The Religious Void

[The Grand Nudger]

Now if it is in human nature to be delusional then it's something that people need to work on to weed it out. But rather it seems that people are misinformed, there are many lies floating around, they are confused, especially since critical thinking is not exactly taught to people - those are all factors, rather than just people being "fundamentally religious creatures" just as is the case that the countries with least educated people are mostly religious.

I would say scientific thinking is not natural to us, whereas religious thinking is. It is easier to take a particular belief on abortion or immigration as sacred for your group, than it is to be objective and open towards all sides.

-that, right there, is when a political belief becomes a religious belief by definition.  When it refers to the sacred and makes a moral claim - in our example a claim about right political action.

You're probably barking up the wrong tree with some All Sides on that one, as a person who makes a moral claim about immigration policies on account of a belief concerning the sacred is unlikely to accept that there is any other side to a given issue - and there may not be.  You could argue immigration statistics with them all day long and that won't matter - because it's not about the statistics.   If you tell a person who thinks that human life is sacred that immigration is costly - whether you're right or wrong about that has no bearing on their position. Similar to abortion - if you tell a person that none of the asserted ethical objections to abortion are cogent, that won't matter, because their objection arises from a belief about the sacred, not facts about pain or cognizance or the position that the person getting the abortion is in.

Politics is an easy one, ofc we behave in a religious manner in politics. Politics and religion have always been in the same business. The notion that we're fundamentally religious creatures is too thin to support much of anything, though, - it's an observation about the fact that people do tend to have ideas about what is and is not sacred, and that those ideas compel us to particular actions and positions. There are no Actual Religions™ and Not Actual Religions™ in this context. A person does not need to believe in jesus or any god to be devoutly...and actually... religious.

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My question is this:

Is it better to have a well defined religious structure in which religious activities can exist rather than no structure at all; and does that successfully deminish religious behavior elsewhere?

In my own experience, being raised Christian does seem to stop me from having religious affiliation with other groups like politics. And I generally find it odd when I meet a Christian that is religiously political.

Hazarding an answer to this, and one specifically aimed at the above - it goes the other way round in our observations.  People turn to gods like yours when secular authorities fail to provide...and people turn away from gods like yours when secular authorities succeed.  So, yes, in a roundabout way, having an effective political outlet for a persons religious beliefs does appear to reduce religious behavior elsewhere, particularly in less effective outlets. A person can pray or they can vote, and if they believe that their moral imperatives are better served by voting than by praying (and they are, lol), we shouldn't be surprised to find them spending more time in politics and less time in the pews, as it were.

If a satanist ran on an open borders free abortions platform, do you really think that your beliefs about the sacred wouldn't be in play? When you say that you find religiously political christians strange, what exactly do you mean, and in what way are you -not- religiously political? Here in mere reality, being Raised Christian™ has a strong correlation with politics. You may be an exception, but that would make you the strange one, not the others.