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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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"Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right" - Abraham Lincoln
In my opinion, this says perfectly when religion will always exist.
Ethics have no right and wrong answers in most situations.
We can only do what we think is right and more correct.
"Save planet Earth" "Be the change you want to see in the world" "Yes we can" "we are the future"
Charming sentences that motivate or confirms you are right or let you know what is right are just ways to confirm we are doing the right thing.
I think it was George Carlin that said religion is just another way to control individuals.
I absolutely agree with him and I also think this is unavoidable because at the end, ethics are incredibly complex and we need something simple and reaffirming we did the right thing.
This is why even in prime communism China under Chairman Mao, he was basically idolized as God.
If in difficult times, read his little red book.
Always think how you can contribute more for China, just what Chairman Mao would have liked.
in my opinion, the actual existence of god is not crucial, the crucial thing is that he exists for you to follow.
That he represents something you believe in and he offers a way to achieve it correctly.
Deep down we all know we are not placing 100% effort to be a good person.
But also we want to know and confirmed that we are still a good enough person to feel happy about and to avoid self guilt.
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On October 06 2016 00:11 ETisME wrote:
"Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right" - Abraham Lincoln
In my opinion, this says perfectly when religion will always exist.
Ethics have no right and wrong answers in most situations.
We can only do what we think is right and more correct.
"Save planet Earth" "Be the change you want to see in the world" "Yes we can" "we are the future"
Charming sentences that motivate or confirms you are right or let you know what is right are just ways to confirm we are doing the right thing.
I think it was George Carlin that said religion is just another way to control individuals.
I absolutely agree with him and I also think this is unavoidable because at the end, ethics are incredibly complex and we need something simple and reaffirming we did the right thing.
This is why even in prime communism China under Chairman Mao, he was basically idolized as God.
If in difficult times, read his little red book.
Always think how you can contribute more for China, just what Chairman Mao would have liked.
in my opinion, the actual existence of god is not crucial, the crucial thing is that he exists for you to follow.
That he represents something you believe in and he offers a way to achieve it correctly.
Deep down we all know we are not placing 100% effort to be a good person.
But also we want to know and confirmed that we are still a good enough person to feel happy about and to avoid self guilt.
Beautiful post man.
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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.
I wouldn't find it too wild to say that rationality undergirds the development of technology. One could also say that "capitalist culture" involves the application of rationality to the exchange and distribution of material goods.
As for nuclear family culture, I see a few main drivers for it:
1. The rising expectation for university education has made it more normal for cultural leaders to have to move from their hometowns and thereby damage local relationships. Then, at graduation, they usually move again and must sever in-person ties again.
2. Population density forces and global information technology supports people to look far afield for employment / cultural / living opportunities. As people keep moving to new places where other people are also constantly leaving and arriving, local ties are fragile and less beneficial.
3. With so many cultures splashing into each other, and norms changing so quickly, there is more inter-generational conflict, people "disowning" children or parents, more divorce, etc., which shrinks social reach.
4. Increasing state benefits and automation, lessening employment, and more wealth have made people less economically reliant on each other and instead on the faceless state. People are less likely to worry about how to take care of their parents because their parents are more likely to have savings (vs. 200 years ago) and there are social security programs.
5. This is one I think about a lot but haven't seen enough talk about: Google kills small talk. 20 years ago, if you overheard that someone wanted to build a simple thing, and you knew how to do it, you had an excuse to maybe come over to their house and show them how to do it. Now, I would just mention a YouTube video about it and the other person would go home alone. Before, you could ask people in person about restaurants and now you go to Yelp. If you go up to somebody and try to small talk about restaurants or almost anything, there is this undercurrent of "Why is this person talking to me? I know they have a cell phone because even homeless people do now. They must have some ulterior motive. Maybe they want to sleep with me or maybe they want *gasp* friendship." This makes all small talk bigger and more anxiety producing than it used to be. Before, you might talk about little practical things and before you know it you are comfortable together. Everything is weirder now.
We ended up with current technologies due to a propensity toward rational problem-solving that always produces a new environment with new challenges, requiring new adaptation.
You indicate that you think rationality is more of a result than a cause of "capitalism" and technology. Now, maybe by "capitalism" you actually mean the existence of money, but if you mean the economic system Marx traces back to the 1500s, there was surely extensive, intentional development of rationality long before that. Again, there are myriad definitions of "rationality", and discussion of it without falling into the fallacy of equivocation may even be impossible, as it is probably a "strange loop" in the Douglas Hofstadter sense, but if you mean atheism, atheism surely predates capitalism, as pre-Socratic atheists demonstrate. If you mean something like "tending to optimize behavior through quantitative means", that is something that would lead to the development of capitalism and technology. Obviously, being born into a world of capitalism and technology could influence you further in an instrumentalist direction, but it could also make you sick of that direction so that you developed an aversion. Crows can make tools on the spot, but I think their biological capacity for analogical reasoning was a prerequisite for that. I don't think their ability to make tools caused their biological capacity for analogical reasoning.
Because things can be rationally manipulated, but people can be irrational, I do think pursuit of rationality can drive anti-social behavior.
Also, I would say that capitalist culture is not "focus... on gaining material goods rather than socialising". You might mean consumerism, although stories like that of King Midas show that focus on goods over people predates consumerism. Or maybe you mean "economic materialism" although that gets confusing because there is materialism in the Marxist sense as well. For example, Ayn Rand is not a materialism because capitalism is, for her, the means to a spiritual / symbolic / emotional end. Marx is a materialist because historical materialism holds that organizing material good production / transportation is the means to proper socialization.
