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The Religious Void
#11
RE: The Religious Void
In as much as the behaviors are religious, they don't resemble the secular behaviors. In as much as the behaviors occur in secular contexts, they don't resemble religion.

What you have is essentially a false analogy. Which means that any conclusions you might draw are likely unreliable.

And I would disagree with you about Smart's 7 dimensions. That seems an intentional mischaracterization, likely because your aim here is apologetic, not honest discussion.
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#12
RE: The Religious Void
(January 3, 2021 at 7:53 pm)Fake Messiah Wrote: 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.
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#13
RE: The Religious Void
(January 3, 2021 at 5:21 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote: A brief thought for discussion:

It's not difficult to find religious behavior in nonreligious places. The US elections is a recent example of how easily cult-like and religious undertones begin to emerge in politics and otherwise secular groups. We are fundamentally religious creatures, and seem to default towards this mode of thinking when gathered too strongly into groups.

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.

Where do you get the stance that "we" are fundamentally religious creatures?  

I don't agree with that statement.

I think ancient people looked for answers to questions they had about the world around them and with a lack of science to give those answers they filled in the gaps with gods and godlike entities.
  
“If you are the smartest person in the room, then you are in the wrong room.” — Confucius
                                      
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#14
RE: The Religious Void
(January 3, 2021 at 10:02 pm)arewethereyet Wrote: Where do you get the stance that "we" are fundamentally religious creatures?  

Primarily from the work of Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychology. Though the idea is found in many other places like evolutionary psychology.
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#15
RE: The Religious Void
OP: Sounds like you're describing tribal think/behavior more than religious behavior.

The military also instills a zealous tribal thought/behavior. Should we conclude that there should be more military posts and reinstate the draft?
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#16
RE: The Religious Void
(January 3, 2021 at 11:02 pm)brewer Wrote: OP: Sounds like you're describing tribal think/behavior more than religious behavior.

The military also instills a zealous tribal thought/behavior. Should we conclude that there should be more military posts and reinstate the draft?

In many ways religious behavior is interconnected with tribal behavior, moral thinking, holding things sacred, etc., and it is not exactly clear which way the casual arrow goes. I have no issue with drawing a circle around all of them together though I understand their distinctness.

However, I do agree that there is a sense in which it is religious and a sense it which it is not. When it comes to the military it is still a secular enterprise despite the tribal behavior, the moral standards, rituals and ceremonies, and whatever things it holds sacred. And yet there are still certain members that do display a religious devotion to the military, while others have a more secular relationship.
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#17
RE: The Religious Void
(January 3, 2021 at 11:37 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:
(January 3, 2021 at 11:02 pm)brewer Wrote: OP: Sounds like you're describing tribal think/behavior more than religious behavior.

The military also instills a zealous tribal thought/behavior. Should we conclude that there should be more military posts and reinstate the draft?

In many ways religious behavior is interconnected with tribal behavior, moral thinking, holding things sacred, etc., and it is not exactly clear which way the casual arrow goes. I have no issue with drawing a circle around all of them together.

However, I do agree that there is a sense in which it is religious and a sense it which it is not. When it comes to the military it is still a secular enterprise despite the tribal behavior, the moral standards, rituals and ceremonies, and whatever things it holds sacred. And yet there are still certain members that do display a religious devotion to the military, while others have a more secular relationship.

Tribal behavior does not necessarily imply morals. Neither does military. Think Lord of the Flies.
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#18
RE: The Religious Void
(January 3, 2021 at 7:30 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote: So if we're wired to behave religiously, is it better to do so within a religious institution than outside of one?

We aren't. We're have predispositions toward superstition and tribalism that mix with various social institutions to produce religion. We're also predisposed to rape, murder, and theft. Just because your inner chimp has some instincts doesn't mean that you should follow them.

