Around the World, Many People Are Leaving Their Childhood Religions(pewresearch.org) |
Around the World, Many People Are Leaving Their Childhood Religions(pewresearch.org) |
Non-believers often ask themselves, "what god would have the ability to eliminate suffering and choose not to?" We should also ask, "What religious institution and followers, having amassed the riches of the world, would choose not to eliminate suffering when they could?"
The weight of these contradictions eventually breaks belief. There's one way to win back believers and it's to eliminate in-group/out-group dynamics and replace it with material acts of benevolence - akin to large scale public works projects to eliminate suffering.
That would make me think more of the organisations in question, but I don’t understand why it would affect belief. It has no bearing on the correctness of the claims they make.
It has bearing on the veracity of those making the claims.
Why *believe* claims from those whose actions prove they don't really believe it themselves? If they did truly *believe*, they would certainly be acting much differently.
"Do as I say, not as a I do" is not a convincing argument to most rational people.
This seems accurate to me. To wit: https://principiadiscordia.com/book/45.php
But instead of 'just stopped caring' I might substitute 'realize they don't have the resources or power to fix the root cause and are resigned to reducing suffering on a small scale'.
"God exists and he is good" is mentioned as fact. The evidence of the existence of God would be his goodness - call it miracles if you will.
In a world where you perceive the absence of this goodness removes the only evidence provided. The logical consequence is not that god exists and is malevolent, the logical consequence is that the goodness is not there because God does not exist.
I suspect a large number of people leaving religions aren't militant atheists convinced by the logic of Dawkins/Hitchens/Harris et al. Instead they are people who believe in some kind of higher power or spiritual unity in a way that is totally compatible with deism (or even light theism).
However, the traditional religions have left a lot of progressive minded individuals behind. Rigid dogmas and suspicious meta-physical commitments seem to turn people off.
This is an interesting space to explore. Many of these people would happily affiliate if there was some organization that met their needs.
> In short, these age patterns might be signs of secularization... However, it’s also possible that some of the age differences in religious affiliation revealed in a single survey could result from people becoming more religious as they grow older.
Here's an article from the same research firm last month that examines a different measurement: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/decline-of-c...
The fundamental thing that I think many people need to understand is that many of these "changes" are merely an outward reflection of an inward problem. Meaning a large majority of these individuals were often pursuing Christianity due to some external factor. Take, for example, cultural Christianity. I've sat in rooms with people who have literally been in crisis because they don't understand why people don't stay for the potlucks anymore. The entire foundation of their faith was on the culture surrounding Christianity in America. With that now (as the article points out) fading quite rapidly, they are joining their peers in leaving (or, worse in my opinion, becoming Christian Nationalists).
Many of us have seen this coming for a long time. Heck, if you go back and read Francis Schaeffer's writings, especially his later ones, it's almost uncomfortable how accurate his predictions were.
Some 30 years later, we had a class reunion. And I found out that there was only one other "cradle Catholic" besides me who had never stopped actively practicing Catholicism. There were about six or seven who had stopped at one point and then returned, often when they had kids.
But that still means about 80% of our class are no longer actively Catholic.
To what do I attribute this decline?
I actually think it started two generations before mine. Back then, parents sent their kids to Catholic school to reinforce the faith they were exposed to at home. In the following generation, many parents sent their kids to Catholic school to teach the faith because they weren't exposed to it at home. But obviously, if that faith isn't being practiced at home, it's going to be unlikely to stick.
The horrible sex abuse scandals absolutely hastened this decline, but the ball was already rolling decades beforehand.
> The U.S. and Kenya have the highest levels of “accession,” or entrance, into Islam, with 20% of U.S. Muslims and 11% of Kenyan Muslims saying they were raised in another religion or with no religion. That said, overall, Muslims are a minority in both places: About 1% of U.S. adults and 11% of Kenyans currently identify as Muslim.
I don't think every religion is like that. I think there are approaches to Judaism and Buddhism that you can participate in that don't demand true faith in the "spooky side," as one of my friends puts it. And I don't just mean being ethnically or culturally linked with a religion, I mean actively engaging with it in a regular and organized way. Christianity doesn't offer that, and I don't know if it could or ever will. (I tried the Unitarians.) If it did, I'd probably enjoy being "Christian" again, at least with quote marks. As it is, if I was forced to affiliate myself with an organized religion and participate in weekly ritual services, I'd probably choose my local Zen center or see if my Jewish friends thought it would make sense for me to join them. Going to a Christian church without believing in capital-G God would be unpleasant and unrewarding.
