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Conventional wisdom says that religion has been declining around the world over the last century, particularly in the developed countries, but has it really?
Yes is has, but, I conjecture, not as much as you would think. Allow me to explain.
Let me pose: what is the purpose of religion? Religious beliefs are, on the face of it, ridiculous. A thousand societies all claimed to believe in different One True Gods, they cannot all be right. What is really going on here is that for the most part religion is acting as a social-group signalling mechanism. For example by loudly proclaiming (or routinely quietly confirming) that Jesus had no mortal father to those around you you affirm that you are part of their group too. Any outsider would think it unlikely to be true and if they said so they would consequently set themselves up as an outsider, a false person ready to be exploited or driven out. I reckon that this social mechanism helps foster a group bond and homogeneity that is useful in oiling the gears of co-operation (I help you now, you or someone else in the tribe will help me later). Such co-operation has been a universal trait in the primitive societies that formerly existed around the world and was crucial to the survival of the group.
Religious service attendance has declined dramatically, but such social-group signalling mechanisms are to be found in abundance today. The requirement is simply to say that you believe in something which is generally held to be false by the majority of the worlds population and most scientists. The more obviously wrong such a belief is the more powerfully it works. Examples include: anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, hardcore social justice warriors, inveterate racists and heaps more that I'm not remembering right now (suggest some in the comments).
Politics has taken on some characteristics of this too and it might largely replace organised religion one day, but it does not wholly fit in as many people switch parties without considering what others would think. Although people increasingly do change or adopt religions even when it would put them at odds with their current group, so there may be some convergence here.
There are many tangents you could go on here such as the human need for belonging, signalling with fashion (e.g. hipsters), fad diets, group identity theory, etcetera. Overall I still think the rise of science and rationality has been winning out, but it has been much slower going than may have been hoped for.
Let me leave you with a question. As society in general becomes more rational does that mean that we each become more isolated from each other, or is increasing social isolation a function of something else?
 
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The purpose of religion is to give people something for the afterlife.
As to your question. We become more isolated because of the way we live. Religion has nothing to do with this. As more the life becomes complicated, the more you will spend time trying to solve it thus taking from the time you spare for your friends or relatives.
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On October 03 2016 21:21 Wrath wrote:
The purpose of religion is to give people something for the afterlife.
As to your question. We become more isolated because of the way we live. Religion has nothing to do with this. As more the life becomes complicated, the more you will spend time trying to solve it thus taking from the time you spare for your friends or relatives.
What a deep thinker you are.
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On October 03 2016 23:04 NukeD wrote:Show nested quote +On October 03 2016 21:21 Wrath wrote:
The purpose of religion is to give people something for the afterlife.
As to your question. We become more isolated because of the way we live. Religion has nothing to do with this. As more the life becomes complicated, the more you will spend time trying to solve it thus taking from the time you spare for your friends or relatives. What a deep thinker you are.
Thinking was never one of my strong points.
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United States889 Posts
Preface: the idea that "society is becoming more rational" is pretty hopelessly naiive. Look at anti-vaccers. Using "rational" as a code word for "less religious" is just wrong. I don't need to point out that many religious people can be rational, and many atheists can be incredibly irrational. Society is just as irrational as it's always been, and it will continue to be that way.
Actual response: I think the factor you've identified is the one that determines, for example, the difference between urban and rural societies in terms of religious observance. The more rural a society is, the more religious it is, and this generalizes proportionally. Correspondingly, the larger a community, the less pressure to belong, because you have more choices in who to associate with. There's no pressure to fit in with your neighbors because they're the only people you have, and you need to rely on them for things.
But groups also have to rally around ideas. The "atheist church" experiments that have been going on in the UK for a bit are examples of this; attendance declined rapidly because, even though they were gathered around an idea, and they were a gathering of like-minded people, secularists are also pluralists. There was no common truth to rally to.
So you've hit on something, but your explanation isn't correct. You're seeking an explanation in terms of how you view the move to secularism ("increased rationality"), rather than an explanation in terms of demographics and the forces of human interaction.
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On October 04 2016 00:43 Arrian wrote:
Preface: the idea that "society is becoming more rational" is pretty hopelessly naiive. Look at anti-vaccers. Using "rational" as a code word for "less religious" is just wrong. I don't need to point out that many religious people can be rational, and many atheists can be incredibly irrational. Society is just as irrational as it's always been, and it will continue to be that way.
Actual response: I think the factor you've identified is the one that determines, for example, the difference between urban and rural societies in terms of religious observance. The more rural a society is, the more religious it is, and this generalizes proportionally. Correspondingly, the larger a community, the less pressure to belong, because you have more choices in who to associate with. There's no pressure to fit in with your neighbors because they're the only people you have, and you need to rely on them for things.
