> The mad rush to as quickly abolish religious practices in mainstream U.S. culture without any form of societal replacement is puzzling to me.
> I am no fan of religion having grown up in an exceedingly religious environment. But it was always completely obvious to me even as a child that the primary purpose of religion was to form local communities and have others with shared values to rely on.
It is a problem, but… religion isn’t true. How do you square that with any sort of culture that values reality?
The church that I was raised in and grew up in for the first 18 years of my life... I became a militant atheist when I left that church at 18, close to 30 years ago. In my 30s, I started to drift between Zen Buddhism, Druidry, wicca, paganism, looked into Daoism, and on and on it went. And I finally realized, quite recently, that I had a God-shaped hole running right through the center of me. I still haven't quite figured out what to do about that, I've been looking deeply into Eastern Orthodox Christianity because I find it very compelling, and I have no interest in going back to Protestantism and am deeply troubled by the Catholic Church and it's hierarchy, but I have my doubts and skepticism still.
Regardless, I personally find all of that to be vastly preferable to whatever the fuck is happening to us in the absence of Christianity.
I (somewhat unknowingly) spent several months of immersion in a Hindu monastery. At least in the branch they practiced, they were very clear that your internal beliefs on the theology were far less important than doing the practices that will bring you benefits in this very lifetime—no need to reincarnate to enjoy your positive karma. Christianity puts too much emphasis on belief and not enough on rituals & practices to thrive in a skeptical public.
I asked many of these same questions when I lost my faith. I found compelling answers as to why I had a god shaped hole in D.S. Wilson’s Darwin’s Cathedral. It’s taken 15 years, but I also finally have plans about what the fuck we should be doing about it.
As a low key non-religious person, I find the German Mennonites pretty appealing. They have a sort of DIY approach to religious practice and very little decorum. But AFAIK the US branch is much more radical, I'm not even sure if there are others than the Pennsylvania Dutch.
Protestants in Europe are also very different from the US btw - they are more moderate than Catholics, not less. I grew up Protestant and have always had doubts, which turned into being pretty sure that it's all bogus from age 20 or so. Having something to believe in is probably nice, but it doesn't work for me.
I am surprised this needs to be pointed out, but people generally believe their religion to be true and do not find it at odds with reality at all. That doesn't mean you have to agree with them just because they believe it, but it is certainly not the case that religion is false in a provable sense, nor that religiosity is incompatible with valuing reality.
His point is a criticism of the role of religion as a community accessible to everyone; what if you don't believe in it? What if you can't? This makes the idea that everyone should just join their local church group a non starter.
I feel this is a very 'Protestant' (for lack of better word) view of the situation.
If you don't believe in it, you should just do all the actions and move on as normal. This is the 'liturgical' approach to religion and doesn't require belief.
I myself have confessed many times to my priest a lack of belief, but by virtue of the fact I'm there, I'm clearly still practicing. I mean, as a very analytical person, sometimes I feel very skeptical, and sometimes I feel as if God obviously exists. But either way, it doesn't matter because the answer is unknowable by observation, so it's a choice to believe or not. But even if my choice feels strained, being liturgical[1] about it still provides the same benefits.
[1] By liturgical, I mean, doing the actions, like kneeling, standing, bowing, etc. This builds community independent of any belief.
Well since we ended up with the most popular religions being monotheistic, it follows that regardless of what is true, most religious people are wrong. We just can’t prove which ones.
On the contrary, most religions assert that their particular views are the _only_ valid ones -- and many require their adherents to actively proselytize, to try to convert others to their dogma.
These views are replete with many untestable and non-falsifiable axiomatic assumptions, which must be accepted on "faith."
That word means "accepting the validity of those axioms _despite_ their lack of congruence with reality."
>How do you square that with any sort of culture that values reality?
Empiricism doesn't help you with the questions of "who are my people?" or "what matters?" You can make a legitimate case for some of religion's claims being empirically unsound, it doesn't take away from the fact that religion is very effective at giving a lot of people meaning and community, orthogonal to those specific claims.
It's arguably only effective if you genuinely believe the truth claims of the faith. There is this sort of strange very online revival of "trad" beliefs but you can literally tell that the people are trying to gaslight themselves into believing something they don't. Sort of a split-brain religion at best.
Nietzsche's aphorism about God being dead was correct, as was his prediction about the future. Religion wouldn't immediately die out but it would take increasingly pathological forms, it's arguably why religion has taken such a political turn as the capital 'f' Faith portion is just gone.
> It's arguably only effective if you genuinely believe the truth claims of the faith.
At least for Judaism that not true at all. There are enormous numbers of Jews who do not believe, and yet consider themselves Jewish and go to occasional services, and find meaning in them even while not believing.
There are even pulpit Rabbis who do not believe and yet faithfully follow all the practices and teach.
