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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

#601

Post by tomjen3 »

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.

That is Marxist false consciousness and should not be brought up in a debate.

As for the difference between the two, for me a religious belief is one that is without evidence, a non religious belief is one that has some evidence for it, even if it is still wrong (e.g if you believe in the misama theory and so avoid stinking food you are less likely to catch a food born illness).

I do agree without you that it would be better if we adopted some better understanding of the secular beliefs, but that would also cause a lot of infighting because not everybody who hates the current system wants to replace it with the same and they may hate each other more than they hate the current system.

As an example: Malcom X and MLK. They didn't want to be under the boot of Jim Crow. They disagreed about what they wanted and how to get there.

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

#602

Post by u8mybrownies »

amcoastal wrote: post #583
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 –…

While your points are good your last paragraph projects a lot of weaknesses onto your readers. Do you believe you're the first person to come up with these points and realize them? Or perhaps that someone could have taken an opposite approach of yours -- moving from very religious to non-religious and can see the same behaviors? And then you continue to assume the only way forward is to perpetrate that behavior. All…

I read the last paragraph analytically, as in the Sapir Whorf hypothesis. It can be difficult to identify that one is in a religion if one assumes that it will call itself one. In this case, missing the “cognitive tools” could be a precise way of describing the shortcoming.

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

#603

Post by throwaway210222 »

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.

There is no mechanism by which the ABSENCE of a belief in your parent's invisible sky wizards becomes just evidence of an alternative belief system.

Not believing in the tooth fairy does not make my understanding and endorsement of say, the periodic table, an equivalent, dogmatic, religious, ineherited-from-parents belief.

The two are not the same. One is better.

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

#604

Post by matchbok »

efitz wrote: post #418

I grew up in a Protestant home (southern baptist church, 3x/week + youth activities). I have nothing against religion and I like religious people, I just don’t have strong faith anymore; the older I get the more skeptical I get of everything. It always makes me grin how much secular political issue adherents act like religious people. You can just listen to the language (“climate deniers” etc., “the end is near in 12…

[flagged]

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

#605

Post by ithkuil »

GreekPete wrote: post #600
ithkuil wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed ethical systems have changed throughout the lifespan of a religion. Religions are not set in stone and change more than what most religious people are willing to admit.

For example, people used to believe the Book of Genesis literally, and now (I believe) most denominations take it allegorically. I wonder how many similar stories like that will we have in the future. For me, it always felt like the interpretation of the Holy Books are changing through time as we understand science more and more. And it feels ironic to me.

That's true. But even leaving science aside, and focusing only on non-falsifiable aspects of human ethics, there are many examples such as slavery where Christianity for example has changed over time quite radically (and not even linearly)

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

#606

Post by furgooswft13 »

dudeman13 wrote: post #559
the-smug-one wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Many secular people are very fond of pinning all the worlds problems on religion, so I think it's fair to use the term back at them when they constantly act in the same exact ways they decry.

It clearly hits a nerve too.

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

#607

Post by u8mybrownies »

nzmsv wrote: post #589
pdonis wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Ethical systems are not the same as the kinds of religious beliefs I was talking about. Ethical systems have practical consequences that can be tested. Good luck testing one of the currently accepted "ethical system"-type religious beliefs. The only kind of outcome of such a test that is "allowed" is full agreement with the ethical system. A lot of these systems are just as self-reinforcing and barely based in real…

In my experience having been near many church splits I still feel this simply isn’t true. Churches operate like git forks and merges of ideas.

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

#608

Post by chii »

amcoastal wrote: post #583
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 –…

While your points are good your last paragraph projects a lot of weaknesses onto your readers. Do you believe you're the first person to come up with these points and realize them? Or perhaps that someone could have taken an opposite approach of yours -- moving from very religious to non-religious and can see the same behaviors? And then you continue to assume the only way forward is to perpetrate that behavior. All…

> while claiming other people don't have the cognitive tools you do. I'm amazed this comment didn't get downvoted.

it's the HN psuedo-intellectualism. Most HN readers tend to believe in their above-average intelligence, and that their view point comes from a place of rationalism and superior intellectual capability to analyse the world.

I myself, also fall into this category.

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

#609

Post by stjohnswarts »

False correlation. People realizing that belief in imaginary beings somewhere out there is false is a good thing. Any correlation at the same time of a rise in people becoming political or ideological zealots has nothing to do with the failure of religion in modern science based societies.

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

#610

Post by ehvatum »

throwaway210222 wrote: post #603
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. There is no mechanism by which the ABSENCE of a belief in your parent's invisible sky wizards becomes just evidence of an alternative belief system. Not believing in the tooth fairy does not make my understanding and endorsement of say, the periodic table, an equivalen…

The issue is seen when it comes to the question of what intolerance a secular person will not tolerate.
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