It's unsurprising that some people behave religiously towards politics given the already large similarities. You could make comparisons to sports fans, gambling, and a whole host of other behaviours. Given how the devout voted in the last few elections I'm not thinking that what we need is more religion. I mean, I'm going to have fun for the next few decades asking moral absolutists how they voted but it really wasn't worth it.
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#19
RE: The Religious Void
(January 3, 2021 at 8:18 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:
(January 3, 2021 at 7:53 pm)Fake Messiah Wrote: 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.

(January 3, 2021 at 5:21 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote: 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.
I am the Infantry. I am my country’s strength in war, her deterrent in peace. I am the heart of the fight… wherever, whenever. I carry America’s faith and honor against her enemies. I am the Queen of Battle. I am what my country expects me to be, the best trained Soldier in the world. In the race for victory, I am swift, determined, and courageous, armed with a fierce will to win. Never will I fail my country’s trust. Always I fight on…through the foe, to the objective, to triumph overall. If necessary, I will fight to my death. By my steadfast courage, I have won more than 200 years of freedom. I yield not to weakness, to hunger, to cowardice, to fatigue, to superior odds, For I am mentally tough, physically strong, and morally straight. I forsake not, my country, my mission, my comrades, my sacred duty. I am relentless. I am always there, now and forever. I AM THE INFANTRY! FOLLOW ME!
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#20
RE: The Religious Void
(January 5, 2021 at 10:18 pm)Paleophyte Wrote:
(January 3, 2021 at 7:30 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote: So if we're wired to behave religiously, is it better to do so within a religious institution than outside of one?

[...] We're have predispositions toward superstition and tribalism that mix with various social institutions to produce religion. [...]

I suspect that the OP is thinking of this pre-wired disposition differently than some other people here. 

It might be clearer if we don't think of the details of any particular religion, but of the overall structure. This is what, I think, people are wired for.

So if we take out the details of a given religion -- Christianity or Buddhism, etc. -- then we can define a religion as a mental and emotional structure which integrates metaphysical beliefs, values, and desires in a way that makes sense of the world for its adherents. And I think that any thinking adult has such a structure, whether or not it includes ideas of God or other traditionally religious concepts. 

Sometimes you read philosophically naive atheists who seem to think that religion is just a kind of blanket of error, thrown over people's view of the world. They think that if this blanket could be pulled away, we'd be left with a direct and unproblematic view of things, and any errors that might remain would be, eventually, cleared away by science. 

I don't think that philosophy, sociology, or anthropology can support such a simple view. Everyone has a structure of beliefs through which he interprets the world. Everyone holds to a set of metaphysical beliefs. Everyone has an ideology. Anyone who says he doesn't have these things is just revealing that he hasn't examined his own structure yet. We all get our ways of interpreting the world through unprovable and historically contingent commitments. For example, the idea that science tells us accurately about the world (rather than just a mental image of the world) is itself a metaphysical view that can't be proven by science. The whole set of liberal values which most Americans hold to is very much a historically contingent and probably unsustainable ideology. 

(And here I don't mean "liberal" in the way that the American media uses it -- the opposite of "conservative" -- but in the classical sense of "liberal values." That is, the assumption of liberty, the sovereignty of the individual, that stuff.) 

So the web of beliefs and values that a modern American atheist has wouldn't normally be called a religion, but it is structured much like one. It differs from that of a modern American Christian in that it doesn't have a God, but it does have all kinds of unprovable and historically contingent assumptions. And -- perhaps unfortunately -- a surprisingly large percentage of that structure would probably be shared between the two groups. 

So I am sympathetic to the OP's argument, because I think that many modern atheists are unaware that they have such a structure, and haven't examined what it consists of. Again, they think that because they lack religion they also lack some predetermined belief system. But I don't think that human beings in society are able to lack such a thing. (And the reason that Nietzsche said "God is dead" isn't because some deity had supposedly died, but because in his view ANY such human structure is a mentally-created dream image, and a lie.)

And being aware of one's own structure is necessary for understanding oneself and one's time. It also teaches the extent to which there are alternatives to the beliefs which to us seem self-evident, but which, if there are still people 1000 years from now, will probably seem laughably naive.
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