A belief that does not affect your actions, but implies or causes a belief that does affect your actions. Well, that does affect your actions. :)

But serioulsly, joke aside, that was an interesting concept

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

#557

Post by bildung »

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 –…

You are confusing different concepts: ideology and religion.

Ideologies are a set of ethical/moral assumptions about what is right and just, i.e. they are about human practice, about what humans ought to do.

Religions are ideologies, but they are also a set of beliefs about the world itself, about the physical and metaphysical reality - which are thought as true a priori. This part is almost universally wrong, as we could learn by a competing concept: science.

Ideologies can only be falsified insofar as they base their arguments on statements about human nature - these can be questioned empirically.

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

#558

Post by savingsPossible »

kwinten wrote: post #516
tonymet wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you believe that becoming religious made you smarter / more aware As in it's equipped me with mental models to understand which components of secular life are acts of faith & ritual vs reason. > 'secular world' is perhaps not as centrally organised as you may believe or wish for Nor is it uniform. But there are some overt and some covert aspects. the covert forces benefit from being nebulous. One reason religion…

> The secular world is applying all sorts of demands & social pressures on you, and there's no way to oppose them, because secular ideology doesn't have an identity, an institution or value system open to attack. It's like fighting smoke or a swarm of bees. That's because there is no such thing as "secular ideology". It's a meaningless phrase.

Correct.

There is no such thing as "secular ideology". There are many. Just as there are many religions.

There is materialism+work ethic, there is materialism without work ethic, there is "wokeism" (to pin a definition, the belief that oppression is a fundamental societal force and clearly directional based on some enumerated characteristics), there is nationalism. There's even "startups" :P

But perhaps you have a grain of truth in that rarely is a "secular ideologist" a "monotheistic" (monoidealistic?) one. Usually one's identity holds a plurality of those identifications.

Also, people can have a strong identification to ideas without a community to back it up (another grain of truth, and the saddest part)

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

#559

Post by dudeman13 »

the-smug-one wrote: post #548
Jare wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Eye rolling on a claim that "X is religious" when it can be just a simple "X is a cognitive and organizational tool" seems fair to me.

Specially when religious people are so fond of calling something religious when that something has nothing to do with religion

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