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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

#661

Post by tonymet »

savingsPossible wrote: post #558
kwinten wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 gr…

This is academically true but not practically true. sure there are various secular ideologies in the wild, but due to globalized media & culture, you will generally find major and minor dominant ideologies ruling over you personally.

Overall the point isn’t to say that all secular belief is the same. The point is that any secular ideology you follow will have the same characteristics of religious belief despite lacking definition.

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

#662

Post by mensetmanusman »

pdonis wrote: post #198
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.

> 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…

“ They're just a free-standing, self-consistent logical structure that can't be justified in any way except by claiming that it justifies itself. It's not that Aquinas didn't use reasoning; as noted above, he did--lots of it.”

Interestingly, this also describes all of math, logic, and philosophy.

One of the more interesting axioms or assertions is whether there exists free will, which is, by any interesting definition, a supernatural entity.

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

#664

Post by mensetmanusman »

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.

Jewish Old Testament scholars haven’t taken Genesis literally for more than 2 millennia.

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

#665

Post by mensetmanusman »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #553
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…

>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 (t…

https://www.catholic.com/tract/primer-on-indulgences

The powerful hoping to keep people ignorant seems like conspiracy/folklore.

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

#666

Post by Shorel »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #487
Shorel wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Few people understand that most religions e.g. Judaism and Christianity have an apologetic discipline – a deliberate arm open to debate. That's just a trick religious evangelizers use as bait to unleash their barrel of canned answers. And boy, you really have a lot of ammunition to use. But, and this is an important but: In the end, it is all just rhetoric to justify what you already believe and are unwilling to ch…

> That's just a trick religious evangelizers use as bait to unleash their barrel of canned answer How is that different from what the atheist side offers? The fact is, the big questions in life tend to be complicated to figure out, so canned answers are a practical way to not devote your entire lifetime to redeveloping the conclusions from scratch. Ideally, you'd also do some due diligence and try to figure out wheth…

> How is that different from what the atheist side offers?

That one is easy: we don't pretend we have the answer to everything. In fact, that's the first thing we say.

Is the sun going to appear in the sky tomorrow? Probably yes, as far as I know, with 99.99999 certainty, but it is never 100%.

Pure theological questions are answered by me with: is that even a useful question? I don't even care if a god exists, because so far they have been unable to interact with the world in any meaningful way. And you people worry so much about your next life, you are forgetting to live this one.

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

#667

Post by remarkEon »

hackyhacky wrote: post #515
remarkEon wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In contrast, modern secular culture, although not immune to tribalism and ideological blindness, is much more open to building belief through analysis and understanding, i.e. the scientific method. I think this was true, at a certain point in or for a window of time, but it certainly isn't true today. There are well known axioms that are not-to-be-challenged, and doing so risks expulsion (i.e. Excommunication). So m…

That's certainly the way Fox News tries to portray secularism. In my experience, it has no basis in reality.

There has to be a name for the rhetorical strategy that goes something like "your opinions or observations are sufficiently similar to media_influencer_I_dont_like regardless of their actual origin, and thus I'm able to discount what you are saying outright". Every time this topic comes up, even when it's in a more interesting and philosophical thread like this one, the Fox News bogyman always gets trotted out. TFA is from ... The Atlantic, if you haven't noticed.

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

#668

Post by mensetmanusman »

_teyd wrote: post #539
coldtea wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First, people don't acquire the beliefs by considering and weighing evidence; they acquire them by being told them, usually at a young age, by people they trust, and making them part of their identity. That's why people are so resistant to changing such beliefs. Second, the set of beliefs acquired in this way is not just a few isolated ones, but a whole network of beliefs that cover every aspect of life and are all…

This idea that science and technology is just another random religion is so frustrating, but I encounter it online way more often than I would expect. I don’t need to personally review and understand the details of why electricity and the internet work, because I am literally typing this message on an electronic device and sending it via the internet. No faith needed, and anyway.. I can go build a simple computer and…

The scientific method is just a tool of thought that encompasses one subset of human interests.

For example, the scientific method has little to no utility about whether your grandma loves you, or what love is even.

Much of a life is built around areas of thought like this. Politics, for example, is mostly preference.

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

#669

Post by trashtester »

bildung wrote: post #557
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…

That is what I used to believe, too.

More recently though, it seems to me that ideologies DO have a pretty strong impact on what people believe about the world itself, especially by people who have a tight coupling between their identiy and the ideology.

At the very least, this seems to apply to both sides of the current right/left divide in the west. For instance, if I ask you to predict how climate change will affect the world over the next 300 years, and your response lies in what is predicted by the 5% most optimistic climate scientists, you are very likely to be on the right. On the other hand, if your response corresponds to the 5% most pessimistic, you are very likely to be on the left.

As ideological polarization, an increasingly large part of the population will fall into one of theose extreme groups, which I interpret as a way that the ideology promotes beliefs that are not supported by science.

It seems to me that the underlying motivation is that people who believe axiomatically that a free market is good, see global warming as a threat to that belief. The leftists may believe the opposite because they see the free market as evil, or just to oppose the right.

There are plenty of other cases where ideologies cause beliefs that are not well founded in "real" science, even though there may be plenty of ideologes that promote them. Some beliefs are so sacret that any challenge to them will be punished as evil/heresy, which itself is a clear indication that the ideology does not value open inquiry.

I would even go so far as to see some of the principles and ideas involved as somewhat metaphysical. Capitalists can see the "invisible hand" in such a light, while leftists seem to imagine some sort of oppression to determine every social interaction (not very diffrent from how Christians in Europe believing that demons were virtually everywhere).

In the end, I think it is about the people following a given ideology. It used to be that atheist were a relatively small minority composed of mostly people with an above-average level of scepticisim to ways of thinking not supported by hard evidence.

But as the percentage of non-religious people increase, more and more poeple that have a religious inclination become "atheists", and those (I think) may be much more likely to accept incredible (literally) statements as fact, with little or no evidence.

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

#670

Post by mensetmanusman »

_teyd wrote: post #616
zosima wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then you have done validation of some of the proposition of modern science and technology. But quite a lot "science" can not verified in the same manner as some physics, math, chemistry and biology can. And to go from the fact that some science is verifiable and then conclude that everything which tries to take on the label science or follow similar rituals to the verifiable sciences, also deserves the same respe…

Some (most even that is relevant day to day?) is quite easy to validate and yet we still have flat-Earthers.

Note that a lot of the flat earth stuff is a large troll to make people mad, crazy stuff comes out of 4chan…
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