Ah, another God shaped hole article, albeit well written.
If only one thing has become apparent over the last few years it’s that climate zealotry, racial activism etc does not satisfy the human quest for meaning and fill aforementioned hole.
Ah, another God shaped hole article, albeit well written.
If only one thing has become apparent over the last few years it’s that climate zealotry, racial activism etc does not satisfy the human quest for meaning and fill aforementioned hole.
This is the conundrum of modernity. People are born into a society that is stabilized by a moral structure grounded in religious beliefs. Then they go to school and learn from Darwin that human value systems are based on no reality that is independent of the social interactions of humans as an evolved species. The implicit logic of this is that cultural norms are relative, which devolves into the nihilism of Critical Theory that we are all living through at the moment.
When Nietzsche said God is dead, he wasn’t celebrating a liberating insight, he was just pointing out that humans are utterly alone.
The problem is that a call to return to God is simply a dead end. All worldwide statistics show that religiosity is decreasing.
So, demographic trends will increase Muslim populations as a percentage. That’s sort of my point. The secular west is in decline demographically and in terms of cultural cohesion. The irony is that the embrace of empirical methods/science has led to unparalleled material prosperity but loss of strong religious faith. I think this is why progressive ideology feels like a rudimentary religion trying to fill the void left by the naturalistic worldview we’ve embraced since Darwin.
My bet is that Islam will also gradually secularize.
So.. I happen to live in an area highly populated by Christians. When people talk about “our society” we mean some people but not others… Hasidism, Black churches, and recent immigrant Hispanic Catholics. Not to speak of Mormons. And so-called New Age beliefs are spiritual so there’s that. If you spend time on Perhaps these surveys are about institutions and not beliefs.
And national surveys tend to miss cultural pockets. And yet we each live in our own cultural pocket. I just think it’s a lot more complicated than material prosperity yields unbelief.
My hypothesis is that societally it isn’t cool to believe in spirits anymore.. even in theology schools (other than certain groups) direct experience with the Spirit is downplayed. And a church without Spirit is indeed an empty shell. IMHO.
"All worldwide statistics show that religiosity is decreasing." You need to expand your understanding of "religiosity". There are many "gods" in societal belief systems and there is a rotating system of belief that accompanies these "gods". They are run alongside of, compete with, and supersede the God of the bible, the traditional Western belief system. None of them are divine, and none of them are eternal, yet they are religiosity in fact!
All good but your last paragraph feels very pessimistic and misguided. Statistical trends do not have any bearing on whether a course of action, a belief system, or even a so-called fact, is true, right, virtuous, etc. To assert that religion is a dead end on such strangely chosen grounds feels at odds with the rest of your post.
People believe that their faith in God gives them the strength to act morally--- “true, right, virtuous”; the non-religious are at a moral disadvantage. That’s why you uniformly see comments from believers prescribing a return to God as the solution to society’s ills.
My problem, which I admit is pessimistic, is that that from the evolutionary perspective it’s the coalition around the shared belief in God that is more potent than whether God actually exists. As more people get away from a literal belief in God it weakens social cohesion.
Ah, another God shaped hole article, albeit well written.
If only one thing has become apparent over the last few years it’s that climate zealotry, racial activism etc does not satisfy the human quest for meaning and fill aforementioned hole.
We’re going to need to go deeper folks.
This is the conundrum of modernity. People are born into a society that is stabilized by a moral structure grounded in religious beliefs. Then they go to school and learn from Darwin that human value systems are based on no reality that is independent of the social interactions of humans as an evolved species. The implicit logic of this is that cultural norms are relative, which devolves into the nihilism of Critical Theory that we are all living through at the moment.
When Nietzsche said God is dead, he wasn’t celebrating a liberating insight, he was just pointing out that humans are utterly alone.
The problem is that a call to return to God is simply a dead end. All worldwide statistics show that religiosity is decreasing.
Actually statistics don’t exactly show that religion/spirituality is decreasing worldwide https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010-2050/
So, demographic trends will increase Muslim populations as a percentage. That’s sort of my point. The secular west is in decline demographically and in terms of cultural cohesion. The irony is that the embrace of empirical methods/science has led to unparalleled material prosperity but loss of strong religious faith. I think this is why progressive ideology feels like a rudimentary religion trying to fill the void left by the naturalistic worldview we’ve embraced since Darwin.
My bet is that Islam will also gradually secularize.
So.. I happen to live in an area highly populated by Christians. When people talk about “our society” we mean some people but not others… Hasidism, Black churches, and recent immigrant Hispanic Catholics. Not to speak of Mormons. And so-called New Age beliefs are spiritual so there’s that. If you spend time on Perhaps these surveys are about institutions and not beliefs.
And national surveys tend to miss cultural pockets. And yet we each live in our own cultural pocket. I just think it’s a lot more complicated than material prosperity yields unbelief.
My hypothesis is that societally it isn’t cool to believe in spirits anymore.. even in theology schools (other than certain groups) direct experience with the Spirit is downplayed. And a church without Spirit is indeed an empty shell. IMHO.
"All worldwide statistics show that religiosity is decreasing." You need to expand your understanding of "religiosity". There are many "gods" in societal belief systems and there is a rotating system of belief that accompanies these "gods". They are run alongside of, compete with, and supersede the God of the bible, the traditional Western belief system. None of them are divine, and none of them are eternal, yet they are religiosity in fact!
Spirituality and organized religion are not the same thing.
Indeed but it’s a Venn diagram with a very large overlap.
All good but your last paragraph feels very pessimistic and misguided. Statistical trends do not have any bearing on whether a course of action, a belief system, or even a so-called fact, is true, right, virtuous, etc. To assert that religion is a dead end on such strangely chosen grounds feels at odds with the rest of your post.
People believe that their faith in God gives them the strength to act morally--- “true, right, virtuous”; the non-religious are at a moral disadvantage. That’s why you uniformly see comments from believers prescribing a return to God as the solution to society’s ills.
My problem, which I admit is pessimistic, is that that from the evolutionary perspective it’s the coalition around the shared belief in God that is more potent than whether God actually exists. As more people get away from a literal belief in God it weakens social cohesion.
Thanks. It was less the critique of religiosity per se that I found dispiriting, rather the use of a statistical trend to support your point.
Truth and virtue are rarely arrived at through consulting statistical trends of popular opinion.
I don’t agree. The problem is not looking at all.