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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

#501

Post by bwb »

kazen44 wrote: post #133
ardit33 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. when I lived in Sweden, I noticed that Swedes in general have less stuff. Smaller housing, fewer cars, less ability to buy stuff, and even go out. The average engineer salary was almost half (about 60%) of those in NYC and SF, while prices coffee/going out in Stockholm were almost the same as in NYC. Rent prices were lower though. But, their quality of life seemed higher overall. Less stressful in general, more…

Also, social control is quite a bit stricter in a lot of (especially northern) european countries compared to the US. Showing one's wealth is in bad taste, and bragging about status is considering being an outlier. This is slowly changing (since about the 80's) but prior to that, showing off your middle class wealth as a status indicator was frowned upon in certain circles. especially considering the hardship most pe…

That gets down to culture.

I was raised in the USA and I was raised that showing one's wealth is in bad taste. In fact I think most of the midwest feels similar. I still do. The point of money isn't to show it off, it is to put it to good use.

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

#502

Post by Haiatu »

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 –…

"One aspect of religion I appreciate is that these aspects are well codified and debated – i.e. much more explicit."

They are not well debated in a sense that it would be called reasonable in a normal and educated world. Thats why we call it believe. Its much easier to say 'whats written in a book from some people from some 2000 years ago is true' and start to philosoph around it than actually not stoping questioning until there is a real truth to it. My discussion with a very religios person stoped after i realizied they are convinced that stuff in that book is relevant and true and moving the debate of it to 'our old people studied it and gave those learnings to future people'.

Interesting to read that for you, becoming more religiuos made you aware of other religious tendencies. For me it actually started in school with discovering group dynamic and then after that, questioning religion which lead me to being non religious and i'm very very aware of how other cognitive biases and media and co are forming us.

The biggest problem you might not understand in your world of codified: 'the other believe system' is universal and doesn't need to be codified its just that you might need to discover it for yourself or accept the truth yourself.

Ah it sounds much more spirital than i wanted it to be. Effectively my family/friends are normal good people. We don't identify us through religion and we don't hurt each other. We basically are all on the same planet, we know who birthed us but we don't know why. Single wall of truth: the big bang. Single simplest rule: Don't harm others / don't do things you don't want others to do to you.

And actually, certain states have very well defined law books which answers a ton of questions. Even slightly weirder ones that if someone had an accident with a car, to a degree both parties can be in fault. Its basically us wo build our believe system through living together.

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

#503

Post by Haiatu »

lhorie wrote: post #415
xelxebar wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is just a sort of tautological argument, wherein you adopt that "to be religious" is the same as "to have a belief system". Not OP, but I think this is a pretty narrow reading of their statement. Personally, I read it to be more about value and community dynamics. Institutionalized religions often are very explicit about their (supposed) terminal values and arrange social situations to explicitly work toward o…

> I believe OP is pointing out that secular groups (at least those within view of OP's demographics) mostly fail to have explicitly defined value systems. I read it like that as well. I've seen this idea illustrated this way: a kid raised in a religious community gets drilled from an early age about morals as an umbrella abstraction (in the form of allegories from religious texts), so they don't need to be micromanag…

Plenty of people prove this not to be working at all.

Plenty of priests have fucked kids.

Religoius people are often enough the same amount of assholes or more. I have not fought over a city for ages due to some believe.

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

#505

Post by Haiatu »

slibhb wrote: post #257
gameswithgo wrote: post #123

>The secular world would benefit from adopting more formal definitions of their belief system. Just as the religious world contains Christians, Jews, Scientologists, Muslims, Hindus, et cetc" with sometimes radically different ideas, the secular world too has a great many different people with different belief systems. >If you believe you are not religious, it just means that you don’t have the cognitive tools to rec…

Regardless of whether "everyone is religious," everyone certainly has revelatory beliefs, i.e. beliefs that were not reasoned to. Christian thinkers have spilled a lot of ink attempting to clarify the boundary between reason and revelation whereas, in the secular world, many people do not seem to understand that many of their beliefs (particularly the foundational ones) are revealed.

Non religious people call this 'science'.