But groups also have to rally around ideas. The "atheist church" experiments that have been going on in the UK for a bit are examples of this; attendance declined rapidly because, even though they were gathered around an idea, and they were a gathering of like-minded people, secularists are also pluralists. There was no common truth to rally to.
So you've hit on something, but your explanation isn't correct. You're seeking an explanation in terms of how you view the move to secularism ("increased rationality"), rather than an explanation in terms of demographics and the forces of human interaction.
Nice post.
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United States15275 Posts
what is the purpose of religion?
The "purpose" of religion (an inherently fallacious way to frame the question, as belief systems are not generally generated with a specific endgoal in mind) is to provide a holistic framework for understanding the world. By doing so, it also serves to establish/justify social institutions and norms, create rituals to mark progression in life, create attachments among communities, blah blah blah.
Religious beliefs are, on the face of it, ridiculous.
No more absurd than many of the tenets that pass as "common sense" in this day and age. Most people are simply not aware of the history behind their formation, so it's easy to accept them as indisputable facts.
As society in general becomes more rational does that mean that we each become more isolated from each other, or is increasing social isolation a function of something else?
As society grows more rational, it will eventually face the baselessness of its core principles i.e. general beliefs of secular humanism, liberalism, etc. In a sense, the U.S. population is already dealing with those issues on a day-to-day basis as all the racism/elitism/sexism/economic inequality/whatever directly counters our supposed commitment to liberty, equality and freedom. In the worse case scenario, we'll go all postmodern and start doubting the veracity of any independent truths except that which appeals to our own individual tastes. Go look at what Vladislav Surkov was doing in Russia for comparison.
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The title reminded me of Joseph Campbell's "The Hero with a Thousand Faces." It's about how mythologies overlap in different cultures and how various myths came to be. I think this piece was a bit too rational about why men develop myths— If that makes sense.
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On October 04 2016 07:28 imgbaby wrote:
The title reminded me of Joseph Campbell's "The Hero with a Thousand Faces." It's about how mythology overlaps all cultures. I think this piece was a bit too rational about why men develop myths— If that makes sense.
Rationality does a poor job of proving itself rational 
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On October 04 2016 07:28 farvacola wrote:Show nested quote +On October 04 2016 07:28 imgbaby wrote:
The title reminded me of Joseph Campbell's "The Hero with a Thousand Faces." It's about how mythology overlaps all cultures. I think this piece was a bit too rational about why men develop myths— If that makes sense. Rationality does a poor job of proving itself rational
hmm brain-twister.
edit - I don't really think so. As long as reason is deductive and not inductive it is self-evident. All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal.
It's just that myth is something humans seem to need like food.
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What does "as long as reason is deductive and not inductive it is self-evident" mean? How can something like rationality be self-evident?
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United States15275 Posts
He means all true conclusions derived from deductive logic are necessarily true and all true conclusions derived from inductive logic aren't.
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Yes but how does that make the rationality of Rationality self-evident, even if constrained to a deductive modality of reasoning?
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United States15275 Posts
It doesn't. I was being generous and assumed he went too far with the whole thing.
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you pedant, you
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Why would you corelate rationality as the reason to why people are more isolated? There are more simple reasons to look into such as techology, capitalist culture (as in focus is on gaining material goods rather than socialising), nuclear family culture etc. Going for rationalism as the culprit before skipping everything else is a stretch. You could argue that all those things are the result of rationality and lead to individual isolation, but i am more prone to think that rationallity is also one of the results of the things I listed and not the cause.
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Thank you for the replies, I am always receptive to feedback to help refine my ideas. Unsurprisingly the writers gave some of the best. This blog could have done with mulling over for a few days before posting, but I really wanted to just get it committed to the figurative ink quickly.
CosmicSpiral and imgbaby pointed out the religion is quite a bit broader than what I focused on. I think however that the explanatory domain of religion is not so important these days as science has really filled out our understanding of the world such that the gaps that exist are pretty small. Nevertheless it is still an important part of religion, but no longer really a driver I would say.
Myths can spring from many sources: there are national myths, such as Camelot, or personal myths, such as Beowulf. Myth and religion are highly intertwined, but can exist separately of each other. And, yes, I think I was influenced by Campbell's book title in my own choice of title.
On October 04 2016 00:43 Arrian wrote:
Preface: the idea that "society is becoming more rational" is pretty hopelessly naiive. Look at anti-vaccers. Using "rational" as a code word for "less religious" is just wrong. I don't need to point out that many religious people can be rational, and many atheists can be incredibly irrational. Society is just as irrational as it's always been, and it will continue to be that way.