There aren't, which is exactly why they're exceptional. After the experiences of the 20th century Jews have retained an acute awareness of threats to their very survival as a group which is why they tend to adhere to practice despite secularization. It's also likely why secular Jewish women are the only secular group with a high birth rate.
There's no historical analog to this in pretty much any other modern society, which is why you don't see secular Swedes drag themselves out of bed to go to mass on Sundays.
... And the 19th, and the 18th, and the 17th, and the 16th, and...
The Jewish condition was obviously affected by the Shoah, but the fundamental elements of otherness from the communities it lived in (since the exodus), with all the very real threats that they inevitably attract, have always been there.
(Sadly any further elaboration on this point cannot be made in a public forum today.)
It's actually 'okay' to gaslight yourself into believing something you don't. That is the basis of human society and mental health. I mean, everyone gaslights themselves into believing all sorts of weird statements on reality, such as 'my parents love me unconditionally' (realistically, there are probably conditions attached).
It's okay to make aspirational claims or commitments like, "I'm going to do my best to love my children unconditionally". It's not mentally healthy to tell yourself "my marriage is great" when your marriage is in fact in shambles. In an extreme case say, believing your parents or spouse love you unconditionally if they're abusing you might destroy a life. A lot of relationships probably decay beyond repair because people don't face reality early enough.
Personal commitments, even if idealistic are good, trying to talk yourself into facts about reality that you don't even believe is never good. And most religions of course make those demands. It's basically like being in the late Soviet Union. Everything is great, everyone is equal, you leave the house and there's a doctor selling cigarettes and vodka on the streets to survive. And basically when in your mind you see that double-think it's already over in a way.
> How do you square that with any sort of culture that values reality?
You examine all cultures and find that, despite their claims, none truly value reality. Then you choose to believe, or have experiences that lead you to believe, one that explicitly says that there is more to life than what you can see.
It seems in 2024 that one simply chooses their religion. Arbitrary GDP growth in a finite environment isn’t true either, it’s just another convenient fiction. More recently the AI doom/effective altruist community has just made some hypothetical AI thing into a god. Even rational things like environmentalism and social progressivism have taken on many of the trappings of a religion.
It might be time to start judging which faith-based organizing principles produce the best outcomes.
Religion is literally false but metaphorically true. Our brain filters existence through metaphors. I’m not religious but my metaphors of understanding reality are built on a culture that was for thousands of years until the state got separated from church within my lifetime here in Norway. And it hasn’t made things better.
God is not true, at least not the sense that any religion claims (God as an abstraction and a meme is as real as any other, as real as Harry Potter or Slenderman) Claims of absolute moral right or authority derived from divine right are not true. Claims made by the religious that belief in God is a prerequisite to morality, community or cultural identity are not true. Claims made by religious teachings about the nature of the universe are not true.
So what does that leave? Philosophy, ethics and cultural mythology? Why do we need to keep religion around for any of that, any more than we need alchemy when we now have chemistry?
God is not a testable hypothesis. There is no empirical way to conclude God does not exist except by assuming that anything that cannot be tested does not exist. Such an assumption also rules out morality, as there is no empirical basis for that either.
Assuming you're utilitarian, you're working off of the untestable belief that making people happier has some property called 'goodness', and that there is some inherent value to it. But that doesn't even matter because happiness is a qualia that cannot be tested anyway.
So, while I agree that faith in God is not a prerequisite for morality, faith in something certainly is. And once you've allowed faith into your worldview, stating with certainty that God doesn't exist becomes inconsistent.
Faith in something doesn't need presuppose faith in anything supernatural.
And theists have no empirical basis for their morality either, because faith by definition is belief in the absence of such evidence. People just believe what they believe. I prefer to be fed rather than starve, I prefer peace to suffering, I prefer liberty to slavery. I'm a social being capable of empathy and extending my beliefs about myself to include my expectations for others. I prefer others be fed, rather than starve. I prefer others have peace rather than suffer. I prefer others have liberty rather than slavery. I believe human life has value because I value my own life, and therefore value the lives of others.
What do I need to have faith in, here, other than nature and mortality?
Faith in something that is the basis for any morality absolutely does presuppose faith in something supernatural. If you know of anything in the natural world that proves the existence of right and wrong, by all means let me know.
I don't disagree that theists lack empirical basis for morality, both because I don't think anyone does and because I don't believe there is an empirical basis for God.
But it doesn't sound like you have a morality*. It sounds like you have preferences. One doesn't decide one's preferences, and even if they did, they would need a morality to do so rightly. This suggests that your being a good person is strictly luck of the draw. If my friend Bob the sadist says he loves it when people starve, would you be in the right to tell him he's wrong? On what grounds?
*Don't take this the wrong way- I don't mean to insult you, and I fully expect you do have morality. I'm only criticizing the argument here.
