Really? Cause society has gotten way more secular lately, and instead of social cohesion we have MAGA dipshits shooting up public spaces.
Bowling for Columbine was released 17 years ago.
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I’m generally anti-religion but I’m very suspicious of the direction of causation you’re implying here. I think it’s vastly more likely that secularization is the result of increasing levels of education, wealth, life expectancy and so on, rather than being a causative agent. Much like, and related to, declining birth rates.
I also think you can’t subtract religion from a society and not replace it with any other source of meaning, a process which is happening apace in various parts of America. Religion may be the opiate of the people but it is probably preferable to actual opiates. Also to virulent nationalism or ethno-nationalism.
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Religion has a sociological function. A society without religion would be dysfunctional. Take a look at studies on religiosity and psychological well-being.
The world is too complex for most people to grasp. Religion is a rational strategy for organizing data in a way that those people can comprehend in a way that is efficient in terms of getting good enough results while minimizing cognitive burden.
Some violence is a result of lashing out due to cognitive dissonance when one can’t reconcile a worldview, religious or otherwise, with real-world results. But sometimes that violence is the logical step to taken, given one’s beliefs and desired goals.
Sweden is a hellhole.
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Religion is just a device used to control the unwashed masses and always has been. Whether or not that is good or bad is debatable I suppose. Although I imagine almost the most cynical worldview would actually see like 80% of society living their lives based on what a fairy tale tells them to do as a net positive.
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Yeah but I think when we talk about the world getting secular, it’s really more of a move away from strict dogmatic ass-in-a-pew-every-Sunday type of religiosity that’s far more likely to be the type that spreads to the ballot box. The ones who find the world “too complex to grasp” will be the types that we all know already, that say “There’s just gotta be something bigger than us” and “I like to believe my mom’s in a better place now because that makes me feel better” while not having stepped into a church in decades and are fine with abortion rights and dgaf about whether they teach evolution in schools etc.
That group of people, and the unapologetic atheists who don’t see a problem with life having no ‘meaning’ other than what they bring to it, are both growing, but the former probably faster than the latter.
Like, I remember reading Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins back in the day an nodding along. After 9/11, it seemed like a good argument that religious fundamentalism was driving division and hatred and we just need to get rid of it and the world will be a better place.
20 years later and boy things didn’t play out the way I expected. I’ve made many tl;dr posts about how the Republican party has made the switch to a secularized version of enthic tribaism, you’re all probably tired of it by now, but it’s clear that the rise of fascism in the US from 2012-present has jack-all to do with religion, and we’re still more divided than we’ve ever been. We’ve mostly excised religion from the public discourse but the MAGA chuds are still throwing Salvadorean children into cages and tossing out anti-Semitic tropes and telling us that the Muslims want to murder your whole family. It’s clear that you can do away with religion and still keep all the paranoia and hatred that we ascribed to religion.
Like, go over to 22 and see how many of the resident trolls talk about Christ or the Bible. I’ll guaruntee you they never do that. But they’re still trafficking in the usual bigotry and hate against Jews and Muslims and the LGBT community.
I’m not sure if the world is really getting as secular as people think. It’s getting somewhat more secular, but it really is becoming more individualized. People are moving away from organized religion and towards some sense of individual spirituality. I think that is related to the decline in party affiliation and people seeing themselves more as independents even if they almost always vote for the same party.
People with a tendency to become racist gun nuts used religion as a vehicle to come together in solidarity. Now, the alt-right, pseudo-intellectual dark web is providing a vehicle for these people to come together. This is the difficulty of multi-culturalism and freedom of thought. If you give groups the freedom to coalesce, then you also give bad actors the ability to form groups. Getting rid of religion just changes the form of hate.
I lean towards the Hobbesian view of man in the state of nature as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” People are natural-born haters. I don’t think it’s possible to get them to stop hating. The more feasible course is to get them to hate those things that I also hate.
Part of the problem is that religion, dogma and the demand for uncritical acceptance of religious beliefs leads to a society where feelings and faith have to be considered as much as facts and science.
Take religion out of the abortion debate and what is left? We can still discuss the value of unborn or potential lives but without a magical god-given soul the argument become much more one-sided.
There wouldn’t be elected politicians denying global warming because „god promised in the bible he wouldn’t destroy mankind again“.
