RE: How many Atheist are also vote Republican from time to time?
July 17, 2015 at 3:41 pm
(This post was last modified: July 17, 2015 at 3:43 pm by Dystopia.)
(July 17, 2015 at 3:06 am)Cephus Wrote:(July 16, 2015 at 7:49 pm)Dystopia Wrote: Conservatism has a lot to do with religion because it entails preserving your culture, and your culture is inevitably influenced by religion - Even if you're against religion, you're probably very influenced by the predominant one and its ideas. It is inevitable. Laws are based on morality, usually the majority's morality - Morality itself is influenced by religion even if most "devout" atheists don't want to admit it - This isn't to say you need to be religious to be a conservative, but to say conservatism isn't influenced by religion is naive - It has something to do with religion because it promotes tribalism and a continuum of moral values. IMO, anti-theism and conservatism are fundamentally incompatible.
Not necessarily. Conservatism isn't clinging to any tradition, just because it is a tradition, it is picking and choosing what new ideas to adopt and what new ideas to reject, based on a rational evaluation of those ideas. It isn't changing, simply for the sake of change. Clearly, when 20% of atheists are conservative, those people are not utilizing religion in their evaluation of ideas. When we have something that demonstrably works and the new idea has not been shown to do so, we won't change until you can prove it's an improvement.
By your thinking, everything is religious because religion pervades the lives of the majority of citizens worldwide, regardless of political lean.
Actually the first sentence describes basically what any political ideology claims to be - You do know that most political ideologies don't entirely reject everything old and praise everything new, right? So what? The fact you are an atheist doesn't mean anything about the influence of religion on your political ideology - You can be an atheist and strongly influenced by Christianity because your culture is itself Christian influenced. Not everything is religious, but you make a good point - Humans have a tendency to be religious about something, whether it's really a true religion or just an idea. We like tribalism. I still don't get where you're coming from - What you're saying is just a reasonable moderate position on politics, it isn't recognizable as conservatism or liberalism, it's just a middle rational ground. Conservatism entails preserving basic principles of society and tradition - Religion is a tradition, so even if you're not personally religious you have to accept that for some people it matters.
If you are against religion, being a conservative is fundamentally oxymoronic and irrational. The two don't match up. If you were a liberal who thought religion was obsolete, I'd understand, but a conservative (atheist) would probably think that regardless of personal decisions, religion matters and influences culture and therefore people's choices and the majority's leaning should be accepted and preserved. Consevatives usually oppose drastic revolutionary change, right? Hence why they are against communism, right? If so, it is simply stupid to oppose religion because it operates a revolutionary and even anti-tradition view about society, whether you like it or not and despite what this board makes it look like, being against religion is itself an extreme position to take according to social standards.
Quote:That describes the left every bit as much as the right. Modern American politics is really messed up.There isn't a left on american politics.
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you