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On October 04 2016 18:25 Korakys wrote: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. Show nested quote +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.
I think our language / common way of evaluating religion tends to miss what is really important.
Here is how I define religion: Religion is the means by which one crosses the is / ought divide.
To me, the important contrast is not atheist / theist. It is nihilist / not nihilist.
I agree with Nietzsche that many atheists, especially British-styled ones like Dawkins or Hitchens, are not atheist at all. They have internalized certain ways of crossing the is / ought divide from inherited religious / ethical / aesthetic norms they have marinated in until they assume they are just regular human biology and that Christianity did not influence them at all. So you get Hitchens supporting the Iraq war. Why? Well it will save more lives in the long run. Well why is saving human lives important? At some point, you have to posit some "inherent" metaphysical value on either a human life, or something, or be a nihilist that just follows unconscious biological impulses.
From this point of view, I don't think the anti-vaxx movement is religious at all. The underlying religion is the impetus for the ideas that curing disease is good, that limiting or lowering human population by making post-birth people die earlier is bad, that the life spans of relatively innocent people should be extended indefinitely even at quite a high cost, and so on. I think most anti-vaxx and pro-vaxx people share these religious beliefs. It's just that anti-vaxx people have a different epistemology, they have an extreme hermeneutics of suspicion for certain studies, they really think vaccines will hurt their children. Lots of anti-vaxx people are athiests and theists. Lots of pro-vaxx people, too. There is often a difference in standards of evidence and whose voices are trusted, but not in religion.
This is separate from people with different religious beliefs on vaccines, like those who think that curing or preventing a disease interferes with God's will for when someone should die, or those that think vaccines derived from pigs should not be consumed, or those that oppose vaccines that are produced through abortion. The more I look into vaccinations (and perhaps the more I look into any set of things) the more I find that I oppose some and support others.
I think there are more "atheists" in the sense that fewer people are able to look at their own religious beliefs (ways of crossing the is / ought divide) and think that they match up with a particular established church. There are probably more nihilists, too, naturally. One shouldn't look at a growing number of atheists and think progress is being made unless you know what those atheists actually believe under that broad label bucket that you have put them into. It could be a single word to group together people that are actually agreeing less and less with each other. Hence, it's not "the more absurd the dogma, the stronger the bond" so much as: "since our society can no longer agree on how to cross the is-ought divide, our teachers can only agree to teach 'critical thinking', which leads to people creating more and more elaborate and unique ethical / moral beliefs, which are increasingly incompatible and therefore alienating." So are people disagreeing with each other religiously more and more? Or are they blindly coming together like the people for and against vaccinations who agree religiously, but not practically?
The rural / urban divide in religiosity is certainly not new. There are certainly Hindu texts that are well over 2000 years old that indicate certain ideas / chants / texts are not to be brought into cities because there is an understanding that they cannot be properly sustained in the cacophony and interference there.
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Good posts on this page, carry on... 
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On October 04 2016 21:37 Arrian wrote:
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.
I think the decline in membership to trade unions and parties has to be linked to the decline in utility as population pressure grows. For example, there are more than 10 times more people per senator in the United States now versus in 1790, and this drastically reduces the responsiveness of government and quality of relationships. This overlooked ratio of representation highlights an alienating force that no good intentions on the part of elected representatives can turn back.
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On October 06 2016 00:11 ETisME wrote:
"Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right" - Abraham Lincoln
In my opinion, this says perfectly when religion will always exist.
Ethics have no right and wrong answers in most situations.
We can only do what we think is right and more correct.
"Save planet Earth" "Be the change you want to see in the world" "Yes we can" "we are the future"
Charming sentences that motivate or confirms you are right or let you know what is right are just ways to confirm we are doing the right thing.
I think it was George Carlin that said religion is just another way to control individuals.
I absolutely agree with him and I also think this is unavoidable because at the end, ethics are incredibly complex and we need something simple and reaffirming we did the right thing.
This is why even in prime communism China under Chairman Mao, he was basically idolized as God.
If in difficult times, read his little red book.
Always think how you can contribute more for China, just what Chairman Mao would have liked.
in my opinion, the actual existence of god is not crucial, the crucial thing is that he exists for you to follow.
That he represents something you believe in and he offers a way to achieve it correctly.
Deep down we all know we are not placing 100% effort to be a good person.
But also we want to know and confirmed that we are still a good enough person to feel happy about and to avoid self guilt.
We can have technological progress, but not moral progress, because technological progress is not impeded by death, while new people always have to become newly trained. And, at least in my society, there doesn't seem to be any organized training for actually executing ethical action, only for trying to determine what that might be.
For example, Gandhi would train at chastity by asking to sleep in a bed with a woman and then trying not to lust after her or doing anything untoward. So, it's like weightlifting training, but for resisting temptation. Well, if it sounds bizarre, it certainly goes to demonstrate how little design and effort goes into helping people get better at executing ethical standards. We exercise so that our bodies might do all sorts of things more easily, but the idea of a video game centered around giving to the poor or keeping yourself from cheating seems completely absurd.
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United States15275 Posts
On October 08 2016 00:53 Pyrrhuloxia wrote:
We can have technological progress, but not moral progress, because technological progress is not impeded by death, while new people always have to become newly trained. And, at least in my society, there doesn't seem to be any organized training for actually executing ethical action, only for trying to determine what that might be.
I think after ~5000 years of failure on that front, it's best to let that dream go.
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EPT