Thoughts and prayers wouldn’t be an acceptable answer to mass shootings.
There maybe wouldn‘t be waste of insurance or tax payer money on homeopathy and similar non-sense.
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Maybe this should be its own thread, but is that really the problem? This is something that, like Trolly, I’ve shifted on over the years and I think you’re missing his point. Absent religion, people simply create their own religions. Trumpism and the MAGA movement is essentially a religion. QAnon is certainly a religion, in fact all conspiracy theories are.
This is an example borrowed from Matt Christman of Chapo Trap House, but take chemtrails. Leave aside the specifics. The emotional story chemtrails are telling is “the government don’t care about ordinary people like me, I’m like an ant to them, I have little to no control over what they do to me and they would probably poison me if it suited their agenda”. That emotional story is not wrong. The specifics are all completely wrong, but the underlying thing those people are trying to express is correct. Pizzagate is more or less the same, look at the Epstein case.
The shallow point here is that trying to make people govern their lives with Facts and Logic is a quixotic pursuit because millions and millions of people are never going to do that. But the galaxy brain point is that that isn’t even the problem. The people most dedicated to cold, hard logic applied to politics and political economy are libertarians and anarcho-capitalists. Ben Shapiro’s motto is Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings, dude. Yay, we did it?
The problem with American society isn’t a lack of respect for cold logic, it’s a lack of respect for human feelings and experience. To bring this back to the topic of the thread, you know what? The gun nuts are right that gun control, in and of itself, is not going to bring an end to mass shootings. The United States is awash in guns. Anyone who wants them is going to be able to get hold of them. The point is that the society needs to step back from the escalation of violence as a solution to problems. I’ve linked Matt Taibbi’s Parkland essay many times before, I think it’s the most insightful piece I’ve ever read on the mass shootings problem in the US. Read the whole thing as it’s hard to excerpt, but I’ll try:
The people who point at pop culture as the reason disturbed kids and lone-wolf madmen go on killing sprees are half right. But images of violence are less the problem than the messages behind them, which are profoundly intertwined with deep-seated cultural ideas about the virtue of military supremacy and the political efficacy of violence.
… We’re trained to accept that early use of violence is frequently heroic and necessary (the endless lionization of Winston Churchill as the West’s great realist is an example here) and political courage is generally equated with the willingness to use force. JFK’s game of nuclear poker with Nikita Khruschev is another foundational legend, while Khruschev is generally seen as a loser for having backed down.
We just don’t believe in peace. We don’t believe in nonviolence. The organizing principle we’re going with instead involves using technological mastery to achieve order by killing exactly the right people.
These are arguments about feelings, not about logic. The stories people organise their lives around are important. Religion has an awful lot of drawbacks as such a story, but organising things around cultural stories about the efficacy of violence is even worse.
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I agree. I don’t want to derail this thread so for now I will only say I disagree with several of the points you raised.
An evangelical leader claimed Sunday that mass shootings are caused by “driving God from the public square,” and specifically by teaching kids about evolution.
“We’ve taught our kids that they come about by chance through primordial slime and then we’re surprised that they treat their fellow Americans like dirt,” Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, said on “Fox & Friends” one day after a gunman in Texas killed seven and wounded 21 others.
“I think we have to go back to the point where we instill in these children, at least give them the opportunity to know that they’re created in the image of God, therefore they have inherent value,” he added.
Perkins also claimed it’s impossible to have morality without religion, a view he said George Washington had shared.
He did not, however, offer any theories as to how nations with lower levels of religious adherence manage to avoid mass shootings.
“We’ve taught our kids that they come about by chance through primordial slime” says the man who clearly didn’t learn evolution at school or is purposefully misrepresenting it. It’s like the “descended from monkeys” thing … no - it’s a common ancestor ffs.
Wrong thread…
I don’t think the problem is that the world is too complex. I think it’s that life is meaningless and when you die, that’s it. That bums people out.
It’s astonishing how quickly so much of the online atheist set went fash or fash-adjacent. Fucking way to prove Chesterton right, you guys, cheers for that.
If I believed that life is meaningless, I’d probably say “screw it” eventually and go on a mass shooting spree. Since I don’t believe that, people are safe.
I’ve always thought that belief in social Darwinism is the sort of thing that the “reason” of the Enlightenment builds towards. Of course, I fancy myself as more of a post-Enlightenment thinker.