I think that the gnostics with the idea of a malevolent creator god would fit our world better.
Many, many scientists start gravitating back towards religion. I’ll never understand the cocky approach with this topic.
But I have read selections of the bible, as well as a bunch of other religious texts like selections from the vedas and sutras.
The first parable in the gospel of Mark, the oldest gospel known, is Jesus talking about a farmer sowing seeds. Some of the seeds end up on rocks and birds eat them. Some seeds end up in shallow soil and wither quickly. Some end up surrounded by thorns and are choked out. Only a few land in fertile soil. But the crop that results from the grain grown from the fertile soil is massive, enough to feed people and leave over seeds to repeat the process.
The entire point of the literal first teaching of Jesus is: most people won't actually do what is taught. For various reasons, they will hear the teaching but it won't stick in them. But it doesn't matter because the few people who actually listen to the teaching and actually change their lives will be enough for goodness to spread.
So the criticism of "some (or even most) believers don't act as they profess to believe" is accounted for in the teaching pretty explicitly. Jesus even states later on how at the time of judgement many people will call his name and he will tell them that they never knew him.
My main issue is how a lot of people I see that are strongly religious also don't seem to accept the core tenets of the religion in their hearts. As an example, Christianity is a religion that professes love, but many practitioners are quick to hate others, etc.
Religions help keep destructive people in check. There are people who readily admit that the ONLY reason they haven’t gone on a shooting spree ending with blowing their brains out is their religious faith.
Weirdly though, my mom took my sister and I to a Quaker meeting when we were 10, 11 years old and I thought it was kind of cool. Still didn't believe in a god or whatever but I liked the people and the kind of lack of hierarchy of Quakerism (no priest, just people sitting in silence facing one another, etc.).
I was surprised to find myself seeking out a Quaker meeting again recently — here now 50 or so years since. Perhaps memories of that time came back when reflecting on the past after my mother's death a couple years ago. Perhaps the times we are living in caused me to look for "community".
And I have enjoyed finding the small group of Friends I could in Omaha. When I told one of the regulars that I was atheist, he was cool with it. "Atheism is a necessary step on the way to enlightenment," he told me.
Still puzzling over that.
Quakers like as much as anyone else to be taken as having had some special revelation, especially if they can get that to happen without having to show so bold as to overtly seek to claim it. Don't go thinking they're really so ahierarchical as all that, or that the names they call themselves are any truer by default than anyone else's.
I wonder if the same thing will happen with China.
Though the trait originates in the useless prejudices of the useless English, in a pluralistic, liberty-oriented culture it is a habit coincidentally serving several valuable purposes, none of which will require the clarification two decades hence that they would need just now. Unfortunately, liberty itself being entirely out of fashion among the nonces for the nonce to the fore, there is not much point either elaborating on or expecting the sorts of reforms which an aficionado of liberty, not at all the same as a soi-disant "libertarian," would appreciate.
I’m 38 now and in the process of becoming Catholic. I’ve started going to mass every day. I’m not really sure why but I feel really great.
Our goal is to inoculate our children from atheism. We knew a lot of people who killed themselves over the years who were part of the “atheist church” we went to in our 20s. I’ve stopped caring about being right, and don’t really care to argue about religion with people. Instead care about living a life I find meaningful. I want the same for my children. After exploring the other options, I think a religious framework is what makes that possible.
The Mormons I know were warned against an "unhealthy" level of interest in theology. Very different from Catholicism, where they assume it's normal and healthy to be interested in theological questions, some people will go deeper than others, and the church should embrace it. The only Mormon I know who persisted in his interest despite official warnings was pretty racist and was convinced that racism, like polygamy, was still part of the faith and was only denied for political and social reasons. He got crosswise with some school officials (at BYU) because they wouldn't discuss it with him and temporarily lost his temple recommend. According to him, what they said he needed to correct was his excessive interest in theology.
I am sure there are bad experiences out there too, but there are plenty of good ones.
We do not need someone to tell you how the wrote is - we can see it ourselves. What we see in life is explained by science, that brings in new progress - we do not need a group that claims that gif dud everything, to tell later that it was just allegoric when science explained it.
