Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

As religious faith has declined, ideological intensity has risen

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 823 posts

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

#111

Post by dimitrios1 »

pmoriarty wrote: post #76

We may be on the cusp of a great religious revival, due to the increased acceptance and eventual mainstreaming of psychedelics. People often interpret their psychedelic experiences in religious terms, and psychedelic use has often created new religions and helped to engender an authentic reconnection to existing religions. Mainstream religions rarely offer much more than platitudes or a place to socialize for the maj…

This is such a belittling and reductionist take on religiosity that all I can do, as a religious person myself, who is well educated (because that's the other assumed trope common in places like these: people must be religious because they are otherwise ignorant or uneducated), is laugh.

Not only has American theological ignorance increased (people like Richard Dawkins for example, popular in atheist cultures, has just downright comically terrible theology and understanding of the Bible), but as well as ignorance of the human psyche.

I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

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

#112

Post by willhslade »

fatsdomino001 wrote: post #97
bwb wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't true if you mean in terms of achieving the classic American dream… Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and others are moving more people out of lower/middle class to middle/upper class as a percentage. I do not know in terms of raw numbers but via % we are behind.

Canada is about to revert to the mean in a very hard way though, so I wouldn't count on that statistic too much.

Care to elaborate?

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

#114

Post by rmellow »

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 USA is the only country where you can move to and say you're from.

North of the border there's a vast, mythical place called Canada - about 20% of Canadians were not born there [1].

Yes, this feeling of "acquired origin" is not true of every country, but the US and Canada are seldom the only place.

In my experience, the same would happen in many South American countries if one is successful in integration - there's no snobbery about not being born there.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canada-s-foreign-born-populat...

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

#115

Post by bdv5 »

vmception wrote: post #6

I think this correlation is related to causation. I think there are registers in people's minds that are simply occupied. Addicts occupy their predisposition to addiction with a single or ever changing way of neglecting their responsibilities and relationships and health, based on simple earliest exposure. Susceptible people occupy their predisposition to susceptibility with religion or fervent ideology, the "choice"…

Starting conditions matter but all kinds of forces (and they are ever changing) exist and act upon the chimp mind as it moves through the jungle that is life. Where it ends up is highly unpredictable.

So we get a chimp troupe like China were all the chimps appear to have the same programming or like US where chimps magically get polarized into exactly 2 camps on any issue or an Israel which due to the unique challenges it faces ends up with a knesset with more ideologies than anyone can keep track off.

Starting conditions are only one variable in a very complex equation.

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

#116

Post by throwaway34241 »

The themes here remind me of another politics-is-the-new-religion article by David French, "America Is in the Grips of a Fundamentalist Revival". [1]

In it he draws a distinction between religion and fundamentalist religion (which the author has a background with), with a key quality of the latter being a lack of a sort of humility, a certainty that they're right. Which in turn leads them to be less tolerant of opposing viewpoints - because (in their view) they can see right and wrong so clearly, it pulls them to the position that "error has no rights".

That being said, I think it is easy to pay too much attention to the extremes.

An analysis of the US's political problems is out of scope of a HN comment, but one thing I did recently was read books by two prolific authors on the US left and right [2] (who each have historically been aligned with one of our two political parties). They both contained opposing narratives covering the last 100 years or so, but what was very interesting was how they both overlapped around certain key historical/political events.

I think reading these books was quite helpful for my understanding of US politics in a way that isn't really covered by the news cycle (in the future, I'd like to spend more time reading these sorts of books and less time on news).

[1] https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/america-is-in-the-grip...

[2] Paul Krugman's "The Conscience of a Liberal" and Charles Murray's "By the People"

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

#117

Post by dstroot »

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 an American I find being accused of being unAmerican is usually something I find humorous: 1) If you don't blow stuff up on 4th of of July you are unAmerican! 2) If you can't eat Hotdogs like Joey Chestnut you are unAmerican! 3) If you don't own gun you are...

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

#118

Post by version_five »

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.

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

#119

Post by nvahalik »

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 –…

What’s even more interesting is that most ideologies also adhere to a standard religious framework as well:

- anthropology

- problem of evil/sin

- redemption

- eschatology

If your system he answers to these, you basically have a religion.

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

#120

Post by hilbertseries »

It’s interesting how you’ve written so much here and not given what concrete example. Makes it very difficult to examine your argument, when you simply state that secular ideology is religious. I think it’s worth noting the definition of secular is:

> denoting attitudes, activities, or other things that have no religious or spiritual basis.

Post reply on HN