'We' think about the big bang 'we' wrote the book on it.

Religion writes books about 'gods' and repeat stories from the past.

Math unites people across the globe. Everyone agrees globally on the scientific truth.

I understand that there are plenty of countries which you would prefer not to life in but i do believe in my country but my country is a good one. We don't kill people anymore because they are different than the norm.

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

#506

Post by Thorrez »

sidlls wrote: post #199

> Few people understand that most religions e.g. Judaism and Christianity have an apologetic discipline – a deliberate arm open to debate. The range of permissible debate is quite narrow in reality, and usually start from an assumption that the core tenets are more or less true. > 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 hav…

>The range of permissible debate is quite narrow in reality, and usually start from an assumption that the core tenets are more or less true.

The purpose of apologetics is to defend the faith debates with people of other religions or atheists. If there are rules about not allowing certain things to be debated that's not going to work at all.

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

#507

Post by Thorrez »

manmal wrote: post #255
sidlls wrote: post #199

> Few people understand that most religions e.g. Judaism and Christianity have an apologetic discipline – a deliberate arm open to debate. The range of permissible debate is quite narrow in reality, and usually start from an assumption that the core tenets are more or less true. > 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 hav…

I had an otherwise enjoyable conversation with a just recently-turned-religious person. As soon as core tenets, as you nicely put it, where up for discussion, conversation came to a screeching halt. People who think the ten amendments must be strictly followed have a lot of cognitive dissonance to resolve, and reasoning is not welcome. The same person asked me into great detail why vaccinations should be a good idea,…

>the ten amendments

That's hilarious. I'm not sure if that's a typo or joke. It also makes me think of the US Bill of Rights, which are the first ten amendments to the US Constitution.

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

#508

Post by Haiatu »

simonklitj wrote: post #330
joe_the_user wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a non-religious person, certainly I understand many of my beliefs come from convention or intuition or whatever non-rational source, sure. But I don't have any meta-belief telling me to hold onto given beliefs-that-seem-implausible-or-unverifiable because I'll be rewarded in the end or because it's a test or whatever. I don't continually change whatever belief I know is arbitrary but that's because consistency has…

What is rational? Is not rationality subjective? What you might deem irrational others might deem perfectly rational, and vice-versa, what you might deem rational others might deem quite obviously irrational. Are we to see experiences as rational explanation of a phenomena? Sure, I see and feel a rock, and I verify its existence rationally. I smell food and verify its existence rationally. What about people experienc…

We actually don't know that:

"What about people experiencing a divine being communicating to them, then?"

But we have studied this and the answers tell us what the most realistic thing actually is and thats why we see 'divine being communicating to them' as a mental illness.

You can expierence this challanging thought yourself by taking LSD. Realizing that you are actually know everything for a few hours and than getting back to your 'normal reality' is exhausting.

But i still don't believe we are all caught on the earth and we need LSD to shackle those bounds. I know how many people are on the planet, how many people i have seen die and leave our planet in the normal rational way. I have never ever seen anything which makes me believe otherwise and LSD showed me even more how fragile my own reality is.

You might want to look in a medical book on different topics you refered to to see what you believe. Nonetheless its just more realistic that human a had a similiar brain issue than all other similiar independend cases before than that this person is now talking directly to god and we areound us are all dumb shits not being able to recognise it.

My default sentence for this is simple: I'm a good person, and i don't like the idea very much that there is a god who allows cancer in kids and rape from religious people and murder etc. and either this god is a massive asshole, clearly not relevant enought to woreshop or doesn't exist anyway.

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

#510

Post by jart »

irrational wrote: post #466
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.

Do we want people to make choices that benefit themselves? That seems to be the root of so many problems in the world. Shouldn't we encourage people to make choices that benefit others, benefit the wider community, etc.?

Of course and one way to do that is by ensuring everyone gains. Startups for example create wealth by building products that provide a service to their communities. Paul Graham talks about this sort of thing on his blog. I think that's great even though it's not the case for folks in rent-seeking economies with zero-sum games where people can only win by making the other guy lose. Would you encourage someone in that situation to act against their self-interest?
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