Religion is poison to democracy

[Simon Moon]

North Korea isn't democratic.

So what?

They are also not secular in any reasonable description.

They just replaced gods and religion, with a 'religious' like worship of their leader and State.

When the US and other Western countries help provide North Korea with food and supplies during time of drastic food shortages, the North Korean government spins that as the rest of the world paying homage to Kim Jong-un. Kim Jong-un is portrayed to the people of North Korea as being infallible and very godlike.

Don't fool yourself, North Korea is a very religious country.

[Ferrocyanide]

That is Rajneesh Osho.
I think it was a 1970 or 1980 thing in the USA.
A lot of people joined him, a good portion were people with an education.
The followers were called Rajneeshies.

At some point, they decided to get together at a small town and put their money together and they built some buildings by themselves.
They were doing all the construction work.
Naturally, the locals were worried.

At some point, Rajneesh was running for mayor. They knew that he would win but just to be sure, they were planning to poison the water, to give the people who were not members of the cult, diarriah.
I think the FBI was listening and they made arrests and there was a court case.
Each one was blaming the other. Naturally,  Rajneesh says he gave no such order and his second in command was saying she was not aware of such a thing.

I don’t know the rest but I think that ugliness caused the cult to collapse quickly.

[Belacqua]

It looks as though the consensus here is that "religiousness" makes a person unable to participate in democracy in an intelligent way.

Since roughly 80% of human beings in the world identify as religious, I guess we'd have to make laws that they couldn't vote or run for office. That would make democracy more rational. But since some percentage of non-religious people are also irrational (flat-earthers or whatever) then we'd probably end up denying participation to even more people.

So to have reasonable and sane democracy, we'll have to have the remaining 19% rule democratically over everyone. Since the word "aristocracy" means "rule by the best people," it would be a sort of democratic aristocracy -- with of course non-religious people defined as "the best."

History doesn't give us many examples of countries ruled by atheists. I suspect that any number of presidents or prime ministers have been, privately, non-believers, but for political reasons they don't announce that. The only example of a top-level politician I can think of who would see his atheism as a positive trait would be President Xi of China. China is officially the country with the most atheists. So there is a real-world, concrete example of how an atheist might run a country. Certainly other atheists might rule differently, but we have no historical examples. And if the atheists here are advocating rule by only a small minority of the population (until such time as more people become reasonable) then majority rule doesn't seem like something they would prefer.

Earlier atheist rulers of China agreed that rule by religious people was a bad idea. Tibet, before Chinese intervention, was a feudal theocracy in which a small minority of priests controlled enormous wealth, while the great majority of the population were serfs, with short life expectancy and very low literacy rates. Since the atheist intervention in Tibet, literacy and health have achieved modern levels. So given that example I guess atheist rule really would improve many people's lives.

[The Grand Nudger]

19% isn't too far off of what we have "ruling" now, in the us, except that..as you notice, they're not our best people. When less than half of your people vote, and less than half of those people vote for any given candidate, that's roughly what you get for percentages. Even fewer people vote for things the smaller the contests get. Our entire government is barely legitimate, lol.

[Fake Messiah]

It looks as though the consensus here is that "religiousness" makes a person unable to participate in democracy in an intelligent way.

The study in question from Copenhagen and Lund is not about people being religious, but about keeping religion separated from the government.

[Ferrocyanide]

It looks as though the consensus here is that "religiousness" makes a person unable to participate in democracy in an intelligent way.

Since roughly 80% of human beings in the world identify as religious, I guess we'd have to make laws that they couldn't vote or run for office. That would make democracy more rational. But since some percentage of non-religious people are also irrational (flat-earthers or whatever) then we'd probably end up denying participation to even more people.

So to have reasonable and sane democracy, we'll have to have the remaining 19% rule democratically over everyone. Since the word "aristocracy" means "rule by the best people," it would be a sort of democratic aristocracy -- with of course non-religious people defined as "the best."

History doesn't give us many examples of countries ruled by atheists. I suspect that any number of presidents or prime ministers have been, privately, non-believers, but for political reasons they don't announce that. The only example of a top-level politician I can think of who would see his atheism as a positive trait would be President Xi of China. China is officially the country with the most atheists. So there is a real-world, concrete example of how an atheist might run a country. Certainly other atheists might rule differently, but we have no historical examples. And if the atheists here are advocating rule by only a small minority of the population (until such time as more people become reasonable) then majority rule doesn't seem like something they would prefer.

Earlier atheist rulers of China agreed that rule by religious people was a bad idea. Tibet, before Chinese intervention, was a feudal theocracy in which a small minority of priests controlled enormous wealth, while the great majority of the population were serfs, with short life expectancy and very low literacy rates. Since the atheist intervention in Tibet, literacy and health have achieved modern levels. So given that example I guess atheist rule really would improve many people's lives.

You can certainly have a democracy with religious people.
Democracy doesn’t mean freedom.
You can certainly have a country where they vote and the majority chooses to ban abortion or to send all homosexuals to jail or to kill them all or to destroy a certain minority group.

In Canada, about 25 y ago, one of the political party members said that Canada should institute a law that says when 100,000 canadians want to vote on a topic, the federal government should make a referendum. The name of that politician is Stockwell Day. He is in the Conservative party.
A certain show called The Mercer Report where they do a lot of political jokes asked canadians to sign a petition to change Stockwell Day’s name and you guessed it, over 100,000 signed.

What about the jewish religion and the jewish god? Let’s say we turn the “heaven” into a democracy.
If the majority are jews, for sure, they are going to vote for that same jewish god.
Let’s say that god decides to ban the eating of pork and whoever disobeys, gets 10 y jail time and a beating everyday.

So, there is the issue of respecting other people’s personal space because one day, the atheists might outnumber christians in country X and they might vote to give them 10 y of prison time and a beating everyday.

[Belacqua]

The guy who wrote this article is actually a druid, and has been writing about his type of "religiousness" for years.

You can tell from his analysis of political issues that you'd never want him to vote. Read the article and believe exactly the opposite.

https://unherd.com/2023/04/americas-empire-is-bankrupt/

[The Grand Nudger]

You wouldn't really expect a druid to rate high on the voting risk scale, they're pretty chill.

[Anomalocaris]

There is a profound, but perhaps to some people too superficially subtle, difference between 1) whether a religious person can participate in democracy, and 2) whether participation of large number of persons of a high religiosity tends to strengthen democracy in the long run.  the answer to 1 is a qualified yes, and to 2 a rather less reserved no.


one might be blunt as ask can poison be ingested without apparent harmful effect,   the answer is yes.   but does that then mean poison is a good ands noble thing because people who seems impressive greedily partook of it with seeming pleasure, and one should therefore not mind the advocacy of eating poison?

[The Architect Of Fate]

The guy who wrote this article is actually a druid, and has been writing about his type of "religiousness" for years.

You can tell from his analysis of political issues that you'd never want him to vote. Read the article and believe exactly the opposite.

https://unherd.com/2023/04/americas-empire-is-bankrupt/

So managing to push irrational America bashing with your unhinged idea America is weakening (it's not ) mixed with the absurd idea were worried about flipping druids.