We do not need the mud of religion to cover for what it cannot explain - you mention how an insufferable edgelird you were, but religion is this, plus no will to change our learn.
Christianity is falling apart because all groups are falling apart in traditional Christian countries, including other religions, including everything from Tennis clubs to Latin study groups.
So if someone says "god exists and he is good" and all you end up doing is disputing the second statement... you didn't even touch the first.
Of course you're correct that, in the abstract, the set of potential divine deities is infinite. But most people in the Western world turning away from religion are turning away from some flavor of the Abrahamic religious complex.
- Jealous
- "Full of wrath"
- Vengeful
- Willing to harden hearts (make people resistant to obedience)
- demanding and severe
- prone to tempting or testing people
These are not my pejorative statements, but the literal language used, at least in the English translations. It seems the idea that the Abrahamic God is just trying to make everyone's life better all the time is a more modern western invention. I don't think it was common even 150 years ago.
Telling. (Me, I could definitely use even less.)
I think GP has a point, but it kinda works the other way around. (Which is common among unexamined intuitions.)
Basically, you can't represent any data with just ones, or just zeros. And the most basic unit of meaningful sensory data is "suffering/not suffering".
As long as there's any difference between "more preferable" and "less preferable" states of being (and not a uniform homogeneous universe, or alternatively a universe free from subjects able to prefer -- neither of which would not be much of a universe anyway), there will exist suffering caused by being in the less preferable state; and, conversely, the striving towards the more preferable one will be experienced as meaningful.
(And once you're in the most preferable state available to you, "meaning" becomes somehow unimportant. It's why they say "struggle builds character" -- "character" is one name for the ability to discern personally relevant meaning. It's also why it's easy for "personal fulfillment" to make a person kinda dumb -- unless they keep challenging themselves in actually meaningful ways.)
The evident paradox of "why would God not prevent suffering" is therefore a bit nonsensical, like most Christian doctrine (if you look at the history of Christianity past the point of being made state religion of the very empire that persecuted it -- no mean feat! -- you can see how it's pretty much designed by committee). Among extant religions, Buddhism seems to have the most no-nonsense treatment of the question.
On a practical scale one can see something similar in the concept of the "first world problem". Someone cooked your food wrong? There are people starving somewhere, you are in a vastly more preferable position to those -- but the knowledge that someone else is suffering from starvation does not in any way diminish your experience of (admittedly tiny) suffering caused by the unpleasant food. (That one takes a basic degree of self-control -- the "character" again.)
(Someone's taking away some privilege of yours in order to ensure more equitable conditions for others who never had that privilege? Well, pretty much the same thing. Which is why you see people hanging on to ill-gotten gains for dear life...)
So, that's why suffering and meaning are so often juxtaposed. What do we say to people throwing a tantrum over a minor inconvenience? We tell them to "grow up", i.e. that their suffering is not meaningful to us, and they should learn to extinguish that suffering in themselves.
Is it just to tell someone who is experiencing any suffering at all (even that of the minor inconvenience) to just, like, not suffer? That question also has no practical bearing. Ending suffering in oneself is the only end to suffering there can ever be. (Other than death, I guess. In death one is free from all suffering, striving, and meaning. I've heard that the ancient Thracians used to celebrate passings and mourn births, which I find much more logical than the ritually prescribed emotions of our culture. On the other hand, maybe that's why they're gone now :D)
Doesn't mean we shouldn't improve the world and end poverty, injustice, disease, stupidity, and other pretty obviously fixable forms of suffering. We just deserve a more meaningful teleology for that than just "ending suffering". Because I don't think "ending suffering" is a thing that can ever be done in light of the above. Even by an omnipotent being, since "potent" assumes power to change stuff, and "change" assumes the existence of "more preferable" and "less preferable" states. Might as well ask why there's something instead of nothing...
Suffering has to involve being coerced (even if merely by physics). Something has to upset you, knock you off balance. If you're prepared for it, if it isn't an intrusion, it isn't suffering. We are always in a less than ideal state, but not always suffering - unless you want to make the term meaningless by stretching it.
But problems, which may be welcome and enjoyable, are endless. And it's true that suffering is relative, and people who seem to be having a tantrum are most likely suffering for real.