Actual response: I think the factor you've identified is the one that determines, for example, the difference between urban and rural societies in terms of religious observance. The more rural a society is, the more religious it is, and this generalizes proportionally. Correspondingly, the larger a community, the less pressure to belong, because you have more choices in who to associate with. There's no pressure to fit in with your neighbors because they're the only people you have, and you need to rely on them for things.
But groups also have to rally around ideas. The "atheist church" experiments that have been going on in the UK for a bit are examples of this; attendance declined rapidly because, even though they were gathered around an idea, and they were a gathering of like-minded people, secularists are also pluralists. There was no common truth to rally to.
So you've hit on something, but your explanation isn't correct. You're seeking an explanation in terms of how you view the move to secularism ("increased rationality"), rather than an explanation in terms of demographics and the forces of human interaction.
My point is actually that groups like anti-vaxxers are actually functionally behaving like a religious group, so even though declining numbers of people say they are religious on the census this does not correspondingly mean that they are "rational", which is a word I use only because I can't think of a better one. Despite this I reckon that number of rational atheists has been climbing significantly. I compare to 100 years ago and I think great progress has been made.
The rural-urban spectrum is an interesting one. It reminds me of this aphorism: the further you live from your closest neighbours, the better you know them. Urbanisation is a more recent phenomenon in human history that perhaps helps explain some of the decrease in religious observance, but I grew up a pretty rural area and there was a noticeable decrease in religious attendance there also.
I think the atheist churches tend to fail because, as you say, there is no rigidity in them and as I said the more absurd the dogma the stronger the bond. Secularists inherently lack these absurd beliefs, which denies them a strong focus.
I started from a basis of why religion exists in the first place and then explained why secular people can still have these strange beliefs that fly in the face of all evidence.
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On October 04 2016 16:30 NukeD wrote:
Why would you corelate rationality as the reason to why people are more isolated? There are more simple reasons to look into such as techology, capitalist culture (as in focus is on gaining material goods rather than socialising), nuclear family culture etc. Going for rationalism as the culprit before skipping everything else is a stretch. You could argue that all those things are the result of rationality and lead to individual isolation, but i am more prone to think that rationallity is also one of the results of the things I listed and not the cause.
Because it does seem to correlate quite well. But I did specifically ask is this just correlation, or is there some causation in this too?
I do not think that rationalism is a cause of social isolation, but that lack of religion could well be part of it. I believe that there is an in-built bias in most people to favour privacy. Religious gatherings (e.g. Friday prayers) could be counteracting that, but as Arrian wrote urbanisation might be the bigger effect.
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United States889 Posts
Something else you might want to consider: the Christian church is making comparatively massive gains in China, but its growth lags in urban areas over rural ones, even though it is growing in both rural and urban areas.
Given that China has had institutionalized atheism (but of course, in practice, traditional belief systems which did not require a person to question the primacy of the state were tolerated) for the better part of 50 years, there's also a cultural component. So one factor is probably due to the urban/rural divide owing to interaction & pressures within smaller communities, but again I think the cultural factor isn't due to some education or awakening in the West, it's that the West has been becoming less and less agreeable to institutional affiliations of any kind. (Official) membership in trade unions and political parties, for example, has also been declining in the West (and about at the same rate, iirc). Combine less pressure from neighbors with a lower disposition towards "labeling" oneself with official membership in anything, and that's a recipe for decline.
Atheism grows by default, but it should be noted that there are huge numbers of people who left "organized religion" but maintain religious beliefs, either in the form of a sort of individualized theism, or to worse things like New Age. The number of people who have left organized religion have not all jumped on to the atheism bandwagon, but rather individualized their religious beliefs. That behavior is directly predicted by the idea that declining disposition to affiliate with institutions/organizations, and not, to my knowledge, by some optimism that people are being persuaded by the rationality of some different position.
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United States15275 Posts
I think however that the explanatory domain of religion is not so important these days as science has really filled out our understanding of the world such that the gaps that exist are pretty small. Nevertheless it is still an important part of religion, but no longer really a driver I would say.
When I said "understanding the world", I didn't mean "explain how the natural world works". Sure, for the earliest cultures this was vital as there were few ways to pass on knowledge between generations; then again, they didn't see a distinction between knowledge of the natural world and knowledge of the divine. That divide could only be conceived after agricultural societies became dominant, intellectual pursuits (including the recording of information) became sustainable and consistent, and intellectuals could abstract what constituted knowledge into separate fields like logic.
The primary function of religion is to ascribe purpose and meaning to reality within the context of a society. It may explain why certain social strata exists, but the explanation itself is only meant to preclude the justification for it. Religion provides a comprehensive way for the individual to relate to society/social class/race/the world/the universe/etc. and vice versa.
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EPT