>If my friend Bob the sadist says he loves it when people starve, would you be in the right to tell him he's wrong? On what grounds?
You first. You don't believe there is an empirical basis for God yet you believe morality absolutely presupposes faith in the supernatural. Presumably, you also consider yourself to have morality. On what supernaturally-derived basis would you (presumably) believe Bob is wrong? and given that the supernatural cannot be objectively proven, how does that faith differ from a preference, on your part?
On the basis of utilitarian notions of right and wrong, I would have no issue with saying that Bob is objectively wrong- he disagrees with what I claim is objectively right. If all I had were preferences, I could no more claim Bob was wrong to prefer to be a murderer than I could claim he was wrong to prefer to be an art teacher. I say, 'I wouldn't do that if I were you', he replies, 'Good thing you're not!', end of discussion. And then I guess he would probably murder me. Or worse: teach me art.
Faith also beats preference here in that, given the premise that it is good to reduce suffering and increase happiness, I arrive at the same conclusions about morally correct actions regardless of the time and place that my mind happens to exist in. I can align my actions to the right choice even if I was raised to prefer something else. A slave owner prefers that slavery exists; a utilitarian slave owner can see that that is wrong and free their slaves.
Growing up in Nashville I've frequently heard that religion is a prerequisite to ethics. While I disagree in principle, I struggle to come up with an example where philosophy and ethics are discussed in a secular setting outside of school(academia included) and politics.
It would not surprise me that on the whole our society is worse off for lack of a widespread secular tradition of discussing these concepts with your community.
edit: substitute "secular setting" for "secular state", definitely not arguing for the integration of church and state.
It's always looked to me like from a first approximation, people just do whatever they want and come up with justifications. The smarter they are, the more elaborate the justification. I doubt I'm above it.
I think you're right, but that developing a sense of ethics and believing those ethics and morals down to your bones will make you not want to do certain things. People without empathy don't have trouble lying to, stealing from, or committing violence against other people - but those things feel wrong to me intrinsically, because I was raised to feel empathy. But empathy is taught. Seemingly immoral things can be everyday occurrences. For example, it used to be acceptable for husbands to beat their wives up, and now it's not. Probably most people truly believe it's immoral now, unless they grew up with their father regularly beating their mother.
I suspect empathy is mostly nature with some influence via nurture. Once you encounter a few genuine psychopaths who aren’t particularly good at hiding it, it sure seems like it’s just something innate to them.
Certainly you can instill reverence in people - give people a challenge that involves using a cross as a hammer to complete and they’ll recoil instinctively, but I think that’s just software tapping into something more akin to firmware.
This is just my conjecture, but I think that it's that psychopaths lack the capacity for empathy, and empathy is otherwise like a muscle in that it can be trained. I suspect this because I've grown more empathetic compared to when I was a kid, and some other people I've talked to said it was like that for them (not very scientific, I know). I remember being somewhat selfish and amoral.
I think it's a combination of the environment you grew up in, the behavior of the people you grew up with, the values you were raised with, and the education you received, and some of it is also purely self-driven. And so toddlers and little kids are like amoral sponges, since they're still developing their senses of justice, morality, and empathy.
Right. I would argue that organized religion provides(provided?) a guided framework of accountability, transparency, and acceptance for your "justifications" amongst your community. In a vacuum, these differences compound into a complete breakdown of understanding.
It's harder to call someone a "libtard" or a "troglodyte" if you have to sit next to them in a pew for the rest of your life.
I fail to see how being forced to confess your crimes to someone who can then informally blackmail you or your employer, for the benefit of an elected dictator-for-life living on the other side of the ocean, provides any "transparency" or "accountability" towards the community.
> an example where philosophy and ethics are discussed in a secular setting
That's what the intellectual cafes of 18th/19th century were. In a more bastardized way, that's what pubs can be today.
This said, school and "politics" have always been the main locations for such arguments - "politics", after all, was effectively built as an alternative to religious establishments to discuss matters without pesky clerics around.
False beliefs are often much more instrumentally useful than true beliefs.
I notice I usually walk away from conversations with fellow believers about the nature of God, the Bible etc feeling closer to and more trusting of them even compared to if I talk with them about e.g. trolley problems or what their take on moral realism is, especially if I later confirm they in fact walk the walk by living in a way which agrees with those principles. There's just something about the religious framing that gives it that extra kick.
The actual question of whether God is real is irrelevant. I just assume they're playing ball the same way I am, and that's often enough to kickstart the friendship.
This is stating as fact several things that have not and cannot be proven by tools such as the scientific method. Seems ironic, given the subject matter. :)
The list of claims made by religion which have been disproved by science is innumerable, and the list of claims made by science which have been disproved by religion does not exist. But sure, let's pretend religion and science are equally valid....
It is a problem, but… religion isn’t true. How do you square that with any sort of culture that values reality?