You could encode the same meaning using only experiences above the absolute threshold of suffering, i.e. as 1 and 2 instead of 0 and 1. I believe a world with no experiences below the threshold of absolute suffering would be strictly superior to our world. Relative suffering is sufficient for meaning.
But is it true of suffering? That seems possible, but not obvious. I think it implies that suffering evolves with culture. Like I got cake crumbs on my silk sheets! Such discomfort! How I suffer! ... in this way "suffering" just means viscerally-felt problems that we didn't choose, and it's plausibly an eternal part of existing in a physical world with problems to solve - if we can't manipulate all upcoming problems to be always fun.
Ensuring all problems are always fun probably entails seeing into the future, and wouldn't be possible. So, OK, I'll buy it, suffering is a side effect of living well.
Kind of raises the question of how much we can reduce suffering, though - if at all. Is there a particular percentage of the time that an average human spends suffering, whether in ancient times or today or in the future?
I completely understand that some places bring the kind of inner peace someone needs. I like to sit in churches to think because they are nice, cool and silent. I aml also an "active" atheist and these things do not clash. It is just that churches in my country (France) are great places for this kind of meditation, but it could also be a Buddhist temple or anything else not related to religion.
Of course, their kids saw this as immediately, obviously wrong and disassociated from their parents. Then they proceeded to join the Democratic Party, bringing all of their entirely ineffectual political tools along with them. This was, again, very useful for helping a certain subset of elites[1] retain position in the social hierarchy but not useful at achieving any of our stated goals. Don't worry, @jointheresistance2016, once we've cancelled enough old fogeys in Hollywood and found someone who can pass all of our purity tests, we can totally have our Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communist utopia.
The answer to "OH. WELL, THEN STOP." is "But if we do that, then the bad guys win!" We've been drowning ourselves in outrage, accelerated by new communications technologies[2], as the people who actually run the show are plotting to see how quickly they can get everyone else to kill each other. Everyone is vying to grab as much power as they can as quickly as they can to impose their ideas upon everyone.
Free societies are built on a bedrock of decentralization, trustworthiness, and humanity[3]. Whether the institutions have the word "government" or "religion" (or "union") written on them matters less than if they're able to meaningfully resist attempts to divide and conquer the public. The more an institution focuses on gaining power, the less they care about eliminating suffering. I mean, why would they? That suffering is the point. It both eliminates a group of people as potential competing powers as well as creates a justification for you continuing to centralize power.
[0] I am perfectly aware that using this adjective is going to make many a Marxist's heads spin. Bear with me.
[1] Us (as in, the average tech worker) and our bosses (who have fucked off to the Trump Train)
[2] Specifically, cable TV and social media. The relative political harmony of the 1950s was aided by a deep and pervasive government censorship regime, whose harms are unrelated to this rant but were arguably worse.
[3] Or if your particular political ideolect prefers, "diversity, equity, and inclusion".
And I say supposedly because even this God of Love allowed merry events such as the Inquisition to happen.
Maybe He just liked a good barbecue.
There is no "God" of the Bible per se because the "Bible" itself is a, dare I say it, social construct and "God" is a mirror that people hold up to reflect their understanding of nature and morality, and that that context is always subjective and transitory. To me that conversation that humanity has with itself over time as it tries to reconcile a chaotic and arbitrary universe is far more interesting than anything one learns in Sunday School.
Agreed, looking at religion from a philosophical angle is a lot more interesting. I have little interest in Christianity from a dogmatic perspective - believing in a God is not something that makes much sense to me - but I find the lore of something written by multiple hands throughout centuries quite fascinating.
They don't seem to add more stuff to it though. Last commit to blble git was a long time ago.
I don't intend to come off as obtuse here, but this was my original point. Our current understanding suggests this is a design flaw and is "wrong." However, there are plenty of cases where new discoveries have changed our understanding of a system.
So, I'm simply putting forward the question: At what point can we confidently say something is poorly designed? I'm not disagreeing that, based on our current understanding, some systems in the human body seem suboptimal.
The counter argument to that is that we do not understand why this is so (together with suffering etc.) which is the end of any discussion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_C#Evolution_of_animal_...
At Google (as an SRE), a large portion of my work was trying to understand problems that people have never even comprehended due to the sheer scale we operated at. Reading through code, I would often scratch my head at some decisions, only to later find out it had a really good reason often associated with some high-level incident. I feel the same can be said for biology. Just because it doesn't immediately fit into our theoretical understanding doesn't mean it was designed poorly.
But the equivalent in biology is that we scratch our heads at some clearly suboptimal "design" choices, only to later find out that it evolved gradually from a much simpler system that solved a much simpler problem, sometimes even a different problem.
Might they not? I think measuring such things would be near impossible, but a human body does interact with a generally specific set of variables on a day-to-day basis, and breaks down when new variables are introduced - like when you travel to a new place and pick up a local bug that you have to get used to.
At least IT systems can generally disregard variables they don't recognize.
How many times has your hearing stuttered in and out?
How many hearts have you had changed out in your lifetime? Eyes? Ears?
Are you on your second or third tongue?
To say that IT systems are more robust than the biological systems is wild.
A healthy human lives on average for sixty plus years with almost every major system in the body being totally beyond repair by medicine.
There is almost no IT system in existence that has gone more than a few years without a crash or shutdown.
Many people lose their sight or hearing - or worse - regularly, often with no medical recourse. On the other hand, IT systems can be repaired and replaced as we encounter or anticipate certain failures
For a physicist for instance, being in god is symptomatic of a mental disease, probably multiple personalities disorder -- because these two concepts cannot live together in one brain that believes both.
What we cannot model or measure yet - we do not know. Plain and simple. We do not try to push an agenda of a deity of some sort which did all of that and therefore the "explanation" is that god is great.
We admit that we do not know and, hopefully, we will know at some point but before then we do not put ourselves in the comfortable shade of someone sitting on a cloud in the sky who know it all (but does not want to share :))
Again, it’s got nothing to do with a guy sitting on a cloud. Anything natural to the universe must comply with the laws of physics. Any “powerful dude” is only a god until a “more powerful dude” comes along, realistically speaking.
I guess I'll allow that death is the ultimate undesirable thing, disrupting all intentions, negating all possibilities.
I can see how this could be interpreted as unusually high tolerance for suffering, by any normal, latently suicidal person. But from my point of view you're just all getting it wrong. I've never heard anybody else express this position, though, so perhaps I'm an irrelevance.
Late edit: there's more to preferences than mere experiences, mind you. So "I prefer that I not exist" makes logical sense, but not by the reason "because my experiences are so horrible": perhaps some philosophical notion could be the reason for it, though I can't imagine one. Oh, self-sacrifice to save others, for instance, or for knowledge in the abstract, that kind of thing.
I logically prefer than I had never existed, because existing is what exposes me to the cycle of suffering, and I cannot prevent suffering with any certainty. The opposite - this inability to prevent suffering is itself a source of chronic low-grade suffering known to all as "anxiety".
But... I've found myself here anyway! Furthermore, having been born an animal, I find myself bound here by my self-preservation instinct. So, the ethical thing for me to do would be to try and reduce that suffering which I observe. Am I succeeding? Honestly, I don't think I am. (But it's a source of meaning regardless.)
Can I imagine a life without this background of suffering? Only vaguely. Being able to imagine it may itself be a source of suffering, even if I were to accept that it's in fact beyond reach.
I don't think it would be possible to set a threshold for "what counts as suffering", since suffering is an interior experience. It would be the same as attempting to measure consciousness; you can measure its external manifestations, but not the thing itself.
Besides, who would be doing the measuring? Who would be systematizing the results? Who will be interpreting them? None other than beings who are themselves part of the cycle of suffering. So, even if the measurement was to be possible, and communicating its results was to be possible, it's impossible to avoid the data to be biased -- such as by the measurers' self-preservation instincts. An objective measurement can only happen from outside, and... there is no outside.
(I'm imagining maybe dystopian but I would hope at least comprehensible scenarios, such as a state-level actor developing the science enabling them to establish a (purportedly) objective scale of suffering, but then forcing the measurers to publish biased results under duress, in order to promote that state's self-serving agenda.)
Hence, I work with a simple and abstract distinction: less preferable = more suffering. So, not between 1 and 2 -- which communicates exactly as much meaning as 0 and 1, only at a greater cost, think vacuum tube bias voltage -- but fractionally between 0 and 1.
Where the threshold lies for the self and others to recognize that suffering, much less to take it into account, is entirely up to the perceiver(s) in question, and not something that could be irrevocably defined by fiat.